Sponsor: Baltimore City Mayor’s Office of Recovery Programs
The ARPA Impact Indicator StoryMaps, are an interactive resource designed to provide residents with insights into the impact of the $641 million American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds allocated to Baltimore City. The tool offers a view of Baltimore’s conditions at the neighborhood level prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a series of StoryMaps, residents can explore indicators such as vacancy trends, housing affordability, home rehabilitation, employment levels, the digital divide, and capital investments.
Sponsor: Johns Hopkins SCIBAR|Support for Creative Integrated Basic and Applied Research
People living near vacant lots and abandoned buildings exhibit poor health; fortunately, recent research has shown that when vacant lots are greened and restored, the health of residents greatly improves. To date, most of this research has focused on adults. BNIA-JFI is part of a collaborative inter-university team to expand on this body of evidence to determine whether and how restoring vacant lots can mitigate health inequalities among disadvantaged adolescents, whose health and well-being are strongly influenced by neighborhood factors. BNIA-JFI’s main role in the project is to build a sharable database containing key characteristics of restored and unrestored vacant lots; While Baltimore City currently has over 18,000 vacant lots and 17,000 abandoned buildings, the City has developed a plan to ‘clean and green’ vacant lots in neighborhoods with large concentrations of vacancy. This provides us with a timely opportunity to explore the impact of vacant lot restoration on the health of adolescents living in disadvantaged neighborhoods, with findings that can be used to develop long-term strategies for improving adolescent health equity.
Sponsor: The National Science Foundation
This multi-university project will create novel methods, answer open empirical questions and provide research-based guidelines for the design, development, deployment and evaluation of a privacy-respectful toolkit to identify and characterize the multi-factorial challenges typical of complex trips often times endured by low-income residents in Baltimore City; and to drive bottom-up, crowdsourced-informed actionable solutions via community conversations and a decision support system. This research is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1951924 to the University of Maryland
Sponsor: Housing Authority of Baltimore City, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
The Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance is supporting the Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC) as part of the Perkins, Somerset, Oldtown Transformation Plan. By tracking key indicators about the physical neighborhood, the residents, and the investment levels, a clearer picture of the transformation’s effects emerges.