2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Using Data for Neighborhood Improvement 207
ties in Cleveland and recommended strategies to prevent, reclaim, and
reuse these properties. In their summer 2005 report, the authors wrote
that the lack of comprehensive information about real property in the
city contributed to the lack of progress in addressing vacancies (Mallach,
Mueller Levy, and Schilling 2005). The authors argued that if city decisionmakers
didn’t know how many vacant properties there were, where
they were, and their impacts on neighborhoods, then developing solutions
would be difficult. The National Vacant Properties Campaign recommendations
laid the foundation for a strong push by the broader
Cleveland CDC community for access to property-level data on code
violations, condemnations, and demolitions as a way to better identify
these problem properties and begin to counteract their negative impacts.
Leading the way in this effort was NPI, which convened key stakeholders
and decisionmakers across the county to push for access to
property-level data and develop strategies to deal with vacant property
issues. The Vacant and Abandoned Property Action Council (VAPAC), as
the group became known, included community development organizations
that would use the data; city and county agencies that collected the
data; Case Western Reserve University’s NEO CANDO staff, who had the
technical expertise to make the data accessible; and finally, the funders
who were being asked to support the upgrade of NEO CANDO to house
these data. VAPAC, in its early meetings, pushed to have decision makers at
the table—in other words, individuals who had the authority and ability
to provide data. The group began meeting regularly in late 2005 to determine
which data were critical to acquire, develop strategies to acquire the
data, and discuss how to make them available through NEO CANDO.
Much of the data VAPAC needed were stored in Cleveland’s Building
and Housing Department, which collects and maintains information
on code violations, condemnations, building permits, and demolitions.
Another important source of data was the Water Department, given that
water shut-off can signal vacancy. Likewise, as a foreclosure filing can
be a precursor to vacancy, knowing that a property is being foreclosed
on is essential to intervening with the borrower and staving off another
vacant home.
VAPAC’s efforts were timely. With the SII project under way and the
city’s glut of vacant properties and those at risk for vacancy on the rise,
the group had to get a better handle on the status of these properties.
However, obtaining the data was not an easy task. In some cases, the data
were not stored electronically. In other cases, data providers expressed