Neighborhoods

The Next Urban Comeback

October 29, 2019 By Otis White

I was fortunate to have a front-row seat for the greatest urban story of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the revival of America’s downtowns. A few scenes from that story:

When I started paying attention in the mid-1970s, downtowns were at their lowest point. With the rise of the automobile, families had started moving away from downtowns in the 1920s, followed by retail in the 1950s and offices in the 1960s.
By the 1970s, what was left in many downtowns was government, the courts, law offices, a few office towers, and a handful of once-grand churches struggling to hold on to their congregations. Some had a historic theater, a civic center, or a stadium that drew crowds a few nights a week. But main streets were pockmarked with empty storefronts, and on most evenings the sidewalks were deserted.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that downtowns found the keys to success: adaptive reuse of old buildings, housing, wider sidewalks, streetscaping, transit, density, waterfront access, mixed uses, business improvement districts, sidewalk dining, activities and concerts, and a dozen other New Urbanist-inspired strategies.
Today, downtowns are being revived everywhere in Georgia, from Savannah to Columbus, Augusta to Atlanta. And in new cities like Sandy Springs and Johns Creek, downtowns are being created where none existed before.

The comeback of downtowns isn’t complete but the goal line is in sight. So it’s time to consider: Where will the next great urban revival take place? My guess: in neighborhoods.

You can see neighborhood revival in some cities. In Atlanta, the Beltline is fueling a rush of development into nearby neighborhoods. In other cities, neighborhoods with historic homes and traditional street grids attract outsiders. As a result, you might think cities’ greatest problem is gentrification.

Gentrification is a serious issue, but decay and abandonment are even greater problems for most cities. So how do we turn around declining places and do so in ways that include those living there now?

It gets complicated because, when it comes to reversing neighborhood decline, we’re in the same place as downtowns in the 1970s. We don’t have a playbook. Parts of the downtown playbook might work in some neighborhoods: walkability, mixed uses, transit, and so on. But much of it won’t.

Even more complicating, we had help from big commercial interests in downtowns. We won’t have their help in neighborhoods. And taxpayers will be even less supportive of spending money in other people’s neighborhoods than they were of investing in downtowns. After all, downtowns are used by everyone. Neighborhoods are mostly for their residents.

So whom do we turn to in reviving neighborhoods? Who will write the playbook of neighborhood revitalization? And where do we get started?

My suggestion: Begin with the only genuine asset that neighborhoods have, their residents. Get them involved and organized, help them to learn about positive neighborhood change, then let them share in decision making and provide some of the effort. In other words, create partners so that the city government is no longer doing things FOR neighborhoods, but doing things WITH neighborhoods.

Where will these partners come from? From strong, representative neighborhood associations, along with crime-watch groups, friends of neighborhood parks, community-garden groups, PTAs, small-business associations. Really, any group focused on making a neighborhood—or even a single block—better.

In some neighborhoods, such groups do not exist. That’s why city governments from Riverside, Calif. to Longmont, Colo., Phoenix to Philadelphia are helping residents organize them. There’s no reason we couldn’t do the same in Georgia.

But for this to work, city leaders must practice restraint. In the case of neighborhoods, a wise approach is to help residents organize, learn, discuss, and come to consensus on a short list of achievable projects before the government makes its commitments. Oh, and be sure the neighbors contribute something to the effort, even if it’s just working alongside city crews or offering the proceeds from a bake sale.

After all, groups that have helped scrub graffiti from buildings, sold cakes to turn a vacant lot into a community garden, or worked with police to shut down a drug house won’t let the graffiti come back, the garden fall into disuse, or the drug dealers return. Not without a fight. And that is what cities need if we’re going to turn around troubled neighborhoods: committed, effective partners willing to fight for the places they live.

A version of this posting appeared on the Georgia Municipal Association website.

