Part 1: Human Services and Neighborhoods

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Part 2: Establishing Institutional Partnerships

People turn first to family, friends, and neighbors when problems arise in their lives. This “informal helping” is voluntary, spontaneous, individualized, flexible, based on self-reliance, and is reciprocal in nature. Such helping breaks down barriers created by “provider” and “client” relationships and helps overcome the fragmentation and crisis orientation of social services. Informal helping is most effective when social networks have the greatest size, diversity, quality, and interconnectedness. This is the very definition of social capital. We need to identify, support, and enhance neighborhood helping networks, and establish collaborations between human service agencies and informal helping networks.

Introduction to neighborhood strategic planning. The second slide show (Part 2) in this topic deals with Establishing Institutional Partnerships. This slide show relates especially to established human service providers. It addresses issues of forging coordinated and effective program implementation. This slide show fits neatly with the need to begin strategic planning efforts with the neighborhood. Resources throughout this web site are related to conducting participatory strategic plans. The reader is referred especially to website Topic 4, Neighborhood Strategic Planning, Topic 7, Building Community with Land Use Planning and Zoning, and this topic 12. Of particular value are two neighborhood plans conducted for the O’Fallon neighborhood in St. Louis. Links to these neighborhood plans are found in Topics 4 and 7.

Selected Readings:

Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar, Streets of Hope, The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood (Boston: South End Press, 1994), Chapter 7, “Holistic Development: Human, Economic, Environmental”, pp. 169-202.
Reading #1

Charles Froland, Diane Pancoast, Nancy Chapman, Priscilla Kimboko, Helping Networks and Human Services (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1981), pp. 17-54, 137-149.
Reading #8 (pdf)

Atelia I Melaville and Martin J. Blank, What It Takes: Structuring Interagency Partnerships to Connect Children and Families with Comprehensive Services, Washington: Education and Human Services Consortium, 1991, “Part One: Where We Are – Where We Need to Be”, pp. 6-19.
Reading #18 (pdf)

Safety, both from fear and crime, is essential to neighborhood quality: it is a condition for the wonderful things that can happen in neighborhoods.  But the absence of safety also is a significant contributor to neighborhood decline and a barrier to personal and community action to make life better and to establish partnerships beyond its boundaries.

Fear and crime are the products of people’s beliefs and actions.  As such they can be reversed through our understanding and efforts.

It pulls together many factors that issue from our history, prejudices, and the conditions in these neighborhoods.  Covered are the New Jim Crow and War on Drugs, police militarism and mass incarceration, homicides and clearance rates, police shootings, and the fear-charged explosion of gun ownership.  These factors are daunting but not insurmountable barriers to well-functioning neighborhoods where the challenges are greatest.  Facing these realities enables us to rectify them.

The Part 1 slide show addresses a set of causes and consequences, a downward spiraling system.  It is focused on segregated African American and Latino neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, which are a special concern of community development and planning. It is in the spirit of Benjamin Marsh, the author of one of the first modern urban planning text in 1909, who said: “no city is more beautiful [and successful] than its most unsightly tenement.”

Part 1 – Neighborhood Safety in Context

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Part 2 – Community Oriented Policing

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Part 3 – Crime and the Built Environment / Streets

“When people started protecting themselves as individuals rather than as a community, the battle was lost.” Community Oriented Policing (COP) is the public safety counterpart of Neighborhood Planning. In COP, the police and community work together to identify, prioritize, and solve public safety problems including crime, drugs, fear of crime, social and physical disorder, and neighborhood decay. The beat officer under COP almost becomes like a neighborhood planner and a government ombudsman. The neighborhood built environment and street design impacts crime and disorder. The underlying focus, again, is building social capital.

Readings:

Robert J. Sampson, “Crime and Public Safety: Insights from Community Level Perspectives on Social Capital”, in Susan Saegert, J. Phillip Thompson, and Mark R. Warren, Social Capital and Poor Communities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001).
Reading #2 (pdf)

Robert Trojanowicz and Bonnie Bucqueroux, Community Policing, How to Get Started (Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing Co, 1994), Section One: “What is Community Policing?”, Section Five, “What Community Policing Officers Do on the Job”
Reading #6 (pdf)

“Taking Back the Streets” in Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio, Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 151-173
Reading #8 (pdf)

U.S. Department of Justice, Executive Office for Weed and Seed, “Citizen Action for Neighborhood Safety: Community Strategies for Improving the Quality of Life”, August 1997. On web at: www.ojp.usdoj.gov/eows/pdftxt/qolmas.pdf
Reading #11

James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows, The Police and Neighborhood Safety”, The Atlantic Monthly, March 1982. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/crime/windows.htm
Reading #16

Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (New York: Collier Books, 1973), Chapter 1, “Defensible Space”; Chapter 3, “Territoriality”.
Reading #20 (pdf)

Donald Appleyard, Livable Streets, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981), Chapter 1, “Three Streets in San Francisco”, Chapter 2, “The Ecology of Streets”.
Reading #26 (pdf)

NOTE: If you have difficulty in opening your readings, you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader.
This is a free download and simple installation. Please follow the instructions at the official Adobe website.

