Housing and Inner City Redevelopment

In many areas of our lives, change is expected, even welcome.
As parents, we thrill to each new phase as our kids advance through the years. Each year we eagerly embrace the change from sweltering summer to cool, colorful autumn, or from the muddy snows of late winter to spring’s warm, aromatic breezes. When unexpected change comes to our neighborhoods, though, most of us find it unsettling.
First come questions about what a proposed development could mean for the character of the area, for quality of life or for property values. Then comes the anxiety of being thrust into the unfamiliar world of planning, zoning and development, with their specialized terminology, dense books of codes and confusing array of meetings and decision points. In dealing with local officials and developers—and their lawyers and consultants—who regularly inhabit this world, citizens must educate themselves quickly, not just about the approval process, but about what they can reasonably hope to get from it.
This publication is intended as a quick-start guide to help citizens get up to speed on the terms, procedures and key issues in development. This effort is motivated by one central belief: The surest way to create neighborhoods, towns and metropolitan regions worthy of passing on to our children is to engage the full, informed participation of the people who live in them. It is our hope that, by leveling the playing field for citizens even a little bit, we can help make planning and development more collaborative and less adversarial.
That is perhaps more important today than ever before.
Over the last decade, people all across the country have grown increasingly worried about the consequences of rapid growth and poorly planned development. In search of a better way, many of those concerned citizens have been working with forward-looking professionals in planning, design, real estate and related fields to figure out how to be smarter about growth.