A trio of young design-geeks, immigrants to Providence, have taken it upon themselves to document the impact of the foreclosure crisis in Providence, one boarded-up house at a time. Their site, ForgottenProvidence, is a mashup of user-generated photo content, property data, and Zillow real estate data. Though it has what would be considered a sampling of abandoned homes, if they could find a way to crowdsource the effort, I’m sure some others could get on board. Read about the project at ProJo, or just go visit the site. Nice work, gents.

Each morning on his way to work in downtown Providence, Josh Oakhurst takes a hard look at his city.

He sees boarded houses, their windows sealed shut like the eyes of corpses. He sees houses gutted by fire or vandals, their lawns littered with debris. He sees scenes of neglect and decay that make him angry.

Now, he wants other people to get angry, too.

“Why is this happening to these streets?” he wants people to ask. “Why is this being allowed to happen? And what are we as a city doing about it?”

The 27-year-old Web manager for an advertising firm who “likes to take pictures of ugly houses” has launched a new Web site with two of his friends called www.forgottenprovidence.com.

Together with Sam Holland, a Web designer, and Myles Dumas, a graphic designer, Oakhurst is hoping to build a grass-roots campaign to tackle the problem of foreclosed, abandoned and vacant houses. Their Web site combines photographs of boarded and abandoned houses with links to property data from a local nonprofit, The Providence Plan, and real-estate information from Zillow.com.

By photographing the houses and assimilating the available public data about them, the creators of Forgotten Providence say on their Web site that they hope to provide information that might lead to changes in code enforcement, tax laws and the way the city deals with owners who fail to keep up their properties.