2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Using Data for Neighborhood Improvement 153
organized into six sections, sequenced roughly according to stage of
development:
• Efforts in community initiatives to assess neighborhood conditions
and trends. Community initiatives began to use neighborhood
indicators systems in an exploratory mode soon after they were
developed and also collected original data on conditions not easily
captured by administrative data.
• Uses of data to learn and mobilize around key issues. Some influential
uses have focused on individual topics, using data to better
understand an issue and then to mobilize external support for
neighborhood recommendations.
• Sophisticated uses of property data in the foreclosure crisis. Data
systems with a wide array of information about properties have
enabled more nuanced decisions about how to address the problems
of neighborhoods hit hard by foreclosure and abandonment.
• Applications in large-scale comprehensive initiatives: examining the
potential for performance management. The largest comprehensive
community development program operating in any US city in the
2000s was Chicago’s New Communities Program (NCP), notable for
its pioneering efforts to apply performance management in the community
development context.
• New insights on neighborhood change from Making Connections.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections initiative
focused on improving low-income neighborhoods in 10 cities and
supported an associated survey research program that has yielded
important new insights related to neighborhood change.
• Intensive data use in program planning and implementation: Promise
Neighborhoods. The Promise Neighborhoods Initiative has upgraded
expectations for the use of data in program planning and implementation
and suggests future directions for the field.
Efforts in Community Initiatives to Assess
Neighborhood Conditions and Trends
Chapter 1 noted that the first ongoing multisource neighborhood-level
data system was developed by a community-oriented research center at
Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The system was
established in part to support the new Cleveland Community Building