City: Shreveport, Louisiana

Reporting to: City Attorney

The Challenge

The City of Shreveport faces a persistent and multifaceted challenge with distressed properties that are widespread, and the situation has evolved into a crisis. This issue affects every resident across the city, not just those living adjacent to abandoned or distressed structures. As noted in community discussions, these properties aren’t merely an aesthetic concern; they are a physical manifestation of deeper social and economic challenges that harm the city’s identity, discourage investment, and diminish community pride. The city must deal with over 5,000 tax adjudicated properties, many of which are also vacant, abandoned, or out of compliance with the city’s property standards. These properties create a ripple effect of problems, as they:

• Serve as visible symbols of neglect that damage community morale and signal disinvestment,
• Increase the city’s direct and indirect costs of abatement, demolition, emergency services, and social services
• Diminish the values of private properties, and
• Harbor criminal activity, illegal property entry, house fires, and neighborhood instability.

While the human and financial costs of these conditions are well-documented, Shreveport’s approach to addressing the problem can be improved, and the city is committed to addressing the problem. Specifically, the city seeks to move beyond a reactive, complaint-driven system to one that can comprehensively and proactively address physical property decline. The department seeks to leverage new data and mapping systems and a robust citywide resident engagement effort to inform and prioritize investments.

City and civic leaders have emphasized the importance of addressing property conditions and neighborhood decline as their most critical priority. They seek not just an improved Property Standards Department, but a more complete paradigm shift—moving from viewing code enforcement as simply regulatory compliance to seeing it as a vital community development function. The city requires a strategic, coordinated approach that can engage property owners, leverage community assets, and create pathways to reimagine neglected spaces while ensuring consistent standards across all neighborhoods. The city participated in the 2025 Bloomberg Harvard Collaboration track to leverage partnerships and pose key questions to deepen their understanding of root causes of property distress and neighborhood decline, including how to begin to overcome them. Those questions include:

• How should the city prioritize investments across and within neighborhoods?
• What tools might the city utilize to increase compliance among property owners? How can they improve compliance without displacement?
• How can the city enhance their community engagement efforts to inform operational changes and to enlist residents to help with neighborhood revitalization efforts?

What You’ll Do

The fellow will engage with key internal and external stakeholders to begin framing an engagement strategy. Stakeholders will include the Property Standards Department, the Mayor’s Office, the City Attorney’s Office, the Offices of Community Development and Economic Development, and civic organizations such as churches, community groups, and the Community Foundation of Northern Louisiana.

Through engagement and research, the fellow will provide necessary inputs to inform key deliverables, to include:

• Assessing the current code enforcement operations and performance metrics
• Analyzing data to identify patterns of code violations and evaluate the effectiveness of current enforcement strategies
• Recommending more strategic, data-driven approaches to prioritize enforcement activities in high-impact areas
• Developing key performance indicators to measure enforcement outcomes and departmental effectiveness
• Preparing a preliminary implementation plan with short and long-term recommendations

What You’ll Bring

• Quantitative and qualitative interviewing and analysis
• Policy analysis
• Data analysis
• Stakeholder engagement
• Outstanding written and verbal communication abilities
• Design thinking
• Interest in code enforcement, property standards, or related fields a plus
• Agility to work both independently and collaboratively