Challenges and opportunities in building a comprehensive neighborhood transformation plan in an urban public housing development

Housing has been studied as an important determinant of public health since the 19^th century.  This paper presents the process of building a plan that truly integrates public housing redevelopment, community health and wellbeing and support of a community’s strengths.

The Choice Neighborhoods (CN) program is a HUD initiative that supports locally driven strategies to address struggling neighborhoods with distressed public housing through a comprehensive approach to neighborhood transformation.  Choose Yonkers is a collaboration between city government, the municipal housing authority, a non-profit developer, researchers and community advocates, residents and other local stakeholders. Choose Yonkers received a CN grant in 2013 to support creating a plan for replacing distressed public housing, and improving the health, safety, education and economic self-sufficiency of residents in one Yonkers neighborhood.

Challenges to the planning process included (1) isolated silos of expertise and interests for neighborhood stakeholders, (2) multiple players with differing explanatory models (of poverty) and neighborhood challenges/strengths and (3) distrust between city/housing stakeholders and residents because of a recent history of ‘failed’ redevelopment of other housing sites.

Responses included (1) evidence-supported organizing principles for supporting plan development (ecocultural approach), (2) an innovative community advocacy/academic partnership to build trust between researchers and residents and (3) researchers/advocates’ continued resident support and education throughout planning process – researchers and advocates were part of the planning team and did not leave after data collection.

We hope that description and analysis of our process will help identify useful strategies in context for facilitating comprehensive collaborative planning.