Part 1 – Background, Economic Transformation & Concentrated Poverty, and ED Approaches

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Part II – Programs, Financing, Place-Making

“At the very center of the community building challenge is the effort to revitalize the community’s economic life”. However, broad economic conditions make this a challenge in neighborhoods, especially those of concentrated poverty.

In many cities, a number of transformations have taken place that create the current situation. In the 1940s to 1960s local elites promoted urban renewal to clear low income areas for growth, setting in motion cascading social and economic disruption of neighborhoods. In the 1970s a total of 38 million jobs, mostly traditional working class ones, were lost, including half the manufacturing jobs in many Northeast and Midwest cities. While urban areas were losing jobs, white flight to the suburbs was accompanied by the highest rates of business locations and job growth. Over time in the center-city, the African-American population greatly exceeded the number of jobs there.

By 1970, half the population of inner-city African-Americans were 24 years old or younger, jobs for whom were disappearing quickly. Occupations with the greatest growth (retail sales, truck driving, maintenance and cleaning, health care, at food counters, etc.) have been the lowest paid. The government income safety net has been repealed. The federal minimum wage has fallen in real dollars since 1968. Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC 1975) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF 1995) replaced the welfare entitlement program. EITCs depend on having a job and TANF has a life-time benefit limit of 5 years. This situation has deteriorated to the extent that a family with one working adult and one or more children earning minimum wage plus maximum EITC is just at or below the poverty line. Presently 43.1 million Americans are living in poverty

Mortgage red-lining, discriminatory suburban housing practices, inner city siting of affordable housing projects, decades of triaging poor neighborhoods, and the outward movement of stable working class and middle class African-Americans resulted in racial and class “hypersegregated” neighborhoods populated to a greater degree by the most disadvantaged individuals.

With high levels of segregation, fewer neighborhoods absorb damaging changes. While employers seek “work readiness” in applicants including basic skills, personal qualities, and credentials that signal employability, neighborhood social problems are exacerbated including failing schools. In poverty neighborhoods in St. Louis, school competency tests results for english, math, and science are one-fourth of state standards, poorly preparing many for employment.

A number of programs exist to address the economic development needs of low income individuals and neighborhoods. However this writer believes that these efforts miss the mark. Most are “siloed” in practice and fail to be commensurate to the conditions of life of what has been described as the American “under-class”. They are not scaled, connected, and funded at a level that will make significant progress toward desired outcomes. (In the O’Fallon neighborhood of St. Louis alone, there are likely 1,000 individuals out of a population of 5,100 who would be well served by help finding, securing, and keeping employment.) Neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are said to exist in an “institutional nexus that enables the transmission of poverty from person to person and generation to generation” (as reported in Massey, American Apartheid).

The challenges of economic development efforts in communities of concentrated poverty begin at birth and are made daunting by decades of detrimental circumstances in the local neighborhood, city, and nation.

Programs must be driven by resident-guided plans that are long term, comprehensive, and financially and administratively supported by non-profit organizations, foundations, government, business, and other partners. It may be that a neighborhood-based approach, whose goal it is to improve the lives of all residents, is the only way to achieve substantial progress because the intrinsic resources and support of the entire community must be drawn upon, sometimes over a life-time .

Selected Readings:

Ch. 4, “The Small Community” in Murphy and Cunningham, Organizing for Community Controlled Development, pp.53-77.
Reading #1

University of Illinois – Chicago, Center for Urban Economic Development, Community Economic Development Strategies, A Manual for Local Action, Chicago, 1987.
Reading #2 (pdf)

“Rebuilding the Community Economy” in John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight, Building Communities from the Inside Out (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1993), pp. 275-344.
Reading #7

Chapter 5, Ross Gittell and J. Phillip Thompson, “Making Social Capital Work: Social Capital and Community Economic Development”, in Susan Saegert, J. Phillip Thompson, and Mark R. Warren, Social Capital and Poor Communities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001.
Reading #10 (pdf)

Ch. 15. “Workforce Development”, in Murphy and Cunningham, Organizing for Community Controlled Development, pp.292-310.
Reading #17

Ch. 14. “Business District Renewal” in Murphy and Cunningham, Organizing for Community Controlled Development, pp.277 – 291.
Reading #21

Peggy Clark and Tracy Huston, “Assisting the Smallest Businesses: Assessing Microenterprise Development as a Strategy for Boosting Poor Communities, An Interim Report”, The Aspen Institute, Washington, D.C., August, 1993.
Reading #24 (pdf)

