On related topics here see Are you ‘Carfree’, Does Beijing Have Too Many Cars?, Climate Change: The Moral Imperative for Smart Growth (on urban form and driving), and (a question hopefully we’ll ask soon) Will Electric Cars Fuel Urban Sprawl?

My proposal for a social vacant property database website (originally posted here), caught the eye of a Shaun Farrell, a developer in the DC Apps for Democracy competition. His app, VacantDC, allows users to view a map of vacant properties in the city, view easy-to-read information pages for each property complete with photo, and even submit their own reports. Since it’s in “pre-alpha release,” being developed under the extremely tight limits of the competition, it’s a bit rough around the edges but clearly headed in the right direction. In an email Shaun explained the data in the system is from June 1, 2009, but DCRA has agreed to provide him a monthly set of current vacant properties.

I’m really excited about the site and wish Shaun luck in his development sprint for the final prize. Hopefully he will release the code under some kind of license so it can evolve into a resource for any city struggling with abandonment issues.

The ANC system was created in 1976 as part of the D.C. Home Rule Charter. In order to provide a means for local engagement and participation in public policy, the city established 37 commissions across the city, each representing a portion of a ward. (The names are the ward number followed by a letter, such as 1C, 2A, etc.) Each commission is composed of people elected from Single-Member Districts (SMDs) of approximately 2,000 people. Thus, across the city every resident is represented by exactly one ANC and one of the 270 commissioners. This map, showing the ANC and SMDs of the Mid City neighborhoods of U Street, Adams Morgan, and Columbia Heights, illustrates the dense geography of the ANC system.

I was reminded of the topic when a friend sent me this blog post about the latest ANC scandal, about an ANC commissioner and his partner apparently trying to obstruct the renewal of a liquor license for two popular restaurants. Indeed, the area of liquor licenses is often an area of intense conflict. Local residents oppose loud, noisy bars open late, and the attendees of loud, noisy bars open late aren’t a particularly organized constituency. The result is (unknown to most D.C. residents) that some neighborhoods (specifically, Dupont Circle, Georgetown, Glover Park, and Adams Morgan), have moratoriums in effect for new liquor licenses. The effect of the limited supply is the existing bars are even louder and busier, but that’s an issue for another day.

Before describing potential reforms I think it should note that most ANCs function relatively well most of the time. They are groups of citizens, serving unpaid, who have regular meetings to discuss issues of neighborhood concern. It’s important to note the critical role the ANCs create in providing a forum for neighborhood-level discussion, and to allow city government a formal way to communicate with local residents about proposed developments and policies. In fact, the intense emotion surrounding some ANC races speaks to the important role they provide. Although some throw up their hands and call for them to be abolished, I believe they play an important role and should continue to exist in some form.

Since no political system is perfect, this post serves to discuss some potential improvements. Here are too general categories of criticism.

First, too often ANCs are not representative. As a result, ANCs disproportionately represent the views of older, more affluent property owners. The views of the significant renter population in many neighborhoods is limited in many ANCs. Additionally, because of these biases the views of all may not be represented. In Adams Morgan, 1C is all white despite the huge diversity of the neighborhood. (See members today). In other neighborhoods, the patterns are different by no less troubling, with ANC commissioners not representing every facet of the community.

Second, ANCs are highly varied in their operations. The ANCs are independent, receiving only a small amount of support from city government. As a result, the quality of their websites, publications, location and openness of the meetings, and other aspects of operations varies widely, resulting in frustration and making them susceptible to manipulation.

Partly responding to these criticisms, below are four possible avenues of reform:

1. Modify the structure of Single Member Districts. The SMDs ensure every resident exactly one ANC commissioner to report to, however they suffer the same problem of any geography-based electoral system: diffuse interests are often not represented. (renters, immigrant populations, etc.) For this reason many city councils, including D.C., have at-large seats. The ANC boundaries could remain the same and all commissioners could be elected at-large within the ANC. Or, a compromise option, each ANC could have one at-large commissioner in addition to those elected from SMDs. The number of SMDs could be reduced, or the total number of commissioners in each ANC increased by one.

