University Times

Pitt’s senior administration grabs most of the headlines. The faculty here get noticed when they bring in research dollars, win teaching awards or publish in their fields.

But behind the scenes, University staff, some 7,200 strong across five campuses, often toil in jobs ranging from the mundane to the esoteric.

From mailroom workers to data entry specialists, costume designers to biosafety officers, photographers to accountants, staff at Pitt perform tasks great and small, year-in and year-out, for the greater good of the University.

This is one in an occasional series profiling University staff, providing a glimpse of some of the less recognized employees whose primary business is making Pitt work.

During a typical work week, Robert M. Gradeck is leading data management training sessions for faculty, staff, students and representatives from regional communities, soliciting data from local government offices for neighborhood projects, “cleaning up” data within individual projects and organizing events, such as brown bag discussions led by local and national experts and an annual data users’ conference for the University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR).

Gradeck (known as Bob to just about everybody), is a 1993 magna cum laude Pitt alumnus of the urban studies program, has a Master’s of City Planning degree from Georgia Tech and more than 15 years of experience in community and neighborhood development, including advanced applications of economic, real estate and demographic data in community frameworks.

Bob Gradeck

Following 10 years working at Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Economic Development, Gradeck came to UCSUR in 2009 charged with developing city and county neighborhood datasets. “As technology has advanced, the data have become more available and there are a lot of researchers looking for information on neighborhoods,” he said. “That’s where we come in with our knowledge and experience working with property, with very specific information about a place.”

Gradeck brought with him to Pitt the Pittsburgh Neighborhood and Community Information System (PNCIS) that he co-founded at CMU and now manages at UCSUR.

PNCIS is a property information system that collects integrated data on community conditions and provides it to local stakeholders, as well as to social science researchers. The goal of the system is to empower community leaders through the direct use of data on a wide array of topics and issues. PNCIS features an interactive map for registered users, whom Gradeck trains on the system’s functions. (See related story, this issue.)

Officially, Gradeck is a research specialist and project manager for outreach and development of geographic information systems (GIS) projects in the center’s urban and regional analysis program.

Translated, that means the native Pittsburgher does a little bit of everything at UCSUR, the Pitt center founded in 1972 as a resource for inside- and outside-the-University researchers and educators interested in the basic/applied social and behavioral sciences.

“Part of my work week is always devoted to data clean-up,” Gradeck said. That might mean taking someone’s data and putting them on a map, for instance.

Usually, neighborhood-oriented data are a mere phone call away, he said, because government officials, for example, know which data he needs. “It’s a matter of building trust, and I always tell them what I’m going to do with the data,” Gradeck said.

“Once you get that trust, you can get the data, and once you get the data you have to figure out how to put it on a map and once that happens you have to determine what does it all mean? Once you get the data, it’s not the end by any means. There are a lot of questions,” he said.

Gradeck learned an important lesson from his graduate research assistant days in the mid-’90s with the Atlanta Project, a community-based study designed to assist small- and medium-sized businesses with marketing efforts through the use of GIS, then a relatively new tool.

“We were working with community organizations that really had not ever seen this kind of stuff before. We were presenting them these data for the first time and what we learned was that most folks didn’t know how to use the data. It’s not just enough to put data up on a web site; you have to get out there and encourage folks, suggest ways to use the data and partner with them in developing specific projects,” Gradeck said.

“To do that, you need the infrastructure in place to enable them to make sense of the data and use information effectively. That’s what community information systems like ours do,” he said. UCSUR functions as a “data intermediary,” Gradeck explained, “where we’re the organization that can help people understand the data, ask questions about the data, relay those questions to the people who put the data together, suggest how the data can be used and suggest what tools people should use.”

At UCSUR, Gradeck currently is heading projects in a number of Pittsburgh and outlying neighborhoods, including Mt. Oliver and East Liberty.

“Recently, after hearing from some of the folks out in the community talking about foreclosures, we’ve been looking at that closely,” Gradeck said.

He discovered that one property owner in East Liberty had his entire portfolio of some 40 properties go into foreclosure at once.

“What happens in a lot of cases is that when these marginal properties go into foreclosure they wind up leaking into real blight,” Gradeck said. “So we started to look at where else this is happening. Then we started to look at address lists to learn more about what was going on. Now we’re sharing information with a lot of our regional and city partners about what other investors might be at risk for foreclosure. It’s a way to raise awareness of an issue, using the data in different ways to take a look at something.”

