mapping

I spent some time doing a quick mapping project for an area of my neighborhood that has consistently experienced high crime and poor housing conditions. It is only about a 4 block area but is responsible for about 20% of neighborhood crime. Some of this is due to a party store that sits dead center in the area and serves as a gathering point for people. You can see from the map that this is the epicenter of much of the crime.


So I took several data sets to create the map. It's exciting to me to start to see some local area maps with data at this level in a community. For several years I've been in groups talking about neighborhood data and indicators, but the problem always comes down to missing data or that we have data but it isn't meaningful to a group. I think through these series of maps, I've created a picture of a small community that is meaningful and could encourage some dialogue, action and accountability.

I know the image below isn't the best resolution, but I do that for your own safety. If you saw this map in all its glory, your head would explode trying to process the complex layers, graduated colors and symbols, and perfectly symmetrical north arrow. The basic gist is that your looking at a 4 block area with individual parcels or homes, the green to red scale is number of housing code violations (red bad) the smaller to bigger circles are number of crime offenses (big red or green circle is bad) and the purple crosshatched squares on the map are absentee landlords (purple may be bad depending on the landlord).

So the data I'm pulling together comes from three sources (it's about who you know, not what you know): the City Assessor's Office (taxpayer info March 2007) Neighborhood Improvement (housing code violations, 2006) and Grand Rapids Police Dept. (crime offenses April 06-Feb. 07). By using GIS to layer the data you can start to see trends of high crime areas with absentee landlords that aren't maintaining their properties. It makes sense to me that this would be the first tier. Communicate with the absentee landlords that have more than 1 code violation and more than 1 crime offense at their address in 2006. A second tier would look at homeowners that have the same and then third would be to go after more isolated cases. I'm meeting with the neighborhood association later this week to discuss some of this and see if there might be a plan of action.

Anyway, I wanted to share the idea here because I'm pretty excited about having this type of information at such a focused scale.