2. City government should enforce greater transparency and consistency in operations. The city could mandate the ANCs report their budgets, agendas, and other documents to a central repository. Access to these documents is often uneven. ANCs could be provided access to a system to allow them to set up a website through city resources. The ANC office in general takes a very hands-off approach, which is understandable given limited resources. However, a more active ANC office could standardize the operations of each without threatening their autonomy.

3. Reduce the number of ANCs or enlarge SMD sizes. Although some neighborhoods enjoy active ANCs, others are less active and successful. Each ward contains 4 to 6 of the groups, perhaps the total number should be reduced and the corresponding SMDs enlarged. Currently many neighborhood civic organizations and ANCs cover similar areas, making the ANCs slightly larger would reduce this apparent redundancy. Having fewer ANCs might also increase the quality of their participation in public policy as it would cut down on the number of meetings necessary to reach every neighborhood in the city. It would, however, dilute the power of individual votes and reduce the number of elected commissioners.

4. Term Limits for ANC Commissioners. In Shaw, and other ANCs throughout the city, ANC commissioners can be very long-served, with mixed effects. Although they can be trusted voices and amass deep historical knowledge, long-serving ANC commissioners may prevent others from getting involved. The same arguments for and against term limits for any representative seat applies. Commissioners could have term limits, something fairly long but enough to ensure some turnover, perhaps 5-10 years.

These are just some tentative proposals based on my limited knowledge and experience with the system. Additional viewpoints are welcome. ANCs should be recognized as a valuable D.C. institution that is become a critical part of the local political life. However, like any political system their structure and operations need not remain static and fixed.

Note on boundary maps: The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics has this gallery of maps of the district boundaries. However, I think they are inferior to an older series that has been removed. For example, the new maps don’t contain labels for all the SMDs. Luckily, these maps are preserved in the Internet Archive here. For the technically inclined, KML and ESRI Shapefile versions are available from the city here.

After deciphering the water quality data table (requiring a glossary of 14 acronyms and terms) it looks like my tap water is pretty clean, except for turbidity (suspended particles) and sodium (from road salt and the treatment process). Two of 60 homes tested had high levels of lead, unfortunately not unusual in a city with old water systems and old residential plumbing. The newsletter even boasted about a testing program for pharmaceuticals and personal care products (the D.C. water from the Potomac River has trace amounts of six of these) but they only found nicotine and acetaminophen in small amounts.

I also discovered that, unlike what I assumed, Cambridge does not share a drinking water source with the large Metropolitan Water Resources Authority system that serves the City of Boston. In this map of the MWRA system, the Cambridge drinking water source is located above the tanks just before the aqueduct splits to serve Boston.

Instead, the water comes from the affluent suburbs of Weston, Waltham, Lincoln, and Lexington, where the city funnels a small watershed into two reservoirs for drinking water. Although most of the land is privately owned, Cambridge owns over 1,200 acres of land including the reservoirs and some surrounding land. The water is piped to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, where the treatment plant is located. Tiny diagrams in the report illustrate the watershed and treatment process.

The majority of the watershed is very low density residential neighborhoods in Weston and Lincoln, which show up as a lush green forest on the satellite imagery. This is no doubt the reason for the water quality, and in an interesting way the low density of some of Boston’s exclusive suburbs serves to ensure the extremely urban City of Cambridge with a clean water supply.

The watershed is not without any potential pollutants, however. On their website, the city has detailed maps of zoning, land use, and protection areas in the watershed. The risk map (detail, below) shows the watershed area contains the busy Route 128/I-95, a number of buried petroleum storage tanks (usually at gas stations), and even a capped landfill (see arrow). The city reservoir at Fresh Pond is very close to Danehy Park, build on top of a closed 50-acre city landfill, but presumably the potential for contamination has been thoroughly explored.

What about the commentary on bureaucracy? Below the water quality data is a small note. “In 2008, we had a Monitoring Violation” the city reports. According to a “laboratory scheduling error” the city failed to test for perchlorate in the 3rd quarter of 2008. When they discovered the omission on October 28, 2008, they tested the water and found none detected. Nevertheless, the city reports, “we cannot be sure of the quality of our drinking water during that time.” That’s going in somebody’s annual review.

