The pilot project, if successful, will alert City Hall when problems arise whether that be a collapsing structure or damaged street signs. But it will also create a continuous record of Cleveland’s housing stock.
In the past, surveying each property took months and dozens of people walking the streets. It was only done every few years and it quickly became outdated. Cleveland’s last comprehensive property survey, started in 2022, took six months, 40 workers and cost about $170,000.
Liz Crowe, Cleveland’s director of urban analytics and innovation, told council that the new AI-powered solution, once dialed-in, can create an automated property survey once a month.
The project will be run by City Detect, an Alabama company that ran similar efforts in South Carolina, California and Arizona. Council approved the pilot this month, which is funded by an $85,000 Rocket Community Fund grant.
Two cameras will be mounted on a city-owned vehicle. A staffer will drive the car at normal road speeds, automatically taking photos of each property it passes. Those photos will be fed into City Detect’s software, which will use artificial intelligence to detect property issues.
Driving seven hours a day, three weeks a month, the vehicle is expected to cover Cleveland’s 1,264 miles of roads and all 167,000 parcels each month. It will be branded a “311 City Support Vehicle.”
Cleveland staff will then have access to a finished product that looks a lot like Google Map’s street view, but with regularly updated images. It will also detect problems like high grass, graffiti, boarded-up windows, damaged guardrails and trash.
Faces and license plates will be blurred. City Hall will not have access to unblurred photos, Crowe said.
The software will not automatically issue tickets or citations, inspectors will still have to physically visit a location to do so, Building and Housing Director Sally Martin O’Toole told council.
She said the software will be a new tool that will save inspectors time so they can focus on serious issues.
For example, roughly 30% of complaints City Hall receives are invalid, Martin O’Toole said. But investigating them still requires driving to the sites. Updated photos could prevent wasted trips.
If the complaint is about a collapsed porch, and a photo taken last week shows that isn’t the case, they can skip the drive. The same is true for when inspectors cite someone and ask them to make a fix. If they can see the house is fixed in a new photo, they won’t have drive out a second time.
The software can also make a list of homes with potential issues to visit. And it can help keep an eye on vacant properties with updated photos.
Crowe said it will take a few months to get the vehicle and software running smoothly, and to fine-tune the AI to ignore minor litter while catching larger issues like illegally dumped tires.
Once ready, multiple departments — from Public Works to 311 — will be able to use it, Crowe said.
Council members Kris Harsh and Rebecca Maurer, two members of council heavily focused on housing issues in Cleveland, supported the idea but raised privacy concerns.
They also asked several questions to make sure the City Detect vehicle couldn’t be used for surveillance of residents or invade anyone’s privacy.
“I think that if we are blurring out identifying marks like faces and license (plates), this can just be a tool for the city to just keep an eye on what’s going on in our city, not what’s going on with our people,” Harsh said.
Crowe emphasized the photos will not be shared with police systems, such as license plate readers, and staff will not have access to the unblurred versions.
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