Garbage in, garbage out
New Orleans remains the most blighted city in America. The factors that produced an estimated 57,000 blighted properties are historic outmigration, exacerbated by flooding after Hurricane Katrina.
Despite the overwhelming need to revitalize neighborhoods by bringing property back into commerce, there are tremendous investment opportunities in the city, with attractive, historic architectural gems distributed throughout the city, and great neighborhoods to settle into.
A critical part of the solution to the blight problem is taking a systematic and integrated approach to enforcing the city’s code enforcement laws, according to a story by Jennifer Larino printed in this week’s New Orleans City Business.
David Marcello, the executive director of Tulane’s Public Law Center, said, “the important thing is to get about the business of doing it. Brick by brick, we can build an effective system of code enforcement.”
Meanwhile, Chief Administrative Officer Andy Kopplin said that Mayor Landrieu’s focus will be determining how to integrate the various departments involved in code enforcement.
What will be an impediment to administering a streamlined process is reliable citywide property data. For years, the city has failed to produce a comprehensive, credible, enterprise property database that’s accessible to all departments, so that public officials can track problem properties, and accessible to the public, so that private and non-profit real estate developers can identify clusters of investment opportunities.
Flashy technology isn’t necessarily a panacea. What’s required is a principled and systematic approach to improving the quality of property data, blight data, and code enforcement data, by improving the way that data is collected and managed. These are, generally, business processes that need to be improved.
This was a key point made by Allison Plyer, a co-director of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center:
Her main concern is that the Landrieu administration will attempt to use technology such as Accela, a code enforcement software used in cities throughout the country, to plug a hole in business process. It’s the same trap the Nagin administration fell into, Plyer said.
“Technology is very seductive, and it’s very pleasant to think that technology can address data problems,” she said. “But it can’t. When it comes to technology and data, it’s garbage in and garbage out.”
