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POLITICS

New online tool lets you compare Indy neighborhoods

Brian Eason
IndyStar
IndyVitals.org measures the health and stability of 99 communities in Marion County.

Ever wonder how your neighborhood's property values stack up against the rest of Indianapolis?

How about its crime, poverty and vacancy rates? Is your neighborhood doing better, worse or about the same as it was five years ago?

Indy now has a tool for that.

Area leaders hope that Indy Vitals, an online data visualization portal, can shed light on all of the above, giving Indianapolis residents and city planners alike a more informed picture of the challenges and strengths of Marion County's many neighborhoods.

So what's Indy Vitals?

The tool, found at indyvitals.org, was created as part of the city's Plan 2020 bicentennial master plan. It's expected to help city leaders track whether public and private investments in things like housing, early childhood education and trails are truly improving the lives of Marion County residents.

“But that’s not why we built it,” said Brad Beaubien, the city’s director of long-range planning.

Because of budget cuts and philosophical shifts, the city government’s role in community planning has shifted from leader to more of a facilitator. So Indy Vitals’ true purpose, Beaubien said, is to provide community organizations, public agencies and residents a centralized, consistent tool to inform community development efforts.

The underlying data have long been available from various places, such as the U.S. Census. But it's often not presented in an easily accessible way, or even with the same geographic boundaries.

“Indy Vitals was a way to consistently tell the same story about the same geographic area that multiple people are interested in," said Sharon Kandris, director of SAVI, which powers the Indy Vitals database.

“In five minutes, you can start to really weave together and understand what some of the challenges and barriers and positive aspects of a community are.”

Plan 2020: This is the key to Indy's future

SAVI, run by the Polis Center at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, is the largest community data portal of its kind in the nation. But the no-frills data interface can be a bit overwhelming for many users. The hope is that Indy Vitals will prove useful not just to city planners and researchers, but also to community organizations and inquisitive neighbors.

SAVI, the city and the Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee unveiled the tool at an event Thursday morning at WFYI.

The homepage is simple enough: Just pick one of the 99 communities from the map, or from the drop-down on the left to get started.

IndyVitals.org measures the health and stability of 99 communities in Marion County.

Long term, Kandris said, they hope the data can give city planners and community groups a better idea of what things each neighborhood needs to improve in order to succeed.

Take the Mapleton-Fall Creek neighborhood as an example: the area is overwhelmingly poor, leaving its residents with a high housing cost burden. But unlike many of Indy's poorest neighborhoods, its residents have good access to grocery stores and high-quality pre-kindergarten providers. Violent crime is on the decline. It also has a high walkability score. That might suggest to planners that the neighborhood has some assets it can build on, but there's still a need for affordable housing and good-paying jobs.

Meet Indy's next Fountain Square

So what else can you do with it?

It lets you rank communities.

The main dashboard ranks the neighborhood of your choice on 20 key metrics and shows not only how it ranks today, but also how how that compares to 2010 and to Marion County at large.

IndyVitals.org measures the health and stability of 99 communities in Marion County.

Obligatory disclaimer: There's often a lag in data collection, so depending on the metric, the most recent data might still be a few years old.

But the available data show that Mapleton Fall-Creek ranks poorly on many housing metrics. Its median assessed value of $80,750 is below the Marion County average. Perhaps more troubling, that figure has declined since 2010. Its ranking has slipped 8 positions to 74th out of 99 communities.

And you can compare them.

Graphing tools make it easy to see how each neighborhood stacks up against Marion County as whole.

Indy Vitals charts allow you to compare the neighborhood to the county.

The chart above shows that Mapleton-Fall Creek residents have good access to quality early childhood education compared with many other neighborhoods. Below, you can see how Mapleton-Fall Creek's 15 percent unemployment rate in 2014 stacked up against the county, metro area and state at large.

Trend charts allow you to see how the neighborhood fares over time for a metric. This one shows that unemployment rates are higher in Mapleton / Fall Creek than the county, metro, and state – and the rate is trending upward in MFC while downward across the county as a whole.

Savvier users can drill down even further, breaking down metrics by race, gender, income or education.

You can also map community assets...

This one shows the availability of childcare in Mapleton-Fall Creek based on the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration's quality ratings.

Indy Vitals maps allow you to explore assets within the community.  This one shows the availability of childcare in Mapleton / Fall Creek based on the quality rating.

...Or key indicators.

The heat map below shows that Mapleton-Fall Creek is one of the most walkable communities in Marion County.

Maps allow you to view the neighborhood in comparison to the entire county to see how it compares.  This walkability map shows Mapleton / Fall Creek is one of the most walkable communities in the county.

The tool does have its limits, Kandris said.

"It’s really just a place to start to tell the story," she said. "It’s also going to raise new questions."

The hope is that the questions — and the answers — will be smarter if everyone has access to better information on the front end.

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Call IndyStar reporter Brian Eason at (317) 444-6129. Follow him on Twitter: @brianeason.