From Blight to Beauty in the Motor City

In 1988, John George moved his family into a house five blocks north of the Old Redford neighborhood in Detroit. Shortly there after, a crew of drug dealers took up residence in a derelict property behind his home.
“My instinct as a father was to flee,” says George. Instead, he grabbed some nails, a hammer and plywood from a hardware store and boarded up the house.
Almost 30 years later, George is still fixing up deserted properties. Watch the video above to see how his organization, Detroit Blight Busters, is revitalizing the Motor City — one building at a time.
“If you never quit, you can’t lose ’cause you’re still in the game,” says George. “And Detroit is still in the game.”

The Job-Training Program Giving City Kids a Reason to Hope

As urban areas across the nation experience renewal and transformation, Camden, N.J., is at the beginning of its renaissance.
The city — once known as America’s most dangerous — has been experiencing dramatic decreases in gun crime and violence, namely an 80 percent reduction in homicides during the first three months of 2017. That’s good news for Camden, which has also become a testing ground for tech nonprofits that want to help beleaguered youth find their way out of neighborhoods riddled with gang violence and into well-paying tech jobs.
But for Camden’s young residents, an increase in opportunity might not necessarily mean a better economic future.
“We had seen too many times in Camden, programs that had trained young people the same way, the same old skills, the same old methodology. Our young people needed something different,” says Dan Rhoton, executive director for Hopeworks ‘N Camden. “Our young people needed training, they needed healing, so that they could get a career that not only gave them a pathway to the future, but offered them sustainable opportunities now.”
Other nonprofits work to get minority students or young girls interested in tech jobs, but Rhoton says that the biggest challenge most of those organizations face isn’t getting kids interested — it’s that they don’t address the trauma that comes along with poverty or exposure to violence.
By using therapy as a means to address deep issues that can affect work ethic and personal integrity, Hopeworks has been successful in providing a steady stream of quality graduates that are career-focused and mentally prepared for work.
“Our young people have been hurt. Their legs have been broken, and yet we put them at the starting line with everyone else and tell them to run,” says Rhoton. “When they struggle, when they fall over, what too many programs do is they say, ‘Try harder,’ or they say, ‘You’re not motivated.’ If my leg is broken, motivation is not the issue — healing is.”
Hopeworks began 17 years ago under the guidance of three faith-based community leaders that “looked out on the streets and saw young people with no dreams, saw young people with no opportunities,” says Rhoton. The program was meant to address some of the biggest challenges in Camden at the time: getting teens from the tough streets of one of America’s most challenging and economically poor cities into more fulfilling careers in tech.
With a background working at detention centers and bringing education to those formerly incarcerated, Rhoton came to Hopeworks in 2012. At the time, the organization was experiencing problems, namely that it was only seeing a 10 percent success rate.
“We were bad at our job,” he says, adding that the low success rate was the catalyst for Hopeworks to focus on personal issues, such as abuse or neglect that can hamper a student’s ability to learn. “We decided that a 10 percent, or 20 percent, 30 percent success rate wasn’t okay.”
“Yes, young people need to learn technology, but if you can help them deal with what’s happened to them, then you can help them show up on time, you can make sure they’re ready for work,” Rhoton says. “It’s harder, it’s longer.”
Brandon Rodriguez, a 19-year-old student intern for Hopeworks and lifelong Camden resident, says that when he joined the organization, he was only looking for a gig learning graphic design.
“When you come into Hopeworks, you have this pre-conceived notion that you’re coming here for an internship, or you’re coming here to just talk to someone. You don’t think you’re gonna get as much as you get.” he says. “I’ve only been here for less than a week, about five days now, but the opportunities started flying my way.”
Student-turned-mentor Frankie Matas graduated in 2013. Today he works with incoming Hopeworks students.
“Everybody learns different. If some people need to show them a different way, I help them in that aspect,” he says. “Hopeworks noticed that about me, and that’s what got me to become the first youth trainer. It helped me become a better leader.”
That aspect of youth training and leadership is key, says Rhoton.
“It’d be one thing if someone who looked like me was teaching you how to code, but if it’s someone who, just a few weeks ago, was standing on the corner with you, that’s a powerful message about who can do it, and how you can do it,” says Rhoton.
To that extent, Hopeworks has been successful since Rhoton came on board. The program has seen a 300 percent increase in students going into college and employs nearly 50 students each year after graduation to work within their studios, which take in $600,000 in annual revenue designing websites, among other things. Other participants land part-time and full-time jobs in the tech market, says Rhoton.
“What we wanna do is we wanna make sure we change the equation,” says Rhoton. “So that our young people are not only able to change their lives, but they’re able to change lives in the next generation, as well.
The 2017 AllStars program is produced in partnership with Comcast NBCUniversal and celebrates social entrepreneurs who are powering solutions with innovative technology. Visit NationSwell.com/AllStars from Oct. 2 to Nov. 2 to vote for your favorite AllStar. The winner will receive the AllStar Award, a $10,000 grant to help further his or her work advocating for change.
 
