The City of Evansville’s mission to identify and remove vacant and blighted structures from city neighborhoods received some outside help this summer.
Savalee Tikle, a 26-year-old student in Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, spent 10 weeks with the Evansville Department of Metropolitan Development, building a digital database of properties meeting criteria for demolition. Her fellowship was through Mayor Stephanie Terry’s participation in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, which fully funded Tikle’s fellowship.
Tikle’s professional and academic work has focused on planning, data analysis, and climate-resistant design. She’s well-versed in mapping, and she put her skills to use at DMD, working with Executive Director Kolbi Jackson, who collaborated with City of Evansville Communications Director Joe Atkinson on the application to the Harvard fellowship program.
Terry has identified blight elimination as a key goal of her administration – she set a goal to remove 150 properties this year, which would be nearly three times the total for 2024.
“The mayor’s Flight Blight program was in the works when we were working on the application, and we were aware that when it came to our ability to identify how many blighted spaces and structures, we weren’t going to find everything by asking the public. To get a handle on the issue, we needed to find another avenue,” Atkinson says.
The avenue has been paved by Tikle, who tailored a mapping plan specific to Evansville. “The primary goal was to map blighted and vacant properties within the Center City — essentially building a foundational inventory that could guide future redevelopment and revitalization efforts,” says Tikle, a native of Mumbai, India. “This was meant to serve as a pilot that the city could eventually scale to other neighborhoods.”
Not only was that goal achieved, but Tikle says her work went beyond its original scope. It wasn’t just about collecting data, she explains, but about deeper looks at property condition, ownership patterns, and development potential.
“I’m an architect by profession, an urban designer and planner in the making. I’m not a data analyst, so I’m looking at data through the lens of an architect: That’s not a vacant parcel of land, it’s something that has so much potential as housing or an economic driver. We’re changing the perception of what we think blight and vacancy could be,” she says.
Tikle says her process across her 10-week fellowship was broken into three stages: mapping, analyzing, and ideation. The first two weeks, she spoke to stakeholders in local government and in the neighborhoods themselves “to understand the landscape of vacancy and blight, past efforts to address it, and how policies and capital are currently aligned,” she says.
She and Jackson spent three weeks touring Evansville’s Center City, looking at the issues first-hand, conducting a block-by-block window survey, and inputting data in their database. They developed five stages of blight — low, medium, and high levels, with transitional stages between — to help categorize properties’ needs and recommended priority.
The database, she says, “goes beyond simple mapping — it’s a decision-making tool that helps the DMD identify where to direct resources, plan targeted redevelopment, and reframe vacant land as opportunity zones for future housing and economic growth across the city.”
Next came two weeks of major analysis of the data collected and researching potentials leading up to a week of ideation and case-study comparisons with blight projects in cities like Charlottesville, Virginia.
“We’ve also worked to make these strategies replicable and prototypal for other neighborhoods, so the city can use this as a toolkit for long-term equitable revitalization and reuse of underutilized land,” she says. She cited the Jacobsville neighborhood and the South Kentucky Avenue area as places where the model could be replicated.
Along the way, Tikle took note of potential in Evansville’s Center City neighborhoods. “They’re close to Downtown, have so much character, and you can really feel the community roots. It made me realize these aren’t just problem areas, they’re prime spaces for community-driven growth and reinvestment,” she says.
Results of the blight study still are being finalized, but “the number was larger than I anticipated,” Atkinson says. “It showed me there’s tremendous value in what Savalee’s doing and the importance of scaling up the plan. If there’s enough of a gap in data in that section of the city, there’s more out there.”
As Tikle’s 10-week fellowship reaches its conclusion in late July, she is finalizing reports and holding final meetings to hand the reins over to stakeholders and government officials.
“We want them to understand what we’ve done, because these people will be the ones to take it further through capital investment and planning strategies,” Tikle says. “Ideation is like outreach: This is what the city is really investing time and effort in. If you take part in an action plan, we can make better use of the data we already have. There’s vacant land just waiting to be converted.”
Tikle, who is to receive her Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard in 2026, enjoyed her time in Evansville, residing near the Haynie’s Corner Arts District and exploring the city. “I didn’t expect such a rich blend of history and creativity in a city this size,” she says. “It was a very cool discovery.”
