Geezzz what a long winded title for a blog post… It was either that or:
Arch GIS and its Future role in Both RE Valuations using Criminology, as well as the overall concerns this technology raises.
That didn’t have much of a ring to it either… Ohh well moving along…. While Googling to see if Dekalb County GA has placed their GIS Maps online I stumbled upon Dekalb County Illinois GIS system.
(I actually thought I was in Dekalb County GA’s system… Dekalb County put their private system online and have all of those Gov. Cheese eaters out of work… who was I kidding?) Anywho, After playing around in the system for a few mins I noticed something intriguing…
The map layers I am used to seeing are things such as Parcel boundaries, Zoning, Address, Rivers, Lakes, etc etc etc etc….Sex Offender Maps, etc. etc. et….WHAT??? Exactly…
Here is what I found… You can both over lay where the registered sex offenders live as well as the “Safe Zone” that surrounds schools, daycare, and here in Georgia “Any place where children may congregate”.
A few clicks later and I was amazed to see what came up with a simple Google search for Sex Offenders and GIS. The majority of the 682,000 websites you will find will either be an actual interactive map showing sex offenders or articles about the privacy and other civil rights debates going on in this arena. This website actually showed you who the offenders are and what they were convicted of.
Plenty of people have written about this and I have one of the stories as it relates to GA at the bottom of this post.
What I am more interested in today is how GIS relates to business that place value on properties both directly IE. appraisers and indirectly IE. Lenders.
The importance of this takes us to the next aspect of why I write this post which is how this relates to Redlining. For those of you who don’t know, Redlining is the practice of denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking to residents in certain, often racially determined areas.
You might be thinking, “Didn’t the pass laws to ban this sort of thing?”. And you would be correct in the passage of both the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (which prevents redlining when the criteria for redlining are based on race, religion, gender, familial status, disability, or ethnic origin), and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which requires banks to apply the same lending criteria in all communities. However, if you read the fine print in these laws, they did not seem to anticipate the capabilities of GIS applications today. Now it is possible to geocode every building and associate that location with other geocoded items such as: violent crime locations, sex offenders, drug busts, and the list goes on and on.
Using a proprietary business model and dynamic data set such as Zillow.com who is now in the RE valuations game, all sorts of odd players could be jumping into this arena soon. As computing power becomes cheaper, and databases such as MYSQL get more sophisticated… how long will it take to run not only sex offender location and type of crime statistics into valuation models that RE professionals and Lenders will use. My guess is that this could already be in play…but not to the level of a pure one off geocoded valuation… It wouldn’t surprise me at all if you see news about lenders using this type of technology to place valuations on their loans. In my opinion the value to their business models will of set the risk of litigation and you will see more of this go on as police keep ever increasing records of their criminal activity.
Beginning July 1, new sex offender laws took affect that placed an increased responsibility upon Sheriff’s Departments across the state. Currently, all sex offenders must register their home address with the Sheriff’s department of community in which they choose to reside. And each time they move, they must re-register. But the latest changes to law include restrictions upon where sex offenders can reside. Georgia Law states that these offenders cannot “…reside or loiter within 1,000 feet of any child care facility, church, school, or area where minors congregate. Such distance shall be determined by measuring from the outer boundary of the property…” to read more click here
May 2nd, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Maps or not, a quick check of the GBI sex offender data base shows 7 of the numerous registered offenders in our zip, 30318, to all be living at the same hotel on Northside Dr. What’s with that???