NeighborWorks Rochester Expands Healthy Blocks Approach

By Ascala Sisk, Senior Manager
Neighborhood Stabilization
NeighborWorks America

Reposted from StableCommunities.org

NeighborWorks Rochester has partnered with residents in three neighborhoods to make exterior home improvements, address quality of life issues, and attract new residents and investment. Through this targeted “Healthy Blocks” approach, homeowners, tenants and landlords work together to create neighborhoods of value and choice.

After eight years of sponsoring “Makeover Madness” home beautification campaigns, organizing social events, planting gardens, sponsoring neighborhood clean-ups, and promoting new neighborhood branding, the Healthy Blocks approach has proven to be successful in improving physical conditions, creating pride, and fostering a community identity. For example, in “The Pocket,” a 7-block neighborhood of 750 residents in the East Main–Atlantic area, NeighborWorks Rochester has observed that physical conditions are improving, the average sales price is up 20 percent since 2008, and homes on the market sell in an average of 18 days as compared to 27 days in 2008 — all signs of a rebounding housing market.

Building on this success, NeighborWorks Rochester is considering candidates for its next two Healthy Blocks initiatives. To help with the selection and to train new staff members on the core components of this approach, NeighborWorks Rochester CEO Kim Brumber turned to David Boehlke, the nation’s leading Healthy Neighborhoods strategist. Joining them over the course of two rainy days in January 2013 were representatives from NeighborWorks Western Vermont who wanted to learn how they might apply this thinking to their own newly selected target neighborhood in the town of Rutland.

With a healthy dose of offbeat humor, Boehlke stressed the need for strategies that are grounded in market realities and build confidence among existing residents. “Markets need to be built,” he said, “not just houses.” This is especially true in cities with stagnant or declining populations where potential homebuyers have many homes and neighborhoods to choose from. In order to compete, you need to reposition your neighborhood in the marketplace. Building confidence in the future of the neighborhood validates people’s choice to live there, creates pride, and encourages investment because it makes economic sense.

So, how do you build confidence? A lot of it has to do with image and physical conditions. Neighborhoods with houses that are reasonably well-maintained and have tidy gardens and litter-free streets instantly convey that this is a neighborhood where current residents succeed, and where future homeowners would want to buy. But according to Boehlke, the key to building confidence is engaging residents and building their capacity to manage day-to-day neighborhood issues. Ultimately, people are more likely to invest in areas where residents work together to improve the quality of life.

As NeighborWorks Rochester considers its next Healthy Blocks, it will select neighborhoods where resident engagement activities and modest investments in home repairs are likely to leverage additional investment. As the team from NeighborWorks Western Vermont also learned, Healthy Blocks’s focus on building markets, improving image and physical conditions, and fostering resident leadership offers lessons for other organizations that are designing place-based revitalization strategies.

To learn more about the Healthy Neighborhoods approach that David Boehlke created and teaches, take a look at his monograph, Great Neighborhoods, Great Cities, written about the Healthy Neighborhoods approach in Baltimore for the Goldseker Foundation.
 

Rebuilding Market Demand: The Neighborhood Marketing Program

By Ascala Sisk, senior manager,
Neighborhood Stabilization
NeighborWorks America

In recent years NeighborWorks has launched a number of initiatives to respond to the impact foreclosed and vacant properties have on families and communities.  Now we are pleased to add another tool to the foreclosure response and community stabilization toolbox. Last week, NeighborWorks America’s Stable Communities Initiative publicly launched the Neighborhood Marketing Program, a new initiative to stabilize communities by helping to restore stakeholder confidence and build market demand.

We started this program understanding efforts to stabilize communities need to do more than restore housing. To build strong communities, the case needs to be made for investment, both by current and by future residents and businesses. For that reason, we are supporting a group of high capacity organizations that have made significant neighborhood investments with additional tools and funding to work with resident leaders to reframe the image of their community, improve stakeholder perceptions and build market demand. 

Sixteen organizations in the NeighborWorks Network were competitively selected to participate in the 2012-2013 pilot program.These organizations will receive approximately $50,000 in grants and technical assistance to create neighborhood marketing and branding campaigns. Over the next several months, all of the recipients of the Neighborhood Marketing Initiative grants will begin working with residents, stakeholders and marketing coaches to develop plans to move their communities forward.  

At NeighborWorks, we see the Neighborhood Marketing Initiative as a natural extension of our existing leadership in helping residents, local nonprofits, and other businesses respond to the foreclosure crisis and build strong communities. As part of that, CEO Eileen Fitzgerald, pledged the Neighborhood Marketing Program as the NeighborWorks America commitment to action at the recent Clinton Global Initiative America. With this public commitment, we hope to engage more partners in supporting this and similar neighborhood-based recovery efforts.

