The award, presented last weekend at the 2001 national ACSP conference
in Cleveland, was given for the best paper evaluating how new knowledge
developed by professional practice or academic analysis and research
significantly improved professional planning practice in a housing or
community development project. Preference was given to authors who actually
are involved in the project.
The Taylor-Cole paper is an outgrowth of the authors' research and
professional involvement in Buffalo's Fruit Belt neighborhood, the poorest
in the city. The paper presents a detailed analysis of why the decades-old
community revitalization movement, in all its permutations, has failed
to transform inner city neighborhoods and suggests an alternative "turning
point" approach to urban neighborhood development.
The turning point theory calls for urban communities to develop strong
transformative goals, as well as the policies, programs and political
action to achieve them.
A project to be launched by the Center for Urban Studies—which
is directed by Taylor—that is built upon the turning point concept
has been provided $300,000 in seed money by the Rev. Robert E. Grimm
and his wife, Roberta.
Grimm, who retired in 1987 as director of the Council of Churches of
Buffalo and Erie County, says he and his wife were looking for a project
in this community that would help people improve their lives.
"Mr. Taylor's project seemed not only exciting, but even more viable
because of the university support," he adds.
Taylor and Cole say that decades of failed community-revitalization
strategies have been fueled by neighborhood life-cycle theory, which
Taylor calls "a racist structural barrier to inner-city development.
"Life-cycle theory stresses neighborhood decline as a 'natural process'
dictated by rational, impersonal forces of change and by the racial-
and social-class composition of neighborhoods," Taylor says. "In fact,
decline is due to the failure of redevelopment strategies, which are
a mixture of policies, budgetary allocations and planned interventions.
It also discourages massive fiscal investment in inner-city neighborhoods,
although just such an investment is central to any strategy to revitalize
central cities and energize urban regions."
He says it was life-cycle theory that served as the theoretical underpinning
of the neighborhood classification system derived by the Home Owners
Loan Corporation (HOLC) in 1933. The system ranked neighborhoods according
to their economic trajectory—the in-migration of blacks being a
downward trigger.
The HOLC ranking took on a life of its own, he says, and for decades
negatively influenced the attitudes of homeowners, mortgage bankers,
policy makers and developers toward inner-city neighborhoods, thus provoking
their ultimate decline.
The goal of the community-revitalization movement, which emerged in
the 1960s, was to break this cycle of inner-city distress by fostering
a fundamental transformation of poor neighborhoods. New programs were
expected to bring about sustained improvement in the circumstances and
opportunities for those living there. Despite its promise, Taylor says,
the movement failed to develop a model capable of achieving its goals.
He says that over the past two decades, the movement devolved into
a series of uncoordinated, disjointed activities, from enterprise zones
and community enterprise corporations to social capital initiatives,
community policing, faith-based initiatives and, most recently, "comprehensive
community initiatives."
Taylor and Cole write that another popular and failed approach to community
revitalization is based on "tipping theory," which promotes the infusion
of marginal and incremental resources that are insufficient to stave
off neighborhood decline.
"The neighborhood life-cycle and neighborhood tipping theories describe
revitalization in passive, preventive terms," Taylor says, "but in order
to achieve the objective of vital, reinvigorated communities, we must
think about inner-city development in bold, new ways."
The authors maintain that, despite past failures, it is possible for
declining neighborhoods to be brought back to life using strategies
that require private-public sector cooperation.
The new approach they call the "turning point theory" calls for an
aggressive, comprehensive approach to neighborhood and community development.
The theory holds that there is a threshold of investment in a neighborhood—below
which there will be no significant overall improvement and above which
there will be a reinforcing spiral of enhancement that will radically
transform the community. To achieve threshold, Cole says, improvements
must take place across several dimensions.
"Building new homes without landscaping streets or dealing with security
issues is unlikely to be sufficient," he says.
"The additive model we used in the study of the Fruit Belt," he notes,
"takes many things into account in the economic analysis: the rehabilitation
of existing dwellings, new homes, demolition and landscaping, upgrading
of streets and sidewalks, and commercial amenities."
The study applies the turning point theory in its assessment of the
total cost and return of revitalizing the Fruit Belt neighborhood. It
proposes methods of financing and suggests the improvement thresholds
necessary for tax increment financing and commercial development to
kick in and provoke further neighborhood development
"The time has come for planners and community developers to think big
and imaginatively as we chart a new urban agenda for the 21st century,"
Taylor says.
The paper concludes that for the outcomes of the turning point theory
to be realized, the community-revitalization process must be led and
controlled by neighborhood residents.
It will take a political fight, the authors say, to implement the kinds
of changes prescribed, but that development can occur if residents acquire
the political muscle to move development beyond the turning point threshold.
In discussing the Center for Urban Studies project in the Fruit Belt,
which is being launched through the Inner City Transformation Group,
Taylor points out that the Grimms' gift is "jump-starting the process
so that we can begin leveraging funds to facilitate partnerships and
make it happen.
"Ultimately, it will be a $40 million to $50 million project, using
an innovative development model that we hope will work in communities
across the country," he says.