Housing for Community

The following three slide shows include a range of topics regarding housing.  Part 1 covers the importance of decent affordable housing to personal, family, and neighborhood stability.  A history of affordable housing programs is presented, showing how motives other than the interests of residents, in combination with entrenched racial bias, often have resulted in shabby housing, the concentration of poverty, and encouraged abandonment and urban sprawl. Affordable housing is covered in the context of early, formative urban redevelopment practices and policies in St. Louis and Chicago.   Part 2 identifies types of neighborhoods and suggests different housing programs appropriate for them.  It shows how neighborhood planning provides a strong basis for creating a housing program.  It reviews how the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) can be a tool to implement the program.  The Part 3 slide show addresses the many ways to achieve housing affordability, covering legislative actions, development techniques, and subsidies especially Low Income Housing Tax Credits, Historic Preservation Tax Credits, and New Market Tax Credits.

Part 1 – History of Subsidized Housing, Government Action in St. Louis and Chicago, Findings, and Recommendations

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Part 2 – Neighborhood Change, Planning, and the Community Reinvestment Act

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Part 3 – Achieving Housing Affordability

Neighborhood character is affected in large measure by its housing. While housing affordability is a sought-after goal, neighborhood housing policy must be consistent with neighborhood characteristics. The ideal is a “stable” neighborhood which is neither declining nor gentrifying. Housing programs should be tailored to neighborhood conditions. There are many programs and approaches to creating housing affordability. The goal is to foster a diverse community based on a mix of housing.

Selected Readings:

Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar, Streets of Hope, The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood (Boston: South End Press, 1994), Chapter 5, “Controlling the Land Through Eminent Domain” and Chapter 6, “Land and Housing Development: The Triangle and Beyond”, pp. 115-167.
Reading #1

Patricia Ewalt, Edith Freeman, and Dennis Poole, eds. Community Building: Renewal, Well-Being, and Shared Responsibility (Washington, D.C.: National Association of Social Works Press, 1998) Ch. 21, Carol S. Cohen and Michael H. Phillips, “Building Community: Principles for Social Work Practice in Housing Settings”, in, pp. 239-251.
Reading #5 (pdf)

Ch. 13, “Neighborhood Preservation Through Affordable Housing”, in Murphy and Cunningham, Organizing for Community Controlled Development, pp. 257-276.
Reading #7

Adrienne Schmitz, et. al., Multifamily Housing Development Handbook (Washington, D.C. : ULI – the Urban Land Institute, 2000), Chapter 5, “Financial Feasibility Analysis”, pp. 83-93.
Reading #11 (pdf)

S. Mark White, Affordable Housing: Proactive & Reactive Planning Strategies, American Planning Association, Planning Advisory Service Report #441, December, 1992.
Reading #15 (pdf)

Ch. 3, “Community Development Corporations and the Resurgence of Organizing”, in Murphy and Cunningham, Organizing for Community Controlled Development, pp. 38-52.
Reading #19

Workforce Housing Opportunity Act, This is the original version of the legislation written to establish policy for Albuquerque’s affordable housing programs.  Notable elements in it include: defining neighborhoods as “Stable”, “Rising”, and “Declining” with appropriate housing strategies for each category; setting aside $10 million in each two-year CIP program for affordable housing; prioritizing affordable housing for households at 50% and 30% of Area Median Income; designating non-profit organizations with being the lead affordable housing developers; linking housing provisions to the priorities of the Planned Growth Strategy (see Topic 3 – Metropolitan Forces Affecting Neighborhoods & Urban Growth Management); providing zoning and administrative incentives for affordable housing; and providing that projects receiving financial support are made permanently affordable. A number of these provision were compromised during adoption, but the approaches are valuable.

Slide Shows

The three slide shows below address this broad topic of building community with land use planning and zoning. They show how to use planning and Form Based and Mixed Use Codes to create quality places and build social capital. The process begins with area-wide and neighborhood-based policy plans and a land use and design “template”. The city-wide “template” is modified appropriately to a particular neighborhood using a community-directed planning process. Here we begin with St. Louis and O’Fallon neighborhood policy documents. These policies and a general zoning template are applied to create the regulations for new and rehabilitated housing and a revitalized commercial center. The Part 1 slide show contains the overall approach, which is applied in the neighborhood as shown in the Parts 2 and 3 slide shows.

Part 1 – Building Community with Land Use Planning and Regulation: Overview

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Part 2 – Neighborhood Housing

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Part 3 – Neighborhood Commercial Center

The built environment is never more important than one’s relationships. But quality, attractive places can be built (or rebuilt) that foster and support social capital, helping economic development and more. On a fundamental level, there is a connection between social conditions and how and where people reside, work, shop and recreate. As such, our desire to build community has an important counterpart in the built environment.

