Communities & Neighborhoods

Chicago's Large Lot Program was born out 2014's Green Healthy Neighborhoods plan, a long-term strategy for the use of vacant land in specific city neighborhoods experiencing population loss and disinvestment. The Large Lot Program targets neighborhoods where the city owns a significant number of vacant lots and lists those lots for sale for $1 under certain conditions to help return lots to the tax rolls, give residents greater control over vacant land in their neighborhood, encourage neighborhood wealth growth through increased property values, improve safety, and revitalize communities. The project website, LargeLots.org, was created to facilitate the purchase of city-owned land by city residents, and provides users with an interactive tool to explore available and sold lots, and links to applications to purchase vacant lots. Funding for the online tool came from LISC Chicago and the Boeing Corporation, and was created using open data.

The Fruit Belt Community Land Trust was established in 2017 after years of community organizing. The Fruit Belt is a low-income neighborhood directly adjacent to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, and a land trust for the nearly 200 city-owned vacant lots in the neighborhood will ensure housing affordability for future generations by preventing these parcels of land from being used for market-rate housing. The City of Buffalo has already agreed to transfer ownership of 50 of these 200 city-owned vacant lots over five years, and the Land Trust has partnered with Habitat Buffalo and Belmont Housing to build new affordable housing on these parcels. The Land Trust also recently received a $800,000 affordable housing grant from the State; some of these funds will be used to rehabilitate existing housing in the neighborhood. Besides being used for housing, the vacant lots can also be used for retail and services that are currently not available in the neighborhood.

The Bailey Green Initiative was created in 2008 by Harmac Medical Products, a manufacturing company headquartered on Buffalo's East Side. With the goal of restoring a safe, attractive community for residents to live and work in after decades of neglect, the initiative began with investments in green space and tree plantings. As the initiative evolved into a multi-faceted, collaborative effort, investments in the neighborhood around Harmac, where many of the company's 400 employees live, began to address pressing community needs such as housing, health and safety, healthy food access, community beautification, skills training, and improved infrastructure. In 2016, Harmac partnered with organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, Heart of the City Neighborhoods, and several others, to help fulfil the community's vision, by creating affordable homes, green houses, and athletic fields. By 2018, the project saw some success with several owner-occupied affordable homes constructed in the neighborhood.

In 2009, Boulder County Colorado was the first county in the US to merge housing and human services into a single agency. Human and health services such as SNAP and Medicaid are directly related to housing services (Section 8, Housing Choice Vouchers), so combining agencies could improve the quality of services for residents by supporting whole-person, whole-family services. Relationships between separate agencies in the past were disjointed at best and adversarial at worst, but after the merger, service providers found stronger, collaborative relationships between housing service providers and social service providers. Combining agencies also provided logistical benefits; all information about clients is now stored on a single database, streamlining the process of identifying need and eligibility and reducing the amount of work needed by both the client and the service provider. Overall, the merger has reduced costs for the agencies, while enabling the providers to serve the community more effectively and efficiently.

Hennepin County Minnesota, home to the city of Minneapolis, recently decentralized the human services office from downtown Minneapolis into regional offices across the county. The county's $41 million plan to close the downtown central offices and expand into six separate locations began with the opening of the first regional hub in Brooklyn Center in 2012. Over the course of two years, the other hubs were opened with the goal of improving access to services by bringing them closer to where people live. Each center provides access to the full range of financial, social and public health services the county offers, such as access to medical, emergency, food assistance, child care, and homeless services. In addition to county-provided services, some hubs also include on-site services from non-profit partners specific to each community. The old central office was sold by the county to a private developer, helping offset some of the costs required to create regional hubs.