That project also employed data from outside Pittsburgh and expanded to other neighborhoods here, Gradeck noted. “We’re part of a network with 35 other cities through the Urban Institute’s National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership. So we’re able to bring things in from outside and introduce them to Pittsburgh,” he said.

“For example, Cleveland has been doing a lot of work on foreclosures and the aftermath. They’ve been one of the places that have been really hard hit. We’ve learned a lot from them and that approach is guiding us in our project at the Hilltop Alliance in south Pittsburgh,” Gradeck said.

UCSUR sends out notices to people either in foreclosure or at risk of foreclosure, letting them know there are services and counseling available to help them.

“So it’s using data to target outreach,” Gradeck said. “We’re also developing a predictive model to run some statistics to see who’s at risk, based on the characteristics of the property. We put the maps of an area’s foreclosed properties together with ownership records, the crime records, land use, other factors. That’s one of our key values.”

Left to their own devices, neighborhoods typically can struggle for months to gather and interpret relevant data, he noted.

“That kind of effort, multiplied across 80-90 different communities, makes it nearly impossible to get comprehensive information for the entire city or the county. So that’s when we come in, taking all these disparate datasets, bringing them together and then bringing them to bear on a number of different issues,” Gradeck said.

Another project Gradeck contributes to is studying the impact of Marcellus shale drilling on the Allegheny County housing market. “If the drillers are coming in from out of state and scooping up all available property, what does that mean for the housing market and for the lower-income folks who used to be able to use housing vouchers and other subsidies to find housing in their market? What turned out in places where there’s a lot of drilling is that those subsidies are not working, because it’s a type of mini-housing boom. So the policymakers are going to have to work on that,” he said.

UCSUR also has partnered with Rebuilding Together Pittsburgh, a nonprofit dedicated to keeping low-income elderly and disabled homeowners living in safe homes.

“We put together data to identify seniors who would qualify for home repair. Rebuilding Together Pittsburgh wants to make sure they’re reaching people and the legion of contractors that volunteer with them. They want to make sure people are safe in their homes, and they want to have a social impact in targeted communities,” Gradeck said.

“We helped them do a neighborhood survey that identified the 30 worst properties in Homewood and within a month, after everybody involved collectively called the city’s 311 phone line, 70 percent of those properties were addressed. There’s a positive outcome from our work.”

In many cases, the projects Gradeck supports dovetail with academic research. “We partner with different folks, different schools and departments here at Pitt, to share this information with them, consult with them on their research and do what we can do to help them along. Right now we’re working with a number of folks in public health, we’re involved with various studies at GSPIA, social work, urban studies.”

Pitt faculty also solicit Gradeck’s expertise to train their students in data management as part of their formal course work.

“Over the last two semesters, we’ve probably trained about 100 students. So it’s not just people in the neighborhood and it’s not just faculty,” he said.

The technical aspect of the training is the easy part, he noted. “The hard part is getting students to understand what data they really ought to apply. Now that there’s more and more information out there, I think students are coming in with a lot more savvy, but the thing you want to instill in them is understanding how to apply the information. The first part of that is getting them to ask the right questions,” Gradeck said.

Students in urban studies, sociology and social work, typically, have class assignments where data-gathering and analysis are integral components, a perfect match for what Gradeck teaches.

“I’ll lead a class and show them how to apply data to issues, share some stories about how that’s been done already, share some of the tools out there. It’s all hands-on,” Gradeck said.

He also leads sessions with trainees from both the community and within Pitt and has observed that they often form partnerships as a result of common interests.

“In a lot of cases when people in the University come in and they meet people in the community who are dealing with issues that they’re working on right now, they make a connection there. Academic research and neighborhood improvement projects often go hand in hand.”

Looking toward the future, Gradeck said, “Our geographic area at UCSUR right now is Allegheny County. But we’ve gotten calls from people on the other side of the state, and even out of state. The word’s getting out. A few months ago we started gathering data from Mt. Oliver, and now other areas are coming to us: Can you do this in our community? People are seeing the value of having information. We want to get into more and more environmental data, and health data, which often are related, and we’re working with some folks at public health on that expansion.”

He added, “There will always be a role for organizations like ours to tell people who don’t work with this stuff every day how to use data, what questions to ask, who you can ask questions of regarding this data, and what some applications are for using the data. The stuff that really adds value is letting people know what to do and how to make sense of it.”

—Peter Hart