A trained sociologist, as a newly minted PhD Hampton taught at the MIT Urban Studies and Planning program from 2001 to 2005. Here he developed and launched I-Neighbors, a “social networking service that connects residents of geographic neighborhoods.” The website allows registered users to look up and join “neighborhoods.” Each neighborhood has a variety of default functions: email list, polls, business reviews, photos, documents, events, and a directory of other members. Originally it had a “GovLink” service allowing users to connect to local elected officials, but this has been shut down due to cost.

Although the website could use some design tweaks (fonts are too small, for one), the website is reasonably straightforward to use and clearly carefully thought out. I think I remember reading the site was accompanied with some offline training sessions in the Boston area.

Unfortunately, it’s taken off in relatively few neighborhoods. According to a 2006 paper, as of then 23.6% of website users hadn’t joined any neighborhood, and only 9 neighborhoods have over 50 users. These facts suggest it’s either not what they’re looking for, too complicated, or have another usability issue. When users look up a zip code, if another user has not created a neighborhood the systems says there “are currently no i-Neighborhoods in your area” asking, in smaller letters, if they want to create one. Creating new neighborhoods is simple enough, but I bet pre-creating any searched for neighborhood would get more users engaged in the system.

Individually, the tools are useful, and in fact sites have thrived performing almost all individually:

• Business reviews – Yelp
• Geocoded Photos – Flickr
• Neighborhood listservs – Yahoo, Google, private lists
• Neighborhood news – Variety of local news, blogs, neighborhood (offline) newsletters.

Why isn’t there greater use of these functions on the website? In marketing parlance, the ‘unique value proposition’ of social networking websites, is the content and the people, not the functionality. Thus in the fickle world of social networking, some have thrived while others have withered according to their relative popularity among users, not necessarily the sophistication of the functionality. I-Neighbors has struggled to take off in many communities.

Additionally, the content is carefully organized into neighborhood-specific stovepipes. This reduces the potential users able to see, say, the review of a local business. Additionally, urban residents have famously fluid conceptions of neighborhoods, suggesting perhaps the content should be organized in a less rigid way. Although functioning in some ways like a social networking websites, users don’t select which friends they will allow to see their profiles, instead all members of the neighborhood are thrown in together. Additionally, there’s no search functionality for users and users can only see other people in their networks, not across the system. These barriers to finding other people thwart one potential source of interest in the system.

A related conundrum for academic innovators is although they may be able to imagine possible new tools, they can rarely keep pace with the private sector in terms of usability, design, and functionality. However, the market may not produce the websites with precisely the sort of arrangement or functionality we’d like to see. I give Prof. Hampton credit for developing such a sophisticated tool, but it will have trouble to keep pace with private sector websites with dedicated staff making continual improvement.s

One approach to the success of a myriad of highly specialized sites for specific geographically specific information is the one taken by EveryBlock, which aggregates private and government data for every block (or zip code), including Yelp! reviews, geotagged Flickr photos, restaurant inspections, blog posts and crime reports.

A Success Story

One neighborhood, profiled in this academic paper, was particularly successful, resulting in a very vibrant email list. What can we learn from this case? This neighborhood was already well organized offline, is a physically distinct community with an association that adopted I-Neighbors as a platform for online collaboration. The group requires members to use their real names (something the e-democracy.org folks believe in). As an aside, the use of the site also shows the direct connection between neighborhood media to planning and policy, a early hot topics was a redevelopment plans, how the neighborhood corporation was investing revenue in the neighborhood.

This successful neighborhood benefited from several very active members. Although hyperactive participants can be a liability, overwhelming visitors or dominating conversations, a core of enthusiastic participants can benefit a forum because they create a public good – information and opinion – that others can read or react to. This relates to Noor Ali-Hasan’s blog study that argued active conversation starting blogs play an important role in a larger ecosystem of online communication.