Check out www.StableCommunities.org/marketing for more on the program and updates on how things are going. You can also download our new case studies report here.

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Lit Review: Interesting Articles from the Boston Federal Reserve

Reposted from the "Stabilize" blog of the NeighborWorks America Stable Communities program.
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The latest issue of New England Community Developments from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has a couple of articles particularly interesting for those engaged in stabilizing neighborhoods.  In the first, the author discusses preliminary findings from ongoing research exploring the effect of foreclosure and NSP intervention on neighborhood social stability, with surprising results. The second presents a logical framework for deciding what REO is best marketed as rental property.

In "What Do the Neighbors Think? Assessing the Community Impact of Neighborhood Stabilization Efforts," author Erin M. Graves describes her research assessing residents’ perspectives on neighborhood-level social capital and social disorder.  She hopes to assess the impact of foreclosed properties on those residents before and after NSP intervention.


Graves used a standardized “Sense of Community” survey administered door-to-door, and also assessed property conditions of all parcels in the subject neighborhood.  In the article, Graves describes three themes that emerged from the first round of the survey. The first theme was that residents did not view the vacant foreclosed homes on their street as the primary threat to stability in the neighborhood; nor did they often realize which were due to foreclosures.  If they did know of a foreclosure, they saw it as an individual problem rather than a community problem or trend.

Second, existing crime and gun violence were the main concerns of these neighborhood residents. Residents in this neighborhood did not see vacant properties as attracting crime, and they viewed vacant lots as a greater threat to their sense of community than vacant homes.

Third, residents did believe in the efficacy of government institutions, including the police, to solve community problems, but felt underserved by them.  In order to deal with the safety and property abandonment issues on their streets, Graves says residents defined ever-smaller boundaries for what they consider their [good] part of the community – a street, a section of a street, or sometimes only their house.  These carefully drawn boundaries allow some residents to enjoy and stay in their unstable neighborhoods longer than outsiders would expect them to.

For Graves’ discussion of policy implications, see the full article.

In "New Ideas for Old REOs : A Disposition Framework for Marketing REOs for Rental Properties,"  Prabal Chakrabati and Mariana Arcaya propose a four-step rationale for sorting a community’s REO portfolio to find those properties that are the best candidates for disposition as rental units.  The criteria include:

• whether or not the property is GSE-owned,
• whether the property has been REO for less than or greater than one year (greater than one year means it is unlikely to  be taken up as a homeownership property),
• whether the property is located in an area of high need for affordable rental units (vis a vis Massachusetts’ 10% mandate for municipal subsidized housing inventory),
• whether or not the property is also located in an area that lacks rental housing options (since rental housing demand is on the increase, the model assumes places without those options need them, and that mixed-income communities are a goal).

Additional considerations, such as proximity to transit and jobs, are also mentioned. The article includes an easy-to-read chart, and a specific analysis of Massachusetts REO inventory.

New England Community Developments is published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.  Free subscriptions are available here.

Department of Education's Place-Based Strategy

Reposted from the "Stabilize" blog of the NeighborWorks America Stable Communities program.
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This progress report, "Impact in Place: A Progress Report on the Department of Education's Place-Based Strategy," presents outcomes to date on efforts at a case study of San Francisco on efforts by the Department of Education to strengthen the role of schools in their communities. According to the report, "Communities that face underperforming schools, rundown housing, neighborhood violence, and poor health know that these are interconnected challenges and that they perpetuate each other....In the education world, the focus on place is particularly important, as it gives the Department a mechanism to see how its investments focused on 'in-school' levers of change interact with 'out of school' conditions for learning and the interventions meant to address them."

Elements of the theory of action include:

• Engage the Community Through Asset Mapping and a Needs Assessment
• Focus on Clear Results and Develop Shared Data Tools
• Integrate Programs From Cradle to Career
• Build Core Capacities Within Organizations and Communities
• Break Down Silos
• Capture and Share Learning

San Francisco put these elements into action to refocus citywide strategies into place-based ones, using a report from its Human Services Agency that indicated that many families accessed multiple services: mental health, juvenile justice, and foster care. It retargeted some of the $100 million flowing into two zip code areas to focus on 2,600 families with 5,800 children.

The Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation (i3) program supports the development and expansion of innovative practices that can serve as models for improving student and school outcomes. The program also identifies and documents best practices that can be shared and taken to scale based on demonstrated success. As part of the Obama Administration's Open Data Initiative, a large focus of the place-based focus has been on improving data reporting and use for effective programming.

Have any of these efforts trickled down to the places you work?