Comprehensive plans can inspire their creators to tap their highest and best professional skills, training, and vision—or cause them to question their choice of profession. They often take a couple years to produce and can require extensive community outreach, sometimes with rancorous results—if, for example, the community has strong opposing opinions about a vision for future growth and development.

“Comp plans have the unfortunate reputation of being long, cumbersome documents that talk about vision and not the day-to-day situations that affect people,” says Peter Pollock, manager of Western Programs for the Lincoln Institute.

But Pollock says today’s comp plans are “addressing a much broader range of topics that relate more to people’s lives.” He says comp plans are being used to discuss issues beyond the traditional land use topics, as “vehicles for sustainability, community resilience, and other unifying concepts that have virtue.”

Indeed, sustainability and equity are objectives in recent comprehensive planning efforts in Seattle, Boston, and Denver—all hot-market cities dealing with an influx of knowledge-economy jobs and a dearth of affordable housing. These cities, members of the Big City Planning Directors Institute, sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the American Planning Association, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, have other long-range challenges in common, including the need for better multimodal transportation systems and stepped-up climate-change resilience. But their approaches to comprehensive planning vary widely, with one city updating policies every year, another updating after a half-century, and a third finding that integrating multiple detailed master plans may be more helpful than a comprehensive plan for long-range planning.

“Comp plans,” as they’re known in the vernacular, have been the linchpin of long-range land use planning and regulation since the City Beautiful Movement early in the last century. Local governments may adopt official comprehensive plan documents by ordinance to serve as policy guides for decisions about physical development in communities. They generally offer a vision and goals for future growth and development, and provide a framework for big-picture decisions, from preservation of natural resources to where to build new homes and locate jobs, improve transportation connections, and make capital investments such as utilities, sidewalks, and libraries. Comp plans analyze demographic information and discuss key community challenges and opportunities. Some focus exclusively on land use and development, while others include transportation, utilities, the environment, housing, education, parks and recreation, and other aspects of the life, form, and physical development of the community. Some plans enumerate city policies with lists of objectives and strategies. As “living documents,” some are updated every year; others every couple decades. Ideally, they’re coordinated with county and regional planning efforts. They often end with implementation ideas for future action.

“There are thousands of comp plans out there, with varying degrees of sophistication,” says David Rouse, research director for the American Planning Association and coauthor of APA’s 2015 Sustaining Places: Best Practices for Comprehensive Plans. The publication provides a framework and standards for creating livable, healthy communities in harmony with nature, with resilient economies, social equity, and strong regional ties. APA also established a recognition program for best practices in comp plans (see p. 27).

So what is new and different about comprehensive plans, and how are they being used? Land Lines asked long-range planners for Seattle, Boston, and Denver to share their experiences.

Seattle 2035 Comprehensive Plan

Seattle, one of 10 cities that took part in an APA pilot program to develop best practices for comp plans, has a “landmark sustainability comp plan,” says Rouse.

Adopted unanimously by the Seattle city council in October 2016, the Seattle 2035 Comprehensive Plan is the city’s third generation of comp plans, all focused on sustainability and all directing more urban growth into the city to preserve forests and farmlands beyond. Since it was first adopted in 1994, Seattle’s comp plan has guided growth over 20-year periods, with the city council annually adopting resolutions as policies to make sure the plan reflects current community conditions and values.

The Washington State Growth Management Act (GMA), passed in 1990, requires counties and larger cities to create comp plans, and to update them every eight years. The GMA’s goals include reducing sprawl and directing growth to areas that already have water, sewer, transportation, and other urban services. Each county must draw an urban-growth boundary beyond which urban-style development is not allowed. Comp plans must show that each city has enough land with the right zoning to absorb growth that is expected to occur over the next 20 years. Cities must also plan for housing, transportation, water, sewer, and other facilities that will be needed, and create plans that are consistent with other plans in the region.

To prepare for the new comp plan, the Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development issued a capacity analysis in 2014 entitled Seattle 2035: Updating Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan. It noted that Seattle’s population since 1994 had increased 20 percent, with nearly 100,000 new residents and much greater racial and ethnic diversity. Current growth projections for the city of 652,000 indicate 70,000 additional households and 115,000 additional jobs by 2035. The planning department also issued the Growth and Equity analysis to determine access to opportunity and risk of displacement throughout the city. The report indicates locations with the highest risks of displacement, as well as areas with the greatest access to education, transit, and employment. It features an equitable development framework for growth, a displacement index, and an analysis of alternative growth scenarios and their impacts on displacement.

Seattle’s 2005 comp plan called for the city to embrace growth. The 2016 challenge was different: how could the city leverage growth to build better neighborhoods, create jobs and economic opportunity for all residents, and improve the safety and vitality of the city?