Closing Questions

Considering the lessons this website provides, two questions arise. First, what is new? What new information was communicated, new relationships developed, or most importantly new outcomes resulted in the real world? It’s not clear how you could prove something like this, but it is the question of central importance evaluating the significance of a new community-building tool. The second but related question, how did the online intervention change existing relationships and arrangements? Did it reinforce them, alter them in another way? Answering these questions rigorously — about I-Neighbors or any other community building website — will help us understand the true potential for the Internet to affect local communities.

> I-Neighbors.org

Today, the three individuals charged with creating the Open Government Directive launched the Open Government Initiative to “experiment with mechanisms for effective citizen participation” while developing the government’s policy, dividing the task into three parts: brainstorm (now), discuss (starting June 3) and draft (starting June 15th). The process includes “From the Inbox,” a collection of contributed comments, and “Listening Sessions,” or notes or recordings of meetings. Already in the inbox is collection of interesting documents mostly from established interest groups like GWU National Security Archives, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and AmericaSpeaks.

Also today the White House launched Data.gov, an effort to provide a central repository of government data, and the start of a forum on improving Regulations.gov.

Reviewing the suggestions from the Kennedy School’s Transparency Policy Project, this suggestion (PDF) for an experimental project caught my eye:

The Departments of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Transportation could create a customizable platform to allow cities and towns to quickly deploy web sites that allow residents to report local problems (e.g. broken streetlights, abandoned vehicles, potholes, tunnel and bridge problems) in a geo-coded database and display system with mark up features. Cities and towns could deploy the platform on a voluntary, and perhaps incentivized, basis and integrate it with their 311 (non-emergency) incident reporting systems.

The project idea raises several issues. First, despite the fact the initiative is for the federal government as a whole, this suggest leaps all the way to the hyperlocal level. There seems to be something intrinsic about Internet technology that makes it particularly well suited for local initiatives, perhaps due to some of the factors I discuss here. Second, it raises the issue of to what extent government should attempt to create new technology. There actually already is a website that does more or less what the Harvard folks describe that I’ve been meaning to write about — SeeClickFix. In fact, here’s some potholes, broken streetlights, and other problems already reported on this private website:

Some have argued the government should focus on data sources nearly exclusively, but I’m more of a moderate on the issue. After all, the private sector may not develop technology that suits the unique characteristics of government. Lastly, this local suggestion implies the subtle ways the Obama Administration’s innovation in transparency, participation, and online engagement could trickle down to state and local government.

> White House Open Government Initiative
> Data.gov
> SeeClickFix

I profiled the project in an interview with Neil in December 2007, and as this passage describes the project isn’t so much about a simple street map of a fictional city, but an entire fictional planning scenario:

[Neil Greenberg:] … Like you mention, real cities are not perfect. They do contain disappointments and mistakes and challenges. For 50 years, millions of people blithely accepted the idea that suburbs would flourish forever and cities would all die. Let us not underestimate the demise of that conventional wisdom. It’s a very exciting time to be involved in planning. Today, we have a unique chance to re-create vibrant, sustainable cities and regions.

That won’t, however, happen in one step. What intrigues me is the transition. How do we come to terms with decades of poor planning? Where do we make the best of existing infrastructure – and where do we have to start from scratch? How do we learn from prior attempts at redevelopment? What do we want our cities and regions to look like in the future? Why is the need to think ahead so obvious to some and so lost on others?

The “flaws” built into Fake Omaha are exercises in dealing with these questions. In transforming our metropolitan areas — particularly stubborn ones like Detroit — we’ll have to face challenging and unpredictable circumstances. It will take a portfolio of small victories before an entire metro area turns the corner. That’s exactly what I’m doing in Fake Omaha. At 60th Street and Fallbrook, what was once a faltering strip mall is now a farmers market. Along Bishop Street and Charlotte Street, neglected four- and five-story buildings are being renovated into mixed-use commercial and residential space, in the same neighborhood that used to bulldoze those very buildings to make a few more parking spaces. Through all of this, the transit system has risen to the forefront: what was formerly a bus service for the poor and the weak has become an indisputable driving force of smarter, more valuable regional development.

Read my interview of Neil or his article in Triple Canopy: “Boom, Bust, Burn, Blame: Fake Omaha”

For more background, see my post “Fixing America’s Federal Transportation Policy.”