FixList, From Data Scientist Stacey Mosley, Takes on Blight

Aug. eighteen, 2016

FixList, the brainchild of 29-twelvemonth-former open data geek Stacey Mosley, got its start in a decidedly ungeeky way. It was 2010 and Mosley had been laid off from TicketLeap, her first job out of higher, and she had moved back in with Mom and Dad in Levittown. She'd take the R5 train into the city; looking out her window starting around the Fern Rock stop, she'd see widespread blight, shelled-out buildings with missing windows and doors. Surrounded by commuters numb to what she was taking in, Mosley couldn't aid but wonder: "Is anyone doing anything about this?"

Then she stopped into City Hall 1 day and found herself talking to a senior citizen volunteer at the building's Visitor Center. "Do you have a city org chart?" she asked the flummoxed woman, who was more accepted to pointing visitors to nearby museums. Overhearing the substitution was Greta Greenberger, director of City Hall tours and wife of and then-Commerce Director Alan Greenberger. Mosley non only peppered Greenberger with questions nigh redevelopment in Philly—who's doing something about all those boarded upwardly buildings?—she started to volunteer at the Visitor Center herself while attending housing programs and conferences throughout the city. At one, she put herself before Fran Burns, and then the head of Licenses & Inspections, and asked for an advisory interview.

That led to a job at L&I, which led to a position every bit a data scientist in the Nutter administration's basis-breaking open up data squad. Subsequently five years in government, Mosley resigned last October, equally it became clear that open data under the next mayor might not be quite as high a priority as under Nutter. She left to pursue her dream—hatched on that driver train—to take on her metropolis'due south epidemic of blight, using her open data skills to empower private sector solutions.

The result is FixList , which launched in mid-May. It's a Zillow-similar subscription service that culls through the city'due south open data and comes up with some 26 different criteria on over 600,000 real manor locations. FixList's main differentiator is its "Redevelopment Score," which ranks properties on their potential for revitalization. Every bit she sees it, FixList tin can empower developers and neighborhood groups (who can use the service at a discounted rate) alike to help bring communities back.

Until at present, municipal open data has been about government making itself more transparent by releasing voluminous data sets. Mosley realized that good government tin can't be the terminate goal, that data without practical awarding is just more noise. The private and non-profit sectors are where government data tin meet real globe impact.

"The score is going to exist low if information technology's a make new building in Rittenhouse," Mosley says, in an unassuming, lilting vocalisation that belies her disruptive nature. "It's not meant to highlight 'This is a great place.' It's meant to highlight 'This is a corking place to renew something.'"

Developers have long been driven essentially past gut instinct, especially in the wild west that passes for Philly's real estate milieu. While at L&I, Mosley started to suspect that she had access to information that, smartly organized and presented, could make redevelopment less haphazard. She learned of a local window visitor that was searching city information and cross-tabbing it with historic holding information to find historic backdrop that needed to have their windows replaced. "Light bulbs started going off," Mosley says. "I was like, Oh my God, the business community can totally employ this information to discover new customers while at the same time fixing things the city is spending taxpayer money on. This is essentially market data."

Enter FixList, where a curious developer or neighborhood association or nonprofit similar Habitat for Humanity (at a 50 percent discount) can not but find Mosley's proprietary Redevelopment Score, but also discover metrics gauging the accessibility of each holding'southward owner, its condition, how it'due south changed over time, how information technology compares to the remainder of its block, and histories of everything from neighborhood zoning changes to the number of city demolitions in the area. Mosley combs sources that include the Streets Section, the Office of Property Assessment, the departments of Parks and Recreation and her alma mater, Licenses and Inspections; the result is a holistic picture of redevelopment that no business or individual would accept the expertise to define on their own. There is at least one other visitor doing similar work— Brixsy , which provides real manor investors with data on property taxes, death records and violations—but FixList seems broader and more holistic. Mosley wants to help developers, yes, just also assist the city manage redevelopment better.

