Calculating the Citizen Offset Cost Savings of Cities Such As Pittsburgh

Calculating City Savings Offset by Citizen Action

I was mowing the city owned lots next to my house the other day when an idea struck me. Technically I was doing a job that a city employee should be doing – maintaining city owned property. I began to think about calculating the citizen offset cost savings of cities such as Pittsburgh.

Let’s face it, the city is not going to maintain these two vacant lots tucked away on a nearly suburban dead end street that few people see. They just don’t have the resources. That thought lead to me wondering what my tax burden might be if they were to hire enough workers to actually try to maintain all of the city owned properties that citizens like myself maintain. There should be an easy formula for calculating how much potential cost the city is saving through the actions of citizens such as myself.

The first step is figuring out what the cost to the city would be per hour per person. The next step is to create a database to collect data from my fellow citizen stand-ins for city maintenance crews.

Current Status

Currently I’m designing the database to collect the data.