Lesson Five: Vision and Demographics

August 5, 2014 By Otis White

My aim in these postings is to help you, as a reporter or blogger, understand local government and avoid some of the problems I had as a city hall reporter. As I said in the introduction, I never truly “got” local government when I covered city hall. I kept looking for what I’d learned in college political science classes—that government decision making was about interests clashing over public policy. I was disappointed to find city councils focused instead on things that seemed smaller and less interesting: arbitrating zoning disputes, moving small amounts of money among city departments, listening to neighborhood complaints, voting on construction projects. Where were the interest groups, I wondered, the lobbyists, the committee hearings, the position papers, the public policies?

It wasn’t until much later that I understood local governments weren’t smaller versions of federal and state governments; they were focused on something different—not public policy but people and places, how these elements interact, and how they could be made to interact better. Land use, I learned, was the central concern of city and county governments, and it is local governments’ ability to place infrastructure and regulate land uses (not only on public streets and spaces but private property) that gives them power and importance.

A city council’s debate, then, about locating a civic center isn’t a boring discussion about another construction project—it’s a bet on where and how the city will grow. Guess right, and the area around it could be transformed. Guess wrong, and it could be a drain on government revenues and a huge missed opportunity.

And you can go down the list: Where transit stops are placed, sidewalks built, parks located, schools situated; whether to build a performing arts center, start a bike-sharing program, or help the local college expand; how to regulate food trucks and ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft; whether to give economic development incentives to businesses or help a small-business incubator get off the ground. These decisions don’t look like much close up, but collectively they add up to a vision of the city, with each a step toward that vision.

One of your most important jobs as city hall reporter, then, should be to figure out the vision. If your city has been through a full-scale planning process recently, this may be easy. Many will know the city’s intended destination and how it aims to get there. Your task is to put these things into words and explain what they mean, why they are important, and what alternative visions were considered.

If the city hasn’t been through a visioning process or comprehensive planning effort, the vision could be known only to a few. So your first task is to piece together the vision by interviewing those with a say in city decisions and comparing it with the decisions they’ve made and the plans that guide them. (Hint: Talk to the city planning director and the local chamber of commerce president before interviewing the mayor and council members.)

It’s possible, of course, that there is no broadly shared vision, that the city council is feeling its way through important decisions. But trust me on this: Having no direction doesn’t mean the city isn’t going somewhere. It just isn’t going there by design. In these cases, your job is to see where the drift is taking the city, tell your readers what that place is likely to be, and ask leaders if they’re comfortable with the destination.

All of this brings up some questions: What does a vision look like? How would you know if your city is achieving it? And if the city is just drifting along, how can you see where it’s headed?

Actually, it’s pretty simple. Look at the demographics.

Go back to the central issue for cities: People and places, how they interact, and how they can be made to interact better. The tools that a city has are the “places” part of that statement—how it develops public places, regulates private ones, and serves all with infrastructure. The results are the people and what they do with those places. Remember the famous Watergate adage, “follow the money”? If you want to know where your city is headed, follow the demographics.

A vision, then, is an effort to picture who will live in, work in, and visit your city in the future, what they will do for entertainment, how they will relate to one another and the city’s physical assets, how they will move around, and what impressions newcomers will form. And behind the vision should be a plan: In order to make this ideal future become a reality, here are the things we must do.

Describing the vision is important, but you need to know more. Is the vision obtainable? Can the city truly attract those it wants and needs in order to be successful? To answer this, you’ll have to take a deep dive into demographics, starting with where the city is today and how it is changing.

Here are some questions to begin with: Who lives in your city by age, income, educational attainment, and ethnicity? How are these numbers changing over, say, the last 10 years? How do these changes compare with cities of similar size and type? How do they compare with nearby jurisdictions, such as suburbs? (You can find these things from U.S. Census data but call your regional planning agency. It may have additional data and even projections.)

Now drill down a bit: Where in your city are the greatest changes taking place today? If the city is investing in some areas or services (such as transit), how is that affecting the demographics in those neighborhoods? (Again, look not just at population numbers in those tracts but age, income, and education.)

All of this will give you some idea of how realistic your city’s vision is. If the city is aging rapidly and wants to attract more young people and you can’t find a single neighborhood where young people are replacing older families, it’ll be a tough slog—and you can say so. If, though, there are several neighborhoods that millennials are moving to, then there’s your lede. Interview the newcomers, explain the neighborhood’s attraction, and give readers a glimpse of the future.