While hundreds of residents participated in the 2005 process, the recent two-year update process, delayed a couple years because of the recession, involved residents in more than 24,000 website visits, 4,800 online open house visits, 2,600 appearances at workshops and meetings, 2,100 online survey responses, and thousands of facebook and Twitter comments. Topping the list of key issues Seattleites expressed was the need for housing that is affordable for middle and lower-income households. Seattle has been facing its worst housing crisis ever, due in part to tech-oriented businesses such as Amazon and Microsoft, which have introduced new residents in the tens of thousands. Mayor Ed Murray has set a goal of building or preserving 50,000 homes in 10 years, with 20,000 of them rent- and income-restricted. Among the new comp plan policies is an amendment allowing for alternative affordable home ownership opportunities that aren’t common in Seattle now, such as community land trusts, down payment assistance, mixed-income housing requirements, and limited-equity housing co-ops.

The new plan retains the concept that anticipated growth should be focused in the city’s densest areas—the designated urban centers of Downtown, First Hill/Capitol Hill, South Lake Union, Uptown, University District, and Northgate. To maximize public investment in infrastructure and services, the plan also continues to channel growth to 24 urban villages, or mixed-use areas with compact land use and density, such as light-rail station areas. Both urban centers and urban villages are places that already have active business districts, jobs, services, and concentrations of housing, and can accept more, says Tom Hauger, manager of comprehensive and regional planing.

Seattle’s previous comprehensive plan included neighborhood plans with specific visions of how and where development should occur, and made a binding commitment to those visions. To match more recent language in the city’s zoning code, the new plan removed a requirement that upzones—or changes in zoning to allow for more intensive use—must be approved in neighborhood plans before the whole comp plan is adopted. This change allows “a little more wiggle room” to add some multifamily housing to single-family neighborhoods, which comprise about half the city’s 84 square miles, says Hauger. This change now allows for upzoning to occur, even outside the urban villages—if, for example, an area is within the 10-minute “walk shed” of a light-rail station or very good bus service. But Hauger says the city wants to study the issue at greater length and work with the Mayor’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) advisory committee on neighborhood boundaries. Hauger says the upzoning debate features “strong arguments on both sides, though the urban villages have enough capacity for 40 to 50 years of growth. So the need to upzone single-family neighborhoods is not necessary today.”

Perhaps the biggest change in the new plan relates to equity. All three of the city’s comprehensive plans have expressed the core values of environmental stewardship, community, economic opportunity and security, and equity—though these core values have been reordered with each iteration as community values dictated. A 2015 resolution adopted by city council changed “social equity” to “race and social equity,” and this value rose to the top of the list in the recently adopted plan, to emphasize the need to address disparities experienced by people of color, says Hauger.

“We’ve identified ways in which the city, through growth, could help communities that have been underserved in the past, and could reduce the risk of displacement for those populations,” says Hauger. The new comp plan includes over 120 new policies that relate to social and racial equity. It specifies growth will be reduced in high displacement areas and directed to areas with more transit, education, and employment opportunities. The plan also calls for monitoring growth in locations where low-income households and people of color are at risk of displacement. “The shift to equity, especially with rapid growth, is really the focus of the plan,” he says, “but that’s also a part of sustainability.”

Imagine Boston 2030

Boston is a good example of a city where the previous comp plan—called a general plan here—was about land use and development. “But it’s a new day in Boston,” says Pollock, and the new comp plan process has been “about the community, quality of life, and checking on residents’ needs and values.”

In the two generations since Boston issued its last citywide plan in 1965, the city has changed dramatically. The loss of industrial jobs in the 1960s, racial tensions, and other factors led to the loss of about one-third of Boston’s population, which hit a low point in 1980 with 563,000 residents. Since then, the city has rebounded by building a new knowledge-based economy, supported by a legacy of world-class hospitals and universities.

In 2015, anticipating Boston’s 400th birthday in 2030, Mayor Martin J. Walsh launched a new comprehensive plan process (the city is not required to create a comp plan, and city council does not have to adopt or approve a plan). The mayor had two major goals for the plan, says Sara Myerson, director of planning for the Boston Planning and Development Agency (formerly the Boston Redevelopment Authority). The first goal was, she says, “to be a true reflection of Bostonians’ view of the city in the future, because knowing residents’ views about prosperity and shared values would be important when making difficult decisions, and would change the way we govern. The second goal was to move across silos and create a different way to coordinate planning policy.”

Imagine Boston 2030: Expanding Opportunity addresses growth, economic opportunity, and resilience—“with equity at the heart of the plan, and a focus on making Boston more innovative while making the city more inclusive,” says Myerson. A draft of the plan is under review, and a final plan is due out this summer. Imagine Boston is the result of four years of planning and two years of community outreach to create a comprehensive policy framework for the city, says Myerson.

