Searching for substandard housing in Alachua county: A case study

Abstract

Since manual methods for the inventory and identification of substandard housing are expensive and time consuming, the authors have undertaken, in conjunction with the Alachua County Housing Authority, to develop a computer automated methodology for the inventory and identification of the county's substandard housing from county property tax records. While methodologies for identifying substandard housing from property tax data are not new or unique (Koebel, 1986), this paper presents an approach to the process which does not use traditional regression techniques and instead uses a model that selects substandard units based solely upon the query of individual property parcel data, as collected by the county's property tax appraisers. The process identifies housing units as standard, borderline, suspected substandard, or substandard, and maps (among other variables) the number of substandard units, per section of land. An address listing of substandard properties may also be generated for each of the county's 1000 sections of land. Preliminary field testing of 236 housing units resulted in a 97.6% match with only one parcel indicating a mismatch for nonstandard housing, and upon further manual inspection that parcel was determined to be standard, as predicted by the model. As a result of this model, the Alachua County Housing Authority has achieved its goal of identifying the substandard housing within the county, and can now efficiently and effectively begin to deal with annual changes in substandard housing, thereby identifying areas of increasing property structure deterioration.