The Secrets of a Comeback Neighborhood

The Recipe for a Comeback Neighborhood

Each Mayor and city council would like to have access to a secret recipe that would wake up lackluster communities and neighborhoods from slumber and decline and turn them around so they become pleasant places that generate taxes and have happy residents. Something like this: 

"Take one fresh, vibrant anchor institution and an equally sized social justice organization and mix in a diverse set of stakeholders and stir for some time. Add a few Millennials, baby boomers and immigrants, a dose of starts-ups and let the mix simmer on low heat. Now add a catalyst and spice freely with bike paths, street-scaping and a whiff of greenery. For a note of experimental flavor add some galleries and art crawls, for a more savory traditional note use brew pubs and bar crawls instead. Decorate with a coffee shop, car share, bike share and a farmers market and voila, your comeback neighborhood is ready! Enjoy!"

outdoor eating: an ingredient of come back?

This recipe is only partly tongue in cheek, but leaves the conundrum that potential residents pick their city for authenticity, while a recipe approach can only create cookie cutter results that are anything but authentic.

More serious other questions galore: Can come-back neighborhoods be fashioned at all through policy or do they emerge on their own power (through the "market") in such a way that government policies would only create an obstacle to what would happen anyway?

If policies can create come-back neighborhoods, should they aim for the worst case neighborhoods or for those with enough strength to be ready to "pop"? 

Some 30 years ago in Baltimore, socially-minded developer Jim Rouse and new African American ivy league Mayor Kurt Schmoke teamed up to fix Sandtown, which both characterized as one of the most disinvested communities in America. After investments of over $120 million made little visible difference, Schmoke's successor, the white Mayor Martin O'Malley, drew from a different strategy: "Building from Strength". In that approach scarce resources where used in a "triage" where a small investment could save an entire neighborhood from tipping into the wrong direction. That policy was enshrined in policy papers from Brookings and O'Malley advisor Paul Brophy among others.

"Build from market strength wherever it can be found. The long-standing governmental intervention strategy to try to improve the most distressed city neighborhoods has been challenging for populationlosing cities.5 What’s been missing is an understanding of neighborhoods in their market context. Increasingly, city planners and neighborhood improvement specialists are reporting that neighborhood improvement approaches that build from market strength are more likely to be successful than when that market strength is absent." (Paul Brophy, Goldsecker series Great Neighborhoods, Great Cities)

With last year's unrest and the Freddie Grey trial in the national and international spotlight, the attention has returned to Sandtown. Did the "building from strength" approach leave too many neighborhoods too far behind?

Sandtown (photo: Washington Post)

The question of what really makes a sad, disinvested and sad-looking neighborhood work again came into focus when I wrote two articles trying to name Baltimore's "comeback neighborhoods". I attempted to counter the widespread perception that my city was a basket case by reminding folks how many city neighborhoods had actually turned the corner leaving out communities always thrived and never really declined into a state where the doctor was needed. (Maybe the medical metaphor is more suitable than the one of cooking and baking, prescriptions instead of recipes).

Reviewing local success neighborhoods makes certain patterns discernible but answers are not as simple as the questions. For one thing, actual catalytic events are hard to pin-point. In the parlance of statisticians, it isn't always possible to distinguish cause and effect or causation and correlation. The real causes of a turn-around often remain murky because there are too many variables in play, the process takes too long and, instead of a straight trajectory, there are loopy sets of ups and downs that look more like going in circles than progress. Still, some neighborhoods really did kind of "pop" making the hope of being able to delineate the key causes not entirely futile.

In the literature about urban re-development the following topics 

• Anchor institutions
• Location and natural assets
• Strong neighboring communities
• Strong community organizations
• Catalytic projects and enlightened developers
• Pioneering residents and businesses

In my own Baltimore sampling of recent turn-around communities one finding became quickly obvious: the absence of cases representing government-sponsored big plans  This is surprising since Baltimore is globally known for a government-orchestrated comeback: Baltimore's Inner Harbor, a large-scale redevelopment that involved a government-sponsored design masterplan, condemnation, government-issued requests for proposals and strict design review during implementation. That approach was repeated in a somewhat weakened fashion for what is now known Harbor East, also a success story but one where government relinquished control soon after having laid the groundwork. The City had sponsored an award winning masterplan and paid and built the basic infrastructure and roads but later let a master-developer take over. 
The only current project with a strong government handwriting is the East Baltimore bio-tech park and community redevelopment known as EBDI. But it doesn't yet sit in the success column since it is languishing incomplete in a balance where a verdict about success or failure would be premature.

This in itself is a finding with meaning beyond this city, government's role in the transformation of cities seems to be receding with semi government agencies and fully private "master developers" taking over the slack.

