Startup expanding market for city-owned properties

With an international team of college students poised to lend their design talents to help Central Falls this past spring, the only missing piece was the right place to put them to work
Professors from Rhode Island School of Design’s Desine-Lab, who were organizing a Central Falls workshop that included students from Bogata, Colombia, poured over lists of underutilized, city-owned properties, looking for one they could transform into a dynamic community space.
None of the initial options inspired them until they began working with the founders of OpportunitySpace, a Boston startup that creates interactive public-property databases and had made Central Falls its first municipal partner.
Instead of looking at each property as an isolated address, OpportunitySpace allowed the Desine-Lab team to see them mapped together in the context of neighborhoods, public assets, surrounding businesses and zoning.
Using the database, Desine-Lab zeroed in on a vacant lot on Dexter Street where an old house had recently been torn down and plans were in place to create a surface parking lot.
“They saw an opportunity to have something more than a parking lot creating another hole on a main street,” said Central Falls Planning Director Stephen Larrick. “Looking at it on a map allowed them to see something unique that was adjacent to several restaurants.”
This summer, Desine-Lab students built a brick-terraced plaza with seating, a stage, wooden shelter and mosaic mural on the Dexter Street lot, which the city now sees as an attraction for residents and the surrounding businesses.
Only time will tell whether the plaza remains well-maintained and popular, but either way, it’s exactly what OpportunitySpace was created to make happen.
Founded by students from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, OpportunitySpace hopes to become the national online data platform of choice for cities to market their property and for developers to learn about new opportunities.
Thanks to both circumstance and design, they’ve started in Rhode Island, with Pawtucket, Cumberland and Providence joining Central Falls as the first four pilot cities in the country.
To grow, OpportunitySpace intends to make more than mapped property listings and evolve into an interactive tool for navigating land-use rules, tax incentives and the path through government red tape. “We’re very interested in products that make government more open and user friendly,” said Christina Garmendia, OpportunitySpace’s chief customer officer and co-founder.
OpportunitySpace first became interested in Rhode Island because of its proximity to Boston and the fact that its distressed urban communities featured a combination of underutilized assets and underdeveloped technical infrastructure.
The company first pitched Central Falls and Pawtucket officials, who brought the idea to the urban-development team within what was then the R.I. Economic Development Corporation.
By bringing in Cumberland and, especially Providence, Pawtucket and Central Falls, they thought they could scale the project and attract nonprofit dollars to make it viable.
As it happened, the project attracted $10,000 from the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, $7,000 from the Rhode Island Foundation and $1,500 from the Pawtucket Foundation, to go along with $4,000 from Providence and $1,500 apiece from Central Falls and Cumberland.
In addition to city-owned land, Providence and Central Falls have added properties with delinquent tax bills so potential buyers know what will be available at upcoming tax sales.
The property maps can be filtered for zoning, neighborhood and asset type, and Garmendia said OpportunitySpace is working on reverse-zoning search that would allow a developer to type in a use and find out where it could go.
Since the Rhode Island cities went live on OpportunitySpace in mid-June, the site has seen 4,500 unique visitors, 34,000 page views and fielded about a dozen direct inquiries on listings, Garmendia said.
Of those 4,500 visitors, only 1,000 were from Rhode Island and 700 from Massachusetts, Garmendia said, pointing to the fact that the site can open a city’s assets up to interest outside the local area.
In addition to the four Rhode Island cities, OpportunitySpace is also live for Louisville, Ky., and in the next year plans to launch in another 15 cities.
In Central Falls, Larrick said the city’s recent experience with receivership and seeing a number of properties sold under distress underlined the benefit of using OpportunitySpace.
“This opens up a wider pool of investors and makes decisions more data driven and transparent,” he said. •

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