Since the 1950s, conventional zoning created the suburban places we see all around us. By and large, suburban development is homogeneous in nature, separates uses by location, has low densities and is private-vehicle oriented. They are seen here as a narrow framework that does not support a diversity of life styles and circumstances. There is a wide range of life-choices from the country side to dense urban centers. Development standards that vary appropriately for these places are needed.

Fortunately traditional development advocates (including New Urbanists and Smart Growth supporters) have encouraged us to look anew at time-proven house, neighborhood and town building concepts. When translated into zoning, the new standards are conducive to mixed-use development, active street life, pedestrian and bike use and social diversity in terms of income and life cycle. The new standards foster neighborhood units whether at the urban fringe or in older areas of towns and cities.

Newer style zoning codes are visually presented, more readable, and deal with defined standards, such as minimums and maximums. Specific requirements provide predictability regarding what will be built. The old approach provides flexibility for the developer. The new approach incorporates the preferences of the community or neighborhood. When the planning process is participatory, informed by useful information and alternative scenarios, and highly visual, the results almost always are better than when planners and developers work things out themselves.

The plans provided here are examples of better planning and zoning practices that set enforceable standards, incorporate the community’s needs and wishes and provide legally enforceable rights to those affected.

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Key Readings

Neighborhood Plans. Neighborhood Plans are where all aspects of community and community development come together.  The approach supported here includes being comprehensive in scope; following the guidance of neighborhood residents especially; using a strategic planning framework (vision statements, outcomes, strategies, and programs); integrating social programs with the built environment; and incorporating implementation mechanisms.

In the St. Louis O’Fallon neighborhood this process began with strategic planning that resulted in the O’Fallon Neighborhood Community Development Plan and the O’Fallon Neighborhood Community Development Plan – Agency Interviews (see Topic 4 in this website). The planning process allows residents and local leaders to establish the framework for the community development work to follow.

In the strategic plan, O’Fallon residents agree upon middle to long term Vision statements that describe the desired neighborhood; outcomes that contribute to realizing this future; and strategies that address the actions to be taken to achieve the outcomes.  The community’s direction related to housing and economic development, in specific, guides the plan described below.

The O’Fallon Neighborhood Housing and Commercial Center Plans (OFNHCC), highlighted here, shows how land use planning, zoning, and design can implement key elements of a strategic plan and build social capital.  The other readings in this Topic contain many of the land use planning tools used in this plan.   

In the OFNHCC plan, neighborhood “anchors” of stability are identified in the community, which represent social and market strength.  The plan establishes focus areas, the Harrison School housing area and the Warne Wedge commercial center, that link these anchor areas and contain assets, such as buildings on the national historic register and publicly held vacant land.

For both the Harrison School housing area and the Warne Wedge commercial center, the plan contains “building form” standards (building types that are allowed); building design and site standards (such as shop fronts, porches, building materials, and building facades adjacent to sidewalks); parking regulations; and the rules for applying these standards.

While most of the neighborhood is on the National Register for Historic Places, the associated building standards only are required when historic preservation tax credits are used.  The National Register standards do not apply if the buildings are not significant or contributing, when no tax credits are sought, or in new construction.  Since there are 370 vacant parcel in O’Fallon, this is an especially important consideration. The OFNHCC plan standards close many of these gaps.

The building forms and the design, site, and parking standards are employed to draw “model buildings”.  These are used to show how redevelopment would appear under this set of rules.  In turn, computer land use images inform a design charrette and community meetings.

The O’Fallon strategic plan’s social and economic development elements are incorporated into the housing and commercial center plans through the options of: establishing mini-neighborhoods; incorporating human services and economic development into housing and the commercial center; housing solutions that enhance social capital such as land trusts and coop housing; and economic development approaches that are neighborhood-based such as starting a bank account, micro-lending, entrepreneurship training, and a business incubator.

Financing tools are reviewed such as State of Missouri and federal Historic Preservation tax credits and Low Income Housing Tax Credits, and federal New Market tax credits.  See also topics 8 and 9. Potential implementation partners also are identified.

In all, we followed Mike Green’s advice to be “motivated by what you don’t have, to use what you have, to create what you want, by working together.”  

Corridor Plans. Many older urban areas have underutilized and ill-kept block fronts of commercial buildings that often lined now-abandoned streetcar routes. Often design changes to the roadways over time have made the corridors increasingly vehicle-focused to the detriment of the pedestrian (e.g. conversion of on-street parking to traffic lanes, wider lanes, higher design speeds, narrower sidewalks).

