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When Detroit decided to more aggressively tackle blight and vacant buildings, it turned to Loveland Technologies, a Detroit mapping company on Washington Boulevard to provide a digitized map of properties in the city, replete with photos.
They hired 200 people to go house-to-house to gather data: Conditions of the properties and whether they were occupied. The Loveland foot-soldiers also took photos.
Since then, they've expanded their services to cities around the nation and overseas in countries like Brazil, Michael Evans, a senior developer for the company, tells Deadline Detroit.
The company is now going to expand its services in Ohio.
"Ohio is definitely the biggest project going on outside of Detroit," Evans says.
Kathy Orton of The Washington Post writes:
The success of that program caught the attention of civic leaders in other parts of the country. Other communities saw how the data helped Detroit target its sparse resources for greatest efficiency.
Michael Evans of Loveland TechnologiesNow, through a two-year, $1 million grant from JPMorgan Chase, Western Reserve Land Conservancy is bringing Loveland’s data-mapping tools to Ohio’s three largest cities — Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati — with the intent of creating dashboards similar to Motor City Mapping.
“The mapping technology in Detroit has been significant and eye-opening in terms of the need that cities have for real-time data and forward-looking data,” said Janis Bowlder, head of community development for global philanthropy at JPMorgan Chase. “The mapping work that Loveland Technologies does is really a core part of how we think community development needs to happen in distressed communities.”
Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus don’t face the problems that Detroit does. But each of the cities has challenges. Western Reserve Land Conservancy, a nonprofit organization in Northeast Ohio that works to conserve natural areas and revitalize urban centers, launched Thriving Communities in 2011. Through that program, it set up 34 land banks, essentially organizations to repurpose property. They allow counties to acquire distressed properties, clear their titles and bring them back onto the market.
