alert us to early warning signs

"In January, the Council approved a proposal ... to redevelop Allied Drive. Crime there is down by half since the City acted on my initiative to buy 20% of the housing there. Now we’re starting to see millions of dollars of private reinvestment there, which was exactly what we intended when we bought the property ...

But we are also attempting to do two things that have not been tried much anywhere in America: we are trying to improve Allied Drive without driving out low-income working families and we are trying not to simply force problems into other neighborhoods.

Along those lines, we are working on [an] initiative to develop the Neighborhood Indicators pilot project. Inspired by a program in Charlotte, North Carolina, this is a set of statistics that is designed alert us to early warning signs of stress in a neighborhood. Armed with that knowledge we can go to these neighborhoods and ... attack a problem before it gets out of hand."

-- from State of the City Address, by Madison (Wisconsin) Mayor Dave Cielewicz (April 9, 2008)