How Neighborhood Plans Build Excitement, Purpose

Writing neighborhood plans helps neighborhoods in many situations, including the following examples:

• You have significant problems and issues that are not being resolved.

• There are competing visions for the future, or competing groups that want to control the future or at least mold the neighborhood in their image of the ideal community.

• The neighborhood's future looks uncertain because of one or more of the following characteristics: low income, high crime rate, too little variety in ages of residents, age of the housing stock, housing obsolescence (tiny closets, no garage, houses too small, etc.), high vacancy rate of residences or commercial buildings, conflict between the long-time residents and in-movers, or significant unresolved blighting influences such as a noisy freeway, ugly factory, or gang activity.

Good Boundary Definition Helps Neighborhoods

Those of you who don't know your boundaries but have a vague feeling that you want to improve your neighborhood through a systematic planning process, let's work on the borders issue. There's no optimal size to define a neighborhood; it's more about what makes sense to regard as a single unit.

First, look at geography. Rivers, major highways and streets, sometimes railroad tracks, and large institutions such as parks, universities, or hospital complexes form natural boundaries. It's wise to fight those only if you have a strong historical basis for doing so.

For example, if the interstate highway sliced your neighborhood apart but you all still attend the same churches and schools, you probably should stick together, unless your population characteristics start to differ dramatically from one another.

If there is no natural boundary, then you have to look at your patterns of association. Where do people shop, learn, go to the post office, worship, and participate in Little League? Those are strong clues. However, sometimes when you don't have defined boundaries, it's because these social indicators are contradictory.

My advice in this situation is to keep talking and asking people what they think. In many cases eventually it will become clear. If not, it's time for an arbitrary decision. If you're wrong, you'll discover it in the course of preparing neighborhood plans.

But check on the data you will need, most notably the U.S. Census, before you draw a line. Having data on your population is a great help, and some data is not available at the block level but rather only at the larger census tract level. When you divide the census tracts, you don't have a way to accurately obtain that data.

If you have any history of neighborhood organizations, what were their boundaries? If they don't exist any more, did incorrect boundaries have anything to do with their demise? Try to talk with the survivors of these efforts. If they found insufficient talent or interest in organized activity within the boundaries they had established, be sure you know what is different now before you try to write neighborhood plans.

Who’s Going to Plan?

But you need to try to involve the citizens and others who might have a stake in the community but don't live there, such as businesspersons or heads of influential organizations housed in your neighborhood. Doing so is critical to obtaining "buy-in" from those groups. If you're in a democracy, don't have someone sit in a cubicle and do scholarly neighborhood planning. See what people are willing to support. See public participation in planning if you have trouble visualizing how to get people involved.

You can certainly do some or all of the work yourselves, but the best of neighborhood plans probably will require the help of a professional, maybe a city employee, consultant, university student team, or extension agent. If you want to do a plan, approach your city government first and see what resources they can offer. Don't make this request half-baked; there may be a great deal of competition for the efforts of a few professionals.

Typical Topics of Neighborhood Plans

Don’t ignore elephants in the living room.

But a short, breezy, and very focused plan could be very impactful. A crisp one-page plan would knock their socks off, if it's ambitious yet attainable, and clear about who should take what step first, second, and third. So I'm not a fan of long-winded plans.

A plan outline could be as simple as this:

1. We have vacant storefronts. We counted eight, and here's a map of where they are.

2. We have a good nucleus of cute little boutiques. We checked, and we have the income to support that.

3. We don't want or have room for big box stores in our neighborhood.

4. Therefore we need to fill the eight vacant storefronts with cute little boutiques and eateries.

5. The people who should accomplish this are the XYZ group.

6. They have agreed to implement our plan, and they will do so within two years by establishing an "I will if you will" task force.

If you've never faced the fact that the storefronts are vacant, preventing other stores from being as prosperous as they could be, and need to be filled, you have made significant progress even though you won't win any awards.

Planning Process Step 1—Gather Information

Volunteers can manage to obtain the Census data, ask City Hall for all relevant data, and gather information from the increasingly common data compilation services on the web, including DataPlace and even City Data. But volunteers can complete a number of what I call counting projects that are valuable in writing neighborhood plans.

For example, it's much more accurate for the group to walk up and down the blocks and count up the number of boarded up buildings on a Saturday morning than it would be to consult any kind of published data. I've known of a neighborhood group that went into the lobby of each apartment building and counted the number of mailboxes with names on them, at a time they were concerned about whether the apartments were occupied.