As you’re getting used to demographics, don’t forget that cities serve more than residents. They’re also centers for work, entertainment, and tourism. Employee demographics aren’t as easily obtained as residential demographics, but governments do track the types of jobs being created as well as the number. I suggest starting with a federal database called County Business Patterns. Be patient: You’ll have to immerse yourself in things like NAICS codes and learn some basic spreadsheet techniques, but pretty soon you’ll be able to figure out how employment is changing in your city. And the same guidelines apply: If your city wants to be a center of technology and can’t show any growth in that area, then you can be properly skeptical.

Tourism and entertainment statistics will be harder still to come by; they’re kept locally and some are sketchy. But it’s worth the effort to learn who comes to your city and for what purposes. You may, for instance, be able to track restaurant sales figures over time, which will tell you whether city efforts to build an entertainment economy are working. If your city has invested in a convention center, the statistics on its use should be revealing.

Armed with a little curiosity and a few spreadsheet skills, then, you’ll quickly master the changing demographics of your city and turn out some great stories. But remember: You’re a city hall reporter, so your aim isn’t just to report what’s happening but to compare the government’s intentions and actions to the results. If there’s a vision, is it obtainable? If the city is drifting, where is it headed? If the city is making investments, are they working? Demographics will give you the answers.

Three cautions about fairness. First, be aware of the lag effect. Depending on economic conditions, a city can wait years after opening a transit station before developers start building transit-oriented buildings, and even more time before it’s reflected in the population changes. Ask independent experts, like academics and consultants, how long the lag should be.

Be aware too that government census reports are backward looking. They can tell you what happened but not what’s happening right now or what is yet to come. That was a big reason so many were surprised by the great urban turnaround of the 1990s. It had been underway for years before the 2000 Census awoke us to it. So if the demographics don’t reflect what you’re seeing in the neighborhoods, it may be because no one has collected the statistics or run the numbers yet.

Second, luck and circumstance play bigger roles in cities than we sometimes acknowledge. Local governments can do all the right things and yet see little return. Or they can do only a little and see huge changes. Williston, North Dakota, for example, was a sleepy little prairie town for most of its history. Then oil was discovered, its population doubled, and rents soared to levels approaching those in Manhattan. How much credit does the city government deserve for Williston’s growth? Probably not much. In the opposite way, we ought to give some credit to cities like Cleveland that have worked mightily to make themselves more appealing. Despite progress (it was named the site of the 2016 Republican National Convention and some of its neighborhoods are reviving) Cleveland hasn’t stemmed its population losses yet. Is it fair, then, to compare Cleveland to fast-growing cities like Miami or Houston—or would it be fairer to compare it to other cities trying to reverse a growth spiral? I think the latter is fairer.

Third, be smart as well as fair with demographics on ethnicity and income. These are politically sensitive subjects—for good reason. All cities that are successful over the long haul are diverse ones. So don’t let your reporting be an excuse for excluding some, as the city seeks others.

This is one of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by Corey Templeton licensed under Creative Commons.

Lesson One: It’s All About Land Use

May 28, 2014 By Otis White

OK, that’s an exaggeration. Some things about local government aren’t about land use—public education, for example, and some local services, such as sanitation and public health. But it’s astonishing how many things in local governments do touch on land use.

Some of these things are obvious, like zoning and building permits, downtown renewal efforts and neighborhood development. But others are not so obvious, such as transportation, parks, sports arenas, and festivals.

Transportation is a good example. During my years as a city hall reporter, I never heard city officials talk about the connection between transportation and land use, except in a broad, economic development context. Oh, sure, they talked at length about highways, sidewalks, roads, and transit on the one hand, and the need to turn around parts of the city on the other—but not once (in my presence, at least) did a mayor, city council member, or even a planning director connect the two. It wasn’t until the 1990s that I heard local officials talk about using transportation to shape the places they passed through.

