There’s been a lot of talk since Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum took office about how data will drive city hall, and now there’s an example.
"We wanted to look at the relationship between blight and violent crime in Tulsa. To our knowledge, the two have been individually looked at, but we did not find any data that showed we've ever looked at both the data sets together," said Chase Mohler with the city's Working In Neighborhoods Department.
By overlaying WIN and police data on one map, Mohler and other city employees found there tends to be violent crime hotspots near blight, especially in northeast Tulsa and at 61st Street and Peoria Avenue.
Blighted properties are those in such disrepair they can no longer be lived in legally.
The link between violent crime and blight is nonexistent in swaths of midtown. Mohler said some of that comes down to not having an inventory of blighted midtown properties.
"Our two demolition inspectors are grant-funded, and they operate in low- to moderate-income areas. And so, in some of those areas, they're not low to moderate, so they're not operating, necessarily," Mohler said.
Mohler said to get a better blight inventory, the city could turn to residents for help.
Mohler, other city employees and volunteers under the name Urban Data Pioneers are analyzing city data to find trends that could influence city policy. Another recent analysis sought to find the most productive areas acre-for-acre for sales tax revenue in the city.
