Plenty of Niagara Falls residents have perceptions of the conditions of their neighborhoods. Niagara University students and partner organizations spent the past year gathering datasets of one city neighborhood to get the full picture.
The school’s Levesque Institute unveiled the fruits of that labor on Friday, with a new geographic information system map available for viewing by anyone on its website. It hopes to lead to further development within the city.
The map covers the mid-city portion of Niagara Falls, its boundaries encompassing Hyde Park Boulevard, Whitney Avenue, the Niagara River, and the railroad tracks and Highland neighborhood. From there, more than 85 different data points can be gleaned from the 3,326 land parcels and 609 sidewalk sections in this section.
“This tool represents our commitment to data-driven community development,” said Karen Kwandrans, associate vice president of strategic and external relations at NU. “Our goal is to create a vibrant, equitable, and inclusive community that reflects the aspirations and needs of all its stakeholders.”
Such data gathered included occupied parcels, the racial makeup of neighborhoods, transportation options, walkability, community facilities, income, and food access. The map has already won a special achievement in GIS award from Esri, a world-leading supplier of GIS software.
Kwandrans said that after talking with the likes of Gina Beam of Niagara Area Habitat for Humanity, the city’s planning director Kevin Forma, and Matt Chavez of the Niagara Orleans Regional Land Improvement Corp., they had all had an interest in Niagara Falls housing in. Instead of speaking separately, they formed a Neighborhood Evaluation Committee last year with other partners so they could get community input and be on the same page.
She then reached out to the Local Initiatives Support Corporation for assistance, with the committee receiving a $150,000 grant to do this housing study. LISC had already worked with the City of Buffalo to produce Within WNY, which features a similar interactive map of that city’s east side.
The mid-city portion was chosen first since it contains partners like the Niagara Falls Public Library and Heart, Love & Soul as well as the Levesque Institute, which is redeveloping the former First Congregational Church at 822 Cleveland Ave. as a community outreach hub.
“It’s an area that we wanted to know how to develop housing in to develop Main Street as well,” Kwandrans said.
NU awarded LaBella Associates a contract to help carry out this work. Joshua Greene, a planner with LaBella who previously worked for the city planning department, felt that it was a great idea and they had the resources to make it work.
Around a dozen students in Yonghong Tong’s classes on GIS assisted LaBella’s workers and gained real-world experience. Some data was already available through federal and state government agencies while other data came from field trips into these neighborhoods.
Kwandrans considers this first section as a pilot program to see what they could accomplish, with Forma and Mayor Robert Restaino wanting to go into other areas of the city. NU GIS students will continue to update the data on the map as newer information is available.
Restaino added that it had already paid dividends for the city, as they used information from this to drive initiatives along the Main Street corridor. It would also help as the city looks to get funding through the $650 million Pro-Housing Communities Program.
A virtual demonstration of the mapping tool will be from noon to 1 p.m. on Thursday.
The data can be viewed at https://levesqueintstitute.niagara.edu/mapping-tool