Neighborhood Indicators

In October 2010, the DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) became one of 21 recipients of a US Department of Education Promise Neighborhood planning grant. The Urban Institute partnered with DCPNI to act as the data analyst and local evaluator of this ambitious initiative. The Needs Assessment and Segmentation Analysis are intended to provide a timely understanding of the needs of the community and to inform the continuum of strategies developed by DCPNI and their workgroups.

While much has been written about the decline of central cities, very little research has examined the problem in their suburbs. This report focuses on the suburbs of older industrial cities and how best to address the challenges they face. Using census data, literature review, and four in-depth case studies, the authors provide a detailed portrait of the underlying forces shaping distressed suburbs. It highlights a range of best practices used in case study cities for fostering growth and reducing poverty. These lessons can be instructive both to local leaders working to turn their cities around and to the federal policy makers supporting them.

This paper is an early assessment of the six original partners in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership. It first notes the technical and institutional advances that have made computer-based neighborhood indicators systems feasible. Second, it reviews the range of potential uses of such systems, illustrated by a few examples. Finally, it presents ten lessons the author draws from experience with neighborhood indicators systems-lessons offered as guides to planners and other local leaders that are interested in a data intermediary in their own cities.

To alert community stakeholders to buildings at risk, institutions in several cities created neighborhood early warning systems (NEWS) in the 1980's and 1990's. These online systems integrated and mapped public administrative data to pinpoint deterioration in housing. City agency staff, housing practioners, and neighborhood groups consulted NEWS to locate troubled properties or to craft strategies to revive distressed neighborhoods. This paper reviews four neighborhood early warning systems — Chicago NEWS, Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Neighborhood Information System, and the Minneapolis Neighborhood Information System — to explore the value and feasibility of developing a system for Washington, D.C.

Local partners in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) build and maintain information systems with recurrently updated data on neighborhood conditions in their cities for community planning and action. In the summer of 2007, NNIP surveyed its 29 local partners about the sources, geography, and time periods of their data files. The survey confirmed that local partners successfully negotiated access to neighborhood data on a wide range of topics, with the most common being public school enrollment and student proficiency, births and deaths and property sales. Other topic areas, such as utility data sets and business licenses, need further development.

This report summarizes the work of NeighborhoodInfo DC in compiling a list of residential properties potentially subject to rent control regulation in the District of Columbia under the D.C. Rent Stabilization Program. Despite its importance, at present there is no definitive list or database of properties subject to rent control. The report provides a basic overview of rent control in D.C., methods for compiling the database, basic characteristics of those properties and owners, and the limitations. Based on this work, our initial estimate is that there are currently 4,818 properties with 79,145 housing units potentially subject to rent control regulation in the city.

The District of Columbia has undergone many demographic and economic shifts over the past decade. While high rates of home foreclosures and unemployment persist, sustained population growth and development of neighborhoods continue to change the face of the city. This report is an update of the Urban Institute’s 2008 neighborhood report prepared for the D.C. Office of Planning. It provides a comparative analysis of the following: demographics; jobs and income; housing; education; health; family, youth, and seniors; safety and security; and the natural and built environment and transportation (new to the 2010 report).

As foreclosures have been sweeping the nation in the past few years, the effect of the crisis on children tends to be overlooked. In this brief, the first of two, we discuss foreclosure trends as they relate to public school students living in Washington, D.C. between 2003 and 2008. In particular, we describe the demographic makeup of the students affected, the type of housing and neighborhoods in which they live, and the schools they attend. We conclude with recommendations for both the housing and education sectors in mitigating this crisis as the number of foreclosures continues to rise.