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Parcel data: Key to
healthy community
Sarah Treuhaft
Senior Associate
PolicyLink, USA
sarah@policylink.org
In the United States, community-based groups play a critical
role in urban community development. They revitalise
distressed neighbourhoods, organise and provide
services to low-income residents and engage in a variety of
activities to build healthy, livable communities.
Despite their vital contributions, such
groups are generally resource-poor.
While financial resources are often a
primary challenge for them, information
and technology resources are often
inaccessible. Geographic data, for
example, is absolutely critical for
understanding how the neighbourhood
is changing and developing
strategies to intervene. Yet community
groups and non-profits have faced an
"organisational divide"-a lack of access
to important and new information and
communications technology tools that
the private and public/government
sectors quickly adopted, such as GIS
mapping software.
Data on individual properties-such as
land value, ownership, zoning, tax liens
and vacancy status-are particularly
valuable for community development
groups. Parcels are the most fundamental
units of urban land markets.
While community development practitioners
have always sought parcel data,
these data were typically contained in
paper records that were stored in separate
local government offices. Just the
basic fact-finding on properties targeted
for acquisition or improvement
meant visiting city hall or other offices
to examine individual records-a time
consuming process that precluded
using property data more strategically
for planning, decision making and
evaluation.
THE EVOLUTION OF PARCEL
DATA SYSTEMS
A new era of data democracy has
arrived in the United States. In recent
years, technologies such as GIS have
revolutionised public recordkeeping.
Local governments are now creating
integrated land information systems
that recurrently gather data on parcels
from multiple agencies and store the
information in a single location. The
real value of integrated parcel data systems
comes when community organisations
and residents are able to access,
review and use the information. By
virtue of their everyday presence,
neighbourhood-based users often possess
the most up-to-date information
about the ownership, value and condition
of properties. When brought into
deliberative processes, they can use
their local knowledge to verify data,
confirm findings and develop more
specific research questions. The bringing
together of people and technology
helps to build systems that are better
equipped to create healthier, more
equitable communities.
PARCEL DATA IN ACTION
Pioneering organisations and partnerships
are turning robust, integrated
parcel data systems into powerful tools
for guiding community change. A
review conducted by PolicyLink and
The Urban Institute in 2007 revealed a
variety of promising community applications
of parcel data systems, such as:
Providing decision support for major
initiatives.
In Cleveland, Ohio, an older
industrial city that has struggled to
overcome population decline and the
loss of manufacturing jobs, parcel data
formed the backbone of a bold,
longterm effort to turnaround the
housing markets in six targeted neighbourhoods.
Launched in 2004, the
Strategic Investment Initiative (SII)
focusses community development
resources intensively in a few areas
that have the best chance of recovering
from neighbourhood decline and
becoming "regional neighbourhoods of
choice." In each of the neighbourhoods,
staff members from a community
development corporation work with
staff from two university institutes,
and a community development intermediary
(Neighborhood Progress, Inc.),
to develop and implement strategies to
g-governance
In the United States, community-based groups play a critical
role in urban community development. They revitalise
distressed neighbourhoods, organise and provide
services to low-income residents and engage in a variety of
activities to build healthy, livable communities.
Parcel data: Key to
healthy community
stabilise and gain control of properties
that are in the vicinity of large development
projects that they hope will catalyse
neighbourhood market resurgence.
A parcel data system maintained by
the Center on Urban Poverty and Community
Development, Northeast Ohio
Community and Neighborhood Data
for Organizing (NEO CANDO), provides
the neighbourhood teams with the
information they need to make decisions
about the actions they want to
take on individual properties within
the target area and enables them to
monitor and evaluate their efforts.
Informing foreclosure prevention
strategies.
When a wave of home mortgage
foreclosures swept through American
cities in 2006 and 2007, community
groups, funders and government
agencies struggled to understand the
underlying causes and offered strategies
and tools that could enable homeowners
to stay in their homes. Housing
groups and researchers in Cleveland
and Minneapolis-St. Paul have used
parcel data to develop "early warning"
systems to identify properties at risk of
foreclosure and design effective interventions.
In Minneapolis-St. Paul, representatives
from each city, along with
seven non-profit housing development,
policy and funding organisations
formed the Foreclosure Prevention Funders
Council in early 2007. The first step
for the Council was to create an information
infrastructure on foreclosures.
HousingLink, a regional fair housing
data intermediary, partnered with the
Center for Urban and Regional Affairs
(CURA) at the University of Minnesota
to collect data on foreclosures. Assembling
and mapping the data revealed
that the foreclosure challenge was
found throughout the region but highly
concentrated in North Minneapolis.
