Reframing Underserved Communities

It’s easy to forget the real function of a community. It’s even easier to undervalue the benefits an effective neighborhood can have on the people it serves. And that’s the problem.

When things are working well, we give credit to economic momentum. When things aren’t working so well, we blame the absence of resources. Whether we want to admit it or not – there’s more to it than that. But if this is the only lens we use, it becomes increasingly difficult to predict successful strategies within specific neighborhoods.?

The fundamental role of a neighborhood is simple. Their purpose is to provide an effective platform for cooperation between neighbors. And it’s this cooperation that serves as the engine for economic growth at the local level. The problem is that it’s much easier to measure the growth of an area’s median household income than it is to measure the frequency of collaborations between neighbors.?But if we’re sincerely interested in understanding the effectiveness of a community, that is precisely what we should be analyzing.

As communities consider future redevelopment strategies, this emphasis on social capital is critical in order to protect and improve the health and well-being of any neighborhood. Each decision should be weighed by its ability to increase the community’s capacity to sustain social networks that engage a diverse collection of people participating in reciprocal relationships.?More simply put, we need to get better at developing strategies that think less about creating great neighborhoods and start focusing on ways to cultivate great neighbors.

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Loneliness and Detachment

In her book The Lonely Century: Coming together in a World that’s Pulling Apart, Noreena Hertz notes that “The infrastructure of community – by which I mean those shared physical spaces where people of all stripes can come together, interact and form bonds – has been severely neglected at best and at worst actively destroyed. It’s a process that began in many places before the 2008 financial crisis, but accelerated markedly in its aftermath as government policies of austerity took a sledgehammer to libraries, public parks, playgrounds and youth and community centers across much of the world.”

She goes on to say that, “Why this matters so profoundly is because such places are not only where we come together, but also where we learn how to do so, places where we practice civility and also democracy, in its inclusive form, by learning how to peacefully co-exist with people different to us and how to manage different points of view.”

The growing sense of loneliness and detachment within American communities is a direct result of our inability to cultivate neighborhoods that prioritize social capital. For almost a century, the development community has been more focused on private equity than on shared equality – resulting in countless neighborhoods facing complex and urgent challenges that will require a more nuanced approach to community development than many cities are willing to pursue. However, it’s these “underserved communities” that face the most extreme challenges.

The first challenge rests in the very way in which we describe these communities. Referring to a neighborhood as an “underserved community” is a common way to articulate the lack of investment cities have made within a specific area. However, in many ways, this phrase illustrates the commonly misunderstood mechanism of community redevelopment. By saying a community is underserved assumes that their challenges would disappear if they only received the same resources other neighborhoods have gotten over the years. This grossly oversimplifies the problem at hand. These neighborhoods haven’t been underserved. They’ve been improperly served. And we need to understand the difference.

These communities, often with a higher percentage of minority residents, aren’t broken. They don’t need fixed. They need heard. And too often they're not.

Soundness to Listening

Conventional development methods aren’t enough. Providing some new low-income housing apartments won’t be sufficient. And providing more big-box retail won’t guarantee economic momentum. Largely because they don’t address the specific ingredients within the community itself. To serve these neighborhoods most effectively requires the creation of specific strategies that acknowledge the area’s history, its lingering challenges, and its genuine aspirations – variables that are unique to the neighborhood and the people it supports.

For example, the history of the neighborhoods in southeast Fort Wayne aren’t the same as their counterparts on the city’s southwest side. The evolution of these two areas is dramatically different. And to think that development strategies that are effective in one area should be beneficial in the other runs the risk of dismissing the unique socio-economic variables that define these different communities. It’s not that simple.

While we can publicly condemn the systemic racism and disinvestment within the community that resulted from strategies ranging from redlining to suburban sprawl, we must acknowledge that their impact within the evolution of these neighborhoods is multilayered and persistent.??No single strategy, regardless of size or scale, can instantaneously dissolve the impact of generations of improper service.

With that, it’s hard to sincerely prescribe where these communities should begin. But we can start by listening to the people and to the places we hope to improve.

One of the biggest issues with this “underserved” mentality is that it often results in suggesting strategies out of context and with no direct connection to the localized problems at hand. These strategies have application when discussing economic issues within a vacuum but when you are trying to address real needs, with real people, in real places – it’s often much more advantageous to explore solutions within the realities of the specific neighborhood. An easy place to start is by understanding how to evaluate the existing assets within the neighborhood itself.

Each community has a particular set of resources. There are certain people, programs, organizations, and places that define any neighborhood. And it’s often these elements that leverage the most effective solutions for authentic and sustainable redevelopment – especially if the focus is appropriately aimed towards increasing social capital.

For example, if the objective is to increase housing options within the neighborhood, a community could secure land for greenfield development by on outside investor or consider how to repurpose an existing asset in partnership with the neighborhood. While each share a similar goal, they are very different approaches.

In southeast Fort Wayne, buildings like the former Coke Bottling Plant or the abandoned Ward Elementary School can be seen as lingering liabilities or as opportunities for repairing a fractured network by breathing new life into a repurposed structure. This isn’t important for the sake of saving the building, it’s important because it serves as a way to retain an element of the place’s history, the social fabric that surrounds it, and the people it has served over its lifetime. And often times, these opportunities are more abundant than many realize. The trick is finding them and working diligently to ensure their reuse increases the livability of the surrounding neighborhood in an authentic and meaningful way.

The most recent example of this in Fort Wayne is the Village Premiere development located directly south of McMillen Park.?This project aims to transform 20 acres of vacant land within an existing community into a dense, intergenerational neighborhood with over 200 new townhomes, apartments, and detached single-family homes.?The mixed-use, mixed-income project will provide commercial space and public amenities as well as offer senior and income-based housing options. More importantly, the development has been an outgrowth of discussions with the neighborhood and local leaders.

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Authentic Placemaking

Over the last few years, the City has worked diligently to find the right development partner to understand the importance of such a project. Their hope is to create a transformational project alongside the neighborhood, in partnership with its neighbors, in an attempt to properly serve the needs and opportunities within the area.?It’s a fluid process, but one that requires collaboration and communication from all involved to be successful.

The key to effective placemaking is that it should be measured by its ability to develop authentic platforms for cooperation – neighborhoods that support inclusive networks of diverse people who rely on one another. Their growth must focus on the cultivation of social capital and a renewed dedication to understanding how best to properly serve their constituents.

As Hertz concludes in her book, “If we are coming together in a world that’s pulling apart, we will need to reconnect capitalism to the pursuit of the common good and put care, compassion and cooperation at its very heart, with these behaviors extending to people who are different to us. That’s the real challenge: to reconnect not only with those similar to us, but also with the much wider community to which we ultimately belong.”

And that sense of belonging needs to be the priority of the modern neighborhood.?

Note: This essay was originally written for Fort Wayne Magazine.