Posted in Community Close Ups
New case studies show community developers are partnering to create neighborhoods where everyone can be healthier Innovative community developers are making a real difference in the neighborhoods they are revitalizing, creating places that offer the physical, social and economic resources that all people need in order to live healthy lives. Cross-sector collaboration is a given in these projects, as are new ways of thinking about community revitalization. At the Build Healthy Places Network, we are excited by the potential these projects have to create lasting change for low-income communities.
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Hospital Partners with Housing Authority to Put Health at the Center of a Neighborhood Transformation In the early 2000s, Stamford Hospital began planning a major expansion. Located in Stamford, Connecticut’s West Side neighborhood, the 305-bed regional hospital envisioned a large new state-of-the-art addition to its facility. The hospital owned various pieces of real estate in the nearby neighborhood, but none were contiguous with its existing campus. Meanwhile, Charter Oak Communities (COC), a public-private entity that evolved out of the Stamford Housing Authority, was exploring ways to replace its outdated public housing complexes on the West Side.
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Trauma-Informed Community Building Sets Stage for Neighborhood Revitalization Susan Neufeld, Vice President of Resident Programs and Services for BRIDGE Housing Corporation (BRIDGE), describes the existing 606-unit Potrero Terrace and Annex housing projects as “an island of poverty in a sea of wealth.” Unlike many distressed public housing complexes that are surrounded by other disadvantaged neighborhoods, residents of Potrero Terrace and Annex, with a median annual income of $14,000, are surrounded by Potrero Hill neighbors making ten times that much.
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Tipping Point: Deep, Neighborhood-Scale Transformation Creates Lasting Change Of the East Lake Meadows public housing project before revitalization, says Carol Naughton of Purpose Built Communities, “the only thing that was working was the drug trade.” Frequently called “Little Vietnam” – as in, a war zone — the Atlanta neighborhood grappled with extreme poverty, violent crime, abysmal educational outcomes and high unemployment. The poorly built, 40-year-old public housing was in severe disrepair. For kids, East Lake Meadows functioned mostly as a pipeline into the Georgia penal system.
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Revitalizing People and Place with a Healthy Food Hub After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the founders of what became Broad Community Connections (BCC) started attending community meetings, and exploring with their fellow community members how to rebuild a city in shambles. These conversations highlighted some of the seemingly intractable problems that many central New Orleans residents had faced even before the storm, such as economic disadvantage, community disinvestment, health disparities, and lack of access to many needed goods and services.
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Creating Access to Opportunity by Building a “Village Center” in a Houston Neighborhood In the 1970s during Houston’s oil boom, the city’s Gulfton neighborhood sprouted street after street of luxury apartment complexes catering to the single young professionals pouring in to work in the oil industry. Swimming pools, hot tubs, and even a disco seemed essential in the complexes, while neighborhood developers simply skipped building sidewalks, parks or other public amenities. When the bottom dropped out of oil a decade later and the oil professionals left, rents in these complexes plummeted too.
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Weaving Together Opportunities for Healthier Lives for a Diverse Immigrant Community “Wherever there is conflict in the world, a few years later you start to see that population showing up here,” says Andriana Abariotes, executive director of Twin Cities LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation). Minneapolis-St. Paul has a long history of welcoming immigrants and refugees from around the world and is home to many organizations serving these populations. St. Paul’s East Side, where LISC has worked for years, is home to a rich cultural mix of immigrants including Hmong, Somali, Karin, Bhutanese, Sudanese, Latinos and others, alongside Native and African Americans.
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A Hospital Partners with a City to Develop a Health, Literacy and Recreation Hub In 2012, a neighborhood clinic of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in South Philadelphia had outgrown its space and was looking to expand, but in this working class neighborhood of dense row houses, real estate was hard to come by. Meanwhile, the City of Philadelphia operated a health center, a library and a recreation center, in outdated facilities, on a city block of land in the same neighborhood. CHOP approached the city about its need for land, and a partnership emerged.
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Community Development 2.0—Collective Impact Focuses a Neighborhood Strategy for Health Not all community developers are aware that the work they’re doing has the potential to improve health, but the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC) has built health into its strategic plan, and in the neighborhood revitalization work of the San Pablo Area Revitalization Collaborative (SPARC), convened by EBALDC, health is the first priority. The San Pablo Avenue Corridor neighborhood that stretches between downtown Oakland and nearby Emeryville is one of the poorest and most disadvantaged areas of Oakland, California. Here, life expectancy is up to 20 years lower than just a few miles away in the Oakland Hills.
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Holistic Redevelopment to Bring Lasting Change to a Distressed Neighborhood The St. Bernard Public Housing Development was already in severe disrepair and only 75 percent occupied on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit leaving much of the Bayou District neighborhood submerged in eight feet of water. One of four large public housing complexes in New Orleans, the St. Bernard was notorious for its blighted properties, rampant violence, drug activity, and severe poverty. Schools in the area were among the worst in New Orleans, a state whose schools regularly rank as low as 48th in the nation. Katrina rendered the housing complex uninhabitable, and many of the residents scattered as part of the Katrina diaspora.
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This article first appeared on the Urban Institute’s UrbanWire blog on July 20, 2017.
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Frequently, the neighborhoods where many residents grapple with poor health are the very same places where many people are living in poverty. And yet, too often, efforts to address health and those to address poverty are working in silos. Our new case study series shows how community developers working in low-income neighborhoods are integrating health into their projects in ways that are making a real difference in the lives of low-income residents.
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