Erica Raleigh wears the label “geek” as a badge of honor, says Ambassador magazine.
As the still-new director of Data Driven Detroit, which played a key role in the recently released anti-blight survey, she gushes about statistics, studies and data sets that quickly make other people’s eyes glaze over. “I love looking at spreadsheets, but I guess most people don’t,” she admits.
Among D3’s many projects is the landmark Detroit Residential Parcel Survey, a 2009 project that identified the condition of every residential property in the city. Joined by the Detroit Office of Foreclosure Prevention and Response, Community Legal Resources, the Ginsberg Center and Living Cities, D3 examined nearly 350,000 properties within Detroit. Visitors can search the data through detroitparcelsurvey.org by single address, block, neighborhood or region. The information has been used to define everything from voter registration to demolition efforts.
“Oh my gosh,” Raleigh, who has a master's degree in urban planning from Wayne State, tells the magazine. “You can now see a beautiful parcel level map of vacant lots, vacant houses, homes in good condition. We provided these maps to groups and started taking action to lobby for funding and attention from cities and building departments.”
