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In 1995, representatives from civic groups in six cities came to the Urban Institute with an intriguing proposition. All of them had developed computer-based information systems with a host of regularly updated indicators on changing neighborhood conditions in their cities—an asset that had not existed in any city as late as the 1980s. They thought they were onto something important and wanted to explore a partnership with the Institute to both advance the state of the art in their field and spread capacities like these to other cities.
After studying how these groups worked and what they were accomplishing, the Institute agreed the idea had potential. The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) has operated ever since, with funding primarily from the Annie E. Casey, Fannie Mae, and Rockefeller foundations. NNIP now has local partners operating similar systems in 21 cities and we are in contact with groups in 18 more cities that either have built or are working on similar capacities.
The track record of these local "information intermediaries" is already impressive, not only evidencing contributions to program and policy effectiveness, but also hinting at possibly broader improvements to ongoing processes of governance in some localities. However, while the recent expansion is noteworthy, these roughly 40 places still account for a very small share of America's urban centers. We judge that many more would benefit from developing systems like those of the NNIP partners, and that an expanded effort is warranted to help them do so. Below we explain how these systems work, illustrate the contributions they are making, and say a few things about what it might take to support broader scale replication efficiently.
Building and operating neighborhood information systems. This work became possible because of two advances: (1) the decision by most local agencies to automate their records of administrative transactions (e.g., birth certificates, crime reports, property sales, code violations), yielding a host of descriptive information along with geographic identifiers (street addresses or land-parcel numbers) in each record; and (2) the availability of powerful GIS (Geographic Information System) software that can assign geographic coordinates to addresses, almost instantaneously add up such transactions to calculate indicators for small areas (e.g., blocks, block groups, census tracts) and display the results in maps, charts, and tables.
Many local government agencies are now using GIS to plot their own data. The real power, however, comes from systems that have two additional characteristics: (1) incorporating data from many local agencies together, not just one; and (2) making the data public so they can be shared by all users—private and civic as well as public, community groups in low-income neighborhoods as well as private investors and metropolitan planning organizations. These two characteristics are what distinguish the NNIP partners and they were, indeed, the greatest challenges. The technical job today seems quite easy compared with the task of working out long-term data sharing agreements with a host of local agencies and maintaining their trust in how data are applied over the long haul. Such sharing and trust might have seemed impossible two decades ago, yet all the NNIP partners were successful in their efforts, and some have operated their systems successfully now for a decade or longer.
What kinds of organizations perform this work? Interestingly, while local government agencies always collaborate, they have seldom played the lead role in multi-source systems building. More often, the leading player has been a nonprofit civic leadership group (e.g., community foundation, United Way affiliate, or independent civic intermediary). University-based institutes have taken the lead in only two cities, although they play supporting roles in many more. In some cities, new collaborative entities have been created for this purpose, with local governments involved more directly. We expect these arrangements to be more prevalent in the future.
One of the most attractive features of NNIP is how partners work as a one-stop-shop. What happens today in most cities is extremely inefficient. Community groups and service providers, as well as city agencies, generally recognize the need for cross-topic neighborhood-level data. Many waste a great deal of time in redundant efforts to collect the woefully inadequate data presently available, but these groups have other missions and are not equipped to build a large information system. The obvious alternative is to assign that job to one intermediary as its central mission — one that will collect the data from all relevant sources and build a system to serve all user groups efficiently. Building an adequate system of course entails some cost, but it is almost sure to represent a net savings compared with the current resources so many local groups now spend on data with such unsatisfying results. And this is to say nothing of the substantial benefit that should be realized when all users can access much richer and higher-quality data than have been available in the past.
These days, all the data in the system do not have to be in one physical place. They can be drawn electronically from independent operating systems under agreed-upon protocols and be brought together to form one "virtual data warehouse" whose contents are provided to Web users. A number of NNIP partners are exploring this approach. Whether they follow it or use more traditional means, the point is that the user goes to only one place for a vast amount of good, spatially detailed information, at no cost and with very little effort.