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Why Boston Asked Its Youth to Determine How to Spend $1 Million

As America inches closer to the 2015 election, a new wave of initiatives to engage the country’s youth will soon follow. But instead of launching social media campaigns or canvasing college campuses to capture their attention, Boston is empowering young people to care by involving them in the budget process.
Earlier this year the city launched the Youth Lead the Change project, a participatory budget (PB) process inviting young people between the ages of 12 and 25 to give input into how Boston spends $1 million in public capital. The project—the first of its kind in the United States—was limited to “bricks and mortar” funding, ranging in categories including education, community culture, parks/environment/health and streets and safety.
Young Bostonians worked on designing the PB process as well as with city officials on project proposals, spending priorities and current projects in place. The pilot included projects ranging from improving community centers and renovating parks to neighborhood safety and creating new public art space.
Officials then set up voting booths throughout the city at schools, transit stops and community centers from June 14 to June 20. Young people were encouraged to vote for four of the 14 projects showcased, using digital tools such as SMS, Vimeo videos with Mayor Marty Walsh and a custom built platform for ideation collection, according to New York University’s Governance Lab. Young Boston residents joined Mayor Walsh to celebrate the winners this week, which include:
1. Franklin Park Playground and Picnic Area upgrade ($400,000)
2. Boston “Art Walls,” public spaces for local artists to display work ($60,000)
3. Chromebook laptops for three area high-school classrooms ($90,000)
4. Skatepark feasibility study ($50,000)
5. Security cameras for the community near Dr. Loesch Family Park ($105,000)
6. Paris Street Playground makeover ($100,000)
7. Renovate sidewalks and lighting around two Boston parks ($110,000)
The city worked in collaboration with the Participatory Budget Project (PBP), a nonprofit geared towards assisting local, national and international organizations with empowering citizens to become decision makers in the public budget process. More national cities like Chicago and New York have also pledged to use participatory budget practices in partnership with PBP, but perhaps the key to unlocking greater civic participation is focusing on America’s next generation.
Rather than targeting political messaging to young people, let the youth be the architects creating that message. If we begin to foster an environment that empowers young people to be a part of the solution, improving parks and creating art space is just the start of where we can take American progress.
MORE: How Mobile Apps Help Local Governments Connect with Citizens

