Neighborhood Revitalization Requires a Good Activist

If you're that one determined person, or you know him or her, we'll show you the four general strategies from which you should choose.

Deciding What to Do First

What hasn't been explained elsewhere on this site is the importance of chooseing a sequence for neighborhood revitalization, or the order in which you would address problem buildings and parts of the neighborhood.



This can be stated very simply:

1. First, take care of emergencies, if you have them. If a building is falling down, a bridge is blocked because there's no money to repair it, a factory is about to close, you have a drug house, or you have open gunfire or prostitution, those are emergencies.

Put about 80 percent of your energy into those issues, and 20 percent into long-range issues (housing, economic development, community organizing) that strike a chord with you and/or your elected official. If you don't consider any issues emergencies, choose a miaxmum of three general challenges to address at first.

Don't move forward with another neighborhood revitalization project until you conquer the emergencies, unless a true once-in-a-lifetime project drops into your lap.

2. Second, chart a path carefully for how to move forward. This step requires quite a bit of talking, researching, and experimenting. We're assuming you have a working neighborhood association with defined neighborhood boundaries, If not, make those items early priorities.

Channel people with a short attention span onto one of those "fast wins," which is a clean-up, a social event, or beautification project such as painting, board-up, or flower planting. Then while the social butterflies are out having fun and doing things that will attract positive attention for the neighborhood, get to work on a strategy.

Strategy 1 for Neighborhood Revitalization: Work on Your Best Block

Most of the time, your first project that is not an emergency situation should build on a strength rather than a problem or a weakness. So here's what I want you to do. Take a Saturday (at least) and have a bunch of people help you map your assets, as in the asset- based community development approach.

Then step back and notice where there are two or three assets near one another. If a block has a pretty old church and a four-family building being rehabbed, and that's the most assets you've mapped on any block of the neighborhood, there's your answer. Try to get something cooking elsewhere on that block.

In short, for Strategy #1, find the block or half-block where assets are strongest, but where something still needs to be done, and start there.

Use the relationships that you have been building with people of power and influence to ask for money and useful contacts. You have to overcome your fear of speaking with property owners, and if you really need neighborhood revitalization, you'll find one who is discouraged enough with the current situation to sell. Now what you need is an investor to buy the building.

That's harder to come up with than you might think, so if your neighborhood has any rich and powerful friends, this is the time to be talking with them. Plead with them to network in their social and business circles on your behalf so you can identify someone who's interested.

Start a small project, whether it's a new sidewalk or rehabbing of the second building on that block. It won't seem like a little project to you at the time, because it can take you six months or a year to begin to see some progress. Usually much more time than you think will be required to complete a project.

Strategy 2: Tackle the Worst Eyesore First

If Strategy #1 doesn't feel right, Strategy #2 is to begin at the other end of the spectrum, with the worst thing in the neighborhood. Get rid of it.

This is what people who make money in real estate do. They find the worst house on the block and make it the best house. That could be your neighborhood revitalization goal.

Maybe you have an empty building with a nice exterior, and you should find a developer who would help you convert it to a new use.

Then dig into the topic of redevelopment, and learn about the world of possibilities that await you for the site. A new building where your worst building formerly stood might lend a whole new perspective to your neighborhood.

If it's never going to be a good building, because the owner let the roof leak and people crawl in through the broken windows indiscriminately, convince or help the owner demolish the building.

With a very limited budget, consider clean ups. We're inviting our visitors to send photos and paragraphs about their clean up activities. Check at the community development ideas index page for a list of those pages.

If you have a homelessness or drug pushing problem on your streets, combat it relentlessly. That's harder than tearing down a building. But root out the conditions that make congregating easy, working hard to get law enforcement to help you to the extent necessary.

Strategy 3: Work Outward from Your Strongest Assets

To choose between Strategies 3 and 4, you have to make a judgment.

If you have only one strong part of the neighborhood, use neighborhood revitalization Strategy 3. Begin with your most intact area and slowly work outward from your building, block, or series of blocks that are sound. Be disciplined about this, to the extent you can do so in a market economy.

