In 2014, there were nearly 80,000 dilapidated structures in Detroit, making the city even more vulnerable to vandalists, looters, and crime. Once a house reaches a certain amount of structural damage, the city demolishes it, leaving an empty lot. In 2013, the Obama administration helped create the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan, a combination of private, philanthropic, nonprofit, federal, and state partners whose goal was to address every blighted and vacant lot in Detroit.
One solution the task force created was in partnership with Michigan Nonprofit Association, Data Driven Detroit, and Loveland Technologies. Together, they launched a physical survey to gather information about every parcel of land in the city. A team of 150 residents and volunteers used a mobile app called “Blexting” to record the front of every property in Detroit. Users were able to upload images, as well as characteristics of blight for each property like dumping, fire damage, boarding, etc.
The online database had 378,723 parcels of land that were publicly navigable, and the city used the site to determine which lot structures needed renovation versus demolition. Today, the database is no longer active; however, the program’s impacts remain. Detroit’s Open Data Portal is an online space for spatial and non-spatial datasets that anyone can access, and Loveland Technologies has since launched Regrid, where anyone can purchase parcel data for anywhere in the country. Both of these open databases stemmed from “Blexting,” and they continue to encourage citizen-driven community surveying.
“Blexting” acted as a frontier for technological solutions for urban blight, and I wonder how something similar could be enacted in Chicago. While Chicago has an enormous amount of vacant lots, the city also has thousands of abandoned sites. An online surveying database would allow community members to get involved with the vacant or abandoned lots in their own neighborhoods. It would encourage local engagement and further would put pressure on the City of Chicago to respond to and reform unused spaces. I hope to see Chicago can use a similar online approach to “Blexting” to begin to transform the city’s vast array of vacant and unusable space into meaningful community areas.
By Matilda Spadoni
Sources:
https://crdpala.org/2019/04/12/what-ever-happened-to-blexting/#:~:text=As%20much%20as%20it%20may,federal%20government%20for%20blight%20reduction.
https://app.regrid.com/store/us/oh/cuyahoga
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/detroit-blight-blexting-houses-motor-city-mapping
https://datasmart.hks.harvard.edu/solutions/motor-city-mapping
https://jack-seanson.github.io/taskforce/intro/#8 https://datadrivendetroit.org/files/DCPS/Motor%20City%20Mapping%20Training%2010.22.14.pdf
https://www.pbs.org/video/scitech-now-how-blexting-helping-cities-turn-around/