City Detects's Blight Scores can help catch code violations, but critics aren't so sure. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Garbage trucks have a new side hustle: unkempt yard snitches. Garbage trucks now do more than just pick up tossed-out food scraps and junk. In at least four states (California, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas), some city-run sanitation vehicles are being outfitted with AI-equipped cameras from a company called City Detect .

Addressing strategies for managing vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated (VAD) properties is important for maintaining healthy communities. Yet, the process of identifying these properties can be difficult. Here, we create a human-in-the-loop machine learning (HITLML) model called VADecide and apply it to a parcel-level case study in Savannah, Georgia. The results show a higher prediction accuracy than was achieved when using a machine learning model without human input in the training. The HITLML approach also reveals differences between machine vs. human-generated results. Our findings contribute to knowledge about the advantages and challenges of HITLML in urban planning.