The Rise of the Innovation District

Thanks in large part to an understanding of the industrial economy after World War II, cooperation between our universities, businesses, and government helped produce an explosion of growth and prosperity that benefitted more Americans than ever before.
After the Great Recession, we know just how much globalization and technology has altered that landscape, but Brookings, a non-partisan think tank, believes we may be on the verge of retooling this partnership for the 21st century economy in the form of “innovation districts.”
So what is an innovation district? It’s a physically compact, transit-accessible, and technically-wired urban area where public institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups to drive growth and, you guessed it, innovation.
But these districts aren’t like the isolated corporate campuses of the past. They double as actual neighborhoods — communities containing an abundance of housing, retail, and recreation that support a vibrant local economy.
Innovation districts are also characterized by choice and flexibility, allowing cities from Buffalo to Baltimore to develop in ways that best suit their geographic, cultural, and economic needs. While these decisions depend on the pre-existing resources in each city, every district contains a mix of similar elements to revitalize and sustain the ecosystem:
– Drivers are the high-value “anchors” focused on developing cutting-edge technologies, products, and services. Examples include applied sciences research institutions, creative fields such as industrial design, media and architecture, as well as specialized, small batch manufacturing.
– Cultivators are second-tier organizations supporting the growth of individuals, firms, and ideas, such as incubators, accelerators, co-working spaces, schools, and job training firms advancing specific skill sets for the innovation economy.
– Physical assets are the public and privately-owned spaces — real estate (both commercial and residential), parks, and infrastructure like wifi and transportation — that attract new residents and business and sustain quality of life.
– Networking assets develop the human relationships central to building community and driving innovation through trade organizations, workshops, informal learning opportunities, social events, and hyper-local media platforms.
Neighborhood amenities provide important support services to residents and workers in the district ranging from medical offices to grocery stores, restaurants, coffee bars, hotels and retail.
Perhaps most importantly, these districts promote inclusive growth. At a time of rising economic inequality, their mix of public/private funding, focus on education, as well as their proximity to low- and moderate-income neighborhoods could mean a significant expansion of opportunity for those still struggling to adapt to the new economy.
DON’T MISS: 5 Urban Renewal Projects That Could Help America
Growth and prosperity will most likely look differently than it did in those years after WWII, but as we determine how to close the digital divide and equip Americans with the skills they need, innovation districts are a sustainable step in the right direction. Check out the latest Brookings report to find out what your city is doing to develop its own district.
 

These Towns Show What Even Temporary Urban Renewal Can Bring

Have you ever passed by an uninspiring stretch of your city and thought, ‘What this place needs is a beer garden?’
The citizens of several cities in Colorado did, and now they’re taking urban renewal into their own hands, creating temporary spruce-ups of blighted areas to show what is possible — and perhaps inspire permanent changes in the future. In Golden, community members zeroed in on a couple of blocks of a street named Miners Alley. That particular stretch was just steps away from downtown, but the spaces weren’t being put to any inspiring use. As Colleen O’Connor writes for the Denver Post, the street is “mostly used for deliveries to businesses that front bustling Washington Avenue.” But during the first weekend of June, citizens threw a street party called Better Block Golden there.
The volunteer-run event featured a pop-up beer garden, bands, art projects for kids, new landscaping, a vibrant Aspen tree mural, café seating and plenty to eat and drink. “If we like it, we can start making some permanent changes,” Golden’s Mayor Marjorie Sloan told O’Connor.
The project was inspired by The Better Block, a website that tracks and encourages such local improvements to urban landscapes across the country and around the world. Elsewhere, Street Plans Collaborative, an urban planning firm, offers a free guide on how to pull off quick city transformations like “guerilla gardening” and “pavement-to-parks” on its website.
Several other Colorado cities are getting in on the block-improvement movement, including Colorado Springs, where the group Colorado Springs Urban Intervention is hanging signs pointing the way for pedestrians to find easy and safe urban places to walk. They also transformed an ill-used block into the site of Curbside Cuisine, a gathering of food trucks.
“We wanted to change the dialogue on Colorado Springs,” co-founder of Colorado Spring Urban Intervention John Olson told O’Connor. “Instead of dreaming about things, let’s do it. Stop the chatter, and show that it will work. We heard too many times that Colorado Springs isn’t Portland, and it won’t work. But it’s doing fantastic.”
So the next time you walk past a blighted block, don’t be surprised by the transformations yet to come.
MORE: Cycling Tourism Has the Potential to Transform this Hardscrabble New Mexico Town
 

Southwest Airlines Sets Its Sight on Cities, Not Skies

Southwest Airlines is taking its services on the ground, giving cities a boost with urban design.
The national airline has partnered with New York-based nonprofit Project for Public Spaces to launch a three-year initiative — the Heart of the Community grant program — working with cities to revitalize urban areas through construction of new or redesigned public spaces or funding new or ongoing programs.
Southwest has already completed three pilot projects in Detroit, San Antonio and Providence, Rhode Island. Up next? The company will turn its attention to Baltimore, where they’ll work with the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore to rehab the city’s Pratt and Light Plaza.
“We’re in the business of taking people from place to place,” said Marilee McInnis, Southwest’s senior manager of communications, “so we want to support and create and revitalize these places.”
The Pratt and Light area, which the Downtown Partnership’s vice president of communications Michael Evitts described as a “glorified, huge sidewalk,” was built in the 1960s to connect two interstate highways, according to Fast Company. The vast empty, concrete space is currently used to house a farmer’s market. But the city has long sought to revamp the area and the funding from Southwest will give the initiative new interest and fresh ideas from community members.
MORE: 5 European Urban Renewal Projects That Could Help America
The Downtown Partnership will host community workshops to welcome local ideas and hopes to finalize a plan by the fall.

