Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Urban community development corporations and other local institutions routinely face challenging problems in housing and economic development that require substantial expertise in data analytics and decision modeling. While CDC employees have significant experience in diverse application areas, they often face limitations in acquiring, analyzing and sharing data, and using these data to solve decision problems whose solutions can generate novel strategies to address localized needs. Recent research, inspired by local responses to

the housing foreclosure crisis, and developed in cooperation with Boston‐area CDCs, has resulted in a collection of analytic methods and applications that can assist CDCs and similar organizations …

This book addresses the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of decision science and information technologies to help stabilize and revitalize distressed urban communities in the United States.

While cities in the U.S. grow and decline at various rates and for different underlying reasons, neighborhoods within cities that have faced sustained demographic and socio-economic challenges over time may have multiple factors in common, such as physical blight, widespread vacancies, underserved and marginalized populations and, in some cases, local markets that do not respond to traditional economic development strategies. These distressed communities are often indicative of high levels of spatial …