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Ten Principles of Revitalizing Inner-Ring Suburbs Encourage Local Leadership. Encourage community dialogue and grass-roots involvement in decision making, forging coalitions and partnerships among for-profit, nonprofit, and public sectors, building leadership and consensus through local neighborhood-based organizations, having a stated and shared goal and creating a rational and exciting vision of the future; provide dramatic and extensive visual, physical, and verbal portrayals of the future. Be Competitive. Build on “location, location, location” as a key asset, remodel aging housing stock, and make your community clean and safe. Find a Niche/Attraction/Market/or Purpose. Build on strengths and be what you are, explore transit-adjacent development projects, use historic preservation strategies to advance economic development and consider heritage tourism as a magnet. Create Opportunity, Stability, and Diversity. Homeownership strengthens community. Facilitate homeownership and business ownership so that interests are deeply vested, promote mixed-income housing in exurbs to take some burden away from inner-ring communities, encourage infill that fits the architectural context of the neighborhood, and create affordable housing opportunities. Strengthen Schools to Achieve Balance. By whatever means necessary, provide the best schools and the best teachers, work with the local real estate board to counteract “steering” and adopt a fair housing ordinance that legally requires an open community, devise ways to attract and retain middle income families, consider school district tax base sharing and help schools from the outside. Incentivise the Private Sector. Recruit multiple participants: one person, one agency, one project is rarely enough, government should assist in land assembly, political will must be strong and withstand local objections, use inducements such as training grants, favorable zoning, tax abatements, and tax increment finance districts to reduce private sector’s risk, eliminate bureaucratic red tape, expedite development through “green tape.”, relax some development controls, lead in building public support and consensus and maintain and strengthen infrastructure, and provide extraordinary public safety. Embrace Smart Growth Principals. Build mixed-use, mixed-income communities that are less automobile dependent, establish growth zones and incentives to develop in the zone, encourage higher density through policy and practice make places and spaces where people can congregate. Think and Act Regionally. Consider pooling property and sales tax bases among neighboring communities, promote sharing of resources through some form of tax base sharing to ensure equitable distribution of larger regional assets throughout a region, form governance structures that support cooperation for inner-ring suburbs to solve issues together, work toward regional approaches to affordable housing and economic development policy, participate in regional visioning processes and develop a plan that stakeholders buy for coordination of land use and transportation policies. Be Results Oriented; Ask: Has the quality of life been improved? Will the deal pencil out and prove financially sound so that the return on investment pays off? Has the public sector properly set the stage for private investment to help minimize risk? Is the revitalization sustainable? Does it possess permanence and is it self-supporting? Ultimately, a project is economically sustainable only if beneficial only if private investments are made. The above principals summarize findings from two Urban Land Institute symposiums on inner-ring suburbs and four meetings of the Urban Land Institute’s Urban neighborhood Revitalization Forum. Source: Hudnut, William H., Halfway to Everywhere: A Portrait of America’s First-Tier Suburbs, Urban Land Institute, 2003 ISBN: 0-87420-901-3 |
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