These data contain city-owned properties from the eProperties Plus database. The data describe basic aspects of the property (square footage, location, identification, etc.) and its geographically based assignment of various components of city infrastructure (police zone, council district, etc.).
These data are useful for anyone (e.g., the URA) in identifying properties that are unused throughout the city.
These data are taken directly from the city's property management system (EProperty) database, one of several independent systems used by the City to track property-level data.
The latitude and longitude for these properties have to be geocoded from the parcel identifier (that is, the latitude and longitude are not contained in the source data). The various geographic zones (police zone, etc.) are then reverse geocoded from the derived coordinates. The parcel identifiers in the source data can follow several syntax conventions. The original city-formatted parcel identifier is in the parc field, and the normalized version (using a uniform 16-character format) is in the pin field. The id and census_tract fields are categorical/not intended for mathematical operations and are therefore converted to strings.
The URA uses this data for vacant-property identification.
Users can analyze the location of city-owned vacant properties and the property size/classification. These can be used to understand zonal conditions (e.g., neighborhood conditions), concentrations of vacant land spanning zones (across two police zones), etc.
Care should be taken, however, when inferring socioeconomic attributes, city resource allocation, or other higher level variables of interest. There may be a link between vacant land and these factors, but the complexities of city operations and high-order variables can be influenced by lurking/hidden/latent variables. It could be advantageous to consider multivariate models and/or construction of component variables (e.g., using PCA or Factor Analysis).
The city is in the process of publishing other property-based datasets (all city-owned properties, treasury sale properties, condemned properties, and tax-delinquent properties). The city also publishes information on PLI code enforcement violations/permit applications which could be informative of property conditions in a given area.
These data describe only city-owned properties (not privately held properties). The city is currently (2023) overhauling its property management databases. These data represent the best descriptions of city-owned vacant properties that are currently available.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Public Access Level Comment | |
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| Data Notes | |
| Related Document(s) | |
| Frequency - Data Change | Daily |
| Frequency - Publishing | Daily |
| Data Steward | Pittsburgh's Innovation and Performance Department |
| Data Steward Email | Pittsburgh's Innovation and Performance Department |