Posted in Expert Insights
Ashland, CA, is a community in unincorporated Alameda County struggling from decades of disinvestment, high unemployment, and amongst the worst health indicators in the county. The numbers of reentry residents is amongst the highest in the county, further impacting the area’s stability and needs. Despite all this, the community has strong bones to build on.
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This article appears in the Winter 2018 edition of Shelterforce magazine.
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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(COC), a public-private entity that evolved out of the Stamford Housing Authority, was exploring ways to replace its outdated public housing complexes on the West Side.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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**Revised as of July 19, 2017**
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The Mariposa project is on the front lines of a rapidly growing movement seeking to reconnect low-income residents to the critical networks — transit, affordable housing, jobs — that are the cornerstones of opportunity. By centering development efforts around a transit stop, planners are hoping to reinvigorate a neighborhood by connecting its residents to integral supports and services, from hospitals to schools to grocery stores , all while paying heed to the risks of gentrification and displacement.
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When you think of Boston what comes to mind? You may be thinking of American history, world class hospitals, top research institutions and winning sports teams. However, there is another side to Greater Boston, one where more than half of households are rent burdened (paying 30 percent or more of their income on rent) and income inequality is rising – in fact, a 2016 Brookings Institute report ranked Boston as #1 among cities with the highest income inequality nationally. While these statistics are daunting, Boston’s resources and leadership provide a prime opportunity for cross-sector innovation.
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This article first appeared on the Huffington Post blog September 2, 2016 and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation blog on September 5, 2016.
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The Build Healthy Places Network staff presented a webinar for Prevention Institute and The Center for the Study of Social Policy on August 26th. The webinar provided an overview of the
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This article first appeared on the Pew Charitable Trusts blog August 8, 2016.
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Read the full Dispatches series! What meeting did you attend? I presented with the Build Healthy Places Network at the National Association of City and County Health Officials (NACCHO): Cultivating a Culture of Health Equity 2016 annual conference in Phoenix, Arizona. I presented on the following three sessions:
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This Fast Fact is part of a series in partnership with the Georgia Health Policy Center (GHPC), the national coordinating center for Bridging for Health: Improving Community Health Through Innovations in Financing, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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We’re excited to launch our Fast Facts and Jargon Buster Series with the Build Healthy Places Network that will highlight key concepts from our initial research. Explore our postings as we share knowledge and demystify jargon in an effort to strengthen the connection between the worlds of community development and health.
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The Mountain View neighborhood of Anchorage, Alaska, has undergone various reincarnations, but a common concern in recent decades was neglect. Then, at the beginning of the new millennium, community leaders and investors launched a revitalization project. Inspired by Mountain View’s cultural diversity and natural beauty, the practitioners aimed to create a place where families and businesses could grow roots.
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Last summer, we introduced our magazine of stories illustrating the deep connections between neighborhood and health. Our first piece brought readers to two housing developments in Arizona designed for (and with) grandparents raising grandchildren.
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Fact: Since 2011, the federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) has leveraged over $140 million in grants and an estimated $1 billion in additional financing for grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and other healthy food enterprises in low-income food deserts.
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We know that Child Opportunity affects health and varies by zip code. So too a family’s opportunity, especially opportunity to access healthy affordable housing, with low risk of displacement due to gentrification, as explained in this Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) brief.
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This blog series features “quick evidence bites” that highlight the connections between neighborhoods and health and the need for cross-sector solutions for sustained impacts. Tweet these facts and share your own @BHPNetwork #ZIPmatters.
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Build Healthy Places Network senior associate, Daniel Lau, helped low-income families gain access to financial capital. He says our financial and physical health are more closely linked than many of us would like to believe.
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Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies Blog (2/25/15) Not All Hard-Hit Neighborhoods Recover Equally Foreclosures disproportionately hit minority neighborhoods across the U.S. during the housing crisis. In Boston, over 80 percent of foreclosures took place in just five of its 15 planning districts—Dorchester, East Boston, Hyde Park, Mattapan, and Roxbury; nearly 75 percent of the residents in these five districts are non-white, while the remainder of Boston is 70 percent white.
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Does the Earned Income Tax Credit Improve Health?
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Princeton, N.J.—The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) today announced the 15 communities that have been chosen as finalists for the third annual RWJF Culture of Health Prize, which honors inspiring communities that place a high priority on health and bring diverse partners together to achieve local change. Our Managing Director, Colby Dailey, serves on the Review Committee.
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