Imagine Boston is addressing a broad range of issues—housing, health, education, the economy, energy and the environment, open space, transportation, technology, and arts and culture. Recent changes have prompted the new long-term vision: between 2010 and 2014, Boston grew 6 percent, twice the national rate, adding almost as many residents in four years as in the previous 20. The city’s 2016 population of 667,000 is projected to reach 724,000 by 2030, with 15 percent more jobs and a need for 20 million additional square feet of new office, retail, and industrial work spaces. Boston has also become more diverse, with more than a quarter of all Bostonians born outside of the United States. A wide wealth gap exists between white residents and residents of color, who are now in the majority. Neighborhoods have disparities in educational attainment, home ownership, commute times, and access to healthy food and health care that correspond with levels of wealth and poverty. Housing affordability is a critical need, as 46 percent of Boston households are cost-burdened, spending over a third of their income on housing. To accommodate projected growth, Mayor Walsh in 2014 called for 53,000 new homes across income levels by 2030 (10,000 have been built and another 7,000 are under construction).

Another key issue is resilience: as one of the nation’s top four cities at greatest risk of flooding, Boston faces increasing temperatures, extreme coastal storms, and climate-change-related sea level rise, which pose significant risks for Boston’s highly urbanized neighborhoods and coastal job centers. Boston’s sea level rose about 9 inches during the 20th century. Between 2000 and 2030, it’s projected to rise at a rate almost three times greater. An estimated $55 billion in assets are exposed to a 100-year flood event. Planners are coordinating the comp plan work with  the Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Racial Equity, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program, to help Boston plan for and deal with climate-related disasters and other challenges. Boston is planning for climate adaptations with its Climate Ready Zoning, building level adaptations, and district-scale planning.

Imagine Boston planners began extensive community outreach by asking Bostonians to identify their biggest priorities and concerns. Residents responded: housing that is affordable, education that expands opportunity, and reliable and efficient transportation. The community outreach process has yielded responses from 14,000 residents, through traditional open houses, panel discussions, visioning kits, community workshops, online maps, and text-messaging surveys. Some 9,000 responses came from surveys administered by street teams.

“The street teams represented the diversity of Boston,” says Rebekah Emanuel, executive director of Imagine Boston, with some teams engaging residents more playfully, using building-block exercises at farmers markets, parks, and other gathering places. They discussed trade-offs and “how people thought growth should be guided in their neighborhoods” and other potential development areas, she adds. Community outreach helped identify five goals for the plan: 1) encourage affordability, reduce displacement, and improve quality of life; 2) increase access to opportunity; 3) drive inclusive economic growth; 4) promote a healthy environment and prepare for climate change; and 5) invest in open space, arts and culture, transportation, and infrastructure. The comp plan also directed five main actions: enhance neighborhoods, expand neighborhoods, develop mixed-use job centers, develop a waterfront city for future generations, and create networks of opportunity.

The city of 49 square miles of land is looking to support residents’ vision of a more connected mixed-use and mixed-income community by fitting more people and jobs into neighborhoods. The comp plan locates “action areas” with capacity to accommodate Boston’s projected growth in existing neighborhoods and commercial cores, and to reduce housing-price pressure, improve access to opportunity, and stitch together the physical fabric of the city. “Expanded” neighborhoods will vary in size and scale, from development of “neighborhood edges”—or sites on the waterfront, on fringes of stable neighborhoods, or near rail lines—to larger-scale areas with still-vibrant industrial uses that will see significant new mixed-use housing, job sites, and services. These larger, more transformative areas will pilot innovation centers and planning and infrastructure investments to support new office, lab, and industrial spaces. They also will benefit from zoning for climate-change resilience, sustainable building standards, and flood protections, as well as open spaces and places for arts and culture.

Planners reviewed comp plans from a number of other cities, and they found Seattle’s equity and displacement elements particularly applicable to Boston, which is developing a displacement tool kit. “The mayors of Boston and Seattle have had many conversations about growth and displacement,” says Myerson. “That really resonates with us.”

In Boston’s new comp plan, “there’s a real desire to tackle complex urban challenges with policy solutions that cut across silos,” says Myerson. “We’re really creating a hybrid of planning and other disciplines, as a reaction to the complex challenges cities are facing. Many cities are thriving right now, so it’s not about attracting investments, but figuring out solutions to challenges of growth while continuing to build on investments in an innovative economy.”

Denveright/Blueprint Denver

Denver is also taking a different approach to traditional comprehensive planning with a new integrated planning process, called Denveright, involving updates in four key areas that will guide local planning for the next 20 years. The city is now halfway through the 18-month Denveright process, in which four master plans—the Blueprint Denver integrated land use and transportation plan, the parks and recreation plan, the pedestrians and trails plan, and the transit plan—are being updated collaboratively. Denveright is an umbrella project for all the plans, bringing the processes together to maximize resources, make the planning process more efficient, and ensure the plans work together holistically to accommodate future growth. Blueprint Denver and the parks and recreation plan will be adopted by the Denver city council, but the pedestrians and trails and the transit plans, both overseen by public works, will not.

