When Silos Rule: Working on Housing Issues Using Cross-Agency Data on Vacancy and Delinquency

Discussions of, and proposals for, city "recoveries" depend upon the ability of either public or private agencies working with existing land uses and, in particular, the ownership of parcels. Publicly held land records are among the earliest functions established by municipal governance, whether elected or appointed, under both colonial and home rules. Over its nearly 4 centuries of legal existence, Philadelphia has one of the longest existing real property records in the United States, making its land and tax records a potentially valuable resource in the process of altering its physical landscape in response to demographic and socioeconomic shifts in the city and the region. However, Philadelphia, like many cities which have experienced fiscal challenges and political upheaval, from time to time, has a long history of isolating its property data into a series of data "silos". As a result, nearly a dozen agencies of the city and county governments maintain real property and tax records that are frequently difficult to coordinate, in either a programmatic or data-keeping function. In addition, there are an additional half-dozen public-private agencies that develop property-based information that is erratically linked to publicly held information systems. Not surprisingly, there are also many examples of neighborhood level information systems that have been created (for both non-profit and for-profit developers) that provide additional information (including street and block front conditions) that is generally unavailable elsewhere. This paper describes the specific challenges that this "siloed" information system raises when a city seeks to develop new directions for itself. Using the issues of long-term vacancy/abandonment and real estate tax delinquency (and related concerns over the significant increase in tax-free properties) as a focus, it examines the ways that these information systems overlap, as well as several strategies that have been developed to build communications across these several systems. Several policy examples, including the City's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, a court-ordered foreclosure mitigation analysis, neighborhood specific analyses, and a City "open data" initiative provide contexts for a discussion of data triangulation and crosswalks between silos.