In its first month, FixList signed upwardly 24 paying clients, and Mosley, who has funded the company with her savings—she'southward the sole employee—fifty-fifty spent much of the summertime in chat with iii venture capitalist firms earlier deciding that, at to the lowest degree until fall, she'd continue to bootstrap. "Having creative control is hugely of import to me," she says. "I'thousand an engineer who also went to art school. I beloved to play and create things."

Still, the decision to launch FixList wasn't easy. "It took a long time to talk myself into it," she says. "I kept telling myself, 'Okay, there oasis't been many things you've washed that you've failed at,' and I had to just trust myself that I'm going to figure it out somehow."

What she's figured out is arguably the next critical stride for the open up data motion. Until now, municipal open data has been about government making itself more transparent by releasing voluminous data sets; under Nutter, the city released some inventive stuff, but it generally had the feel of preaching to the already converted. Mosley realized that good government can't be the cease goal, that information without practical awarding is but more noise. The private and non-turn a profit sectors are where government data can meet real world impact.

Spend any time with Mosley, and you don't come away with a picture of a hard charging entrepreneur. She doesn't have the gregarious sales pitch y'all often come up across in the startup earth, even though she spends ii-thirds of her fourth dimension pitching to prospective clients. She isn't selling so much as connecting , pausing thoughtfully and punctuating her story with nervous laughter, as though she tin can't quite believe that she took the dive last fall and that this is her life.

Just swoop she did, and when you lot dig deeper, you lot find information technology in her genes. Her maternal grandpa, Herbert Rice, owned a textile conversion business in New York City. When a retailer in the garment district needed a particular leather, say, suppliers called Rice. He died when Mosley was 15, just she'd been at his knee, soaking upwards the nature of risk. "I loved watching him manage things," she says. "I still have a messenger bag that'due south a kind of security blanket. It'south fabricated of a textile he had the rights to and supplied J. Crew with for years. It has holes in it now."

FixList'south principal differentiator is its "Redevelopment Score," which ranks properties on their potential for revitalization. Equally she sees it, FixList tin empower developers and neighborhood groups (who tin can utilize the service at a discounted rate) akin to help bring communities dorsum.

When I inquire Mosley how she feels about Philly, her eyes widen. "I feel so much love!" she exclaims. She was an introverted kid, she says, and y'all can see that—there are remnants of a reserve that masks an atomic number 26 will, no doubt inherited from her granddaddy. "When I moved here, it felt like if there was a topic I was interested in, there was a group somewhere talking virtually information technology, and you simply had to effigy out where and it wouldn't be all that exclusive to bring together them," she says. "For someone like myself, with varying curiosities, whether it's art, government or business organisation, it was really welcoming."

Around Philly these days, you often run into the Stacey Mosleys amongst usa. They are role of the  Yes, We Can generation, young men and women who, whether they were overtly political or not, got a sense of possibility during a high-minded presidential campaign eight years ago. They may have gotten turned off to politics in the intervening years, every bit the poetry of a movement gave mode to the prose of actually governing.

Or, like Mosley, they may not accept been heavily into politics at all, just something in the zeitgeist back and then spawned this army of late twenty-somethings who marry wide-eyed idealism with unbridled ambition, naivete with applied skill sets. They think zippo of asking a volunteer at City Hall for an org chart, because someone had better exist in charge of all those dilapidated buildings. Every bit Stacey Mosley is telling me how she never found her social element in college, how Philly saved her, you lot start to get why she'due south trying to relieve Philly now. She starts to tear up, and I cut her off. Are y'all getting emotional?

"Yeah," she says, laughing, and then she says something that, on some level, is an expression of what cities are all virtually: "Because I came to Philadelphia and joined the lath of Young Involved Philadelphia, and information technology allowed me to notice other young people who didn't know what the hell they were doing, either."

Header photo: FixList

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/stacey-mosley-fixlist/

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