“The benefit of doing all these plans at once is cross-collaboration and an interdisciplinary approach,” says Kimball Crangle, cochair of the Blueprint Denver Task Force. City staff and the cochairs for each plan’s task force are working together to produce a body of policies that will provide a cohesive vision for where and how growth happens. “We see tremendous opportunity in having the plans speaking in the same language,” says Crangle. “They will be dated when we sign them, but at least we’ll be on the same page in terms of how we implement goals across our city.”

“The Denveright process is a significant improvement over the previous approach, doing separate plan updates sequentially,” says Brad Buchanan, executive director of Denver Community Planning and Development. The Denveright discussions “happen in real time,” he says. “The same questions come up week by week with the forces, and they make sure the priorities of all their plans are shared. It’s a more robust process than we’ve ever done before, with a stockpile of deep and rich research in each area.”

As in Seattle and Boston, a vision of sustainability has guided Denver’s comprehensive planning, and it’s evolving through community outreach efforts to include new focuses on social equity and resilience. In 2016, as part of the Denveright process, the Lincoln Institute and the Sonoran Institute, in a Western Lands and Communities joint venture, led exploratory scenario planning workshops on future growth and development for the Blueprint Denver update. The Denveright project is continuing to explore scenario planning with Calthorpe Associates and has created a board game that residents can play at public meetings or online, to weigh in on their choices for where density, transit, and other elements should go in the 155-square-mile city. Denver grew from 468,000 residents in 1990 to 683,000 in 2015, and it’s projected to add another 200,000 residents within 20 years. Citing a housing crisis as the city’s top priority, Mayor Michael Hancock has proposed spending $150 million over the next 10 years to build more affordable housing.

When Denver city council adopted the 2000 comp plan, the city was a very different place than it is today. The Central Platte Valley’s former rail yard had been cleared of its tracks, but redevelopment had not begun on the Denver Union Station neighborhood, which has attracted $2 billion in infrastructure and mixed-use development, with the historic train station restored as a multimodal transit hub for the metro region. Many of the city’s transit lines and station areas that would be built as part of the 2006 FasTracks regional light-rail and bus network did not exist. Large master-planned communities within the city, including Stapleton and Lowry, were in the early construction or planning stages.

The Blueprint Denver plan was adopted in 2002 to help implement the 2000 comp plan and to ensure that continuing growth and development would be located in the most sustainable places. Blueprint Denver’s goals were to direct development to “areas of change,” to limit change in “areas of stability,” develop multimodal streets, and promote mixed-use development and urban centers. Preserving residential neighborhoods was a big focus of the plan at a time of significant “scrape-offs” and “pop-tops” of existing homes.

Areas of stability, encompassing 82 percent of the city, included residential neighborhoods and were marked for character preservation or new investments. Growth was channeled to much denser areas of change, including downtown, commercial corridors, and areas around transit stations, as well as the city’s large redevelopment sites.

Blueprint Denver’s role in locating growth, along with a citywide zoning code overhaul in 2010 that introduced form-based and context zoning and allowed over 6,100 acres to be rezoned from single-use to mixed-use zone districts, many of them near existing or planned transit stations, have helped achieve a more sustainable urban form. Since 2002, two-thirds of new housing (67 percent) and jobs (64 percent) occurred in areas of change, according to Blueprint Diagnostics, a 2016 analysis report prepared for the Blueprint Denver update.

Blueprint Denver is now evolving with more focus on equity issues and resilience in the broadest sense, says Crangle. She says the task force is considering how the city could provide benefits, such as stable affordable housing, parks, trails, transit connections, convenient services, and other healthy infrastructure and amenities, to lower-income neighborhoods undergoing redevelopment and displacement pressures. “In Denver, we have opportunity to spread equity—social, financial, health, general wellbeing. What kinds of benefits do [these neighborhoods] get, and how do we ensure that the people and businesses that have been there for decades can stay?”

American Planning Association (APA) Best Practices for Comprehensive Plans

In 2015, APA published Sustaining Places: Best Practices for Comprehensive Plans (https://www.planning.org/publications/report/9026901/) to define the role of comprehensive plans in developing sustainable communities, and to demonstrate how to turn principles into plans and score the results. APA established a set of standards and a recognition program for best practices in which communities submit their completed comp plans, and APA reviewers score them bronze, silver, or gold. Now in the second year of the recognition program, APA will announce its first gold standard comp plan at its annual conference in New York in May 2017. “Even if cities don’t want to be scored, they can use this document to assess their own comp plans,” says David Rouse, APA research director.

“We’re attempting to be bold and allow a broad-based land-use guiding document that allows for change and evolution,” says Crangle. “Twenty years is a long time, a couple of business cycles, and this document can’t be prescriptive. Our job is to provide the foundation for land use to evolve as the city changes and to allow flexibility.”