Today you can hardly avoid the subject if you’re a reasonably perceptive reporter talking with reasonably cognizant local officials. The growing awareness of how transportation shapes land use is why there’s such interest these days in bike lanes, walking, and transit. These forms of transportation concentrate land uses, as opposed to cars, which spread them out. Denser land uses create livelier urban environments. And livelier urban environments change how people interact with place—my description of the central issue for local governments.

And transportation is just one of those things whose connection to land use is more appreciated today. Take parks. Until the 1990s, most local officials saw them as urban amenities. And if you go further back in urban history to the 1800s, they were seen as beneficial to public health. (That’s one reason Central Park has long been described as “the lungs of New York City.”) But shapers of land use? That’s a more recent understanding, dating to the building of Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta in 1996 and Millennium Park in Chicago in 2004, both of which dramatically raised property values and the density of land uses around them. (And, not to put too fine a point on it, created new interactions between people and places.)

I could go on. Even schools and sanitation have a land-use aspect. Ask any residential real estate agent what effect a good neighborhood school has on nearby property values. And sewer line extensions are, along with transportation improvements, the greatest predictors of future land uses.

So how are land-use stories played out in local government, and how could you cover them in new and interesting ways? Well, you know the traditional stories: “NIMBYs” vs. “greedy developers.” You have the neighbors in bright T-shirts at zoning board or city council meetings, waving signs, and complaining loudly about being overrun with traffic. And on the other side, lawyers in blue suits with architectural renderings, property tax projections, and the promise of lawsuits if things don’t go their way.

Who is right here? The side that promises the best possible interactions for people and place—which could be the neighbors or the developer . . . but is likely neither. That’s because neighborhood associations too often stand for the status quo. They don’t want to improve their neighborhoods; they want to preserve them in amber. And while developers favor change, their changes are often the wrong ones, ones that will diminish the interactions of people and place by creating parking lots, inward-looking buildings, and streets with no sidewalks.

So if NIMBYs and build-and-run developers are the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of change in your city—almost equally wrongheaded—who then is rightheaded?

Ah, there are your stories: Who in your city is talking about and working toward a more interesting and attractive urban environment? What are the elements of their vision? What have cities or suburbs similar to yours done to create these environments? What were the obstacles they faced? Who in local government shares the vision? Who opposes it and why? What is the government doing today to create livelier places? What is it doing that hinders such places from developing? (Hint: Check city parking requirements for new retail, office, and residential properties.)

Other story ideas: What is the state of transit in your city? Do transit officials work alongside city officials in planning denser environments? If so, how? If not, why not? Are there developers who want to create walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented developments? (Hint: There almost surely are.) What do they see as the barriers to livelier streets and neighborhoods? What do local architects say?

Are there business improvement districts in your city? (If you don’t know what they are, Google the term.) If so, which have been successful, which have not had much impact, and why? If there aren’t BIDs, why haven’t they come to your city? What about Main Street programs? (Again, Google the term.)

Is gentrification happening in your city? Why did the gentrifiers move to some inner-city neighborhoods but not others? (Take an evening and knock on doors.) Given what you’ve learned, what is the most likely next neighborhood for gentrification and why? (Interview some real estate agents under age 40.) What has been the reaction of longtime neighbors to the newcomers? Is there a backlash?

Who bikes to work? What have they experienced? Who walks to work? What have they seen and learned? Who could afford to drive but chooses instead to take the bus? (These are called “choice riders.” Again, Google the term.) Why do they take transit, and what have they seen? (Hey, ride along with some.) What is the transit system doing to attract these riders?

Find the most successful public park in your city, in terms of usage. (If the parks department doesn’t have statistics, go out after work with a handheld counter and notepad and count the people.) What makes this park so successful? If it’s a large park, find a small one that’s equally successful on a per-acre basis. Again, what are its secrets? Call the nearest university with a landscape architecture program and interview some professors about what makes some urban parks successful and others desolate.

