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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Research is documenting the harmful effects on children when families must keep moving to find a safe, affordable home.
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This article originally appeared on America’s Essential Hospitals’ Essential Insights blog on 12/4/17.
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New case studies show community developers are partnering to create neighborhoods where everyone can be healthier Innovative community developers are making a real difference in the neighborhoods they are revitalizing, creating places that offer the physical, social and economic resources that all people need in order to live healthy lives. Cross-sector collaboration is a given in these projects, as are new ways of thinking about community revitalization. At the Build Healthy Places Network, we are excited by the potential these projects have to create lasting change for low-income communities.
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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(COC), a public-private entity that evolved out of the Stamford Housing Authority, was exploring ways to replace its outdated public housing complexes on the West Side.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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In Detroit, most of the investments in multi-family rental housing and small business development have been confined to the downtown area. However, in a Northwest Detroit neighborhood, the Winship Community, one catalytic project is proving to be transformational.
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Can a community market improve infant health? Can developing a local entrepreneurship culture reduce the number of babies born prematurely?
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“What ideas do people have for the BART plaza?” asked Scott Falcone, posing the question to a group of community members. Falcone, an independent development consultant to nonprofit affordable housing developer Mission Housing Development Corporation (MHDC), is referring to the community gathering space outside of the Balboa Park BART station, which will be redesigned in parallel with the Balboa Upper Yards affordable housing development. Community members responded and suggested “more trees and green space”, “space for cultural performances”, and “farmer’s markets!” All of these ideas contribute to the design of a healthier and more equitable neighborhood in the Outer Mission of San Francisco.
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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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The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) has spent the last 15 years working with thousands of local businesses, investors, and civic leaders who are actively engaged in improving local economies and communities across the U.S. and Canada. These leaders work to support entrepreneurs, drive investment in local businesses, and build equity in their communities.
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Looking at a map of the places they call home, most people can easily point to notably affluent areas versus the ones that have dilapidated homes, under-resourced schools and unsafe sidewalks—places more likely to be cut through by a six-lane highway, or to host a polluting factory rather than a supermarket stacked with fresh food or a tree-shaded playground.
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A Neighborhood Ripe for Revitalization
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For a long time, parks and other urban green spaces were thought of as nice amenities—but not much more. They were beautiful and relaxing, but far from necessary for neighborhood health and well-being.
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A hundred years ago at the height of the tuberculosis epidemic, New York City’s planners and public health establishment mobilized to develop what the New York Times called “…the largest and finest hospital ever built” for tuberculosis. Operating in the absence of any known cure for the disease, the Sea View Tuberculosis Hospital’s medical facilities were, in a real sense, speculative and aspirational. Tuberculosis (TB) had topped the list of causes of death in New York City for decades, and the call to action was urgent.
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On a Friday afternoon, a 3-year-old girl sat quietly in my clinic with her parents. She wore a beautiful, dimpled smile and sported a purple dress with ruffles, her dark, curly hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. I opened a book and asked her about the pictures. She turned the pages with me, smiling, but said nothing. Her parents expressed concern that she still didn’t speak. They later shared with me that they were sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house, unable to find a place they could afford.
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This article was originally posted on the NACEDA website on September 30, 2016.
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In 2015, sixty students peered out at a local landfill as a community elder and environmental justice activist spoke about the persistent health problems caused by the city’s industrial heritage. The students are in their local high school’s health academy, and are beginning to ponder the future health and sustainability of their community. Richmond stands at a crossroads of an environmental justice and health equity movement. The land beneath their feet transitioned from a landfill to wildlife refuge, park, and organic composting facility. The smoke stacks of the Chevron Richmond Refinery – the largest refinery west of the Mississippi – stand opposite from solar power generation on a wastewater treatment plan. These students are advancing this movement themselves, helping transition their community from an industrial past to a future they own and create. To a place they are proud to call home: Richmond, CA.
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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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Our vision at the Build Healthy Places Network is that all communities should offer people the opportunity to live healthy, rewarding lives. To do that, we need to look more broadly at how health and community interact.
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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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Welcome to The Pulse, the monthly newsletter of the Build Healthy Places Network. Each month we compile a short and sweet round-up of what smart people are talking about, researching, and doing to make neighborhoods and lives healthier. Click here to receive The Pulse in your inbox.
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It’s a vital force that lifts people out of poverty. [figure] [/figure]
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Poorer communities prove they are hungry for healthy shopping options.
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An “Apgar Score” for Community Developers from the Urban Land Institute (ULI); and new reporting on what shapes health and health policy from NPR, Harvard, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Brookings’ new Health360 blog.
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