The comp plan itself is not being updated, and it’s not clear whether it will be, says Buchanan. “Our comp plan is very high-altitude and more aspirational.” Blueprint Denver and other specific plans are the primary policy documents for the decision-making process, he says. “When our comp plan was adopted in 2000, these other plans didn’t exist, and since these other finer-grained plans have emerged, there is less reliance on it.” Buchanan says no decision has been made yet, but the question has been asked: “does Denveright become the keeper of this family of plan documents going forward, and does it replace the comp plan?”

Value-add for Communities

What is the value of a comp plan in the end? “Planners’ strength is that we know a little about a lot, and we can be great integrators and bring together different elements at play in a city,” says Pollock. “You don’t do that by regulations about heights of buildings, but by bringing people together to achieve goals.”

Although the community process may appear to seek general agreement, comp plans aren’t designed to “reach consensus,” he says. “It’s a huge challenge: how are you using the comp plan to engage the community, and how do you deal with the reality of different goals and visions?” The document will be adopted by the community’s representatives, he says, and while everyone does not get a vote, the comp plan ideally values the whole community’s goals, hopes, and dreams and provides guidance on how to achieve them.

“Those of us who are more aspirational see the comp plan as a way to bring in broad elements but also to incorporate a vision for community,” Pollock says.

Kathleen McCormick, principal of Fountainhead Communications in Boulder, Colorado, writes frequently about healthy, sustainable, and resilient communities.

Photograph: plainurban/Flickr

Since 2015, representatives from various public agencies, foundations, and nonprofit groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Denver have been jointly participating in “capital absorption” workshops, to forge solutions to local affordable housing shortages through strategies that attract land, capital, and other resources. They represent not just housing, but transit, planning, and economic development organizations—stakeholders that often don’t join forces to solve problems, even though they work on overlapping issues in identical geographies.

At one of these meetings in January 2016, Abigail Thorne-Lyman, program manager for transit-oriented development (TOD) at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)—a public transportation system that annually shuttles more than 125 million passengers across the region—realized her agency might be able to make a game-changing contribution to solving the local housing crisis, which is among the nation’s largest. More than 250,000 of the region’s very low-income households lack access to affordable housing. The median home value is San Francisco is $1,147,300, compared to $197,500 nationally; the median monthly rent is a whopping $4,350, more than three times the national median rent of $1,500. Nearly half of local renters spend more than 30 percent of income on rent.

Each six-member team of participants from each region had drafted a spreadsheet of all pending development projects that included affordable housing units. “Staring at our list, we realized that capital wasn’t the primary constraint to building more housing,” explains Thorne-Lyman. “What we needed—the missing piece, so to speak—was land.”

In the Bay Area, developers don’t buy land until they are confident they can assemble the necessary financing for their project, making it difficult to compete in a hot real estate market, Thorne-Lyman says. But BART already owned 300 acres across the region.

That evening, Thorne-Lyman started imagining scenarios in which BART made all its land available for developments that included affordable housing. She ran the numbers. “I saw that we could produce maybe 30,000 units if we put our land in play,” she explains, and 10,000 could be affordable—which is significant, given that the typical affordable housing development in the Bay Area produces 50 to 200 units. “And if we put ourselves out there first, maybe other transit agencies in other counties would come along,” as BART serves only four of the Bay Area’s nine counties. Together they could make a bigger dent. “The 30,000 units could turn into 60,000 units, all on public land,” says Thorne-Lyman.

Thorne-Lyman and the rest of the capital absorption team delivered the analysis to BART’s general manager, Grace Crunican. Both Crunican and the BART board of directors decided to increase the agency’s commitment to both market-rate and affordable housing on BART land. Then they asked Thorne-Lyman and the team to model scenarios above and beyond any they had privately imagined.

“That conversation with Grace was like a slingshot,” says Thorne-Lyman. “We had these ideas and played them out. Then the board asked for an even more ambitious vision for our land. Through our work with the capital absorption team, we had all these willing partners—including the affordable housing advocates, community development financial institutions, and foundations—who backed up the idea and pushed it out to the public.”

BART’s new TOD development targets, adopted in December 2016, call for production of 20,000 new housing units and 4.5 million square feet of office space on BART land by 2040. At least 35 percent of these units—7,000, to be exact—will be affordable to low- and very low-income households. So far, BART has produced 760 affordable units on its land, meaning the agency has some work to do. Nonetheless, Thorne-Lyman is encouraged by the challenge. “California has this affordable housing crisis, and we can say that BART will be part of the solution,” she explains. “We have land. And we are willing to offer it up.” “Someone has to be thinking big about how to address this crisis. We are putting forward something big,” she says.