In which neighborhoods do people walk for exercise, entertainment, or to shop? (You may have to use the counter and a notebook.) Why do they walk there but not in the next neighborhood? What is the local government doing to encourage walkability? (Check sidewalk requirements.) If sidewalks are broken, who is responsible for the repairs—and does anyone actually enforce these requirements? What besides the sidewalks are the obstacles to walkable neighborhoods? (As a sidebar, interview public health officials about the connection between obesity and the lack of regular exercise—of which walking is considered the best.)

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. What is your city doing to improve the way people interact with places? Where is it making these improvements, and why is it investing in these locations? What resources is the city bringing to bear on creating more interesting and attractive places? What have been the results, and what have been the responses by supporters and opponents, developers and residents new and old?

Now, stop a moment and think. Wouldn’t writing these stories be a lot more fun than covering the “NIMBYs” vs. “greedy developers” showdowns at the zoning board? Wouldn’t these stories teach readers more about their community and how their government works? Covering NIMBYs-vs.-developers stories is like writing about a baseball game that was played last year. Focus on land use and the forces that are changing it, and you’ll be writing about the game . . . before the players ever take the field.

This is one of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by Dylan Passmore licensed under Creative Commons.

Selling Change by the Slice

October 23, 2012 By Otis White

One of the hardest things to do in communities is to convince your fellow leaders or citizens to join you in a leap of faith. That is, to accept a major change that, while needed and logical, involves doing something most people are not used to. Look around cities today and you see leaders trying to talk people into taking these leaps: to build light-rail systems, accept greater density in their neighborhoods, turn over parts of busy streets to bike lanes, try new ways of recycling, change school attendance zones, and a hundred other things.

The problem isn’t just that the citizens and their leaders are personally unfamiliar with the change you’re advocating (that’s why it’s a leap of faith), but that often it’s “all or nothing” as well. That is, you can’t build part of a transit system or half of a high-rise condo, and then let people decide if they can live with it. Or can you?

Well, no, not literally. But an awful lot of bold community changes can be tried out before being fully implemented. And if you’re proposing a big change, that may be the smartest way you can offer it: as a test. Find a place in the city where you can demonstrate the change and its benefits so everyone can see it. If it’s as successful as you expect, you’ll dramatically lower the fear level, and by the time you ask citizens and their leaders to accept the rest (a built-out transit system, a mixed-use development in their neighborhood, a new kind of recycling), it’s less like a leap of faith and more like a hop.

You may know what I’m talking about as a “pilot” or “demonstration” project. But I like to think of it as selling change by the slice, because your job isn’t to prove a point but to get people to buy the entire change. You’re simply starting with a single slice.

How do you create successful pilot projects? There are two things to keep in mind. First, you have to find a place willing to accept the slice. Second, you have to make sure its success is so apparent that opponents are, grudgingly, won over.

Let’s start with the second challenge. The important thing is to be sure that all the elements of the big change are at work in the pilot project. Let’s imagine that you’re trying to show that a bike-rental program would work in your city, and you’re going to start with a single location. What makes a bike-rental program successful? Marketing, management, maintenance, an information system to handle tracking and payments . . . and a dozen other things. All those elements have to be in place for the pilot to succeed and, therefore, convince citizens and leaders to expand it citywide. So approach the pilot with as much planning and design as you would a citywide program. Don’t think you can place a bunch of bikes around a neighborhood and expect it to convince skeptics.

Another thing about successful pilots is that they have to . . . well, succeed. That means testing in a place where success is most likely. In fact, that’s how most city bike-rental programs have proceeded. They’ve started in neighborhoods where the young and hip live and work, because these are the early adopters of urban cycling. Once people in other parts of the city see so many people on rental bikes (riding safely and with no loss in dignity), they’re open to trying it themselves. Think of it as the “iPhone strategy”: If the cool kids like it, others will come around.

And that brings me back to the first challenge: How do you convince a portion of the city to accept that first slice of change? Well, as I’ve indicated, it’s best to start among the persuadable, the neighborhoods that are most open to this particular change. It’s critical, too, that you go to the neighborhood early on and talk with its leaders. Make them your collaborators in designing the project.

