A Smarter Approach to Vacancy, Blight, and Rental Housing.

Use Case: Blight and Neighborhood Improvement / Rent Licensing and Stabilization Products: BuildingBlocks and Slate City Size: ~633,000 residents, Jefferson County, Kentucky

The Challenge

Louisville Metro Government has set an ambitious goal: meaningfully reduce vacant properties and revitalize disinvested neighborhoods, particularly on the city's west side, where chronic vacancy and abandonment have compounded for decades. The Vacant and Public Property Administration inherited a portfolio of over 6,000 vacant parcels representing roughly 2.3% of the city's potential tax base. As former Mayor Greg Fischer put it plainly: "This is a long journey. This problem came about over decades, and it is not going to be solved overnight."

The challenge wasn't just the scale. It was the fragmentation. The data Louisville needed to act on vacancy, tax delinquency, code liens, occupancy status, property condition surveys, demolition records, cut lists, and foreclosure timelines, lived in Accela, the county assessor, the open data portal, spreadsheets maintained by individual departments, and systems that didn't talk to each other. Staff at the Vacant and Public Property Administration described what it would take to compile a defensible list of properties eligible for foreclosure without BuildingBlocks: roughly ten weeks of work for a single administrator, repeated on a regular basis just to stay current.

At the same time, Louisville was running a rental registry that had 44,000 registrations but was believed to cover only about half of the actual rental market. Inspections were prioritized inconsistently. The worst landlords weren't systematically identified. And the legacy Accela-based registration system was creating genuine hardship for registrants, with some spending 30 to 40 minutes just to register a single property.

What Louisville Built

Louisville's engagement with Tolemi spans both the analytical work of understanding and prioritizing its property landscape and the operational work of running a modernized rental registry.

BuildingBlocks became the platform that finally unified Louisville's fragmented data picture. Data from Accela, the Property Valuation Administrator, Cyclomedia property condition surveys, USPS vacancy indicators, tax delinquency records, demolition and foreclosure history, and code enforcement lien data were all brought together in a single platform and updated on a regular basis. Staff at the Vacant and Public Property Administration could filter for addressable properties in seconds rather than weeks, applying eligibility criteria around lien amounts, vacancy duration, and code violation history to quickly identify what the city's foreclosure toolkit could actually act on.

The foreclosure scoring model gave Laura's team the ability to rank every eligible property from one to 99 based on the criteria that mattered to them: how long it had been vacant, the total value of liens, proximity to schools and parks, whether the block had seen recent investment, and neighborhood vacancy rates. That score, applied with a single click, turned a practically unmanageable inventory into a prioritized action list.

The analytical work expanded significantly over time. Louisville built a lot prioritization model for its vacant lot mowing program, helping Phil Crowe's team at Code and Regulations intelligently route eleven mowing crews across thousands of city-maintained properties. The model factors in calls for service, adjacency to owner-occupied properties, city investment in the block, and crime data to prioritize which lots get mowed most frequently and which can cycle less often. The goal is to go from a 30-day mowing cycle to every 8 to 10 days in the highest-priority areas, with crews organized into permanent zones so accountability and efficiency can improve together over time.

The code lien analysis is another significant addition. Louisville has issued roughly 28,000 liens across nearly 8,000 properties, and until recently staff had no consolidated way to see the full picture of what was owed, what had been paid, and where properties stood relative to the 10-year lien expiration window. BuildingBlocks now lets staff slice that data by neighborhood, by residential owner type, and by how long a lien has been outstanding, so decisions about which properties to push toward foreclosure can be made on evidence rather than instinct.

On the rental registry side, Louisville launched a fully rebuilt registration system in Slate in late 2024, migrating rental registration records going back to 2017 and replacing the Accela-based process that had been a source of persistent frustration. The new system lets landlords register multiple properties in a single application, tracks exemptions and affidavit requirements, and connects registration history to code violation and compliance data in BuildingBlocks so that renewal fees and inspection prioritization can be tied to actual property performance. A performance-based inspection framework is built into the ordinance: landlords with no violations for a year are eligible to have their fees waived at renewal, and the worst-performing properties are flagged for proactive inspection.

What It's Achieved

The impact of the registry launch was immediate and visible. Within weeks of going live, the city had 702 registered properties and 276 pending, with $33,259 in fees collected in the first month. But the more telling signal was what stopped happening. O'Dell, a key stakeholder, described receiving only six emails in the first weeks after launch, compared to a constant stream of complaints under the old system. As he put it: "So much simpler. They delivered what they said they were going to deliver."

Richard Price, who had been working through the Accela system's difficulties for years, captured the shift: "Been a blessing to find you. I know a lot of smart people. The magnitude of the issues that they were in — the last 15 business days they have not had that hostile" environment.

On the vacancy side, the foreclosure prioritization work cut what had been ten weeks of manual data work down to minutes and has supported a sustained effort to reduce the city's vacant property count through foreclosure, demolition, and landbank acquisition. The code lien analysis is now being presented to OMB, code enforcement, housing, and legal teams as a shared analytical foundation for deciding which properties to pursue and which to route toward the city's affordable housing lien forgiveness program.

The lead hazard work represents the newest expansion. Louisville's health department is building out a Slate workflow for lead inspection and risk assessment, tracking 300 properties with known elevated blood lead levels and moving the work off a sprawling spreadsheet the team had nicknamed "Big Bertha."

Why Louisville's Approach Stands Out

Louisville is a city that has been doing this work for a long time and has learned some hard lessons about what happens when data lives in silos and prioritization is left to instinct. The analytical foundation built in BuildingBlocks, connected across code, housing, tax, and real estate data, now supports decisions that span the full arc of a problem property's life: from identification through prioritization, foreclosure, acquisition, rehabilitation, and compliance monitoring. The rental registry work adds the proactive piece, shifting Louisville from a reactive posture toward one where the worst-performing landlords are identified systematically and the best ones are rewarded with lighter compliance burdens.

The Mayor's excitement about the registry launch, and the visible relief of staff who no longer spend their days managing a hostile registration experience, are the kind of outcomes that justify years of sustained investment in getting the data infrastructure right.

[PLACEHOLDER: Client quote. O'Dell, Richard Price, or Laura Grabowski could be worth reaching out to]