The Capital Absorption Framework

The capital absorption workshops that Thorne-Lyman attended are part of a program designed to help cities attract and deploy community investment and to leverage other critical resources, such as land and expertise, to achieve their goals. Community investment is defined as “investments intended to achieve social and environmental benefits in underserved communities—such as loans, bonds, tax-credit equity, and structured investment vehicles.”

The program’s chief architect, Robin Hacke, says, “It’s a way to make resources go to places where they’re not going by themselves, to address the failures of mainstream finance to produce enough affordable housing, reduce health disparities, or minimize the impact of climate change on vulnerable places, among other factors tied to land use.”

Hacke, who is the director of the new Center for Community Investment at the Lincoln Institute, is piloting a new “systems change” strategy that she designed in collaboration with colleagues David Wood of Harvard University’s Initiative for Responsible Investment, Katie Grace Deane, and Marian Urquilla. Called the Capital Absorption Framework, the model is predicated on this idea that mainstream capital markets frequently fail to address the needs of low-income communities, requiring a systemic approach to repair this breakdown and achieve meaningful outcomes at scale (opposed to one-off projects that are difficult to accomplish and, even when successful, fail to move the needle in a significant way). By “bringing to the table” stakeholders who rarely join forces to solve problems despite having aligned interests, the model also augments available assets and power, helping to identify effective new tools and strategies to address unmet community needs.

Systems Change

In order to overcome the effects of discrimination and the market’s failure to deliver adequate goods, services, and opportunities to disadvantaged communities, we need to ensure that capital can flow to those places. Ensuring that residents can thrive means finding ways to finance affordable housing; developing healthy environments with access to fresh food and safe places to walk, bike, and play; and providing access to quality education and jobs. It is not enough simply to invest in a single project and expect places to be transformed. The Center for Community Investment is committed to strengthening the systems that engage a community in planning for its future, creating a platform and network of relationships that unite the institutions and individuals with the capacity to advance the community’s vision; developing and executing investment transactions that implement that vision; and shaping the policies and practices that accelerate how transactions proceed.

—Robin Hacke

The framework is a response to challenges Hacke and Urquilla faced while working on The Integration Initiative, an $80 million program begun in 2010 to improve the lives of low-income residents in five pilot cities—Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Newark. Administered by Living Cities, the idea was to align interests across a range of players and invest capital in neighborhoods that traditionally can’t access funds.

The Integration Initiative demonstrated that participating cities not only lacked capital; they lacked the capacity to absorb and deploy the funds allotted to them through the program, says Hacke.

“Spatially inequitable distribution of low-income people across the United States is an outgrowth of decades of public policy that basically starved communities of capital, whether through redlining by banks or redlining aided and abetted by the Federal Housing Administration,” says George McCarthy, president and chief executive of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, who was involved in The Integration Initiative during his tenure at the Ford Foundation.

“Because we starved communities of capital, we think the way to help them recover is just to provide them with money. But that misses the point that over the years we didn’t just strip out the capital but also the capacity of those places to help themselves. Many people in the community development movement believe that if we just find a way to get more capital to places, then good things are going to happen. But one of the hard lessons we have learned is that, even if you can get the money to those communities, they don’t necessarily have a way to use it. It may sound like I’m blaming the victim, but that’s not it. Rather, it’s understanding that when you deny a place critical resources for long enough and then suddenly provide it, the community may not be ready to deploy it. It’s like people. If you starve someone for too long and then provide food, that person may not be able to eat it.”

Managing the Pipeline

“To deploy capital successfully, places need to identify sources of capital as well as projects that can use it. Proponents of impact investment have focused on organizing capital supplydemand for investment,” Hacke says. “For example, in Detroit, Baltimore, and Cleveland, they were not primarily looking at housing. They wanted to accelerate all kinds of development, including commercial and mixed-use developments. Getting the right set of deals and the right conditions to supply capacity to those deals required much more than just investment capital. The work both took longer than we expected and required much more upfront arrangement of the plumbing than we had anticipated,” she adds.

“Despite the great need in disadvantaged communities, stakeholders have to overcome major obstacles to complete projects,” says Hacke. “If people don’t believe that the deals have a decent-sized chance, they give up on them. So we organize stakeholders around what is most urgent at that time and organize the resources that way as well to increase the probability and the confidence that the critical deals will get done.”

The lack of confidence stems from the cold truth that community development projects are usually difficult to realize (figure 1). Hacke confronts that fact head-on by asking participants to identify what she calls “exemplary community impact deals. The ones that stick out in people’s minds as representative of the field tend to be complex, time-consuming, and politically fraught, balancing the interests of many stakeholders and blending many different sources of capital with varied constraints and requirements. Practitioners evoke the language of heroic quests to describe these deals.”

Identifying and examining “exemplary deals” is helpful in two ways. First, it highlights the complex and convoluted nature of many community investment projects, clarifying the need for a more efficient, scalable strategy. More importantly, analyzing exemplary deals can help stakeholders determine the potential resources and constraints of the larger community development system, including the engagement level of various players, the availability of an array of skills and resources, and opportunities for collaboration.

3 Components of an Effective Community Investment System

Once stakeholders in a region have used the exemplary deals framework to examine how the community investment system is currently operating, the next step is to identify ways to improve the functioning of that system so that it can deliver impact at greater scale.  As organized by the framework, an effective system requires three things, which are the focus of Hacke’s work with communities.

Identify Shared Priorities

First, stakeholders must articulate a well-defined set of priorities that are widely embraced across the community. Affordable housing is not always the anchor for establishing these priorities, but it has proven the easiest starting point in Hacke’s pilots—in part because the field has reliable, effective funding sources, such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, and a robust network of experienced organizations.

“We work really hard to convene and build cross-sector relationships so that we can operate from a set of shared priorities,” says Thomas Yee, the Initiatives Officer at LA THRIVES, a nonprofit that works to advance the equity agenda around smart growth and participates in the Capital Absorption Framework pilot.

“There’s going to be disagreement among really progressive advocates, elected officials, and private developers, so it takes a lot of working together, building trust, and finding common ground. But that’s the way to organize system-level approaches. It allows you to boil down the work to a few principles that excite people and keep them focused on the system instead of their particular neighborhood or project.”

One of the shared priorities to emerge out of the Los Angeles work is the importance of ensuring that LA Metro, the public agency responsible for bus and rail services in Los Angeles County, effectively serves low-income residents, who are the agency’s core riders.

Prior to joining the workshops, LA Metro knew its core riders were low-income. Based on the findings of a research study the agency had commissioned prior to joining the Los Angeles team, the agency also understood how it could assist those riders to live near transit lines. It was developing aggressive housing targets on agency-owned land when it joined the LA THRIVES collaborative.

“The sea change was coming together to get LA Metro to think about what that means for how the agency runs its business—about the bottom-line question of what happens if those core riders are living farther and farther away from existing transit systems,” explains Yee.

According to Yee, LA Metro was interested in additional ways to counter displacement, and joining the collaborative was “really the water needed to grow those seeds.”

The idea that low-income riders would be pushed farther afield disturbed the other members of the pilot’s Los Angeles team. The transportation planners balked at the cost and inefficiencies of expanding service to outlying areas, while the conservationists worried about the environmental impact. The community advocates were concerned about economic and social isolation, and the housing folk feared there was a lack of affordable housing in the outer ring areas. Resolving this issue correctly would present an opportunity to simultaneously address these seemingly unrelated concerns, and so it became a shared priority among the collaborative. In response, LA Metro adopted a new term for thinking about transit in the context of displacement: the Transit-Oriented Communities frame.

But LA Metro wanted to do more. It was clear that, unlike BART, the agency did not have much additional land that could allow for thousands of new affordable housing units. Instead, LA Metro, in partnership with other members of the team, created a loan fund to support the development of affordable housing and retention of existing low-rent, nonrestricted units near the agency’s transit lines. Critically, the units do not have to be on agency-owned land, but they must be close enough to provide easy access to the transit.

“We are so excited that LA Metro is willing to make investments off their property,” says Yee. “Making it easier to develop affordable housing on agency-owned land is one thing—and obviously a huge step in and of itself. But for them to go beyond agency-owned land is a big innovation and demonstrates a commitment to limiting the displacement of core riders.” 

Establish a Pipeline of Deals

Once stakeholders identify a set of strategic priorities, they can then focus on establishing a pipeline of deals—the second step in implementing the framework. Stakeholders begin by examining deals in progress, analyzing whether they support the priorities and where there may be gaps.

The practice of examining the deal pipeline also helps to highlight the resources that are necessary for success.

For the Denver team, analyzing the city’s pipeline resulted in the recognition that the team needed to focus more on attracting mission-driven private capital, says Dace West, a leader of the Denver pilot and, at the time, executive director of Mile High Connects, a nonprofit with a mission to ensure that the Metro Denver regional transit system fosters communities that offer all residents the opportunity for a high quality of life.

“We had this powerful moment as a community when we realized that the way we are doing community development work is really driven by specific, restrictive funding sources that are more mature systems—like tax credits, which are oversubscribed—or, in other cases, sources of capital that are not very predictable,” says West, referring to the takeaways from the pipeline analysis.

“We realized that we are so often falling short in the developments we are working on because of an inability to be very systematic about the way we draw down and deploy capital. So, going forward, we are very focused now on how we leverage private-sector impact investment capital into the system, looking at traditional capital sources in new ways and at what we need to do to unlock significant capital seekng a place to land,” West says.

“We have discovered, from deep and intentional work, that impact means really different things to impact investors. When some say they want impact, what they are really saying is that they want to be able to squint and see something good; that is good enough for them, because what they really want is liquidity and rates of return. We think, ‘That’s good to know, because we have been wasting our time on these things that aren’t real issues.’ Now we can focus on questions such as: what is that target rate of return, and where are the right places to leverage that capital versus other kinds of capital? And that’s been a real ‘aha’ moment—this recognition that real estate, which is something we had been thinking of as a more traditional investment, can be an actual community impact investment, which creates new and interesting connections.”

One of those connections is to Denver’s housing finance agency.

“As we have been thinking about ways this new capital could land, we have discovered that we have a very unusual housing finance agency. It is very creative and flexible and is already managing a huge number of siloed, structured funds that have a community purpose in some way,” says West. “We are working to build out a platform that uses the agency as a base to draw in capital that can go to specific sleeves but can also flow across those gaps and allow us to pursue projects driven by the community and its needs. The housing finance agency is not responding merely to existing funding sources any longer; it’s acting as a broad-based intermediary that can work across and among agencies in the system.”

Create an Enabling Environment

After building out a pipeline of deals, it’s a natural next step to the final piece of the framework—strengthening the “enabling environment.” This is defined as “the latent conditions that shape the system’s operations,” including but not limited to “the presence or absence of needed skills and capacities, political realities, formal and informal relationships among key actors, and the cultural norms and behaviors that manifest differently in different places.”

In the capital absorption workshops, participants are asked to figure out which areas of the environment are or are not working well, and which policies and practices directly affect their strategic priorities. In doing so, they can better grasp the opportunities and limitations inherent in the current system.

For Thorne-Lyman and the rest of the San Francisco team, it was analysis of the enabling environment—of what resources are and are not available and functioning well in the ecosystem of affordable housing—that immediately revealed that shortage of land.

Center for Community Investment

Thorne-Lyman is not the only one excited by the work that has come out of the Capital Absorption Framework. McCarthy is also encouraged.

“Land is one of a community’s most valuable and scarce resources,” he says. “Land policies can play a central role in attracting or generating the investment needed to tackle vacancies and blight produced by dysfunctional land markets or to address the disparate impact of pollution and climate change on poor and disadvantaged families.”

For that reason, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has recently launched the Center for Community Investment with support from The Kresge Foundation and other major national foundations. The Center is a leadership development, research, and capacity-building initiative to help communities mobilize capital and leverage land and other assets to achieve their economic, social, and environmental priorities.Hacke will direct the new center and use it as a platform to advance the capital absorption model.

“We have seen over and over again that land really is an important part of the solution, whether we are talking about the health of people or green infrastructure and the health of natural ecosystems. Being at the Lincoln Institute, which has such tremendous expertise in the use of land to generate and capture value, is a real boon for us,” says Hacke.

At Lincoln, Hacke hopes to expand her work by piloting it in additional communities. Participants in her current cohort encourage those cities to seize on the opportunity. “When we started this work two years ago, it felt like an abstract academic exercise replete with homework assignments. But we hung in there with their approach and have seen such value in the framework,” says Christopher Goett, a senior program officer at the California Community Foundation, one of the supporters of the Los Angeles pilot. “Robin, Katie, David, and Marian pulled together a safe space that allowed us to tackle difficult work and created a support system that strengthened over time. In hindsight, these activities have been critical moments for us in our evolution and growth.”

“Community and economic development work is often addressed through programs in their own respective silos, but that’s not how the world operates,” Goett says. “Average Angelenos wake up and use transit to get to work or drop off their children at school. Systems such as housing, employment, and education all interact, and that’s how the Center’s frame is laid out.” 

“For someone who manages a smart growth portfolio here at the California Community Foundation, the framework continues to become increasingly useful; smart growth is, by its nature, integrated. We have to think about public health at the same time we think about infrastructure and housing, and with this frame we can walk through the transit-oriented development door and still see the anti-displacement and housing angles.”

Loren Berlin is a writer and independent communications consultant in Chicago.

Photograph: Sharon Hahn Darlin

References

Bay Area Council Economic Institute. 2016. “Solving the Housing Affordability Crisis: How Policies Change the Number of San Francisco Households Burdened by Housing Costs.” (October). http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/files/pdf/BACEI_Housing_10_2016.pdf

Hacke, Robin, David Wood, and Marian Urquilla. 2015. “Community Investment: Focusing on the System.” Working paper. Troy, MI: Kresge Foundation. 

Truong, K. 2016, October 11. “Here Are 11 Solutions to the Bay Area Housing Crisis.” San Francisco Business Times. October 11.

Zillow.com. “San Francisco Home Prices and Values.” https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home-values/

Zillow.com. “United States Home Prices and Values.” https://www.zillow.com/home-values/

https://www.zillow.com/home-values/

https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home-values/

http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/files/pdf/BACEI_Housing_10_2016.pdf