Code for America has teamed up with the City of New Orleans to make all of our lives easier. Instead of spending hours on the phone with various city departments or searching through a confusing website, now there is a simple solutions to get up-to-date information about blighted properties in the city. Today at 1:30pm, Mayor Landrieu and the Code for America team, along with Deputy Mayor Andy Kopplin and city officials, will announce the launch of BlightStatus, a new website that brings in all the desired data to one place.
BlightStatus is an open source project from Code for America, one that they are hoping can expand to other cities in the future. The website allows users to see the current status of blighted properties in a searchable neighborhood as well as what is coming next via the status bar feature. All of this information is available to the public. Users can also set automatic alerts by subscribing to individual properties or neighborhoods.
The website has arrived two years after the Mayor’s new blight strategy for the city with a goal of reducing the blight count by 10,000 properties by 2014. CfA has mentioned how the city is leveraging three things to make it work: highly engaged citizens, a strong mayor, and BlightStat, a monthly public meeting. A new study shows the number of blighted properties has already been reduced by around 8,000 since 2010.
For more information visit BlightStatus.com now, or after 1:00pm to search around your neighborhood.