If you're following redevelopment, housing rehab, and serious homeowner maintenance down the street, try very hard to twist the arm of your next would-be investor to stay contiguous (next to) the finished buildings.

When they insist on leapfrogging over to the next block, you can't stop it, but work with real estate agents and other developers to convince them that proceeding in order from building to building is very helpful to neighborhood revitalization.

Strategy 4: Strengthen Two End Points and Work Toward the Middle

This strategy is appropriate if you've identified two or more strong areas, with some weaker parts of the neighborhood in between.

Again exert discipline and persuade real estate folks to help you stay contiguous to the well-maintained parts of the neighborhood that are your two growth magnets, to the extent possible. But reach outward toward the other growth magnet.

In instances where the two positive poles are along the same major street, you'll be able to watch development literally crawl from each end until it finally meets at some point in the middle, and whole block faces are solid.

In neighborhoods where demand is fairly weak, you can see this improvement along one block without any significant progress on the adjacent blocks.

However, once the ends are about to meet in the middle, investors start trying to out-do one another in selecting the next area, so you'll see them jump over to a nearby block to take a risk.

Deepening Your Understanding of Community Dynamics

We've given you four strategies from which to choose, as though these are clean, simple models. The real world will not be as neat and tidy, but if you recognize the sequence you'd like to see redevelopment following, you will be much more focused in your efforts. If other developers step in and mess up your grand plan, just consider that a gain. You may have to regroup more than once to reconsider the strategy you want to follow.

Because all of this is so complex, if you're going to be a neighborhood activist, build a strong knowledge base. Too often leaders simply try to repeat success stories from somewhere else. That might work or it might not.

Please click on the topic in the right hand column that seems most applicable to your situation, and keep reading until you've broadened your understanding. If none of those topics seem right, you can use the search box at the upper right hand corner of the page to look for a term relevant to your own neighborhood revitalization.

Lastly, we have some book suggestions for you:

1. The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Placemaking is a great read for most neighborhood-scale leaders.

2. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts describes the places that really make a neighborhood work. Without what are now being called "third places" for meeting (not home or work), you don't have the neutral territory that today's living seems to demand.

3. A more surprising-sounding choice, but one that really is relevant to working at the neighborhood scale, is Community Economic Development Handbook: Strategies and Tools to Revitalize Your Neighborhood. This is a hefty and serious book, but economic development isn't easy.

4. In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time. The title tells you whether this one is for you.

Publicizing Your Neighborhood Improvements

With every little genuine accomplishment, make sure that the press trumpets your neighborhood revitalization. Cultivate reporters, offer them silly freebies (we're talking T-shirts, nothing more), take them on tours, make their work easy for them in any way you can. Take the trouble to explain your neighborhood revitalization strategy and all the thought and energy that's gone into it.

If you don't have anyone in your community organization with a marketing background, turn to a local university for an intern for a semester. Better yet, manage an intern every semester for the university's benefit and yours.

Enlist your young people, beginning with middle school, to help you. They have the patience to hang out on the Internet for hours on end to blog and tweet about your neighborhood revitalization, where it is, what's happening right this minute, why it's important, how cool it is, who they saw there, and all that stuff.

That's really the way to stir up talk in your town. And you need a lot of hype, even if some of it is adolescent. You need buzz, and young people will create it for you.

The other folks who will create buzz are the artists. Yes, we know, they bring some out-of-the-mainstream behaviors, clothes, ideas, and just plain weirdness. But just think of this as people expressing themselves to a greater degree than most of us are willing to do.

Arts-based community development is on a very steep upward climb in the U.S. We've provide you with a page on community cultural development to explore this trend.

Of course neither arts nor any other single silver bullet will apply to all neighborhood revitalization situations. But we think you improve your chances if you pick a strategy, periodically re-evaluate it, and systematically work on a specific area rather than simply trying to do everything everywhere.

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