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City hopes stats project will ID, prevent neighborhood trouble

Kristin Czubkowski  —  10/10/2008 3:51 pm

From statistics on voter turnout to kindergarten readiness to pavement condition, every number tells part of a neighborhood's story -- where it has been, where it is now and where it's going.

Now, the city of Madison will have the chance to put those pieces together in one location as part the Neighborhood Indicators Project, which will track more than 40 variables about each city neighborhood. City officials announced Friday the official launch of the project's Web site as well as information available on the first five neighborhoods of the project. The city hopes to have information on Madison's nearly 90 neighborhoods by 2009, provided funding is approved in this year's budget.

Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said the goal of the project is to serve as a warning system that will track statistics annually for each neighborhood and eventually follow trends for what needs improvement in a particular area. By getting a jump on neighborhood issues, Cieslewicz said the city hopes to prevent problems like those the Allied Drive neighborhood has dealt with in the last decade.

"The idea is to get early warning signs of stress so that we can evaluate the problem and react early on. Through Neighborhood Indicators, we can spend a small amount of resources in the short term to avoid major expenditures in the long term," Cieslewicz said. "When developing a new program or allocating funding, neighborhood indicators can provide us with the details and direction to better target our limited resources."

Andrew Statz, who works for the Mayor's Office on the project, said the Neighborhood Indicators Project is based on similar projects that have been done in cities like Baltimore and Charlotte, N.C. The city of Madison has had the advantage of working with the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Applied Population Lab, he said, which has helped the city keep costs down as well as deal quickly and thoroughly with varied statistical measures. The information is also Web-based, unlike previous cities, which allows for more easy comparison between neighborhoods.

"We're using modified neighborhood boundaries" for the project, Statz said. "And people right from the beginning would ask, 'Well, what's a neighborhood?' Because we deal with all kinds of different geographies -- we deal with zip codes, aldermanic districts, voting wards, police districts, building inspection, areas of focus. We have a number of different geographies, so what do you choose?"

Basing the project on the city's neighborhood association boundaries, the Applied Population Lab helped modify those neighborhoods to fit the project, Statz said. This included combining very small neighborhoods at times, arbitrating territory claimed by more than one neighborhood and making the diverse statistical measures conform to those new neighborhood boundaries. For example, Statz said the lab was able to use census blocks, or individual city blocks within larger census tracts, to follow the shape of neighborhood boundaries.

Still, he said, some of the numbers are not ideal. For instance, the project tracks unemployment, but Statz said that it is nearly impossible for statistics to measure unemployment in a particular neighborhood, as most official statistics only use states or cities. In the case of Neighborhood Indicators, then, the city uses an estimate from Claritas, an agency that provides detailed information generally for marketing purposes.

"There's simply no source for real unemployment in any geography short of doing a limited neighborhood survey," he said, which would cost too much to do on an annual basis for the project. "It's expectations versus ability."

Statz, who also serves as the city's fiscal efficiency auditor, said he doesn't put "wagers" on whether something will get approved in the budget, but he said many alders, particularly south side Ald. Tim Bruer, have seen the project as useful. The city of Madison has gotten the project at a relatively inexpensive cost by working with UW-Madison, he added, with the mayor budgeting $115,000 in the 2009 operating budget. Other cities have paid millions for similar information, Statz said.

Bruer called the project "10 years in the making." He was inspired to research similar projects in other cities from his longtime experience on the city's south side, which experienced the effects of aging, deterioration and an influx of people from major cities in the 1980s while other neighborhoods experienced growth and prosperity. While the city has mostly reacted to problems in neighborhoods since then, he said this project has the potential to change that.

"For a relatively modest investment, it will soon prove to be an invaluable tool in assessing the quality of life and needs of neighborhoods across the city," he said. "In the long term, unquestionably it has the potential of radically changing how we're responding to poverty and our economic and redevelopment efforts in the city."

Moreover, Statz said after a few years, when the project is better able to show trends, it could end up saving the city money by helping them better target specific neighborhood problems. Knowing demographic information could also help the city identify areas which might require bilingual services or specific technology.

"It's kind of like surgery," he said. "You'd rather have a small surgery and go home that day than have a full-blown complicated surgery. So getting in early can help you save some money and some pain."

For information on the first five neighborhoods, which include Burr Oaks, Bram's Addition, Heritage Heights, Orchard Ridge and Waunona Broadway-Lakepoint, visit the Web site here.

Kristin Czubkowski  —  10/10/2008 3:51 pm