The buildings on these corridors are assets to the community and “Main Street” and “Great Street” redevelopment efforts have made strides in restoring the vitality of these places. The existing buildings contain many attractive elements that can be reinforced, generally with a higher density of residential uses. Commercial corridors are more-public spaces where the neighborhood can meet the city in a comfortable and controlled way. The Huning Highland – EDo Corridor Plan and the Nob Hill – Highland Corridor Plan highlighted here contain many good corridor zoning regulations.

The Huning Highland – EDo Plan combines standards to create a lively pedestrian environment. These regulatory elements address building heights, building “step-backs” to reduce massing where appropriate, site set-backs to bring building close to the sidewalk and enclose the public realm, façade treatments including shop fronts and sheltered sidewalks with awnings and arcades, open views to activity within building through windows and doors, parking on-street and in block interiors only and pedestrian friendly signage and lighting.

The Nob Hill – Highland Plan demonstrates that streetscape design standards (i.e. the area from façade to façade across the sidewalk and street within the public right of way) must be compatible with zoning requirements for buildings. The streetscape elements of note in this plan are ample sidewalk widths including “café spaces”, on-street parking, sidewalk “bulb outs” at intersections, pedestrian crossing improvements and removal of medians in some locations to increase sidewalk widths and reduce traffic speed.

The following links are to the Nob Hill Highland Sector Development Plan. The size of the plan resulted in its division into two parts.
– Introduction, Historic Context, Nob Hill Today, Movement Systems;
– Community Form, Infrastructure, Economic Vitality, Implementation, Regulations, Apendices

Town Plans. The Volcano Heights Sector Plan is an example of how residents and local government can shape the future of urban growth at the fringe by proactively establishing development regulations for large areas in advance of private action. The Volcano Heights Plan creates a town structure of about 30,000 residents, 12,000 housing units and 20,000 jobs on 3,500 acres. It is organized into a town center, five villages with neighborhood centers, and low-density conservation subdivisions at the edges.

A substantial proportion of the Volcano Heights area was platted in the 1970s, and sold to about 1,700 owners, predominantly with 1/3rd acre lots, without the provision of infrastructure; in other words, a “premature” subdivision that would be illegal by today’s requirements. The site is surrounded by the 8,000 acre Petroglyph National Monument and City Open Space containing more than 20,000 petroglyphs carved 700 to 3,000 years ago. The area is an important place in the cultures and practices of many surrounding Native American groups. In the Pueblo world view, blessings are channeled from village plazas, petroglyphs, and shrines through the landscape, amplified, and returned back to the community.

The five neighborhood “villages” have sufficient population to support a small elementary school (about 650 students). Each neighborhood has a mixed use village center with retail, commercial, residential and public uses. All have a central plaza and school, sometimes co-located. Housing densities vary in a progression from higher at the center, through suburban, to low at the edge. Social engagement is encouraged through public facilities such as parks and playgrounds, convenience retail, walkable densities, traffic calming, bicycle and pedestrian friendly streets, buildings brought closer the sidewalks, active building frontages including porches, storefronts and arcades, and other design elements.

The Volcano Heights has a regional mixed-use town center where people can shop, dine, have fun, work and live. Most of the 20,000 jobs intended for Volcano Heights are located here. The town center has a higher density core focused on a plaza and multi-modal transportation nexus (bus rapid transit, possible light rail, and regular bus) and is bordered (rather than intersected) by regional limited access arterials. An active ground floor retail and commercial core surrounds the transit center. Traffic calming on state highway department controlled, limited access arterials is achieved through an urban boulevard design.

The Volcano Heights Plan includes networks of open space, recreational trails, bicycle routes, conservation standards in buffers adjacent to public open space, and archeological resource protection.

[Note: elements of the Volcano Heights Plan were contested legally by some property owners. The district court found a procedural flaw in the adoption, but the plan standards were upheld. Before the plan could be reconsidered, political control of the city government changed and the plan was redrafted and development regulations were compromised.]

The following links are to the Volcano Heights Sector Development Plan. Retaining the detailed graphics results in the number of files.
– Table of Contents, Sect. I, Ch. 1: Area Conditions;
– Sect. I, Ch.1: Area Conditions;
– Sect. I, Ch. 2: Existing Land Use Plans and Policies, Sect. I, Ch. 3: Planning Process, Sect. II, Ch. 1: Goals;
– Sect. II, Ch. 2: Transportation;
– Sect. II, Ch. 3: Land Use;
– Sect. II, Ch. 4: Urban Design, Sect II, Ch. 5: Architectural and Landscape Design;
– Sect. II, Ch. 6: Open Space;
– Sect. II, Ch. 7: Implementation, Appendices A-G

General Use Zone Code. Many goals of the Albuquerque Planned Growth Strategy (see Topic 3 in this web site) cannot be achieved without incorporating them into a new zoning code. Most examples of New Urban / Smart Codes address specific, limited plan areas. The issue of how to apply these new zoning standards is something of a dilemma. By continuing their use on a plan-by-plan basis, the new development regulations cannot become the standard for development. However, stating these regulations in a general way appears to drain the texture and sensitivity that results when rules are crafted for a particular place. Also, the social capital-building focus of this website calls for purposeful engagement of local residents in the rules that affect their lives. The events surrounding the public review, amendment and adoption of the Albuquerque Form Based Code (FBC) clarified these issues and resulted in the amended version of the code presented here.

