A City-Wide Data Foundation, Built Program by Program.

Use Case: Foreclosures and Vacancies / Rent Licensing Products: BuildingBlocks and Slate City Size: ~77,000 residents, Southeastern Wisconsin

The Challenge

Racine is a mid-sized Wisconsin city with an ambitious housing agenda and the kind of fragmented data infrastructure that makes executing on that agenda genuinely hard. Roughly 60% of properties in the city are rentals. The city had launched RacineRENTS, a proactive rental inspection program that was one of the Mayor's signature initiatives, but the data powering it lived across CityWorks, ProChamps, MarketDrive, a separate tax system, and a collection of exports that staff were manually stitching together. Code enforcement, fire incidents, police calls, building permits, and tax delinquency all sat in different systems with no unified view.

On top of that, the city was managing a foreclosure registry, a nascent nuisance property program, and an ambition to eventually give residents public-facing access to property data. Staff knew what they wanted to accomplish. What they were missing was infrastructure that could connect the data they had to the work they were doing.

What Racine Built

Tolemi's engagement in Racine began in late 2021 and has grown steadily ever since, expanding from a BuildingBlocks implementation into a multi-program Slate deployment that now touches rental registration, foreclosure registry, and community development grant management.

The foundation was BuildingBlocks. Tolemi connected and mapped data from CityWorks, ProChamps, MarketDrive, Phoenix, and the county assessor into a single platform, giving staff across departments a unified view of every property in the city. Code enforcement cases, building permits, rental registrations, police and fire incidents, tax delinquency, and property transfer history all became searchable and filterable in one place. The Mayor used it. Police and fire leadership used it during QA to identify which data should be public-facing. Code inspectors used it to plan targeted inspection rounds in the rental stabilization district. The city's assistant attorney could pull the property condition data previously buried in public records requests in minutes instead of days.

For the RacineRENTS program specifically, BuildingBlocks became the operational backbone for proactive rental inspections. Staff could identify suspected rentals, filter by neighborhood or enhancement district, cross-reference with code enforcement history, and identify properties with outstanding violations, tax delinquency, and no active registration. The inspections program itself was designed to work neighborhood by neighborhood, starting with targeted groups of roughly 150 properties in the stabilization district, and BuildingBlocks gave inspectors and program staff the information layer they needed to prioritize intelligently.

Slate expanded Racine's capabilities further. The foreclosure registry, previously managed through ProChamps with limited integration into the city's broader data picture, was rebuilt in Slate with automatic deregistration on sale, custom reporting for Kelly and her team, and clean connections back into BuildingBlocks so foreclosed properties showed up accurately in the city-wide view. The rental registry followed, with historical registration data migrated in, auto-deregistration tied to property sales, and workflows for tracking change-of-ownership re-registration requirements.

The most recent major expansion was the TID program. Racine runs Tax Increment Financing district grants through five distinct neighborhoods, each with staggered two-week application windows across the year. Tolemi built a full application and workflow system in Slate for the TID program, including intake forms, contract stage tracking, contractor management with license expiration alerts, automatic contribution calculations, and custom reports showing where each applicant stands in the pipeline. Christina, who manages the program, previously tracked all of this in spreadsheets. Now the same data lives in Slate with automated tasks and notifications, and staff can see the full portfolio of TID activity across all five districts in a single view.

BuildingBlocks also became a tool for measuring whether the work was having an impact. The city developed a chronic nuisance property filter pulling from CityWorks and Phoenix data, tracking properties with repeated police calls and code cases over defined windows. Staff built a Top 25 most-visited properties list. Assessed value changes over time became the primary metric for demonstrating neighborhood improvement to the Mayor and city leadership, with Tolemi data providing the before-and-after picture across TID districts.

What It's Achieved

Racine started with a rental program and a lot of disconnected data. What's been built over four years is a full property intelligence platform that multiple city departments use daily.

The foreclosure registry has 99 active registrations and is auto-synced with property sale data so deregistrations happen without staff intervention. The rental registry carries full historical data from the city's prior system. The TID program, which ran on spreadsheets, now runs on Slate with staggered district windows, automated contractor tracking, and custom reporting that Christina described as a significant reduction in manual work and human error.

Staff are using BuildingBlocks to find things they simply couldn't find before: which landlords own the most properties, which neighborhoods have the highest concentration of code cases and unregistered rentals, which properties meet the threshold for chronic nuisance designation, and where TID investment is showing up in assessed value changes.

The city has also used the platform externally. A public-facing property lookup tool gives residents access to basic property information, which was a specific goal the Mayor set at the outset of the engagement.

Why Racine's Approach Stands Out

Racine is a good example of what it looks like when a city commits to building real data infrastructure rather than solving one problem at a time. Each program, from the rental registry to the foreclosure registry to proactive inspections to TID grant management to nuisance tracking, connects back to the same underlying property data layer. Staff in neighborhood enhancement, code enforcement, community development, and the Mayor's office are all working from the same picture of the city.

That took time and sustained investment. It also means that when Racine wants to answer a new question or launch a new initiative, the foundation is already there.

[PLACEHOLDER: Client quote, reach out to Kelly, Megan, or Christina for a testimonial]