Database plots Philadelphia's details

Until recently, organizations had to spend hours scouring piles of information at multiple city agencies to find data needed to reclaim the tens of thousands of vacant buildings and lots scattered across Philadelphia. But the once time-consuming process now requires only a few clicks of a mouse, due to the creation of the Neighborhood Information System at Penn's Cartographic Modeling Lab. The computer program maps every property in Philadelphia and lists information regarding utilities, ownership, taxes, building code violations and building characteristics. "Before we were able to use this it would take literally weeks to gather this information," said Eric Hoffman, director of information and technology for the non-profit Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations. "You would have to go to each agency and go through stacks of information," he said. "It literally takes minutes what used to take weeks." The lab, a joint venture between the Graduate School of Fine Arts and the School of Social Work, produced the $900,000 NIS over the last three years using data from 12 city agencies. Founded in 1990 by City and Regional Planning Doctoral students under Landscape Architecture Professor Dana Tomlin, CML is funded by private grants and by the City of Philadelphia. The program -- a password-protected Internet application available to about 100 non-profit organizations -- is a boon to the development and reclamation of derelict properties because it allows users to find the current owners and the status of back taxes and liens on the property. NIS may be key to neighborhood revitalization, and to attracting people back into Philadelphia, a city which has suffered from 40 years of declining population. "We work with businesses in the neighborhood to create a stabilization plan," said Peter Gonzalez of Project H.O.M.E. "We're dealing with crumbling sidewalks, dealing with broken down facades, dealing with abandoned buildings. We're creating a clean safe zone to eventually attract businesses." But when SSW Professor Dennis Culhane initiated the project, he had another purpose in mind -- the study of patterns of homelessness in the city. "The NIS is a project that grew out of my research on housing abandonment and homelessness," Culhane said. "I was studying homelessness and trying to understand where it came from. It's rather a paradox that there are people without homes coming from areas where there are homes without people." Although city records often provide clues that residents might be planning to abandon their homes long before they actually vacate them, the task of monitoring these buildings was virtually impossible because because there was no central database of information. "[An unpaid water bill] is a very good indicator of vacancy, and so is overdue taxes," Director of Geographic Information System at CML Simi Octania-Pole said. She added that people often stop paying their taxes and ignore utility bills in months before they abandon their homes. Organizations can search for vacancies, by address, by ten-code -- a unique identification number assigned to each property, or by zooming in on an area on a map. And they can search by these telltale cues to find vacant buildings quickly, while they are still salvageable. Hoffman estimates that there are about 40,000 vacant houses in Philadelphia. Many were built before World War II, and the cost of bringing the houses up to code is often much greater than that of abandoning the houses. Many organizations under Hoffman's group use NIS to assess the properties and request grants to rehabilitate and rebuild properties and then sell them below cost to low income families. "We have a major affordable shortage of housing crisis in the City of Philadelphia," Culhane said. "Anything that is putting more affordable rental housing into the marketplace is going to help ease that housing [crunch], but the problem is much bigger than that."