The FBC contains prescriptive land use standards that constitute the building blocks for place-making in a variety of settings. These include rules for: 17 different, generally mixed-use Building Forms (e.g. Podium Apartments, Live-Work, Flex Building, Structured Parking); building Frontage Types (e.g. Shop Fronts, Forecourts, Portals / Arcades); Parking; Block Size; Streetscape; Materials; Lighting, and Signage.

In order to create viable places, the FBC is not applied on an isolated parcel basis. Rather it is necessary to utilize the code through area-wide planning processes that apply to neighborhoods, town centers, corridors, employment centers, and so forth. The place-based FBC zones include: Transit Oriented Development – Major Activity Center; Transit Oriented Development – Corridor / Community Activity Center; Planned Village Development – Greenfield (including separate standards for a Village Center, Urban Area, Suburban Area, and Fringe); Planned Village Development – Established area; Commercial Mixed-Use center; Campus; and Conservation Subdivision.

These zones are drafted to apply to both Greenfield and already developed area contexts. This redevelopment focus especially applies to the TOD– Corridor; Planned Village Development – Established area; Campus; and the Commercial Mixed-Use center zones. The new zones are designed to establish more complete, mixed-use places (e.g. adding housing to the commercial corridors, malls, and office centers), fostering pedestrian activity (e.g. commercial shop fronts, reducing traffic lane widths, expanding sidewalks), and re-establishing neighborhoods (e.g. through village centers, neighborhood schools, mixed uses including diverse housing types that support life-cycle changes).

The Albuquerque FBC adoption process went awry when the legislative sponsor focused on modifications so that it could be applied easily to development on individual parcels. Since this approach sought to avoid a lengthier process that allowed more public engagement and adjustment of the requirements, this led to standards with a low common denominator.

Consequently, revisions were made here to the original draft FBC to clarify that it should only be applied through Sector (neighborhood), Corridor, or Center planning processes. This allows modification of the code specifics to be appropriate to context and encourages public participation. As such, the FBC is a tool kit that establishes a coherent, but not mandated, framework for area planning.

[Note: a revised draft version of the Albuquerque Form Based Code is provided here. The adopted version should not be used as a model.]

Public Participation in Planning. Charrettes are much better than public meetings for involving residents in planning efforts. In the charrette process, sound plan alternatives are developed and presented to the community. But, more importantly, residents partner with planners and other technical advisors to guide the final plan. This collaboration overcomes the “us versus them” polarization that is an impediment to good results.

Highlighted here is the East Falls Church Transit Oriented Development Plan. The plan demonstrates the use of a charrette to engage residents (the East Falls Church Civic Association).

People cannot plan or build the world without creating or changing themselves. The built environment is the physical counterpart of the social community. It reflects the neighborhood’s history, culture, spiritual beliefs, and social organization. This section uses The Hill neighborhood in St. Louis to illustrate Kevin Lynch’s categories of “edge”, “path”, “node”, “landmark”, and “district” and also the concept of “sacred space”.

Selected Readings

Kevin Lynch, A Theory of Good City Form (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981), ” Sense”, pp. 131-150.
Reading #1 (pdf)

Mirceau Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959), “Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred”, pp. 20-65.
Reading #2 (pdf)

Louis Colombo, “Neighborhood Place and Community, History, Social Capital, and Religion in The Hill District of Saint Louis, Missouri”
Reading #9 (pdf)

Levi Romero, “La Nueva Resolana”, in New Mexico, May 2001, pp. 26-31.
Reading #15 (pdf)

Neighborhood Planning always involves collecting background information. This topic covers a range of planning tools used to describe neighborhood conditions and inform planning. The tools include some standard approaches like using Census data and surveys. Other less frequently used techniques are oral histories, population forecasts, and employment projections. Background information should be collected in the service of neighborhood strategic planning. Presenting background information should be of secondary importance to Neighborhood and community development strategies,and their implementation.

Reading List
Background Information

Subtopics inside:
History / oral history
Bureau of Census data
Survey research
Population forecasts
Employment forecasts
Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Data &
the Community Reinvestment Act

Key Readings:

Neighborhood Planning and Development Class, University of New Mexico, Bel Air Neighborhood, December 1994, “History”, pp. 13-29.
Reading #4 (pdf)

“Ultimately it is the planning process, not the plan document, that brings about development”. Neighborhood strategic planning can unify diverse community development activities such as in education, housing, economic development, and public safety through long term vision, goals, conditions assessments, strategies, objectives, and programs.

