Core Practices for Neighborhood Reinforcement and City Transformation
We have learned through years of execution that there are core principles which lead to private-public partnership success for tranforming neighborhoods. We emphasize the roles of private and public collaboration being led usually by private sector leadership to assure speed, accountability, and sustainability to achieve transformative success.
Cities prosper when their neighborhoods prosper.
Private and public leadership must organize and collaborate to successfully turnaround a neighborhood. Together, they must be facilitated to lead through the complexities of transforming each neighborhood within a city, especially to the point that most cities need to be transformed.
Our process integrates the following practices to build collaborative partnerships to implement action plans that align to the fabric of the community which a neighborhood serves.
Private-Public Leadership
The first step of neighborhood transformation is to align a leadership team committed to seeing through the change they will design. This is usually a mix of private and public sector leadership members represented through an existing or newly established for-profit, non-profit, or community development corporation.
Most successsful projects are led by multiple private sector leadership members working together to orchestrate a responsible investment stack and revenue stream that assures long-term success.
Where a formal sponsor leadership organization does not exist, we aid in establishing one early in the process. This group will be bound to their vision, mission, workplan, and proforma to set direction for the scope and pace of the transformation process.Neighborhood Portfolio Ventures
Selecting a neighborhood to transform is an art and a science. All communities have specific areas with density that are distressed, blighted, and full of potential for revitalization and change.
Studying leadership, demographics, psychographics, assets, neglected investments, infrastructure, land use, amenities and more are part of the process. Any city will have multiple potential Complete Neighborhood opportunities.
We aid with lining up the criteria and cases for targeting specific neighborhoods that will have the largest community impact. Ideally, over time, a city’s capacity is built to transform multiple neighborhoods and develop a competitive quality of place portfolio. Thereby attracting new residents to each neighborhood.Neighborhood Design and Programming
Great neighborhood design comes down to distilling the character and personality of a neighborhood and translating it authentically through its continued construction of architecture, street design, housing configurations, recreation, commerce and community programming.
The leadership organization must design a workplan that sets the template and expectations for each of the elements that are critical to the continuance and sustainability of its intrinsic DNA. Guiding local contractors, developers, investors, residents, businesses, and community organizations toward these priorities are critical to the long-term buy-in, vitality, and success of the neighborhood.
Ultimately, the neighborhood needs the right ongoing community leadership to program the social integration of events, programs, and activities that connect community members to feel pride and the desire to live, work and play where they coexist as neighbors.Diversified Funding Stack
Funding a neighborhood transformation is not possible without tapping into all possible sources of local, state, federal public, private and institutional funding. The collaboration of these funding sources creates strength and assurance of project success.
Achieving a more complex funding stack isn’t easy and it must be handled strategically to align the agendas, requirements and fund-matching opportunities. Due to COVID, there are millions of dollars available for any one project at local, state, federal and private levels for urban, distressed and low-income neighborhoods.
Working carefully and intentionally to match these funds with the corporations needing qualified workforce and small businesses needing dedicated employees creates an economic pull that sustains for years.Neighborhood Entrustment
Neighborhood transformation initiatives will get very little traction from the start if solid community engagement is not developed as the leadership group is established. Too often, community leaders complete needs assessments, asset mapping, focus groups, surveys, etc. without an established comprehensive planning process and leadership group.
Thus, the fact-finding efforts achieve the opposite of what was intended, which is public frustration because there is no follow up process or entrusted leadership to carry the torch and address the community’s ideas and concerns.
Authentic and transparent community development requires courageous, honest leaders who are believed by the community and who are vetted to be successful with accomplishing what they promise.
Expert partners must be aligned to inform and guide the planning process to support leaders with activating and expediting decision making to show momentum and progress as communicated through the workplan. Regular community communication around the workplan instills the trust leaders need to keep moving forward and proving that success is possible.Measures for Neighborhood Success
We’ve emphasized that every neighborhood has the opportunity to be unique. Thus, each neighborhood will have different metrics for measuring success. While overall, a city should measure progress with its citywide dashboard, we encourage neighborhoods to post a scorecard showing change in the progress they have defined wanting and transparently report the completion of the steps committed to action.
Read more about some metrics that could be considered based on a neighborhood’s design for improvement.