Monthly Real Estate Skinny

Community Development at a Cross-Roads

It seems with the current economic crisis, states and city's budgets, and the foreclosure crisis that community development work would be a top priority. With a long history and past community development corporations (CDC) have been able to make positive and long term changes in all different communities. Yet, today when they are needed most it seems that public and private support no longer agrees.

Noel Nix, an urban planning student at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute, has spent the last several months examining these issues and has compiled a report entitled "Community Development at a Crossroads: CDCs, CCIs, and the Future of an Industry". It is required reading for anyone who has a stake or interest in exploring how to move the work of building healthy neighborhoods forward.

U-plan foreclosure report

U-Plan came out with this report a few months back about foreclosures in Frogtown and Rondo neighborhood. Here is the executive summary:

Foreclosures can have negative impacts on the value, safety, condition and overall health of urban neighborhoods. This is especially true in the Frogtown and Rondo neighborhoods of Saint Paul, Minnesota, where the number of foreclosures have has skyrocketed in the last five years. In this report, we show that foreclosures have a direct negative impact on sales values within Frogtown and Rondo and that this impact is disproportionate when compared to wealthier neighborhoods in the City of Saint Paul.

Using a series of build-up maps and hedonic price regression, we find that foreclosures in 2007 have reduced the value of residential housing in Frogtown and Rondo by $84,847,232, representing a 15.7% drop in estimated market values in 2008. This is a phenomenon that acutely affects lower-income neighborhoods. By contrast, foreclosures in Highland Park, a wealthy neighborhood in Saint Paul have reduced overall estimated market value there by only 1.2%.

You can read the full report here.

A Blast from the Past: Street Cars

The future of Community Development Corporations

Sparc, in partnership with other geographically based CDCs, have been working on a report covering the past, present, and future of CDCs. The report has finally been finished by a CURA graduate student at the Humphrey Institute at the U of M. Below is an excerpt of the executive summary:

Since the late 1960s, community development corporations (CDCs) have been among the vanguard of community development work. However, recent changes and challenges within the support system for CDCs have arisen that make their future uncertain. Specifically, the following issues have come together to create a “perfect storm”:

The collapse of the housing market and the attendant economic recession that have exacerbated many of the issues that CDCs were established to address
Significant constraints on the financial resources available from foundations and governments as a combined result of federal retrenchment and diminished foundation endowments
A shift on the part of funders and intermediaries away from the traditional model of asset based community development toward efforts that combine human service and development under the umbrella of comprehensive community initiatives or community building

This array of factors presents CDCs with a set of challenges that calls into question the assuredness of continued support for their work. Especially at risk are smaller, geographic based CDCs that have small staffs and limited operating budgets. Therefore, it is timely to revisit the fundamentals and structure of the community development with an eye toward defining the roles and contributions of the varying ground level organizations.

Foreclosure maps

Sparc's service area (Hamline Midway, North End, and South Como) have seen our share of foreclosed and vacant properties. The two maps show how many foreclosures from 2007-2009. Let's hope the next few years we can work to see fewer foreclosure dots and replace them with investments to benefit the community.

Cohen Brothers movie on Rice Street

It was a while ago but the movie, A Serious Man, is going to be released in October. The picture above is from the movie shot right on Rice Street.