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396 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
and replicated. Many agency personnel still remain nervous about sharing
data, which slows the release of data to other collaborating agencies,
let alone to the public via data intermediaries or open data platforms.
As implied above, the level of data use lags behind the level of data production.
Given today’s skills, habits, and cultures, much work remains
before it will be possible to characterize all relevant local institutions as
being data driven. Too many key players still see work with data as an
extra task that takes time away from their main job, rather than something
that is an essential component that saves time and improves the
quality of their work. It is not yet built into their daily work routines.
In some cities where agency datasets have been released to the public
directly on open data platforms, there is a concern about underutilization
at this point (Pettit et al. 2014). Our research community needs
to intensify its work in mining the available data to generate scientific
hypotheses and studies. Although progress is being made, more needs to
be done to strengthen the institutions, access to data and technology, and
ability to put the data to use for practice and research.
However, although there is uncertainty, we see the glass as much more
than half full. Even though the pace feels painfully slow at times, local
data capacity seems to be taking forward steps everywhere. Looking back
over the past 20 years, more administrative agencies are sharing data, and
productive applications are advancing, not retreating. We have noted the
increased pressure for accountability of public and nonprofit entities via
data in the past few years and definitely see an increase in the buzz about
data use at the local level generally. In fact, we believe that local governance,
community decisionmaking, and urban research in America could be at
the edge of a major transformation as data availability continues to expand
and innovations in training and tools make the data much easier to use. The
final two sections of this chapter contain our recommendations for making
this transformation a reality.
Creating an Effective Local Data Environment
National researchers and policy makers can take advantage of the types
of data examined in this book to better understand conditions and
trends in America’s communities, but by far the most important applications
occur at the local level. Examples involve the use of small-area data
to improve individual neighborhoods (chapter 5) and to strategically