The Council met biweekly to discuss
the findings and
developed a policy
strategy and expanded
to a statewide
focus, and the City of
Minneapolis is now
working with CURA
to develop an early
warning data system
to identify at-risk
properties in the city
using public data on
housing condition,
estimated market
value and last sale
date/price to develop
and test a predictive
model for foreclosure.
Targeting outreach
to low-income home-
owners.
Community organisations in
Chicago and Philadelphia used parcel
data to target services and resources to
help low-income owners maintain and
improve their homes. Philadelphia
VIP/Law Works, which provides legal
services to low-income residents and
community groups, worked with the
Cartographic Modeling Laboratory
(CML) at the University of Pennsylvania
to understand the "tangled title" problem
in the city-cases where the title to a
home has not been properly transferred
into the name of the person who
has an interest in the home. Without
clear title, homeowners cannot sell or
transfer their property, obtain grants or
loans for home repairs or even arrange
payment plans for delinquent loans.
The CML linked death records with
property ownership records to detect
properties that might not have been
properly transferred following the
death of a homeowner and identified
14,000 possible cases throughout the
city. Mapping these cases by zip code
helped identify where the tangled titles
were concentrated in the city.
Monitoring and preserving affordable
housing.
The major housing challenge
in Washington D.C. is not the weakness
of neighbourhood housing markets, as
in Cleveland, but their strength: rents
and home prices have risen sharply,
creating a housing affordability crisis
for the city's lower- and middle-income
residents. Preserving the city's affordable
housing stock was recognised as
critical to ensuring that residents benefit
from the resurgence in the housing
market. A collaborative effort including
the city, nonprofit housing groups, The
Urban Institute and the Local Initiatives
Support Corporation developed in
2005 to create a systematic, data-driven
approach to managing the affordable
housing inventory in the district. A
comprehensive housing database was
developed, which was maintained in
the NeighborhoodInfo DC data warehouse.
Stakeholders began meeting
quarterly to monitor privately-owned,
federally subsidised affordable rental
units whose contracts would expire in
the coming months or years, making
them at risk of conversion to marketrate.
When the group identifies at-risk
properties, they pool their know-how
and resources to offer technical assistance
to the tenants or to the landlords
to ensure continued affordability.
SUPPORTS FOR
COMMUNITY APPLICATIONS
OF PARCEL DATA
A mix of institutions and technological
tools are needed to move parcel data
into community development.
Integrated regional parcel
data systems
Land information systems that integrate
property data maintained by separate
administrative agencies and
make the information available to
users outside of government provide
the basic infrastructure for advanced
community development applications.
Technological advances have enabled
the rapid expansion of these systems at
very low cost and that trend is expected
to continue.
Community data
intermediaries
Organisations that
gather data relevant
for neighbourhood-
level analysis
and make the information
available to
community groups
and local institutions
play an essential
role in bringing
data and maps into
the realm of community
building.
Robust community
development applications
of parcel
data are almost
always guided by community data
intermediaries, such as the Center on
Urban Poverty and Community Development
(Cleveland), the Cartographic
Modeling Laboratory (Philadelphia), the
Center for Urban and Regional Affairs
(Minneapolis-St. Paul), the Chicago
Metropolitan Agency for Planning, and
NeighborhoodInfo DC. In addition to
building and maintaining comprehensive
systems containing parcel and
neighbourhood-level data, these intermediaries
form institutional collaborations,
partner with communities to
develop data applications, pioneer new
forms of applied research and train
local organisations and individuals on
the use of data in community change.
National intermediary networks
Over two dozen community data intermediaries
participate in the Urban
Institute's National Neighborhood Indicators
Partnership (NNIP). Such networks
help organisations adopt new
information tools and use them effectively
through information dissemination,
convenings, and other activities.
Data-backed community
development initiatives
Community development initiatives
that promote the use of data and mapping
in programme development, monitoring
and evaluation (and provide the
resources to support those purposes)
help to catalyse innovative applications
and effective collaborations.
Public policy supports
Local political support and favourable
public policies are essential elements in
the development of advanced applications
of parcel data.
CONCLUSION
Investment in infrastructure, institutions
and processes that support these
advanced community development
applications is sorely needed to realise
the vast potential that parcel data
holds for the community development
field. Public and private institutions
alike have essential roles to play in
bringing emerging local solutions to
sufficient scale to have measurable
impacts on neighbourhoods, spurring
further innovation in systems development
and disseminating best practices
in the use of parcel data.
Resources
PolicyLink http://www.policylink.org
Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data
for Organizing(NEW CANDO) http://neocando.case.edu
NeighborhoodInfo DC http://www.neighborhoodinfodc.org
Full Circle Community Mapping and Planning Project http://www.fullcir.net/FC/Index.htm
Center for Urban and Regional Affairs,University of Minnesota http://www.cura.umn.edu
Cartographic Modeling Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania http://www.cml.upenn.edu
National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership http://www2.urban.org/nnip