Philadelphia launches Kensington data tool meant to help residents ‘take back’ the neighborhood

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration is launching a new data dashboard for the city’s Kensington neighborhood as a way for residents to track progress on crime, vacant property remediation, and other quality-of-life indicators.

The city developed the dashboard, which was made available to the public on Tuesday, as a pilot program for real-time, neighborhood-level data about a range of city services. It will be used by city officials and is meant to be accessible to residents, and officials envision business owners and developers using the dashboard to identify parts of the city that are prime for investment.

Officials chose to first focus the tool on Kensington, where the Parker administration has increased law enforcement and social services in an effort to shut down the entrenched open-air drug market and address pervasive homelessness. There has simultaneously been gentrification there in recent years as development has pushed north from Fishtown.

Kristin Bray, the mayor’s chief legal counsel and the leader of the data initiative, called Philly Stat 360, said the launch of the public dashboard is part of a new phase of the city’s plan for Kensington geared toward empowering residents to “take back” the neighborhood after two years of an increased police presence.

Some of the data compiled on the dashboard were already publicly available, such as crime rates and 311 requests. However, isolating the information by neighborhood would require users to visit multiple websites and comb through large datasets.

Now, users can see a variety of data markers all in one place, including recent EMS incidents, the number of beds available at behavioral health treatment facilities, and the locations of everything from vacant properties to crossing guards.

One page on the dashboard addresses a long-held concern from some Kensington residents that people arrested for using drugs there had traveled to the neighborhood from outside the city. The tool shows the aggregate home addresses of inmates who were arrested in Kensington over the last year — the vast majority of whom are from Philadelphia.

Another tab allows users to see where code violations are piling up, an especially pervasive issue in Kensington, where real estate speculators have gobbled up properties and left them vacant.

“We’re really giving the community members this data so they can advocate on behalf of themselves,” Bray said, “and so that the city can also see what is happening in the community in real time, so everyone’s operating from the same set of facts.”

Parker campaigned on improving access to city services, and she says often that she wants Philadelphians to “see, touch, and feel” the government at work. The dashboard rollout comes as the mayor is gearing up to deliver her annual budget proposal Thursday. In past years, she has unveiled new quality-of-life initiatives as part of her spending plan.

The dashboard was developed using ArcGIS software created by the California-based firm Esri, which has worked with governments across the country on mapping and other geospatial technology. In Philadelphia’s case, Esri’s software pulls information from city departments in real time and maps it on the dashboard.

Bray said the next step will be creating dashboards for Philadelphia’s other neighborhoods, which she hopes to do this year. It will not be as simple as replicating the Kensington datasets, which are specific to the needs of that neighborhood.

“Each community has its own problems,” she said. “Knowing what those problems are, and being able to map it and see where the issues are so you can target the intervention, can only help us to better serve residents.”