Blight is more than an eyesore; it affects the health, safety, and economic potential of our communities. Neighborhood cleanliness and fighting blight are ongoing responsibilities for the City of Memphis – particularly for divisions like Solid Waste, Public Works, 311, and Community Enhancement. 
 
Thanks to the great ideas that came out of our 2024 City Hackathon, the City has partnered with hackers and Innovate Memphis to make some big improvements to how our community addresses blight. These include developing new tech tools to 1) assign cleanup tasks to community partners and businesses that are part of the Blight Zero initiative; 2) publish a home repair eligibility screener where residents can quickly find out which programs can help them improve their properties; and 3) prototype a forthcoming status report and education app where users can get better insights on problem properties in their neighborhood. Our team at Innovate Memphis has also launched a “newly renovated” version of our Property Hub data mapping tool where users can see several data points for individual properties and larger geographic areas ranging from ownership to vacancy status to evictions.

Call to Action:
For our 2025 Hackathon, we want to build on the successes of last year by focusing on how different types of data sources and analysis can make it easier for City staff and community members to prioritize properties for blight mitigation efforts. With a large geographic service area and finite resources, the City is seeking new ideas on how to prioritize and properly allocate resources based on which properties, communities, property owners, and types of issues indicate recurring blight problems. Challenges include dealing with problem properties where the same issues happen repeatedly (ex: illegal dumping piles, high weeds/grass in vacant lots) and using multiple data sources to prioritize properties for mitigation beyond 311 service requests.

Potential Hackathon Topics
Potential Hackathon subtopics to pursue include (but aren’t limited to) the following:
*Identifying geographic areas, property types, and other trends the City should prioritize for service based on data and mapping
*Using multiple measures for property conditions to create a blight index or predictive indicators for where properties/parcels may be susceptible to blight-related issues
*Mining and analyzing new data sets beyond 311 to improve how the City identifies and responds to blight issues (ex: automated flags from Google images, business rating trends for landlords & properties)
*Designing dashboard or data report wireframes so City staff can identify and prioritize properties that need mitigation

Hacker Skill Sets Needed
*Data analysis/data science
*GIS and mapping
*Data visualization/business intelligence
*App and web tool development
*Project management
*Performance management