“A lot of what downtown Baltimore is trying to do is undo the best thinking of the previous generation,” Evitts said. “Urban planning in the ’60s was very dictatorial. There was a lot of concrete; people were an afterthought.” Now, it’s more about “encouraging those human moments within urban design.”

The Heart of the Community program is currently accepting applications for 2015 and plans to announce grants for two or three additional communities by the year’s end. Each city will receive funding depending on the project, but the company has not disclosed how much it plans to donate over the next three years.

Have an idea to give your city a facelift? Submit your application by September 15. The only parameter? Your community must fall within one of the 95 urban regions served by Southwest.

No Soil? Or Sun? This Urban Farm is Raising Fresh Food in a Whole New Way

With no natural dirt or sunlight, an abandoned brewery may be the most unlikely spot for a farm producing kale and tilapia. But with a little help from technology, St Paul, Minnesota has turned a shuttered industrial space into a source for fresh produce and seafood.
The food-based urban renewal project is spearheaded by local company Urban Organics, which focuses on using an aquaponics system — where fish and plants help each other grow. The ideas is that aquaculture — like fish or shrimp — uses water from hydroponics, or cultivating plants in water, for mutually beneficial agriculture.
In East St. Paul, the local Hamm’s Brewery has long been a local landmark, once symbolizing the neighborhood’s livelihood before it closed in 1997. The shuttering left many without jobs in an area that was in much need of urban renewal.
MORE: What’s ‘the Country’s Best Smart Growth Project’? You’ll Be Surprised

“Hamm’s and 3M provided most of the jobs in East St. Paul, and they shut down within a few years of each other,” said Dave Haider, an Urban Organics cofounder who runs day-to-day operations.

With the help of $300,000 in grants and loans from the city of St. Paul, as well as private backers, Hamm’s is once again giving the community something to boast about.

The aquaponics technology was purchased from Pentair (PAES), a Swiss-based multibillion dollar company that makes industrial fluid-control systems. In three tiers, plants float atop polystrene rafts in plastic troughs while roots drip down into the fishwater — all of this stacked atop 18-foot-high racks illuminated by bright lights.

The leafy greens are electric in color, benefiting from the aquaponics system that uses nutrient-filled wastewater (from four 3,500-gallon tanks stocked with tilapia) to irrigate and fertilize the plants before redirecting it back to the fish as clean water. The closed-loop system may be the largest indoor facility such as this in the country, according to Fast Company.

Without using any soil, the sophisticated system uses about 25 percent of the water needed to grow greens conventionally while using 40 percent less energy than most office buildings. The system can produce about 75 fish a week but the plan is to add more tanks to increase production to 150,000 pounds of fish and 720,000 pounds of greens annually. Produce is available to local consumers within 24 hours of harvest.

The ambitious project took two years to build before its launch this past April. Urban Organics’s first harvest of tilapia was delivered in early April to 20 Lunds & Byerly’s locations, a local grocery store chain.

The high-tech farm is a test case for this new type of urban farming, with hopes that it will serve as a model for other places around the country. Pentair already serves customers in North and South America, Scandinavia, Asia and Saudi Arabia. Randy Hogan, Pentair’s chairman and CEO, said they are now working with entrepreneurs in Kansas City and Chicago.

Though Urban Organics employs only a handful of people, the group is collaborating with a local restaurant, craft brewer, and a distiller to grown some of their botanicals. Urban Organics co-founder Fred Haberman said expectations are high, but the local reaction to seeing a “symbol of decay turned into an asset” is an empowering reason to continue serving the community.

