Building American Cities Toolkit™

A living resource on how to improve a city’s built environment and bring about equitable revitalization. 

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The Center for Community Progress, with the support of Enterprise Community Partners, produced a toolkit to help local practitioners think through strategies and utilize specific tools to carry out those strategies. The toolkit is divided into four elements: read more

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Shrinking Cities Reading Series

How to deal with substantial population decline is a question that many smaller legacy cities will have to answer.

In the summer of 2017, Greater Ohio Policy Center ran a blog series on shrinking cities – or communities that have experienced significant population decline. The blog series summarizes academic books and articles that explore how U.S. cities can manage the many consequences of population decline. read more

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Land Banks

Land banks are governmental entities that acquire vacant, abandoned, and tax delinquent properties to return them to productive use and stabilize distressed markets.

Vacant and abandoned structures have challenged cities for generations. The first land banks were established throughout the 1970s to 1990s in an effort to address the vacant properties left behind as a result urban abandonment. These passive organizations held relatively little power compared to the land banks of today. read more

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Planning in America’s Legacy Cities

Planning for smaller legacy cites requires creativity in thinking about future land use and sensitivity in respecting the needs and desires of current residents.

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“Planning in America’s Legacy Cities: Toward Better, Smaller Communities after Decline,” by Margaret Dewar and Hunter Morrison, explores the unique challenges facing planners in cities with declining populations. This paper appears as a chapter in the volume Rebuilding America’s Legacy Cities: New Directions for the Industrial Heartland, which was edited Alan Mallach and published by the American Assembly. read more

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Regional Collaboration Toolkit

Economies function on a regional level, so smaller legacy city stakeholders will need to work closely with partners across their region to develop and execute economic development strategies.

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Many challenges facing cities of all sizes do not stop at municipal borders – issues related to development, taxation, economic competitiveness, and environmental resources are shared among many communities and political subdivisions within a region. Confronting these shared issues can present yet another challenge, as stakeholders from different jurisdictions may have competing priorities. read more

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National Equity Atlas

Having good data on the diverse groups of people making up a community is key to creating revitalization strategies that will benefit all of them.

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The National Equity Atlas is a tool for understanding the demographic and socio-economic makeup of communities. Produced by PolicyLink and The USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE), the tool provides data on “equitable growth indicators.” read more

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The Place Database

In order to make informed decisions on where public resources should be directed, leaders must make use of all available data.

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One advantage of living in the modern-era is the sheer amount of data available to individuals making decisions. Data can be used by leaders to make informed decisions on how best to distribute resources to projects.  read more

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