With two cameras, a city car and a contract with an artificial intelligence company, Cleveland City Hall plans to survey properties for signs of disrepair and illegal dumping.
A rotating cast of workers will spend a year driving Cleveland’s 1,264 miles of streets multiple times, taking photos of every parcel in the city using special cameras outfitted to the roof of the car. City staff plan to use software from the Alabama-based company City Detect Inc. to analyze those pictures.
The city would pay for the one-year pilot project using an $85,000 grant from the Rocket Community Fund, the charitable arm of Dan Gilbert’s Rocket Mortgage companies. The software will cost $70,000, and the rest of the money would be available for branding the city car and other costs, said Elizabeth Crowe, who directs the city’s Office of Urban Analytics and Innovation.
Officials in Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration described the work as being similar to Cleveland’s manual property surveys — but faster and more frequent. Every few years, dozens of people have fanned out to photograph homes and rate their quality. The 2022 survey required months of work, about 40 code inspectors and $170,000 in grants, Crowe said.
City Hall expects that it would take about a month for a single car to photograph every parcel in Cleveland. The year-long effort would collect multiple photos of each parcel over the course of the year, linking them to a map of the city.
“City Detect provides a way to essentially do a property survey as fast as we can drive the city,” Building and Housing Director Sally Martin O’Toole said in an interview.
That would give City Hall a continuously updated view of property conditions rather than a static survey that receives an update only every few years.
Training software on Cleveland’s properties
Building inspectors could use those photos to cross-check resident complaints and to close out code violations that property owners have fixed. The city would not automatically issue new violations based on the pictures, however, city officials said.
City staff wouldn’t be the only ones looking through the photos. So would City Detect software, which could spot signs of illegal dumping, graffiti, tall grass, collapsing structures and boarded-up windows and doors.
The software is “a little scary good” at picking things out of photos, Crowe said. As with Google Street View, license plats and faces would be blurred out.
Over the year, O’Toole and Crowe hope to train the software to become familiar with Cleveland’s property issues — for instance, by telling the difference between an illegally dumped pile of tires and run-of-the-mill litter.
“We have to teach it,” O’Toole said. “So what is a debris field in Cleveland? It isn’t two gum wrappers and one newspaper.”
City Detect’s list of clients includes such Southern cities as Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Greenville, South Carolina. Expanding to Cleveland will give the software more experience with Ohio weather.
“We’ll be teaching it about snow cover,” O’Toole said.
Council signs off on trial run
City Council members received the idea positively at a committee meeting Wednesday. Ward 14 Council Member Jasmin Santana said that she often drives her own ward, taking photos of possible code violations and sending them in to the city.
“I have thousands of pictures, but when I compare them to the housing court and I compare to all the tickets that are being cited, I’m sending more than what the city is capable to do,” she said.
She wanted to know whether the city could meet the new demand for follow-up inspections with more photos coming in.
O’Toole said that inspectors could save time on their own car trips by using recent photos to double check whether a resident complaint appears to be valid. Then they can focus their time on the worst problems, she said.
Ward 13 Council Member Kris Harsh said that he was generally worried about expanding surveillance powers to “snoop” on residents. But if faces and license plates were blurred, the technology would be just another tool for the city to use, he said.
Rebecca Maurer of Ward 12 said she shared his concerns. Crowe said the city will not receive unredacted photos from City Detect.