Finally, if you can, you may want to present the pilot project as a competition. Have several neighborhoods in mind and let it be known that the one that does something concrete—raises money, finds land, creates a viable plan—will be the winner.

I know this sounds implausible. Change usually creates resistance. Why would neighborhoods compete to do things other places oppose? Because of a quirk of human nature. Present us with a situation that appears to require sacrifice, and we fight it. But present us with a situation that feels like a competition and ends with something that looks like a reward, and we fight for it.

Actually, you know how this works. Think back to that book you read as a child. The one that started out with a boy who got others to paint a fence and pay him for the privilege. Tom Sawyer did it by offering the work as an honor to be won. Surprisingly, change can sometimes be made like that as well.

Photo by Mag3737 licensed under Creative Commons.

This is part of a series of brief postings called Rules for Reformers. For an introduction to the series, please click here.

The Greatest Book About Cities Not Written by Jane Jacobs

July 13, 2011 By Otis White

This is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a book that many urban thinkers consider the greatest ever written about cities. It’s Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” and it is, indeed, an important work. Among other things, it showed us how to look at cities—particularly the interactions of street life—with greater appreciation.

“Death and Life,” then, is a great book. I recommend it highly. But I’d like to offer up another great book about cities, one published in 1993 with a bright green cover and cartoon illustrations. It was by a pair of Chicago academics and community organizers, John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight, with a title only an academic or a community organizer could love, “Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets.”

In 376 pages, Kretzmann and McKnight introduce us to a set of ideas as challenging to the conventional wisdom of community development as Jacobs’ critique was to city planning. Their premise: that every neighborhood and every community—even the most impoverished—is filled with human, organizational and institutional assets that should be inventoried and harnessed before seeking outside help.

I’ll explain more about their ideas shortly, but first let me tell you how I was introduced to this book. In 1995, I wrote an article for Florida Trend, a business magazine, about a city in South Florida called Delray Beach. My assignment was to find the place in Florida with the most committed and effective group of local leaders. I found it in south Palm Beach County, which was a bit surprising because that part of the state wasn’t known as civic minded. But a much greater surprise came when I got to Delray Beach. Leadership worked in Delray, I learned, in ways differently than any place I’d ever visited.

You can read the entire article on the Civic Strategies web site, but here’s the five-second summary: Delray Beach city government insisted that, before it responded to citizen complaints, citizens closest to the problem had to organize themselves, study the problem and assume part of the responsibility for solutions. This bracing attitude—you do your part before we do ours—was so contrary to how local governments worked, I struggled to find ways of describing it. I finally hit on calling it Delray Beach’s “responsibility revolution.”

A year later, I got a second surprise when I was researching a study of leadership in Los Angeles and dropped by the offices of an organization called RLA. RLA had been created four years earlier as Rebuild L.A. and was the political and civic communities’ reaction to the 1992 Rodney King riots. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley asked Peter Ueberroth, the organizational mastermind behind the 1984 Summer Olympics, to head the group, giving it the vague mandate of raising a lot of money and improving the riot-torn areas of South-Central Los Angeles. In short order, Rebuild L.A. became a political disaster, a high-profile piggybank with a 30-member board that served the interests of everybody but the people in the neighborhoods. (To see of how bad things were, read Time magazine’s article about the early problems of Rebuild L.A.)

By the time I visited RLA, Ueberroth was gone and so was the 30-member board. In their place was a quiet, confident Latina named Linda Griego who had been asked to clean up the mess at Rebuild L.A. and do something to improve the area. Griego wasn’t interested in high-profile fund-raisers or big-ego politics. She renamed the organization and focused on the community’s strengths. What she discovered as her organization inventoried South-Central block by block was that there was a lot more to the area than outsiders thought. She found dozens of promising but underserved retail locations and hundreds of small employers. Maybe the greatest surprise: South-Central was a honeycomb of small manufacturers, from print shops to metal-working establishments.

Griego organized these small businesses so they could support one another and negotiate with big businesses and city hall. And she produced corporate-style market studies, pinpointing places that a drug store, supermarket or discount retailer could thrive. She took these studies to chain stores that had never given places like South-Central L.A. a second thought and already had successes to show for her work.

