Looking at public data doesn’t tell a property’s whole story. There’s also what you can learn from standing in the street, looking at the thing, and even more if you live in the neighborhood and have specific knowledge of a property.

In December of 2013, LOVELAND Technologies and Data Driven Detroit teamed up to survey all 380,000 properties in Detroit in a project called Motor City Mapping. We equipped 150 Detroiters with a property survey app developed by LOVELAND, called “Blexting” (blight + texting = Blexting).

Over the next 2 months, through the harshest Detroit winter in a century, our surveyors photographed 377,000 properties, evaluating each for condition, vacancy, fire damage, dumping, and more.

The result is the data shown in the map interface below. Simple dropdown menus allow you to see the extent of blight, vacancy, and more in any area of the city. Coming next will be Detroiters’ opportunity to update and correct the data collected in the survey, as Blexting becomes a public app and key component of “The People’s Property Dashboard” — a kind of city-run Why Don’t We Own This? from LOVELAND. The Dashboard and Blexting will put people and the city on a common platform for updating property information across Detroit.

The project was commissioned by the federally appointed Blight Task Force, and funded by Rock Ventures, the Michigan State Housing & Development Authority, and the Skillman and Kresge Foundations.

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