Accelerator for America

Sep 19, 2023

City has joined a pilot to find out Mayor Todd Gloria speaks at the grand opening of the Amanecer apartments, an affordable housing complex that has 94 units, in Linda Vista in April. (Kristian Carreon/For The San Diego Union-Tribune) San Diego will trade insights with 10 other cities and gain access to a data tool for the next two years Easier said than done. Build it where? Which surplus city properties would be good candidates for this kind of project? What types of policies do a better job of fostering housing development? Advertisement To chip away at the unknowns, San Diego has joined a pilot program with 10 other cities that will provide data and expertise over the next two years. The pilot, announced Monday, is operated and funded on a pro-bono basis by a Boston real estate software company, Tolemi, and Accelerator for America, an economic development nonprofit that connects mayors from across the U.S. with policy experts from “public, private, philanthropic, labor, non-profit, and academic sectors,” according to its website. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria is one of about a dozen mayors who participate in that nonprofit’s advisory council. The pilot’s aim: use big data and shared insight to inform policies that will boost economic stability — in this case, by focusing on housing access and affordability. “By identifying where housing can best be preserved and built and focusing on which owners are disproportionately contributing to housing destabilization, we can help cities focus on concrete action plans to keep families in their homes and build more quality attainable housing,” Mary Ellen Wiederwohl, the CEO of Accelerator for America, said in a statement. Cities will have access to a data software tool provided by Tolemi, a Boston-based real estate data company. The tool, called BuildingBlocks, mines property and ownership data and uses machine learning to help cities make decisions “around land use, affordability, and neighborhood revitalization,” according to the statement. ( Tolemi is pronounced like the Greek astronomer and mathematician Ptolemy.) The other component is expertise: 11 participating cities will learn from one another and from Accelerator for America. The other cities are Albuquerque, Austin, Birmingham, Chicago, Dayton, Lansing, Mich., Kansas City, Philadelphia, Tampa and Tucson. “By bringing people together, we can, I think, hopefully, get to better solutions, faster and more effectively, have folks learn from what worked and most importantly, what didn’t work,” said Anne Bovaird Nevins, Accelerator for America’s director of economic development. San Diego was chosen because it has a demonstrated track record of prioritizing the development of affordable housing, she said, adding, “We are really thrilled that Accelerator for America has a broader relationship with Mayor Gloria.” Dave Rolland, Gloria’s deputy director of communications, described in an email how the city hopes to benefit from the pilot. “We saw this pilot initiative as another tool the city can use to help create more homes that San Diegans can afford, so we jumped at the chance to apply. We’re thrilled that we were among the 11 cities chosen,” he wrote. “With additional, integrated data sources, we can gain a greater understanding of opportunities for additional affordable development opportunities through the Affordable Homes Master Plan, as well as potential impacts to city operations. This tool will also provide us with not just a holistic view of city-owned properties, but all publicly owned parcels. This can lead to partnerships with other government agencies throughout the region to develop additional affordable housing opportunities.” Andrew Kieve, the CEO and co-founder of Tolemi, said giving cities “better information on property, ownership, and neighborhood dynamics” can help them counter economic instability and increase affordability. “Housing markets have undergone a series of dramatic shifts starting with the 2008 foreclosure crisis and followed by the influx of institutional investment into single-family rentals,” he said in a statement. “Local governments are inundated with data that can help their understanding of these changing conditions, but connecting the dots across siloed departments and agencies is a real challenge.” Nevins sketched what kind of information Tolemi’s big data tool could deliver. One is how different kinds of urban layers overlap or intersect. For example: excess public land and transit accessibility. “You can use this tool to look at ‘OK, we want to look at all publicly owned sites, regardless of who the public entity is in its ownership that are within half a mile of a transit. Maybe you only want to look at bus lines, and so you can narrow it down to that,” she said, as a hypothetical. Another data dive could look at how institutional investors maintain properties. “While I would certainly not want to paint all institutional investors or large-scale property owners with the same brush, there are bad actors in that group that are not maintaining their properties,” she said. “This Tolemi data analytics tool will allow local communities to see much more readily and much more easily how all of those different LLCs — that maybe on paper might look like they’re 150 different companies — are actually all aggregated up under a single ownership.” By looking at property records across multiple markets, it’s easier to spot trends. “And then, maybe that policy shift is easier to advance when you can really visualize like, here’s what’s happening and how it really impacts you,” Nevins said.