Payoffs for local policies and initiatives. How NNIP partners use their information is most important. Although recognizing they do not always achieve their goals, all partners have agreed to a set of three principles. The first is to recognize that their primary job is to use data to support policy development and action agendas that will facilitate positive change, not just to create data and research for their own sake. The second is to give priority to improving conditions in distressed neighborhoods. The third is to conduct their work in a manner that democratizes information. This means placing information in the hands of relevant local stakeholders (at the community and citywide levels) and helping those actors use it to change things for the better themselves (so the stakeholders, rather than the intermediaries, feel primary ownership for the results)..
Why is presenting data at the neighborhood level (or smaller) so important? Area-wide averages are not very useful in guiding action when problems are so unevenly distributed across space, as they generally are in metropolitan America. A metro-wide improvement in some indicator (e.g.,
unemployment rate, incidence of asthma, crime rate) may well be the result of modest improvements in many neighborhoods offsetting declines in a few others where the problem is already severe. Unless you know conditions and trends by neighborhood, you have no idea where to target resources.
The partners' applications of such data cover a wide range of issues. Below we note a few examples:
- Several partners have helped community groups use data to change unreasonable laws and processes that seemed permanently entrenched before. Providence's laws regarding sales of tax-foreclosed properties were revised after solid data were presented demonstrating that most recent purchasers were slumlords. Camden's strategy for dealing with vacant properties was altered and given new impetus by maps showing the strong relationship between vacancies and crime. Milwaukee's city council had to make adjustments when maps showed that recently granted liquor licenses were concentrated in a few low-income neighborhoods and that crime was prevalent around those locations.
- Mapping the locations of welfare recipients needing work against the locations of new entry-level job openings in metropolitan Cleveland dramatized a serious spatial mismatch. The
existence of the data and tools (e.g., the ability to forecast changes in commute times that would result from alternative changes in transit routes and schedules), and the prominence the analysis was given in the press, have been credited as key motivators for a substantial state grant for welfare-to-work planning that brought child care planners as well as transit planners to the table for the first time on this issue.
- To provide a basis for the Mayor's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative in Philadelphia, a vast amount of parcel-level data was analyzed to identify six distinct types of neighborhood real
estate markets and to classify all city neighborhoods according to that typology. Each market type was associated with a package of appropriate city actions (i.e., the typology pointed out where it appeared most sensible to give priority to cleaning up vacant lots, demolishing versus rehabilitating row houses, subsidizing new construction, improving roads and other city
infrastructure, etc.). It would be unreasonable to expect any such comprehensive guidelines to be followed religiously. However, this work provides a framework for accountability that should prove hard to ignore. It offers a rationale with much more compelling data to back it up than has been available before and, as such, we judge the approach has potential for replication in other cities.
- Los Angeles built a web-based system, encompassing all parcels in the city, with many indicators that could provide early warnings of deterioration and abandonment. The system has since been widely used by grassroots organizations as well as agencies in efforts to stimulate reinvestment and stem deterioration. The system's success was a basis for the city subsequently taking a systems approach to address dissatisfaction with its sporadic complaintbased approach to code enforcement in multifamily structures. A new management system was built to support a process that now inspects all structures every three years. The data (inspection results, processing status, etc.) are made available to the public on the same web site.
Two policy-oriented initiatives now being undertaken by several NNIP partners together also deserve mention. In addition to benefits in each city, the initiatives will yield lessons that will be relevant nationally.
