Choice Neighborhoods in Action

Choice Neighborhoods in Action

Katherine O’Regan, Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research. Last fall, the research section of The Edge discussed HUD’s interim report on baseline conditions in the first five implementation sites for HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods Initiative. The Choice Neighborhoods Initiative supports the revitalization of struggling neighborhoods that contain distressed public or HUD-assisted housing. Like other Obama Administration place-based initiatives such as Strong Cities, Strong Communities (SC2) and Promise Zones, Choice Neighborhoods is comprehensive and locally driven, engages and leverages resources from a range of stakeholders, and is data and outcome driven. Last month I had the opportunity to visit one of the sites, the Woodlawn Choice Neighborhood in Chicago’s South Side, which received an implementation grant in 2011.

All five of the first Choice implementation sites had begun work when they applied for Choice grants. The idea behind Choice is not for this grant to be the initial spark. Choice grants requires a number of preconditions be met, such as the engagement of local stakeholders who can support this type of work over a long enough horizon to have an impact. Indeed, the grants alone (which average $25.7 million) are not nearly sufficient to transform distressed neighborhoods. The initiative can, however, provide a needed infusion of capital and a process of engagement and planning that acts as a catalyst for revitalization.

A key element of the Woodlawn proposal was redeveloping the 504-unit Grove Parc Plaza, a Section 8 project on a 12 acre site, that had been built as part of urban renewal in the late 1960s but that had quickly fallen into financial trouble and disrepair. By 2006, its REAC score had fallen to 11. The property and its surrounding neighborhood were highly distressed. Grove Parc’s mortgage was assigned to HUD and then sold to the city of Chicago. Failing to find a local nonprofit willing to take over the property, a coalition of community groups invited the Boston-based Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH) to bid for and ultimately win ownership of the project. POAH and the Grove Parc Tenant Association worked with residents to create a relocation and redevelopment plan that HUD approved in 2009. A key piece of this plan was the removal of Grove Parc as an obstacle to other neighborhood investment. All these events happened before the implementation grant had been awarded.

When HUD announced the Choice Neighborhoods program in 2010, POAH approached the city to be a coapplicant for implementation grant funding. The Choice Neighborhoods planning process built on existing community efforts and provided a mechanism for engaging the city. The resulting $30.5 million implementation grant in 2011 provided part of the capital needed to achieve one of the critical first steps of the plan, removing Grove Parc. It also leveraged more than $240 million from other sources.

Today, the transformation of the old Grove Parc is nearly complete. Most of the old development has been replaced with attractive affordable housing. The remaining portion of Grove Parc stands unoccupied, in stark contrast to the vibrant new housing across the street.

The view down the street between the old and new housing paints a vivid picture of both the past and the future. Just enough of the old housing remains to give one a sense of how its poor design and condition contributed to the neighborhood’s high crime rates and blight. Walking down the street was not safe just a few years ago. Today, the street has constant foot traffic; people from surrounding neighborhoods and from the nearby University of Chicago now walk through this block, past the remnants of Grove Parc.

Our small group of staff from HUD, POAH and the City toured the rest of the neighborhood and talked about the nonhousing components of Choice Neighborhoods — people and community — that are critical pieces of the overall plan. More work needs to be done in Woodlawn, much of it not related to housing. But the redevelopment of Grove Parc has opened up new possibilities for this next step, including new sets of partners who might be willing to engage and the prospect of additional private investment from independent actors.

In the final part of our discussion, we talked about the people and service side of the plan. POAH is a nonprofit whose mission is to preserve affordable housing. Participating in Choice Neighborhoods required it to seek out partners for a more comprehensive approach to redeveloping the neighborhood. As part of that process, POAH has become much more involved in the service side of the work, and one staff member stated that this shift was changing the way she thought of the organization’s work elsewhere. Her response gets at the heart of the Choice Neighborhood program goal: to move beyond housing to more comprehensive approaches, and to use the process of partnerships to create a legacy beyond any singular grant.