A survey of residential, commercial and industrial properties in Cleveland is underway. The non-profit Western Reserve Land Conservancy is on track to assess about 2300 parcels of land every day through September.
"We're giving grades to help the city determine which neighborhoods might have a vacancy issue compared to the others."
Nicole Blunk is one of 16 orange-shirted surveyors armed with an iPad and walking east to west through every ward in the city. They're giving each property an A to F rating depending on its condition.
"This one we had to rank an F because as you can see it's structurally unsafe. The porch is falling in. There is broken glass from the windows. The roof is caving in from here. And you can't really see the back. There's also another bad house back there. It's two houses on one parcel. And it is also falling in and caving in."
The goal is to create a map that city officials can use to determine which properties should be demolished.
Cleveland is contributing about twenty thousand of the more than two hundred thousand dollar cost of the assessment. The Land Conservancy has done several of these surveys in Northeast Ohio including Oberlin, Sandusky and East Cleveland.