- The Annie E. Casey Foundation and the National Institute of Justice are sponsoring a project in
10 NNIP cities to help address the formidable challenge created as large numbers of former prison inmates return to a relatively small number of inner-city neighborhoods. In this project, the NNIP partners are obtaining data on the prison populations (descriptive information and likely place of return) to identify neighborhoods that are experiencing high concentrations of returning prisoners. They are then using information in their systems on available services and other neighborhood conditions to examine the extent to which such communities are equipped to address the challenges that prisoner reentry creates, and working with local agencies to devise targeted responses
- The Brookings Institution Urban Market Initiative is funding a project in which NNIP partners in five cities will use parcel-level data as a basis for developing "decision support tools" to better guide the evolution of the local land market. The project will entail analysis similar to that discussed in the Philadelphia effort noted above; i.e., examining detailed data to determine real estate market potentials for neighborhoods and thinking through what mixes of public actions are most appropriate to each set of circumstances. However, the partners will go further, and develop computer-based tools that take advantage of the data to better design and implement specific courses of action in that context. In one city, the data will be used as an "early warning
system" for abandonment; identifying properties most likely at risk of abandonment and then, given individual circumstances, suggesting appropriate preventive actions. In another, tools will be developed to facilitate property-by-property decisions on alternative treatments for properties that have already been abandoned. In yet another, the tool will focus on how to package vacant city-owned properties for resale (based on better understanding the needs of various types of potential investors and relating these needs to property characteristics in the data system). Another city will also employ the "early warning" concept but relate it to gentrification rather than abandonment.
Expanding efforts to build local capacity. As noted, while the numbers are going up, only a small fraction of the nation's localities have developed comprehensive neighborhood information
systems. We think the evidence above suggests the potential payoffs from NNIP-type capacities are substantial. The time seems right for a more intensive effort to encourage this development in many more places.
What resources will be needed? Some type of national support structure is sure to be required.
NNIP has played this role over the past decade, and functions it has performed are likely to be
needed in a larger-scale effort. Activities have included (1) preparing tools and guidebooks based
on experience of the partners; (2) conducting cross-site policy studies (on welfare-to-work and
neighborhood health conditions as well as our current projects on prisoner reentry and land market
tools); (3) holding several major topical conferences; (4) operating an actively used web site and email list-serve; (5) assembling national data sets with small area data and disseminating excerpts to expand the data holdings of local partners; and (6) providing data starter kits and limited technical assistance to help build similar capacities in a few new cities.
NNIP is also currently working with the Fannie Mae Foundation to develop a major national data
portal for the Foundation's KnowledgePlex web site. This site will disseminate national data sets, guides, and illustrative analyses to a broad audience nationwide. It will offer interactive mapping (census-tract level, nationwide), which, coupled with an expanded range of data, should represent a more powerful basic infrastructure than we have had in the past to help new sites get started.
Still, NNIP is not set up to take this initiative to scale on its own. Instead, we think NNIP needs to catalyze a much broader effort, partnering with a number of other national organizations whose missions revolve around improving governance, program performance, and community development at the local level: organizations like the International City and County Managers Association, the American Planning Association, and the National Community Building Network. We plan to contact these groups and others to explore the possibilities.
Our experience suggests that, the cost of this expansion will not be prohibitive. For local
intermediaries, the costs of the required technology continue to decline. Much of the required
skills-training (in GIS, for example) is already easy to access almost everywhere in the country.
The costs to cover the functions of a national support network should also be reasonable
compared to several other national support initiatives we have known. Some technical assistance
to cities starting-up is often critical, particularly to demonstrate to local agencies how cross-agency data sharing has proven both feasible and beneficial elsewhere and to advise on designing institutional arrangements appropriate in different kinds of environments. Along with this start-up assistance, the ongoing facilitation of peer-to-peer interaction and the development of tools documenting the state-of-the-art (like NNIP has been providing on a smaller scale) are also important. However, none of this should require a huge investment.
This is not to say that cost will never be a barrier. Establishing some sort of national fund (that would make small grants requiring a local match) would make sense to help get new cities get
underway. And local funders will need to provide some general operating funds to supplement project and fee-based work. However, we think a very good case can be made that the long-term benefits of such investments in local "information infrastructure" will far exceed the costs.
For more information about the NNIP, see
www.urban.org/nnip/index.htm.
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