Session: Community Statistical Systems

March 31, 10:15 AM

Peter A. Tatian
The Urban Institute

Planners have long understood how valuable it would be to have a set of recurrently updated indicators on changing neighborhood conditions in their cities. The idea goes back at least to the 1960s, when social indicators had more broadly achieved the status of a fad. In the 1990s, however, advancing technology has for the first time allowed this dream to move closer to reality, at least in a few places, and that is fanning the flames of interest in the topic again. This paper is an early assessment of the state of the art based on the author's work with the local partners in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP). It first notes the technical and institutional advances over the past few years 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 recent experience with neighborhood indicators systems-lessons offered as guides to planners and other local leaders in new cities that want to get into the game.

Using Information for Community Change

Neighborhood Indicators: Taking Advantage of the New Potential(by G. Thomas Kinsgsley of The Urban Institute)

Author and Copyright Information

For the past 12 years, Peter A. Tatian has been a research associate in the Urban Institute's Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center. Mr. Tatian's areas of interest include housing policy, neighborhood indicators, participatory research, and community building methods. He is one of the key UI staff involved in the Institute's National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, which makes use of local data to promote community building activities in twenty US cities. He is currently leading the D.C. Data Warehouse, an effort to create a neighborhood data system for the District of Columbia. Mr. Tatian is co-directing the Neighborhood Change Data Base Project, which will bring together comparable neighborhood-level indicators from 1970 to 2000 Decennial Census data. He has also done research for HUD on the impacts of public and supportive housing on neighborhoods, and has worked on housing policy reform in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.