CENT has started work with the City of Syracuse and company partner Chimera Integrations on the Vacant Property Monitoring project. This project is supported via a awarded by the Empire State Development Corporation through its New York State’s Smart Cities Innovation Partnership program. The program supports innovative public-private partnerships that will use technology to address pressing municipal challenges.

The city of Syracuse has more than 1600 vacant properties that it regularly monitors to ensure public and building safety. This project seeks to modernize and enhance the City’s capabilities to monitor its vacant buildings by using sensor technology deployments that can lead to scalable and long-term solutions.

The goals of the project are to make it quicker/easier for the city’s building inspectors to identify safety issues that could lead to damage to the vacant property or neighboring structures, such as water damage, fire/heat, compromised doors/windows, or exterior code violations like tall grass, snow accumulation or illegal trash dumping. Three sites in the city with a minimum of three vacant properties clustered at each site will be targeted to assess and test a technology solution based on a combination of in-building sensors. A video-based solution will also be tested in at least one of the sites. The information from a diverse set of sensors relayed via IoT gateways will be used for monitoring the conditions of each property which will feed an early-warning system for when building inspectors should be dispatched outside of their regular scheduled visits to a property and assess the impact of such a systems with city officials.

The project is expected to complete activities in April/May 2022.