How Buffalo, New York, uses Tolemi to strategically run their Operation Clean Sweep Initiative
Clean Sweep initiatives are community-driven efforts adopted by cities across the United States. The details may vary in each municipality, but the goal remains the same, which is to beautify and improve the cleanliness of the city, town, or township. These initiatives typically involve organizing volunteers to focus on specific areas, resulting in community outreach and cleanup.
In Buffalo, New York, the Operation Clean Sweep Initiative is led by their Citizen Services Department. Their work drives collaborative efforts involving city, state, and federal partners, along with local health and human services providers, community groups, and volunteers, all to maintain and improve the quality of life for the citizens of the city. The initiative’s work is encapsulated in what is called their 4-pronged approach:
- Beautification and Restoration
- Outreach and Education
- Codes and Law Enforcement
- Health and human services
Over a six-month period, on a weekly, rotating basis, teams are positioned in target neighborhoods in all nine council districts. The activities of these teams include boarding up abandoned structures, removing graffiti and debris, code enforcement, community policing, trimming trees, repairing signs, and going door-to-door offering governmental, employment, and health and human services information.
Buffalo’s Clean Sweep Initiative background
Buffalo has a rich history as a major economic and transportation hub. From its birth in 1832, it grew to be among the nation’s largest steel-production centers. Its location at the end of the Erie Canal made Buffalo a vital junction for nearly two centuries. However, coinciding with the northeast’s industrial decline, and the evolution of the U.S.’s transportation network, its population decreased over 55% from a peak of 573,000 at the start of the Great Depression.
Today, Buffalo is seeing chronic vacancy and abandonment, along with a host of deep-rooted neighborhood issues that awaited Mayor Byron W. Brown when he was elected to his first term in 2006. The Save Our Streets (SOS) Task Force was started the same year to address blight and quality of life concerns, requiring cross-departmental and interagency coordination. The city recognized that any approach to revitalization requires not only collaboration within government, but also engagement with the broader community. SOS aims to empower residents in the community and improve the quality of life by ridding residential properties of drug activity, nuisance properties, and other neighborhood issues in a collaborative manner. From there, Operation Clean Sweep was born out of the SOS Task Force to focus on eliminating blight, reducing crime, and providing social services outreach.
The Challenge – Implementing a fair process in choosing Clean Sweep neighborhoods
In the early years of the initiative, Clean Sweep areas were chosen largely based on input from Buffalo’s Common Council members, representing each of the city’s nine districts. This approach was beneficial because it allowed the elected officials to identify the communities they felt were most deserving. But the lack of a data-driven methodology left the program open to criticism because of the subjective nature of the selection process.
As time went on, the city relied on demographic, socio-economic factors, and some simple event information—taken from the American Community Survey and aggregated to the Census Block—to select neighborhoods and blocks. But there were challenges with this approach as well. Factors like poverty rates, demographics, and vacancy change, which resulted in the methodology pointing to the same blocks year after year. While these are a good measure of social vulnerability, they do not always align with on-the-ground neighborhood indicators like blight, citizen complaints, and crime, which change daily and vary block to block.
While the city heard a steady chorus of praise for Clean Sweeps from the citizens, the Citizen Services team struggled to quantify the impact they were having on residents and neighborhood conditions. But if they were able to start quantifying the impact of each operation, they could better refine the selection process and tailor each Clean Sweep to the needs of a specific community.
Oswaldo Mestre – Executive Director of Division Citizen Services, Senior Advisor to the Mayor, Chief Services Officer
“We listen to our residents and respond back. There’s the function of making sure the quality of life of our residents is maintained at a certain level. So in doing clean sweeps, we started to look and said we need to have more of a data-driven approach to how we do clean sweeps.”
The Solution – Using unbiased data to choose and prioritize Clean Sweep areas
In 2017, the New York State Office of the Attorney General's Office launched a program called “Cities for Responsible Investment and Strategic Enforcement” (“Cities RISE”). $8 million in grant funding would be awarded to cities to innovatively address and transform blighted, vacant, or poorly maintained problem properties through the use of housing and community data.
Attorney General Letitia James
“Cities RISE provides a thoughtful approach to how municipalities revitalize their communities, and ensures that housing issues are addressed.”
With this matching considerably for the task at hand, Buffalo applied and won funding from this grant, finding Tolemi in the process. All Cities RISE participants use Tolemi’s BuildingBlocks platform to provide key municipal data insights. In 2017, Buffalo’s Citizen Services Department, the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency (BURA), and the Department of Management Information Systems (MIS), partnered with Tolemi to roll out the BuildingBlocks application. The tool integrates nearly 50 datasets from over 12 systems including 311 complaints, police and fire calls, tax delinquency, foreclosures, utility payments and shut-offs, building permits, property sales, and more, into a single, map-based platform, updated nightly. BuildingBlocks also takes these raw inputs and automatically derives insights on LLC ownership, vacancy indicators, owner-occupancy, fix-and-flips, and more for all 97,265 parcels in the city.
Michael T. A. Smith – Save Our Streets Program Coordinator
“One thing we decided to do was to use data-driven methodology to find out exactly where the clean sweeps needed to happen. When you’re using the data to find out where the needs are most, then you can use that data to tell what services you need to bring into that community. If there’s one area with a lot of housing issues, then you’re going to make sure you bring those housing partners. If there’s an area with a lot of vacant lots, then you’re going to bring those beautification and restoration teams. You’re going to bolster the team that will bring the greatest value to that area.”
Working alongside Tolemi, the Citizen Services team used the BuildingBlocks Score Manager to construct a Clean Sweep score that determined where and when Clean Sweeps would occur. The score factors include 311 calls, police incidents, code violations, and tax delinquency as indicators of distress. At the same time, Mestre’s team recognized that its interventions like Clean Sweeps might contribute to declining affordability, so they also include factors like property sales prices over the past three years, fix-and-flips, and building permits to measure neighborhood change. These property-level indicators were coupled with factors such as housing cost burden, poverty levels, and unemployment rates from the Census Bureau to derive a final score that is used to prioritize the Clean Sweep schedule every year.
Oswaldo Mestre – Executive Director of Division Citizen Services, Senior Advisor to the Mayor, Chief Services Officer
“The data helps us know something’s going on. When people say, “This was the best Clean Sweep ever,” I think, “Yeah, the data told me to go here.” And then the people in the community said, “What took you so long?”
Not only does BuildingBlocks allow the city to keep its finger on the pulse of changing neighborhood and property conditions, but it also allows Citizen Services to measure the impact of the Clean Sweeps. Mestre’s team wondered whether clearing blighted conditions on a block, facilitating conversations between residents and community police officers, and making residents aware of resources available to them could encourage residents to work with the city to improve neighborhood conditions.
The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, in partnership with Citizen Services, used administrative and census data in BuildingBlocks to examine the impact of the Clean Sweeps on residents’ reporting of crime incidents (911) and service needs (311). Using data on the clusters of properties that had received Clean Sweeps from 2009 to 2021 they matched each property with clusters of very similar properties for each year. They found that properties where Clean Sweeps had occurred were more likely to report drug-related crime and service needs related to upkeep of the physical environment, thus being able to continue to foster trust between city hall and the citizens they serve.
Mayor Byron Brown
“Our clean sweeps are another example of the strong partnerships underway in our community, between our city departments, our residents, community-based organizations, non-profits, for-profits organizations, and our partners in other levels of government. County, state, federal government, all working together to make a difference in our community.”
To learn more about Clean Sweep initiatives and how to use data to launch, or improve such a program in your municipality, reach out to us at info@tolemi.com.