ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Officials are working to beef up Allentown’s data efforts to address some of the most-entrenched problems in the city, Mayor Matt Tuerk said Wednesday.
Speaking at Community Services for Children, Tuerk announced the launch of a citywide data strategy that he said will help officials address Allentown’s “wicked problems,” such as homelessness, gun violence and poor air quality.
Those issues are “hard to define, not always clear, and we all disagree about how we're going to solve them," Tuerk said. "They're also deeply interconnected.
“These are problems that need more than just someone who cares an awful lot; these problems require the use of data.”
The initiative is funded through Bloomberg Philanthropies’ City Data Alliance, a network of more than 60 cities in a dozen countries across North and South America.
The data initiative will “match [city employees'] hearts with our brains to meet the challenges of this new environment. That's why we need a strategy to guide our work.”Mayor Matt Tuerk
Tuerk, a self-described “data nerd,” was among 23 mayors who joined the City Data Alliance last summer.
Allentown has long “led with its heart, [with] work done by employees who care deeply about our community,” Tuerk said.
The citywide data alliance will “match those hearts with our brains to meet the challenges of this new environment,” he said. “That's why we need a strategy to guide our work.”
The initiative has several key components: creating an inventory of city data assets, building a public dashboard to share data, training city employees in data literacy and collaborating across departments and with city partners.
Eviction data's worrying trends
Laura Ballek-Cole, Allentown’s civic innovation manager, highlighted a data project in which officials found and analyzed data on evictions in the city.
The project, which was used as a soft launch for the data initiative, sought to find data to prove or disprove anecdotal evidence about increasing eviction rates in Allentown.
“We knew that we needed a better understanding of what was happening so the city could take more meaningful action."Laura Ballek-Cole, Allentown’s civic innovation manager
“We knew that we needed a better understanding of what was happening so the city could take more meaningful action,” Ballek-Cole said Wednesday.
Data compiled from various sources showed Lehigh County has the third-highest eviction rate of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, with almost 6,800 eviction notices filed in the year from July 2022 to June 2023.
The survey also indicated a huge jump in evictions — 103% — since 2020.
But digging through the data revealed less obvious trends, Ballek-Cole said.
Three-quarters of all evictions during that 12-month period were filed against households where the rent was $1,400 or less.
And almost half of all evictions in the city were in the 18012 ZIP code that includes Franklin Park, “a neighborhood that the city is highly invested in,” Ballek-Cole said.
'Our most vulnerable residents'
The data makes it clear that evictions aren’t happening in “the high-rent apartments downtown,” she said.
“This is affecting our most vulnerable residents at the lowest end of the socioeconomic spectrum.”
Eviction data showed landlords won 77% of cases against their tenants, while tenants won 0.77% — 1/100 of the total, she said.
Statistics also showed one property-management company was responsible for almost 7% of all eviction filings, Ballek-Cole said. She did not identify the company.
Tuerk said the “resident impact” project on evictions will help “strengthen our ability to solve future challenges and deal with more wicked problems."
City officials will use data, computers and artificial intelligence technology “to inform our decisions, not make them,” Tuerk said.
“We need to make sure … that we're not just farming out decision-making to a computer,” he said.