You can do a survey of park usership on your own, if that's relevant, or even count the number of left-turn movements that are causing traffic to back up on a Saturday at a busy intersection. But don't collect data just for the sake of having numbers. Make sure there's a purpose in how you use your volunteers if you're trying do-it-yourself data collection.

Step 2—Analyze Information

If you're in a do-it-yourself mode, this is the step where you need to consult anyone available to you who understands the dynamics of cities or towns at a professional level. Take a first pass at what information seems significant to you, but then ask knowledgeable people what else they see.

If you've hired professionals who are accustomed to writing neighborhood plans, make sure to give them time, funding, and permission to really dwell on this step. You don't want any cookie-cutter recommendations or impulsive decisions on their part about what your information means.

You want them to really think. If you ask questions and receive defensive or long-winded answers, use this key question: "What surprised you the most about our neighborhood?" Hopefully this will break down the wall of professionalism a little bit and get the conversation rolling in a productive direction. After all, neighborhood planning is too much work for you in the neighborhood to let someone work for you engaging only half a brain.

Other good questions are:

• If money were no object, what would you recommend we do in our neighborhood?

• If we could change one perception of our neighborhood by the outside world, which one would it be?

• If you were re-planning our entire city from scratch, what would this neighborhood's specialty be?

• Do you see the economic situation of individual households in this neighborhood improving or declining in the next 10 years? Why?

• If we could get wave a magic wand and get rid of one eyesore in our neighborhood, which one would you choose? Why?

• Who needs to change for our neighborhood to be better?

I can tell you, your professionals probably won't like these questions, because they aren't accustomed to them. But they are great discussion starters. Professionals usually take charge, but you can turn the tables and make sure they are thinking. This is a great tactical decision on your part, because usually these people want to do a good job, but the way they or their firm makes money is to repeat similar analysis and the same conclusions over and over again in different locations. It takes less time, and if you're a consultant, time is money.

But you want an engaged, thinking consultant, who's responsive to your needs.

Step 3—Set Goals

If someone writes goals for you and you don't buy them, it's not going to work. It's hard to see why so many consultants think they can write inspirational goals for others. Let's try an experiment. Your goals for the next year are:

1. You will lose 20 pounds.

2. You will save $500 more than you did this year.

3. You will watch only C-Span on TV.

Did that work? Are you inspired? Are these now your goals for real? Hmm, I didn't think so.

These sample goals might even have been based on good analysis, because typical Americans need to lose weight, save more money, and watch less junk TV. But they are not goals that you, the decision maker, brought forth, and they are not goals that you feel strongly about pursuing. So no matter how elegant the plan that I write for you, it won't work unless these are genuinely your goals.

Step 4—Look at Alternatives and Choose Among Them

If you have a situation where some real alternatives are apparent and you don't know which way to go, spend some effort developing the concepts behind the alternatives into a coherent narrative, and then involve your core group guiding the planning process in a discussion.

If possible, hold a public forum where you ask the neighborhood at large to comment on each alternative. Your aim should be a long list of pro's and con's for each alternative.

Discuss and debate, but at some point, choose your direction. If you genuinely can combine two or more alternatives into one, do so. However, don't jam contradictory ideas together just to make everyone a winner at neighborhood planning. At this stage of choosing an alternative, you may alienate some people. But be nice, and like other situations in life, your attitude will mean everything about whether the "losers" stay in the game.

Step 5—Write Down the Plan

The elegance of plan documents has no correlation with the degree to which neighborhood plans will be helpful or implemented. Dwell on that sentence; I won't repeat it.

Professionals are likely to overdo the style and sacrifice the substance. Don't ever let that happen. Yes, you'd like a nice map or diagram or brochure to show your conclusions, but don't let the quality of the printed material outweigh the quality of the thinking.

Step 6—Plot Implementation Strategies

Insist that professionals determine how much implementing the plan will cost, what ordinances or state laws have to be changed so you can implement the neighborhood plans, what new groups will have to be created and governed in order to bring the plan to pass, and how you can implement the plan step-by-step. If you don't know what to do first the moment the consultant walks away, you don't have a plan, even if there are 400 meticulously assembled pages of argument, drawings, and maps.

Even here, you are not finished. You need to monitor how the plan is being implemented, updating it periodically, and continuously attempting to advance the plan. Implementation is everything in determining whether neighborhood plans are worth the time and effort, and usually consultant fees, required to prepare them.

So get off this planning page and go elsewhere on this site to figure out how to actually DO things!

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