Johns Hopkins in background, redevelopment area in
foreground

Anchors

Around the nation reliance on anchor institutions has become one of the most popular economic development and revitalization approaches. In Baltimore and elsewhere strong institutions existed  for much too long surrounded by failing and disinvested communities without taken any notice. Those locations where just where the institutions historically happened to be. The thought that unsettled surroundings could jeopardize the very future of institutions such as Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland or the Maryland College of Art (MICA) seemed far fetched. 

The same had been true in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston and elsewhere. Until crime and quality of life infractions rose to levels that kicked them into action. Pioneers were Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Today it is a recognized best practice that these institutions reach out to their surrounding communities, create partnerships and outreach and invest in neighborhood-level, off-campus improvements. 

"Urban universities are crucial institutional participants in, and promulgators of, this diversity. We are among the anchor institutions, including hospitals, nonprofit organizations, religious and cultural institutions, community-based organizations, and public agencies, that persist across generations as sources of stability as well as innovation, providing jobs, stimulating cultural life, and contributing new ideas that drive economic development. It is the interplay of strengths among anchor institutions in collaboration with the empowered voices of citizens and the availability of dense infrastructure that makes imaginative re-envisioning of the urban landscape possible." Nancy Cantor, Peter Englot, and Marilyn Higgins, Journal of Higher Education #17, 2013

In Baltimore the Bloomberg School of Public Health finally found that it had to tend to the same problems in its backyard it had traditionally addressed in far away African countries. MICA developed a Social Design curriculum that not only brought branch classrooms into downtrodden communities but also proved to be a hit with students.  When the riots hit Baltimore at the intersection of Penn and North, MICA had already built a dormitory less than a 1/2 a mile down the street and rehabilitated vacant factory buildings off campus on North Avenue as important seeds in the fledgling Station North Arts and Entertainment district. 

In summary, one can say that anchors are ideal catalysts for neighborhood transformation if they are strong and thriving and find sufficient overlap between their own mission and community investment. On the other hand, institutions that are themselves overburdened by their core mission of service to disenfranchised communities have a much harder time to effectively reach out with investment. Examples of such cases in Baltimore include the historically black college of Coppin University (which suffers from shrinking enrollment and one of the lowest graduation rates in the country) and Bon Secours Hospital which serves an indigent population that cannot pay for services and usually gets their care from visiting the emergency room, a practice leaving the hospital in precarious financial conditions.

Patterson Park, Baltimore

Natural Attractions

Baltimore's waterfront communities were the first to turn around even in times of rapid population decline. Neighborhoods around Baltimore's Patterson Park began a marked upswing after the non-profit group Friends of Patterson Park began cleaning up the large park, turning it from a liability (unsafe) into an asset (an amenity). Neighborhoods around other Baltimore parks such as Druid Hill Park or Leakin Park continued to languish, showing that "natural" attraction alone may not turn a neighborhood, unless it is combined with strong neighbors and strong community organizations. In the case of Patterson Park it was not only the park non-profit but also a focused community development corporation which managed vacant property, the filling of that property, and the rehabilitation and sale of substandard homes. Overall, though, cities that have natural assets to leverage can certainly compete better in the global competition of cities and the sought after quality of life. Denver wouldn't be what it is without the nearby Rockies, San Diego wouldn't thrive without the Pacific. It is astounding though, how long it takes cities to recognize or uncover the power of this strength. 

Strong Neighbors

Bulding from strength can refer to anchor institutions, social capital or a blessed natural setting. But maybe the strongest stimulant for a recovery is if a neighboring community is thriving and runs out of real estate. Baltimore's thriving Canton and Fells Point waterfront communities expanded north into Butchers Hill and Patterson Park, Highlandtown and Brewers Hill all can be considered come-back communities. In the same manner Federal Hill, perched above Baltimore's Inner Harbor, expanded into South Baltimore and lately even into the historic African American community of Sharp Leadenhall, "Even" because investment doesn't easily jump across clearly defined racial borders, a condition that clearly is an impediment in a city so strongly segregated as Baltimore. The continuity of a full quilt of strong communities is a great plus in a time when real estate websites publish "walk-scores" with their listings and "walkability" has become a planner buzz word. At a time when the car ruled, a patchwork of healthy neighborhoods interrupted by swaths of freeways, industrial uses or decay may have been acceptable, not anymore!