In the space of a couple of years, then, I had seen examples from opposite ends of the United States of how to look at neighborhoods, including very poor areas, in a totally new way: not as hopeless victims but as places with assets—communities with the leadership and some of the resources needed to turn themselves around . . . if outsiders let locals take the lead. And once again, words failed me. I couldn’t come up with the right term to describe what Linda Griego was doing. I called it “grassroots networking.”

It wasn’t until the following year, when I was visiting the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio, that I found the words I’d been looking for in a homely guidebook in the foundation’s library. It was Kretzmann and McKnight’s book, and the term they used was “asset-based community development.”

In an 11-page introduction to the book, Kretzmann and McKnight explained that the traditional approach to low-income neighborhoods was understandable but wrong. As outsiders, we view these places as the sum of their problems: “crime and violence, of joblessness and welfare dependency, of gangs and drugs and homelessness, of vacant and abandoned land and buildings.” This causes us to conclude they are essentially hopeless: “needy and problematic and deficient neighborhoods populated by needy and problematic and deficient people.”

One result, they continued, is that we throw the residents a lifeline in the form of welfare and a mixture of social programs. These programs don’t solve the residents’ or their neighborhood’s problems; they “guarantee only survival and can never led to serious change or community development.”

What’s needed for change—for altering the fate of neighborhoods and the lives of people and not just easing their pain—is a new way of thinking about these communities, not as a collection of needs but as a wealth of assets that haven’t yet been identified, organized and made productive. What assets? They are “the capacities, skills and assets” of the residents and the neighborhood itself. And you find these assets in three forms, Kretzmann and McKnight say: in individuals, associations (formal and informal groups of various kinds) and institutions (from churches, businesses and schools to police stations and neighborhood parks). Most of the book is given over to showing how to find these assets and what to do with them once they’re found.

I knew instantly what Kretzmann and McKnight were talking about. Their notion of asset-based community development was the same as Linda Griego’s belief that South-Central L.A. teemed with productive businesses and potential markets, and what was needed were ways of harnessing this productivity and unleashing the potential. But there was also in the asset-based approach the wisdom of Delray Beach: that real change can’t happen until the community is a full-fledged partner in its own development—and not a supplicant. As Kretzmann and McKnight write:

. . . All the historic evidence indicates that significant community development takes place only when local community people are committed to investing themselves and their resources in the effort. This observation explains why communities are never built from the top down or from the outside in.

Yes, Kretzmann and McKnight are careful to add, outside resources are almost always needed, but these resources are effective only when requested by local leaders and matched by local efforts:

. . . Outside resources will be much more effectively used if the local community is itself fully mobilized and invested, and if it can define the agendas for which additional resources must be obtained.

OK, this isn’t great writing. In fact, at one point Kretzmann and McKnight caution that their book “is not a novel.” It’s meant to be read as a handbook, skipping from section to section as needed. But for community developers or others who care about cities, there’s as much wisdom here about the human assets of cities as you’ll find in Jane Jacobs’ descriptions of the physical assets.

There’s one more thing: The greatest obstacle to effective action in cities is the complexity of communities. People are frozen because they don’t know where to start. “Building Communities from the Inside Out” tells us not only how to make sense of places but where to begin our efforts to improve them. Literally. One of its final chapters outlines a five-step process: Map the assets, build relationships, mobilize for economic development and information sharing, convene the community to develop a vision and plan, and (only then) seek outside help.

If you want inspiring prose and a dead-on analysis of the physical assets and street life of cities, turn to Jane Jacobs, who probably did write the greatest book ever about cities. But if your tasks involve changing attitudes, peeling back layers of cynicism and apathy, and rallying groups to improve the places they live, then Kretzmann and McKnight have written the book for you. And by anyone’s measure, it’s a great one.

Photo of Jane Jacobs book ad by Pdxcityscape licensed under Creative Commons.

The Next Urban Comeback

Lesson Five: Vision and Demographics

Lesson One: It’s All About Land Use

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