The approach here is that community development begins with a comprehensive perspective that is consistent with the connection of all neighborhood elements. Without this approach, community development efforts are quite likely to fail. The planning process described in the Conducting a Neighborhood Strategic Plan slide show, above, was used with the O’Fallon neighborhood in Saint Louis in 2011. This planning effort was carried out in a graduate-level course in social work at Washington University.

Taking a comprehensive approach is complex and can seem abstract and of little impact. However, it allows residents to share a broad understanding of the community, to clarify options for action, and to make better choices on short-term and long-term projects. And when the process is sensitively facilitated, it is informed by community knowledge of the neighborhood. We understand that community building mainly occurs not as a direct result of the plan but through the action that follows to implement it.

Strategic Planning

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Conducting a Neighborhood Strategic Plan

While using neighborhood assets is the most important, effective community organizations also must have strong, direct working relationships with service agencies, businesses, and funding sources located outside the neighborhood. Based on the neighborhood Outcomes, more than 50 possible external partners were interviewed for the O’Fallon plan. The interview findings are starting points for the O’Fallon Community Development Organization to draw on external resources. The surveys were compiled in a second document: O’Fallon Neighborhood Community Development Plan – Agency Interviews .

Short-term implementation projects follow the strategic plan. In our work, graduate-level social work students were paired with O’Fallon neighborhood committees to provide technical assistance and organizing support over the following months. This engagement is critical for effective neighborhood action.

Some neighborhood Outcomes are more technical than others: in O’Fallon this included projects to develop housing and affordable housing to fill the gaps left by abandonment, and to revitalize the neighborhood’s commercial center. A second course was conducted with Washington University social work and architecture students to advance these longer-term projects. The resulting plans are found on this web site under Topic 7, Building Community with Land Use Planning and Zoning.

Key Readings:

Ch. 8 “Forging an Organizational Plan”, in Murphy and Cunningham, Organizing for Community Controlled Development, pp. 154-177.
Reading #1

Ch. 9 “Unity in Creating a Comprehensive Community Plan”, in Murphy and Cunningham, Organizing for Community Controlled Development, pp. 178-199.
Reading #2

Avron Bendavid-Val, Local Economic Development Planning: From Goals to Projects, American Planning Association, PAS Planning Advisory Services, Report No. 353, 1980, Chapters 1 – 8.
Reading #6 (pdf)

Dolores Delahanty and G. Lawrence Atkins, Strategic Local Planning: a Collaborative Model, Project Share, Human Services Monograph Series, National Clearinghouse for Improving the Management of Human Services, Number 23, July 1981. “Considerations for Plan Implementation”, “Conceptual Design and Development”. “The Planning Model Components”, pp. 29-61.
Reading #7 (pdf)

City and regional change have important neighborhood impacts. The region’s vitality and economic growth can slip away from older neighborhoods and focus on the urban fringe. For example, the City of Detroit is in crisis while the Detroit region continues to grow. Metropolitan governments can subsidize growth at the urban fringe, sometimes without knowing it, and fail to be good stewards of existing schools, parks, and infrastructure. This section focuses on the Planned Growth Strategy in Albuquerque, N.M. (PGS). The PGS attempts to guide urban growth in order to revitalize older neighborhoods and small businesses, and to foster community in new areas. The federal Sustainable Communities program announced in 2010 begins to address these issues and may signal an increase in assistance to cities for the first time since the ramp-up of the Vietnam war in the mid 1960s.

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Planning And Placemaking

Readings:

Louis Colombo, “The Albuquerque Metropolitan Area Planned Growth Strategy: A Comprehensive Urban Growth Management System”, 2003.
Reading #1 (pdf)

John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), Ch. 3, “The City as Growth Machine”, pp. 50-98.
Reading #4 (pdf)

Douglas Porter, Managing Growth in America’s Communities, (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997). Ch. 2, “Growth Management Approaches and Techniques”.
Reading #9 (pdf)

Development Impact Fees. A development impact fee system was adopted in Albuquerque in 2004 as part of implementing the Planned Growth Strategy. The fees are calculated based on the “marginal” instead “average” costs of growth. In other words in locations where the public costs of infrastructure are higher (such as the urban fringe), impact fees are greater. In contrast, in older neighborhoods impact fees are much lower or near zero. This sends the right economic signal and supports policies calling for the renewal of older neighborhoods. The local streets development impact fees are an example of how these were calculated. See: Tindale-Oliver & Assoc. Inc, “2004 Roadway Facilities Impact Cost Study”, 2004. Reductions to impact fees were adopted to encourage jobs closer to housing (jobs-housing balance), affordable housing, and redevelopment and transit corridor enhancements. The legislation adopting these reductions is: Bill No. R-04-159, Michael Cadigan sponsor, “Establishing Interim Council Policy Regarding Lower Impact Fees “, 2004.

