University Times

Perhaps the crown jewel of the urban and regional analysis program at the University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR) is the Pittsburgh Neighborhood and Community Information System (PNCIS), which was co-founded and now is managed by Robert M. Gradeck.

Co-sponsored by Pitt’s Community Outreach Partnership Center, the Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development (PPND) and the City of Pittsburgh, PNCIS is a neighborhood indicator dataset system used by government and community organizations, as well as individuals.

The system’s neighborhood data include information on vacancies, building conditions, crime, foreclosures, housing prices, tax delinquency, land use, property ownership, demographics, fires, elections and oil and gas leases — all accessible through interactive maps posted by Gradeck and his colleagues.

In 2006, the beta version of the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Information System, forerunner of PNCIS, was launched. The following year, data-sharing agreements with the City of Pittsburgh were finalized, and the initial strategic plan for PNCIS was developed.

In 2008, PNCIS became a partner in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, and launched the latest version of its interactive maps in summer 2009.

Recently, Gradeck installed server and interface upgrades to the system, making it more user-friendly with greater format compatibility. He leads the system’s training sessions on site at UCSUR.

“A lot of what I do is related, very generally, to helping people by providing guidance to folks who don’t know how to use information. It’s saying, ‘Here’s some data that can help you understand your community, or help you with your projects or your initiatives or help you in what you do,’” Gradeck explained.

“Folks come to us with all kinds of questions, but more often people in communities are looking at many of the same issues,” Gradeck said. “It’s always interesting when you get people who aren’t at all familiar with data and they come in and see their own community information on a map. It allows them to see things in a different light. In some cases the experience confirms their perceptions, in some cases it dispels them or counters their perceptions.”

Also part of UCSUR’s mission is playing a role in the development of new research projects through consultation with faculty investigators, as well as supporting the University’s teaching mission through student and junior faculty mentoring, teaching courses on research methods and data analysis in the social sciences and providing research internships, he said.

Gradeck noted that feedback from Pitt users of PNCIS has been positive. For example:

• William Elliott, a faculty member in the School of Social Work, wrote: “I used PNCIS to help pull together a report for the United Way on the unbanked in Pittsburgh. They needed the report as part of a proposal to receive funding to provide low-income families with access to mainstream banking services. I was able to obtain information on the location of banking and cash advance institutions in the Pittsburgh area from PNCIS. This information was then placed on a map. The map enabled the United Way to clearly see areas where access to mainstream banking is needed and where there were clusters of cash advance institutions.”

• John Wallace, also a School of Social Work faculty member, wrote: “I am working with community members, local nonprofits, [Pitt social work] students, and local government, key funders and other colleges and universities to adapt the Harlem Children’s Zone model to Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood. … The maps [UCSUR staff] have helped us to develop have provided us a number of key insights to the neighborhood that we would not have been able to obtain any other way.”

• Pitt student Elizabeth Muldowney wrote: “PNCIS was absolutely integral to the project I participated in last semester … for a class on community research. We needed to gather and visualize information regarding the housing, focusing mainly on ownership and taxes, in the Homewood area. PNCIS provided us with the necessary platform to quickly filter the vast quantity of information available into manageable datasets. The color-coding and icon options allowed us to further enhance our project by breaking down the information into easy to understand neighborhood snapshots. … Various community members who attended our final presentation were eager to convey that they were particularly impressed and appreciative of the PNCIS information.”

Gradeck said, “The clear trend is that more and more information is becoming available, more and more tools are being built making it easier to use that stuff, but the role for us, probably our key role, is not going to change, and that is: What does this information mean for folks? We still have to be able to tell people these are the issues that you need to look at, because the best tools out there aren’t going to be able to provide that.”

Some PNCIS data are available to any user by visiting the PNCIS web site, www.ucsur.pitt.edu/pncis.php. For access to more detailed data, prospective users must apply for access, complete the PNCIS user licensing agreement and attend a training session. (To apply for full access, email UCSUR staff at pncis@pitt.edu and include user’s name, organization, phone number, email address and mailing address.)

As required by the data-sharing agreement between PNCIS and the City of Pittsburgh, the city also must approve the PNCIS application in order for the user to receive access to city-provided information.

—Peter Hart