Tara Hicks serves as the Assistant Director of the City of Savannah’s Housing Services Department. She helped develop and oversees the City’s 1K-in-10 initiative, which, voters approved $10 million from the “penny” sales tax for the purpose of acquiring 1,000 vacant, abandoned, blighted properties over a 10-year period. Through Tara’s tenure with the department, she has researched, collected, analyzed, presented, and relied upon data to implement 1K-in-10 through various acquisition strategies, including eminent domain, which has proven beneficial for affordable housing, the community, and heirs, when used properly and with partners and organizations, such as the local Land Bank Authority.

Tara earned a Bachelor of Business Administration in Virginia and a Juris Doctor and Environmental Law Certificate from the University of Hawaii at Manoa William S. Richardson School of Law. Tara co-authored, Lessons from a Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning Approach for Identifying Vacant, Abandoned, and Deteriorated Properties in Savannah, Georgia, which was published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research.