A Roadmap to Rebuilding the Core of City Neighborhoods
In this new age of a pandemic, racial tension, political divide, global power shifts, redefinition of family and individual identities, and the inequality of accessible and quality educational opportunities leading to prosperity, we are reminded that the quest for freedom and the American Way remains much the same as our forefathers intended to achieve in their early fight for justice and the pursuit of happiness for all.
This time, these challenges have existed during the lifestyle trend of most Americans wanting to live in urban areas in exchange for the suburban sprawl of parking lots and box stores surrounded by large housing developments. New urbanization and the revitalization of downtowns becoming once again walkable, bikeable conglomerates of “complete neighborhoods” knitted together to each uniquely offer all of life's necessities and amenities within a walk or bike ride of each small borough, has become once again the ideal live-work-play destination for most Americans. And this desired destination is true for all Americans in all socio-economic sectors.
While compromised public safety and exploding costs of living in major metro areas have become intolerable, there is evidence that Americans are now shifting towards moving to smaller cities that organize to provide all that urbanization has to offer. This now undeniability brings exciting possibilities for urbanization to the doorstep of all cities as a method for revitalizing, competing and growing to become a special place where people will want to live.
Note these trends in the recent decade which drive the need for city leaders to address collaborative change within their cities, namely their individual community neighborhoods.
Places with a population of 50,000 or more grew more than other US regions. Yet, most Americans still live in suburban and rural areas, giving suburban cities especially the opportunity to compete with urban cities.
While white-flight from cities to suburbs has been long-standing, black-flight from the 50 largest cities has become more prominent as cumulatively there are less blacks in the top cities than the prior decade, while all other race-ethnic groups have actually gained population in top cities.
Many of the most densely populated neighborhoods of cities need revitalized to overcome blight, poverty, poor quality housing, low performing schools, lack of public transportation, lack of childcare, and inconvenient access to jobs and training.
Grassroots community development initiatives are most effective in the hardest hit neighborhoods that have lacked decades of reinvestment by local, state and federal funds. As a 2019 Bloomberg articles states, “community wealth is “a broad-based effort to build equity for low-income residents,” which could unlock “hundreds of billions in market and civic capital” to revitalized struggling places across America.”
Since COVID, billions of dollars of state and federal funding have been targeted to redevelop distressed neighborhoods. Most state and federal funding requires local public and private matching funds. Yet, many local communities lack the capacity and relationships to organize and access the various funding sources.
All cities, especially those 50,000 and more in population, have traditionally struggled to grow their population and have had less resources to invest in their potential growth. Now, they have an opportunity to lead the way to prosperity.
The primary tool in the strongbox of small city leaders is the capacity to form private-public partnerships and operate with a smart, transformative, and strategic context towards growth. This leadership competency must include the integration of housing, education, business attraction and retention, entrepreneurship, cultural experience, placemaking and intentional neighborhood revitalization to create places where people want to live in each city.
The aggregation of leadership, land, infrastructure, policy and funding can be organized in very creative ways to reconstruct the strongest strands that already exist within the unique fabric of each neighborhood. These strands can then be woven upon to design innovative spaces with and for the citizens who already live there – in addition to attract the new members who will identify with and want to be a future part of what each neighborhood has to offer. We propose that loosely striving cities today can become thriving cities tomorrow if they prove to have the leadership capacity and diligence to build a strong portfolio of Complete Neighborhoods. Ultimately thriving small cities will benefit from civilized, urbanization practices if they first build the competency to formulate the private and public partnerships required to prioritize innovative ideas, execute successful projects, develop fair development policies, and pool multiple sources of funding to redevelop one, unique Complete Neighborhood at a time.
“While there was no silver bullet, the report identified some common patterns for becoming a competitive city. These cities used a menu of interventions to increase competitiveness, including institutions and regulations, infrastructure and land, skills and innovation, and enterprise support and finance. Competitive cities developed growth coalitions of public and private stakeholders. Finally, competitive cities are good at turning strategies into action. They have an explicit economic development-oriented mindset that complements a social and environmental vision. They rallied everybody around a shared vision.”