2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

210 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
knowledge about what was happening in neighborhoods. As they did
earlier in the SII, members of NST came to monthly meetings with colorcoded
maps showing the status of the properties in distress (vacancy,
foreclosure, or poor condition) within a targeted area. At these meetings,
team members immediately accessed up-to-date information about
these properties (including liens, code violations, property values, and
property size) and determined whether specific properties should be
acquired and rehabbed or whether they should be demolished. 2
Preventing foreclosures is one way to lessen the number of homes
entering vacancy and contributing to neighborhood blight. In partnership
with Empowering and Strengthening Ohio’s People (ESOP), a foreclosure
prevention agency, NST used foreclosure filing data (available
from the NEO CANDO system from early 2007) to generate lists of borrowers
whose homes had entered foreclosure, and ESOP used the lists
to reach out to these borrowers with hopes of helping the owners keep
their homes. Similarly, data on adjustable-rate mortgages, linked with
mortgage deeds, were used to identify individuals at risk for foreclosure.
ESOP staff also reached out to these borrowers in hopes of keeping them
from entering the foreclosure pipeline.
NST and its community partners wanted to protect areas targeted
for NSP2 funds and other public and private investments from further
deterioration and instability. This interactive work between the NST and
CDC and municipal staffs allowed for data-based decisions. For example,
a property entering foreclosure located right next to a recently renovated
property might be a prime candidate for door-knocking by ESOP.
If code-violation data revealed the need for a major property repair, the
homeowner could be contacted and provided assistance to mitigate the
risk of further property deterioration. Having the ability to immediately
identify problem properties with a few keystrokes allowed for swift and
immediate action to be taken to protect long-term investments in these
communities. Time was spent identifying and addressing destabilizing
factors rather than searching for data.
Again and again, organization and municipal groups reported the value
of having access to timely and frequently updated data in a single system
and the ease with which data could be extracted from it. Greg Baron,
housing director at the Stockyard, Clark-Fulton and Brooklyn Centre
Community Development office, spoke of using the NEO CANDO
system to find properties for the office’s single-family rehab program. 3
The Cuyahoga Land Bank acquires lots of vacant and abandoned prop-