How Cincinnati Salvaged the Nation's Most Dangerous Neighborhood

After the residential real estate market collapsed a decade ago, a developer that had been revitalizing an impoverished Jacksonville neighborhood with single-family homes pivoted to a broader approach to reducing crime and blight. Progress has been difficult, and violence in the neighborhood remains high. But, by building larger complexes and offering an array of services and interventions, Northwest Jacksonville Community Development Corporation is achieving slow but steady social change.

SHIELDS for Families works in one of the country's most notoriously dilapidated housing projects to revitalize the neighborhood by providing education, treatment and counseling services.

Alleys in Seattle were once places of illicit, illegal, and unsanitary activity. The International Sustainability Institute in Seattle began organizing music and art events to bring in people, which, in turn, cleaned-up the crime and garbage. As an urban development strategy, adjacent vacant storefronts re-opened for business and beautification could be seen in new gardens.

Medellin, Colombia has looked to architecture to help combat its high homicide rate and other problems. Over the past few decades there have been massive public architecture development, transit improvements, creation of public spaces that have all contributed to renewing this city.

Community-oriented heat pump group-buying programs work together to secure discounts of 10–20% on heat pump installations. Organized by companies, nonprofits, and local governments, group-buying programs have led to participants saving thousands of dollars and more people participating in climate-forward development.

Guerrilla urbanism by groups like Chattanooga Urbanist Society develop low-cost, short-term interventions to community problems, like installing bike lanes and painting crosswalks, to fill gaps left by local government. Chattanooga Urbanist Society is focused on making the city more pedestrian-friendly and has installed more than 60 benches in the area. The group also accepts service requests from locals to handle issues the local government hasn’t touched.

Community land trusts typically provide affordable housing but now one is responsible for the revival of a family business in New Orleans. Commercial community land trusts are emerging as viable solutions for tenants being displaced by higher rents as well as the revitalization of historically Black centers of commerce. Commercial land trusts are an avenue for the Black community to have “economic self-determination.”

Seattle’s urban agriculture community saw a boom during the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. BIPOC-led urban farms — like YES Farm and Black Star Farmers — had an increase in volunteers and people wanting to help provide food security, agricultural education, and land access to communities who don’t have their basic needs met. In the first half of 2020, the city of Seattle assigned plots of land to 439 new gardeners to pursue urban farming, with nearly half of them going to underrepresented populations.

Jumpstart Germantown and five spinoff programs trained about 1,000 people in the art of locally controlled neighborhood rehabilitation. The Jumpstart programs target particular neighborhoods, mainly mid-range housing stock with vacant and deteriorating conditions, and lend money to newly minted developers to fix and resell the properties. Housing rehabs maintain the character of neighborhoods, rather than gentrifying them or making wholesale redevelopment changes. Beyond the community improvement benefits, the program helps diversify the real estate business and provides employment opportunities.

Twenty high school students enrolled in Territory, an urban design nonprofit, produced a zine and their own quality of life report for West Austin, where many of the students live. The students conducted interviews, surveys, and gathered community input to create the report. It includes sections on public safety, youth empowerment, and mental health.