It might seem like an unlikely goal for a team like Flowers'. No one on his staff has an advanced degree, and everyone, except Flowers himself, is age 25 or younger. Additionally, because it was a skunkworks project, no one outside the team really understood what they were doing. But they were determined to make a difference. One of the first things Flowers did was to go out into the field and talk to the people on the front lines.

"We got out in the field," he says. "I talked to firemen. I talked to policemen. I talked to inspectors from the Buildings Department, from Housing Preservation & Development. I talked to the Water Department. I asked them: 'When you go to a place that's a dump, what do you see?' Then I replicated that in the data."

Flowers had his team study actual "vacates"--instances where an inspector had found a building so unsafe that it had to be emptied either in whole or in part.

"I didn't need to deconstruct the complaints," Flowers explains. "I deconstructed the problem. And I deconstructed the problem using city data."

Flowers' team looked for several telling metrics, including the following: