Since the formation of the Consortium for Scenario Planning, participants have compiled educational materials and encourage planning educators to train the next generation of professional and citizen planners. These ongoing activities have resulted in three types of materials for planning educators: a syllabus library, a course development guide, and a set of laboratory exercises.
Syllabus Library
Lead: Robert Goodspeed (University of Michigan)
The following syllabi were submitted following calls issued in 2014 and in 2020 for courses that incorporate scenario planning tools and methods. Contributed
Contributed Syllabi:
Community Planning Analysis: Land Use Modeling and Visualization – Jack D. Kartez, University of Southern Maine – 2014 Syllabus
Land Use Planning Methods – Jennifer Minner, Cornell University – 2020 and 2019 Syllabi
Hard Decisions and Wicked Problems – Vanessa Schweizer, University of Waterloo – 2019 Syllabus
Scenario Planning – Robert Goodspeed, University of Michigan – 2018 Syllabus
Scenario Planning in Envision Tomorrow Plus – Dejan Eskic and Keuntae Kim, University of Utah – 2014 Syllabus and Training Session Outline
Strategies for Planning Effectiveness – Alfonso Morales, University of Wisconsin – Madison – 2014 Syllabus
Transportation and Regional Planning for an Uncertain Future – Stephen Still, University of Buffalo and Lisa Kinney, Greater Buffalo Niagara Regional Transportation Council – 2020 Syllabus and Assignments
Research Workshop in Metropolitan Regional Planning – Rob Olshansky and Karen Chapple, University of California at Berkeley – 2020 Syllabus
Scenarios, Plans and Future City – Arnab Chakraborty, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana – 2017 Syllabus
Plan Making – Curt Winkle, University of Illinois at Chicago – 2020 Syllabus
In addition, the following materials may be useful for additional curriculum development:
A set of in-class laboratory exercises, including instructions and data, were created in 2014 to introduce scenario planning methods and tools to students.
Laboratory assignments – all data (ZIP, 187 MB)
Lead: Robert Goodspeed and Jacob Yan (University of Michigan)
Course Guide
Robert Goodspeed and Jacob Yan developed this guide to help higher-education instructors incorporate emerging open planning tools.
Experts from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy will lead and participate in discussions about housing affordability, planning foresight, and scenario planning as well as host a panel discussion with the mayors of Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and Scranton at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference from April 13 to 15 in Minneapolis.
In the United States, housing supply is increasingly limited and costly, contributing to a housing crisis that has left millions of Americans homeless, rent burdened, displaced, or unable to afford to live in certain areas. The Consortium for Scenario Planning at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has selected four project proposals that will work through May 2024 using workshops, games, toolkits, and reports to study or apply exploratory scenario planning to examine local housing trends and generate strategies that improve housing affordability and accessibility.
Moderator & Speaker:Libertad Figuereo, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
This presentation describes emerging trends that will be important for planners to consider and introduces ways to make sense of the future and practice foresight in community planning. With foresight (i.e., understanding potential future trends and knowing how to prepare for them) in mind, planners can guide change, create more sustainable and equitable outcomes, and establish themselves as critical to a thriving community. The practice of foresight is imperative when preparing communities for what’s coming.
Moderator & Speaker: Petra Hurtado, PhD, American Planning Association
Speakers:
Sagar Shah, PhD, AICP, American Planning Association
Ievgeniia Dulko, American Planning Association
Joseph DeAngelis, AICP, American Planning Association
The future is full of uncertainty that can paralyze today’s public actions. In this session, you will learn how the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council is exploring future scenarios to manage uncertainty and coordinate long-range policies and investments.
Moderator & Speaker: Dan Marckel, Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities
Mayors of US cities will join Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy—author of the recently published book Mayor’s Desk—to discuss how policy makers and planners are working together to reinvent their cities in the face of climate change, a housing affordability crisis, and other challenges. Planners will be able to gain key takeaways from municipal leaders, and explore the challenges and opportunities ahead.
Moderator & Speaker: Anthony Flint, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Planning directors from a few of the largest cities in the United States will be joined by an expert on changes happening in cities post pandemic. They will discuss the struggle for inclusive growth in adapting downtowns to a changing economy and society.
Moderator and Speaker: Jessie Grogan, AICP, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Speakers:
Tracy Loh, PhD, Brookings Institution
Samuel P. Leichtling, AICP, City of Milwaukee Department of City Development
This panel will convene learned experts from across the country to discuss the ways knowledge, policy, and research around climate migration impact receiving communities. Migration poses challenges and creates opportunities to make transformational change; the panel will focus on the tools and policy recommendations available to planners.
Moderator and Speaker:Patrick Welch, AICP, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Damla Kuru, PhD, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Catherine Benedict is the digital communications manager at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image (inset photo): Office of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
This multimedia case examines the impact of Burlington, VT’s affordable housing strategies on the Old North End (“the ONE”)—a historically low-income neighborhood which boasts a robust stock of affordable housing while facing rising costs of living and demand for housing. It traces the history of Burlington’s efforts back to the 1980s, when the city government under then-mayor Bernie Sanders established programs and policies to produce affordable housing and combat gentrification and displacement.
Cohen, Helen, and Lipman, Mark. 2016. Arc of Justice: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of a Beloved Community (documentary film). https://www.arcofjusticefilm.com/.
Opportunity Insights. “Neighborhoods Matter: Children’s Lives Are Shaped by the Neighborhoods They Grow Up In.” Online Research Collection. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. https://opportunityinsights.org/neighborhoods.
Having impact at a nonprofit research organization requires being both determined and nimble, according to three scholars who retired last year from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy after decades of service.
The three scholars—geographer and urbanist Armando Carbonell, who led programs in urban planning and land conservation; Daphne Kenyon, an economist studying the property tax and municipal finance; and economist Martim Smolka, director of the organization’s Latin America program—share reflections about their work and the Lincoln Institute in a special edition of the Land Matters podcast.
Though they pursued different areas of inquiry during their time at the organization, they found common themes, like the central task of assembling and convening a network of practitioners, and continually inviting feedback to keep up to date on the challenges and emerging issues in their fields.
One such network formed in the 1980s when Boston attorney Kingsbury Browne brought together a handful of people who were establishing conservation easements to safeguard ecosystems across the United States. The value of exchanging information about tax laws and land conservation was deemed to be so great, the group ended up forming the Land Trust Alliance, which now represents nearly 1,000 land trusts with some 60 million acres in conservation.
Another area of critical importance: communicating in plain terms and being attentive to different audiences, whether the topic is climate migration or informal settlements or the way the property tax pays for essential local services including schools. The interviewees cite Lincoln Institute projects like the State-by-State Property Tax At a Glance website, the Making Sense of Place film series, and a role-playing game that leads participants through the steps of functioning land markets as successful examples of this approach.
The three scholars (bios below) also recall how they first discovered and interacted with the Lincoln Institute—all of them starting more than 30 years ago—and share their experiences putting together extensive programming over that time. They also look ahead to the daunting challenges awaiting future generations working in the nonprofit realm.
Martim O. Smolka, former senior fellow and director of the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean, is an economist. His areas of expertise include land markets and land policy, access to land by the urban poor, the structuring of property markets in Latin America and property tax systems, including the use of land value increment charges to finance urban development and infrastructure. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (MA/PhD), he is co-founder and former president of the Brazilian National Association for Research and Graduate Studies on Urban and Regional Planning.
Daphne A. Kenyon, PhD, is a former resident fellow in tax policy at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Her specialty is state and local public finance, with an emphasis on the property tax. She serves as the president of the National Tax Association. Kenyon’s prior positions include principal of D.A. Kenyon & Associates, a public finance consulting firm; professor and chair of the economics department at Simmons College; senior economist with the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Urban Institute; and assistant professor at Dartmouth College. Kenyon earned her BA in economics from Michigan State University and her MA and PhD in economics from the University of Michigan. She has published numerous reports, articles, and three books. Her research has been cited in The New York Times and The Economist, among other publications. Her latest work was writing a major revision of the 2007 report The Property Tax-School Funding Dilemma with co-authors Bethany Paquin and Andrew Reschovsky.
Armando Carbonell served as head of the Lincoln Institute’s urban planning program. After attending Clark University and the Johns Hopkins University, Carbonell spent the early part of his career as an academic geographer. He went on to initiate a new planning system for Cape Cod, Massachusetts, as the founding Executive Director of the Cape Cod Commission. In 1992 he was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Carbonell later taught urban planning at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania and served as an editor of the British journal Town Planning Review. He has consulted on master plans in Houston, Texas, and Fujian Province, China, and is the author or editor of numerous works on city and regional planning and planning for climate change, including Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning. Carbonell is a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK), and Lifetime Honorary Member of the Royal Town Planning Institute (UK).
There’s so much happening today in the world’s cities—from climate change to a massive shortage of affordable housing—that the job of the city planner has become a furiously busy one, requiring a singular talent for multitasking and managing the needs of increasingly divided constituencies.
Planners have traditionally labored largely behind the scenes, but are emerging into a more visible role as they explain their work and try to keep the peace, said author Josh Stephens on the latest episode of the Land Matters podcast. Stephens interviewed 23 big-city planners for a new book, Planners Across America.
“Planning directors have huge influence over these cities . . . but they’re not necessarily well known. They are not on the level of a mayor or a city council person who are obviously elected officials, and by definition in the public spotlight; they’re not necessarily like a police chief who is always doing press conferences,” he said. “I think one thing that is very clear in these interviews is how earnest planning directors are about mediating, about figuring out what different stakeholders need and want, and are willing to tolerate.”
Acknowledging the distrust that has grown particularly in communities of color, over urban renewal, highways through urban neighborhoods, and exclusionary zoning, Stephens said planners realize the importance of “listening to people, especially people who have historically been left out of the planning conversation.”
At the same time, planners must confront established residents fighting growth, in what is presented as a virtuous grassroots rebellion but is actually the manifestation of NIMBYism, standing for “not in my backyard.”
“Many communities are empowered, and some of that power is unevenly distributed to the extent that some communities have louder voices, and some communities will invoke people like Jane Jacobs in ways that are not necessarily beneficial for the city as a whole, or might even be disingenuous,” Stephens said.
As he spoke with planners, Stephens found widespread acceptance of the idea that most cities need a massive infusion of new housing supply including multifamily housing—and even high-end housing—to help bring prices down as a matter of basic economics. That’s been the aim of several statewide mandates requiring local governments to modify zoning.
“We do need to add luxury housing in high-cost places to accommodate the people who can afford it. I think ideally, that frees up space, and frees up capital and opportunity, and sometimes public funds to then also build deed-restricted affordable housing, and hopefully maintain a supply of naturally occurring affordable housing,” he said.
“You look at where the prices are highest, and that’s where you need to add housing. You need to add it at every level. There’s an argument that there’s no such thing as trickle-down housing. I don’t buy that. I live in Los Angeles, and there’s more than enough money to go around. If you don’t build luxury housing, that doesn’t mean that wealthy and high-income people are not going to move to LA. They’re simply going to move into whatever the next best housing is. That pushes people down, and eventually some people are left with no place to live.”
However, he said, there will be more post-pandemic movement, from hot-market cities to legacy cities, for example, suggesting the contours of a national housing market. “People have moved from LA to Phoenix, from San Francisco to Boise or Reno or Vegas, and there are other equivalents around the country. I think it’s going to be really interesting in the next decade to see how this filters out,” he said.
Josh Stephens is contributing editor of the California Planning & Development Report and previously edited The Planning Report and the Metro Investment Report, monthly publications covering, respectively, land use and infrastructure in Southern California. Planners Across America was published by Planetizen Press in 2022.
City and regional planning has been a major focus of the Lincoln Institute for many decades, from the annual gathering of 30-plus professionals in the Big City Planning Directors Institute, held in partnership with the American Planning Association and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, to the more recent promotion of exploratory scenario planning.
What comes to mind upon hearing Scranton, Pennsylvania? For some, it’s the location of the fictional company Dunder Mifflin, from the TV comedy series “The Office.” Others may know it as President Biden’s hometown. Hard-core urbanists will note that it’s also where Jane Jacobs grew up, before moving to New York City to do battle with Robert Moses.
Ultimately, though, much of what Scranton is about these days is what legacy cities are confronting across the US and indeed all over the world: its postindustrial future, now that the manufacturing industries of yesteryear are long gone.
In the case of Scranton, a railroad crossroads in northeast Pennsylvania, its industrial riches were built on mining and processing coal, as well as iron and steel and textiles, and a heyday of some of the nation’s first electric lights and electrified streetcars, which earned it the moniker the “Electric City.” Though some defense-related manufacturing remains, the city is facing a new frontier. Essentially, Scranton must reinvent itself as a metropolis that was built, beginning more than a century ago, for purposes that no longer exist.
A colorful mural in Scranton pays tribute to the city’s past as a pioneer of electric lighting and its more recent moment in the cultural spotlight as the setting of the TV show ‘The Office.’ Credit: Anthony Flint.
Into this moment comes Paige Gebhardt Cognetti, a transplant from Oregon with an MBA and a stint in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, to help try to forge a way forward. The 43-year-old mother of two was sworn in January 2020 after the previous chief executive resigned and pleaded guilty to corruption charges. She won reelection to a full term in November 2021, and is the first woman to hold the office.
“The Scranton story now is one, I think, of resilience and creativity,” Cognetti said in an interview for the Land Matters podcast. The establishment of the coal and textile industries “really set the tone for the type of entrepreneurship that we are still known for and that we’re looking to have more of in Scranton.”
Earlier generations recognized that local economy needed to be diversified, she said, so the city wasn’t tied to an anchor industry that would inevitably diminish. As a result, the city has “lots of educational institutions, we have hospitals, we have healthcare, we have services. We also still have 11 percent of our jobs that are based in manufacturing. . . . There’s a lot of different family-owned, smaller businesses. That’s really important for our economy.”
The efforts at reinvention are readily seen in projects such as Boomerang Park, site of a former gas plant, and in the transformation of the Scranton Lace Factory, which once employed thousands of people churning out curtains, tablecloths, parachutes, and camouflage netting before closing in 2002. The abandoned campus of red-brick factory buildings is now being turned into a mixed-use project with offices, homes, retail spaces, and event venues.
An ambitious adaptive reuse project is converting the Lace Factory, a 34-building complex that once employed thousands of workers, into a mixed-use neighborhood known as Lace Village. Credit: Anthony Flint.
Those kinds of adaptive reuse projects are “unique and really catching people’s attention, so folks want to be there,” Cognetti said. “That’s something that I think we can replicate.”
She has been bullish on Scranton since she went there nearly 20 years ago and ordered a sandwich at a restaurant run by her future husband. She had grown up in Beaverton, Oregon, and graduated from the University of Oregon Clark Honors College with a BA in English literature; she ended up in Pennsylvania working for political campaigns including Barack Obama’s first run for President. She became a senior advisor to the Under Secretary for International Affairs at the US Treasury Department, was an investment advisor in New York City, and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School as well.
Before becoming mayor, Cognetti advised the Pennsylvania Auditor General on oversight of public school districts and care for older adults, and served on the Scranton School Board.
This interview will be available online and in print in LandLines magazine, as the latest installment in the Mayor’s Desk series. The first 20 Q&As with mayors from around the world have been compiled in a new book, with an introduction by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.
Lead image: Paige Cognetti. Credit: Courtesy photo.
Walk around virtually any city in the United States, and it’s hard to miss the stark symbols of economic inequality. Restaurant workers unable to afford the food they cook and serve. Teachers and tradespeople priced out of the community in which they work. A family on the brink of poverty unable to afford treatment at the world-class hospital a mile away.
These scenes play out not just in large, expensive cities, but in small and mid-sized ones, too, including places that have worked tirelessly to jumpstart their economic engines. These persistent, almost vulgar disparities were enough to make Haegi Kwon, policy analyst at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, pursue a pointed research question: Is economic development, as a set of policies and practices that aims to produce community prosperity . . . actually working?
In a new working paper, Kwon argues that traditional economic development approaches—such as trying to attract outside employers with promised infrastructure or tax breaks (recall how cities bent over backwards trying to woo Amazon as it sought a second home)—often produce uneven growth that can deepen disadvantage and exacerbate longstanding inequities. “Just because there’s overall economic growth at the city level, it doesn’t mean those benefits trickle down,” Kwon says. “A lot of times you end up seeing increased disparities within cities.”
Evidence suggests that when a new tech company or other sought-after employer enters a community, for example, the benefits mostly flow toward homeowners and people who are highly educated. “But if you’re low-income and you’re a renter, then you’re probably going to experience some vulnerability, and at worst displacement,” Kwon says.
Historically, the goal of most local economic development programs has been to bring in more, says Jessie Grogan, director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality at the Lincoln Institute. “More jobs, more investment, more businesses—there’s a perception that you need to grow, you need more stuff, and that’s what economic development success looks like,” Grogan says. But as part of a research project supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Grogan and Kwon are asking community leaders to challenge those long-held assumptions.
In her working paper, Kwon introduces a new three-part framework for thinking about economic development—one that targets resident health, equity, and wellbeing as the explicit goals of such investments, rather than just growth.
Looking In, Leveraging, and Locking
To gain a new perspective on economic development, Kwon explored existing theoretical frameworks such as the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) model and the slow-growth, locally resourced concept of “scaling deep” to achieve more durable success. Applying elements of these alternative perspectives, Kwon has proposed a three-step framework that represents a community-centered approach to economic development: looking in, leveraging, and locking.
“This framework emphasizes the importance of identifying and nurturing existing assets, collaborating to leverage these assets, and promoting greater community stability,” Kwon says.
A framework for remaking local economies proposed by Haegi Kwon, policy analyst at the Lincoln Institute. Credit: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Economic development practitioners should start by looking in, she says. That includes some inclusive and collective soul-searching to identify a community’s issues and shared priorities—but it also means recognizing assets already in place to help attain those goals. Every community has something of value on which it can build—some combination of natural, social, cultural, human, political, economic, or built resources.
Community assets might be historical or geographic advantages, such as a working waterfront, key railway, or abundant green space or city-owned lots. They could include institutions, such as a university or museum, or a patchwork of small nonprofits that have earned trust by developing deep roots in different parts of the city. And then there’s the often-overlooked value of the people and cultures that comprise a community—the local knowledge, lived wisdom, and diverse skill sets of the existing residents.
“There might be a lot of skill and talent in those communities that has just not been recognized,” Kwon says, such as informal businesses that could be formalized, or entrepreneurial immigrants whose contributions are often ignored or underutilized. “If you look deeper, there’s a lot of capital and skill that they’re bringing with them.”
Leveraging those assets means making the most of them by collaborating, sharing resources, and building off even modest advantages to create an impact greater than the sum of the inputs.
For example, bringing together nonprofit organizations and other institutions that have operated in competition with or in isolation from each other, and getting them to complement each other’s work—by sharing information, developing referral systems, and coordinating activities to avoid duplicative efforts—can help them achieve shared goals. Andrew Crosson, founder and chief executive of the regional social investment fund Invest Appalachia, calls this approach the “stone soup” of economic development, with organizations pooling their limited resources and building upon each other’s work.
At a 2016 convening hosted by the Appalachia Funders Network, participants defined critical investment needs and regional assets, developing a shared vision for a new entity that would become Invest Appalachia. Credit: Invest Appalachia.
There’s one more crucial step to the puzzle, Kwon says, and that’s locking investments into place to ensure sustained stability and prosperity for the community.
“Locking is about creating virtuous cycles of growth,” Kwon says, often by investing in workforce training, wealth building, and entrepreneurship efforts. “Local business owners are more likely to reinvest, so the more you have businesses owned by people who live locally, the more likely you are to get this kind of reinvestment in the community.” She notes that shared ownership models such as community land trusts can also help secure continued stability and wellbeing as new investment flows into a community.
Appalachian Assets
Kwon’s framework isn’t just informed by existing research literature; a number of organizations nationwide have been putting similar steps into practice, with encouraging results.
Before launching Invest Appalachia, for example, Crosson and other members of the Appalachia Funders Network spent years conducting an “open-eyed analysis” of the region’s opportunities and gaps within a historical and economic context—looking in, if you will. They identified the region’s active network of nonprofits as a crucial asset. “We have the benefit of some networks of nonprofits that have been doing community economic development work for years, with really sharp, ground-truthed, multi-year track records,” Crosson says.
“They did a very seemingly homegrown exercise in getting everyone who touches the proverbial elephant together to say, ‘Okay, let’s work together. What do we want, and how can we think about developing shared priorities and then bringing in resources around those priorities in a more structured and intentional way?” Grogan says. “They got all the players organized and rowing in the same direction.”
A map of economic status by county in Appalachia reveals a “big red dot” of distressed areas in the central part of the region. Invest Appalachia is focusing its efforts on breaking the cycle of scarcity there. Credit: Appalachian Regional Commission.
One of the most powerful ways Invest Appalachia has been able to leverage its modest grant dollars for greater impact, meanwhile, is through credit enhancements. These arrangements allow the fund to essentially absorb excess risk on behalf of low-wealth businesses, builders, and mission-driven lenders—borrowers who will pay back the money, but lack the collateral to qualify for traditional financing, or who need more flexible lending terms. It’s not entirely unlike having someone with financial stability cosign a car loan or apartment lease for someone else.
“You have to break the cycle of scarcity and disinvestment and lack of investment readiness,” Crosson says. “And I think the best tool that we have as a field is credit enhancements, and specifically grant-funded credit enhancements—like loan guarantees, loan loss reserves, conditional repayment loans, unsecured bridge loans, things like that—that can help to get money into a project to get the juices flowing. You’re giving people a chance to build assets.”
Every credit enhancement unlocks investment capital for projects and borrowers who couldn’t otherwise access it, Crosson says. “It allows community lenders and impact investors to put repayable dollars into things that are investment-worthy but not quite investment-ready.”
One simple and effective example, Crosson says, is providing uncollateralized bridge loans to nonprofits and small businesses that want to invest in rooftop solar. On-site solar generation is a win-win, improving climate resiliency while reducing operational expenses, and organizations can get up to 50 percent of the installation cost reimbursed through federal tax credits—but not until they file their taxes a year later. Invest Appalachia worked with the Appalachian Solar Finance Fund, a core partner in the clean energy sector, to identify this major bottleneck in solar development and develop a solution. By extending short-term bridge loans—which carry very little risk, since they’re essentially backed by the Internal Revenue Service—Invest Appalachia has helped provide nonprofits like the Just for Kids Advocacy Center and Howell’s Mill Summer Camp, both in West Virginia, with the upfront money they need to invest in solar.
The majority of those loans will be repaid and then reinvested, Crosson says, allowing grant money to go farther and last longer. “That money will come back, it will recycle, and we’ll get to use it again and again and again.” At the same time, the repayable nature of credit-enhanced loans helps lock in prosperity by setting projects on a path toward long-term sustainability and self-sufficiency.
In its first full year of operations, Invest Appalachia allocated nearly $2 million in catalytic capital to projects in communities including Athens, Ohio. Credit: Paul Sableman via Flickr CC BY 2.0.
Locking in demands a systems-level approach, Crosson adds. “If we do individual transactions—one factory here, one housing development there, in the way that people think about economic development traditionally—that’s just not going to add up, especially in a place with the socioeconomic characteristics of our region,” he says. Clustered investments, though, can yield compounding benefits.
“A few targeted interventions can generate the momentum needed to sort of catalyze an entire industry,” he says. “We also think about that in terms of geographies, where doing a cluster of deals, businesses, and projects allows that community to achieve some level of self-sustaining growth and inclusive growth that starts to spill over to the communities around it.”
Russell: A Place of Promise
While Invest Appalachia serves an entire region spanning multiple states, the same principles can be applied at the city or even neighborhood level.
In Louisville, Kentucky, for example, local government has been countering decades of disinvestment in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Russell with a focus on revitalization and staying out in front of displacement pressures. Recognizing the value of both the place itself and its people, a public-private initiative called Russell: A Place of Promise has been guiding that effort since 2018 with an uncommonly profound and prolonged commitment to the neighborhood’s crucial asset: its residents.
“Oftentimes, what you see in community development projects is a focus more on the built environment, rather than the actual people,” says Cassandra Webb, co-lead of Russell: A Place of Promise (RPOP) and director of the Place of Promise initiative at Cities United. And as new buildings, facades, trees, streetlights, and other overdue investments make a place more attractive, she says, “folks enjoy the resources and the goods and services that are there, but the people who call that neighborhood home can no longer afford to live there. So part of our strategy was, how do we make sure that folks are a part of building out what RPOP is going to be, and that they also have the opportunities—whether it’s workforce development, greater job opportunities, more sustainable housing—so they can afford to stay in their community?”
A bridge in the Louisville, Kentucky, neighborhood of Russell conveys the spirit of the area’s robust local community development initiatives. Credit: Vision Russell.
RPOP leaders have been listening to, learning from, and learning with neighborhood residents, not only through ongoing conversations, block party events, and leadership education sessions, but by taking residents on paid trips to explore examples of shared ownership in other cities. Webb accompanied a group of about 20 Russell residents on a trip to Atlanta, for example, where they met with peer organizations to learn firsthand about community land trusts.
“It’s about investing in the people of the community,” Webb says, “and as we invest in them, and work in partnership with them, being able to gain insights that then help us inform our strategies on the place side.”
Investing in Russell’s residents has helped cultivate another important, hard-won asset: trust.
“The city is not necessarily seen as a trusted partner in historically Black neighborhoods, because the city has been a driver of a lot of the disparity,” says Theresa Zawacki, RPOP co-lead and policy executive on loan from Louisville Metro Government. “And even in present times, the city is seen as a source of state violence, a source of disparate impact, a source of unkept promises. . . . So there was a lot of relationship maintenance and trust-building at first.”
Those efforts got a boost in late 2019, when RPOP hired a resident named Jackie Floyd—known to many in the community as “the mayor of Russell”—as a full-time outreach member. The pandemic prompted some pivoting, but RPOP continued to engage and support residents through the lockdown, providing local families with care packages containing health and hygiene items, kids’ activities, and fresh food grown by a collective of Black farmers. A program called the Russell for Russell Residents Coalition coalesced online, and drew more than two dozen participants, aged 22 to 72, who helped shape a set of Black wealth creation strategies and craft the group’s Partnership Pledge. Since then, RPOP has graduated 62 residents through its small business accelerator, with one cohort specifically focused on childcare businesses, and built both single-family and income-generating duplex homes in partnership with a Black-led affordable housing developer, Rebound.
In further community workgroups, residents (who earned a stipend for participating) learned about and helped define the parameters of new neighborhood investments, from models of community ownership to universal basic income programs—including the YALift! guaranteed income pilot that RPOP helped create and implement in Louisville along with Metro United Way.
The resident-centered work of Russell: A Place of Promise ranges from affordable housing development to public art and storytelling projects. Credit: Tre’ Sean Durham/Supply Lab Media via RPOP.
Russell: A Place of Promise also has a key place-based asset to leverage toward its mission of creating lasting Black wealth in the neighborhood. Louisville Metro Government has committed a five-acre plot of vacant land to the organization, sitting at the intersection of 30th and Madison streets—across from an athletic facility that draws tens of thousands of visitors annually.
As RPOP prepares to redevelop the property in its first major capital project, residents are deeply involved in charting the course. The goal is to create a mixed-use community focal point, defined by shared ownership, to act as both a catalyst for generational wealth and a bulwark against displacement.
RPOP and Russell residents have been exploring several different models of shared ownership, Zawacki says, including community land trusts and real estate investment trusts. But whatever form that eventually takes, the hope is that it will help lock in place a foundation for long-term stability and opportunity. “Where we’ve landed at this point is that residents are interested in the idea of having some amount of financial ownership in 30th and Madison Street, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be something that pays dividends,” Zawacki says. “It could be something that allows for the profit that comes off of that property, after it stabilizes, to be something that they direct in an investment back into the neighborhood.”
Residents also see the opportunity to own a business at the 30th and Madison Street complex as its own form of community ownership. “We’re actually having conversations with seven- and eight-year-olds, about how one day, when the site is built, when you’re 15 or 16 years old, your business that you’re thinking about could actually be at 30th and Madison,” Webb says.
Prioritizing Well-Being
Both Invest Appalachia and Russell: A Place of Promise are explicitly prioritizing resident well-being and working toward that goal with a promising mix of strategies, Kwon says. And while many of those initiatives are fairly new or works in progress, she’s excited to see the impacts they’ll have on their communities in years to come.
“We’re not saying that everything’s going to be rainbows and unicorns, but Russell, for example, is really looking at cooperative structures, clear ways of trying to ensure that at the city level, you have dedicated, permanently affordable housing,” she says. “They’re not just looking at bringing in a chain supermarket—they’re looking at, how do we build wealth within the community? How do we ensure affordable housing so people can stay, and also ensure a sort of cultural stability as well?”
Indeed, stability may be just as important to a community as economic growth. “The way I’m starting to think about it is that ideal places are stable across generations,” Grogan says. “You have enough opportunities that your kids want to stay here, but you’re not so unaffordable that your kids can’t stay here.”
A block party in Russell attracts participants of all ages. One measure of successful community economic development is whether a place offers both opportunity and affordability across generations. Credit: Marcus Pipes/MAP Visuals via RPOP.
And stability isn’t purely an economic matter, either; it’s also about autonomy. So as RPOP prepares to incorporate itself as a standalone nonprofit this year, its outgoing co-leads are making sure the board is composed mostly, if not entirely, of neighborhood residents and small business owners. “Our board members that we have now, four are Russell residents that have been along with us over the past few years, that have gone on those trips with us,” Webb says, “and now are very comfortable and knowledgeable about how we move this work forward.”
Crosson says one of the key, and hopefully lasting, aspects of Invest Appalachia’s work has been increasing capacity in the region—not just the capacity for technical expertise or securing funding, but the ability to put it to use in service of the community’s agreed-upon goals. “One of our partners uses the analogy of watering the soil,” he says. “If there’s a drought, and you pour water on the soil, it runs off, right? And if a region is disinvested and under-resourced, you can’t just throw money at it and hope that’s going to solve everything.”
Zawacki credits Louisville Metro Government for supporting Russell: A Place of Promise with a steady palm rather than a strong fist. The city doesn’t hold their grant money or dictate how they use it, and has provided land that the organization would have struggled to purchase at market rates. “That opportunity to be entrepreneurial with the resources of government, but without the direction and control of government, has been essential to our success,” Zawacki says. “That is definitely one of the takeaways from the last five years of the work: having the resources is great, but having the freedom is even greater.”
Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: A shuttered movie theater in southern California. Credit: Michael Warren via iStock/Getty Images Plus.