What Cities Can Learn From San Francisco’s Newest Public Housing Project

The extreme wealth of Silicon Valley has catapulted real estate prices in San Francisco into exorbitant territory, all while the cost of living continues to rise — reinforcing the City by the Bay’s reputation as one of America’s priciest urban areas.
In fact, a recent study by the Brookings Institute (a nonprofit, independent research organization) found that San Francisco ranks number one for fastest growing income inequality gap in the United States, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
In an effort to keep its low-income residents, city officials have launched the Hope SF campaign, a public housing revitalization initiative to rebuild five of the worst welfare housing sites, turning them into mixed-income communities.
MORE: How Do You Redevelop an Infamous Housing Project? Chicago Has an Idea
Their hope? To provide existing residents a chance at staying put rather than taking a voucher and moving out of the community. Hope SF residents have the option to live onsite during construction and are guaranteed a place in the new housing.
Hunters View is the first site to be redeveloped, according to Fast Company. The project’s design calls for 267 public housing apartments, 83 subsidized units and 450 market-rate homes. Officials broke ground on Hunters View in April and have already completed construction on 107 affordable apartments.
The site initially consisted of 260 units built for shipyard workers after World War II. Although it was eventually transferred to the housing authority, Hunters View was never intended to last more a decade. The new apartments, however, are built to last 75 years.
Rich Gross, the president of Enterprise Community Partners, a company involved in the campaign touts Hope SF as the “single most important urban initiative in the country.” But public housing is just one component of Hope SF’s mission to close the inequality gap. The project is also raising money to fund job-training workshops, community gardens, healthy eating classes and other beneficial programs for residents. For Hope SF, the goal is to give existing residents, who take home an average income of $12,000, a boost to catch up with the rest of the city.
“This is different. There’s a commitment to work with current residents,” Gross said. “This changes a long history of urban renewal.”

How Do You Redevelop an Infamous Housing Project? Chicago Has an Idea

When the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) broke ground on the Cabrini-Green public housing project in 1942, the country was undergoing a rash of urban renewal initiatives. City officials were clearing out slums and placing residents into affordable housing. At its peak, the Frances Cabrini Row-houses and William Green Homes housed 15,000 people. The tide turned on these residences, however. By the time the last of the network of high-rises and row houses was demolished in 2011, the project was infamous for gang violence and squalid living conditions.
With only scattered low-rise units and dozens of acres of vacant land remaining, CHA has a new idea for urban renewal. The “Plan Forward: Communities That Work” proposal, introduced last year, aims to redevelop Cabrini-Green and the Near North Side, in addition to replacing or rehabbing 25,000 subsidized housing units in the city by 2015 (a goal originally set for 2010), reports Atlantic Cities.
A PDF of the plan envisions the area to include new buildings, retail, green space, and a new L-train station. An area once known for its housing units will become home to a mix of residential property types: CHA says half the new residential units to be market rate, another 30 percent public housing, and the remaining 20 percent affordable housing.
The proposal also breathes new life into what remains of Cabrini-Green. Though all of the William Green Homes have been razed, the Francis Cabrini row homes still stand. The remaining 583 72-year-old structures are eligible for the National Park Service’s register for historic properties. About 150 of those units were renovated in 2008, while the the others remain vacant. CHA’s new plan recommends preserving 30 percent of those and demolishing the remaining units to extend the nearby street grid.
In the Near North Side, where Cabrini-Green once fully stood, gentrification has taken root, alarming critics that worry about how the plan will serve the residents that used to live there. With a Target and high-end condos already in the neighborhood, is time already up for them? Lawrence Vale wrote for Design Observer in 2012, that “in the coming years the former site of Cabrini-Green will fill up with new housing; and there is equally little doubt that not much of this housing will serve the residents who once lived in the vanished projects.”
Things like 2000’s Consent Decree for the residences of Cabrini-Green seems to address these concerns. The decree includes a mandate for 700 public housing units in the Near North Area and the creation of the “Near North Working Group.” As of now, 434 units have been built. The NNWG, represented by a collection of government and housing officials, now provides “overall direction” for future development.
According to Atlantic Cities, a request for proposals from developers is expected sometime this month; after that, new designs will go through a public approval process and financing still has to be secured. But with a year to go until 25,000 units are replaced or rehabbed, there is still hope for the land that once was Cabrini-Green.