A heat map of Coyle's foreclosed properties
Reporters at the Philadelphia City Paper exposed a slumlord responsible for hundreds of foreclosures in North Philadelphia and needed maps to support their story.
Client: Philadelphia City Paper
Challenge: In North Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, “abandoned properties and crime go hand in hand,” wrote Philadelphia City Paper reporter Isaiah Thompson in a July 9, 2010 article. Kensington is riddled with ‘abandominiums’ that provide “prime [spots] for drug dealers.” Reporters from the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philadelphia City Paper identified a developer named Robert Coyle Sr. as the neighborhood’s “slumlord millionare.” Once a well-known realtor in the region, Coyle’s business methods changed after the housing bubble of the mid-1990’s. His property companies took out large second mortgages against rental properties, and left them to deteriorate, failed to pay taxes, utilites, and used falsified rental licenses in eviction proceedings against tenants. When Coyle’s companies defaulted on millions of dollars in loans, hundreds of renters faced eviction and foreclosures even if they had paid their rent on time.
Solution: Reporters from the Philadelphia City Paper asked Azavea to support their investigative journalism with data analysis and visualization. Azavea collected real estate and neighborhood-level data and generated a heat map of foreclosures in Kensington and surrounding areas.
Outcomes: Azavea’s map, a powerful visualization of the severity of the neighborhood’s foreclosure crisis, landed on the front page of the City Paper.
Keywords: data journalism, mapping, heat maps, density maps, spatial analysis, data visualization, foreclosures, newspapers