Highlandtown is helped by immigration and
adjacent healthy communities 

Strong Community Organizations

We noted already Patterson Park as an example for strong social capital. The traditional almost historic example in Baltimore is Fells Point and its fight against urban freeways which not only defeated the freeways but saved a large swath of historic communities that are today one of Baltimore's most visited attractions. To this day the community organizations of Fells Point are a force to be reckoned with. The example teaches so many lessons for comeback communities: the benefit of preservation of historic stock, the benefit of social capital and the lesson that building strong social engagement can pay off for decades. This social, non brick and mortar aspect of revitalization is frequently overlooked. Many times, investment into building community strength on the human level should be the first step of recovery, not a built "project", catalytic or otherwise. 

Catalytic projects and enlightened developers

So far the forces that can turn a community around have been pretty obvious. The question of catalytic projects and who advances them is much more complex. Even communities that have locational advantages like Canton (waterfront) or Locust Point (waterfront) need someone to invest in a manner that changes the way a community is seen.  In both Baltimore examples the change came initially from forward-looking developer William Struever, who as early as 1985 converted canneries into higher-end apartments and condos at the Canton waterfront, and later repeated the same approach on a larger scale across the water on the shore of Locust Point by buying and converting the old Proctor and Gamble soap factory which today is Under Armour's global headquarters. It took these pioneering and creative projects to show the regional developer community that "gold" was not only to be found in the suburbs, but that it could be found in the derelict ruins of the industrial age, a lesson that had been learned in Rotterdam and London long before Baltimore. 

Union Mill, teacher housing (photo: ArchPlan)

A much more recent local example is Seawall Development in Baltimore, a company buying old rather non- descript factory and mill buildings in fringe neighborhoods and setting off a series of larger investments with an initial conversion of those factories into affordable teacher housing with associated support facilities. This approach is genial, it creates affordable housing, helps to retain or attract teachers to city schools and converts neighborhoods that had been previously overlooked. Those developers are doing well by doing good, a difficult approach fraught with risk and complicated funding mechanism that may include all kinds of tax credits from historic to low income. The Seawall example shows that the boom in adaptive re-use conversions does not have to end with waterfront warehouses but can carry forth deep into the less prominent neighborhoods.

Pioneer residents and businesses

Even the most progressive and risk-friendly developer could not realize successful catalytic projects if there weren't pioneering residents and anchor businesses to populate their developments. One of the tried and true pioneer populations are artists. MICA's rapid growth as an anchor institution and its reach deep into the Station North Arts and Entertainment District would not have worked without pioneering artists that opened galleries and new venues that are part performance space, part gallery and part bar or restaurant. Another strong pioneering demographic are immigrants, which have re-populated many communities and cities across America. In Baltimore, that process took off slowly. Highlandtown and Upper Fells Point are probably the best examples of come-back communities fueled by ethnic groups such as immigrants from Latin America.

The much written about Millennials could be also noted as urban pioneers, even though their preference for cities is predicated on a series of qualities that a city has to offer before it becomes their destination. Baltimore's fairly large list of come-back communities listed as examples above has probably contributed to the fact that the city is doing pretty well when it comes to attracting this generation of new urban dwellers. This is a case where chicken and egg or cause and effect are not so easy to distinguish, except that one can say that a positive feedback loop is at work here.

artist housing and  studios in an old factory:
Copy Cat Baltimore (ArchPlan)

The lesson about pioneers is that it often takes a different view to see potential. Many cities and neighborhoods in decline propagate that the protection of those who have been in the community for ages should come first and that revitalization should come from within. As legitimate as this view is, experience shows that new blood and different perspectives can move a city forward in addition to the fact that shrinking cities need new taxpayers and consumers to keep the afloat.

Conclusion

This cursory run through of some of the main factors that can create come-back communities is far from complete. There was no mention of schools (an ever larger portion of urban residents has no children), or crime, two aspects that traditionally have been mentioned first by politicians striving for revitalization. But even this abbreviated overview shows that rarely does one factor works in isolation.

Not only do several of these usually have to come together in a synergistic way, they also need to be accompanied by a lot of smaller and larger system interventions, from transportation to food

South Park come-back neighborhood, San Diego
(ArchPlan)

distribution and educational facilities to name just a few. In the end, we have to return to the recipe we made up in the beginning. Just like a good meal, a successful come-back community does not only need the basic ingredients, it needs sides, spices and often gravy (subsidies). Bikeshare and bikeshops, healthy food markets, good restaurants and rich historic architecture and a lively music scene are just a few of those spices that provide the right community flavor. Here, too, cause and effect are hard to delineate, once again we are talking about positive feedback loops.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff, JD

A list of Baltimore's come-back neighborhoods can be found on these blog posts:

Baltimore's Comeback Neighborhoods (Part1 ), (Part 2)

Links and Sources:

Anchor Institutions and their Role in Metropolitan Change (Penn Institute for Urban Research)

Locust Point: Comeback neighborhood, Baltimore

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