Cost of Schools. Well-functioning community schools are at the center of good quality neighborhoods. For more than a half century, the human resources who can sustain education have left city neighborhoods for the urban fringe, resulting in a concentration of poverty especially in urban public schools. The fault here is more a failure of political leadership, effective government, and consistent foundation and university support rather than any individual blame. The graphic attached, “School GSF vs. Enrollment”, indicates that, in Albuquerque, development at the urban fringe increased demand for school facilities while total school enrollment fell district-wide. Mostly because of population shifts, at the same time that new schools were needed on the fringe, 5,000 empty seats could be found in older neighborhood schools. This represented about $140 million in unutilized assets. (And this situation is repeated for all public facilities like streets, water, sewer, and hydrology lines, parks, and libraries.) The situation is worse in older industrial cities like St. Louis and Kansas City, where community school landmarks with great sentimental attachment are at risk. The destruction of these buildings, when it occurs, sends a strong negative message to long-term neighborhood residents about the place’s future. The residents of established neighborhoods, in places like Albuquerque, subsidize schools at the fringe. The average cost of school facilities in new growth areas there was determined to be $13,000 per single family house. In New Mexico, real estate interests consistently prevent Development Impact Fees from being assessed for school facilities. As a result, a maximum “voluntary” fee of $3,000 per house was agreed upon by development interests, regardless of where the house was built (even in areas with under-enrolled schools), representing less than 25% of the actual cost.

Joint Planning Beween Schools and Local Government. New schools can be a powerful force causing and reinforcing sprawl, or can be integrated into a growth management system. Good regional growth management means effective joint facility planning, land use regulations, and financing provisions between local governments and school systems. Although some local governments control public education, most are separate governmental entities. In those cases, approaches like a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) or a Joint Powers Agreement (JPA) can establish inter-government working relations. JPAs, in some states, can create a new agency of state government and are more durable and flexible arrangements. Joint school planning is effective when based on local Adequate Public Facilities (APF) regulations. APF rules call for adequate school facilities to be available or programmed as a condition of obtaining development approvals for new housing. This procedure is described in the following article: Richard Drucker, “Adequate Public Facility Criteria: Linking Growth to School Capacity”, 2003. An example of a similar system is contained in the Volcano Heights Sector Plan for the city of Albuquerque. This system included a growth phasing and timing plan for a 3,500 acre area slated for 20,000 new residents, and a process for issuing “conditional” building permits based on the availability of adequate funds for programmed new schools. If such funds were lacking, developers (among other sources of revenue) could voluntarily make contributions to address any short-fall and create the school capacity required to allow development to move forward. This section of the Volcano Heights Plan is found in the link: “VII Implementation”, Volcano Heights Sector Development Plan, 2006.

Planned Growth Strategy – Complete Report. The following links are to the entire PGS report. This has been provided to improve access to the material. Please note that some of these files are quite large and will take time to download.

PGS Part I. Findings Report.
– Acknowledgements, Table of Contents, Chapter 1: Introduction, Chapter 2: Development Trends;
– Chapter 3: Alternative Scenarios;
– Chapter 4: Infrastructure Costs;
– Chapter 5: Policy, Regulatory, and Plan Review, Appendix A – Alternative Scenario Tables, Notes, References;
– Chapter 6: The Benefits of Growth to the Bernalillo County Economy, 2000-2020, Appendicies B, C, and D, Notes, References.

PGS Part II. Preferred Alternative.
– Acknowledgements, Table of Contents, Chapter 1: Introduction and Rationale (First Part);
– Chapter 1: Introduction and Rationale (Second Part);
– Chapter 2: Preferred Alternative – Subarea Descriptions, Chapter 3: Preferred Alternative-Summary, Chapter 4: Examples of Mixed Use Redevelopment Projects in Other Cities, Notes;
– Chapter 5: Level of Service Standards and the Planned Growth Strategy, Chapter 6: Financial Implementation of the Planned Growth Strategy Preferred Alternative, Chapter 7: Planned Growth Regulatory Structure Approaches, Chapter 8: Combining the Level of Service Standards and Financial Implementation; Chapter 9: City and County Financial and Planning Requirements, Notes;
– Chapter 10: Growth Strategy Techniques Used in Other Locations, Notes, Appendicies A and B, Chapter 11: Planned Growth Regulatory Structure Outline, Notes, Shared Vision Projects: Creating a Sustainable Future Through Quality Growth, Report on a Planned Communities Forum.