a do tank, not a think tank
Garfield does not have it’s fair share of college graduates. The neighborhoods that surround Garfield have populations with as high as 40% college graduates. Garfield has less than 5% .
The map shows young college graduates (Bachelors degree or higher plus age 18 – 34) as a % of adult (18+) population – City of Pittsburgh, 2000.
At our community advisory meeting, the local champions gave us their blessing by discussing how the cityLAB Six Percent Place experiment presents itself at an opportune moment for the community to re-frame the picture of Garfield. They have just begun to implement their “Garfield 2030 Plan“, a neighborhood plan for housing and development. The plan focuses on physical improvements and developments. cityLAB will focus on demographic improvements.
Nothing happens without champions in the community. CityLAB gathered local grassroots champions and formed the community input committee. These folks will be the vehicle that drives the Special Impact Zone forward: Christine Bethea, Freddie Croce, Courtney Ehrlichman, Matthew Galluzzo, Eve Picker, Jason Sauer, Janera Solomon & Rick Swartz.
It took cityLAB a while to settle on where it would conduct it’s 6% experiment. The Penn Avenue Arts Corridor seemed the perfect place. About a mile long and in Pittsburgh’s East End, the initiative was an experiment itself started fifteen years ago. What was the experiment? To see if the arts could help to transform an extremely blighted corridor. In some respects it did with numerous arts organizations, artists and businesses locating there. In other respects it did not.
There are still many vacancies on the street. The neighborhood to the south, Friendship, has thrived, but the neighborhood to the north, Garfield has declined. It has the lowest percentage of college graduates residing there of any neighborhood in this city. The Penn Avenue Arts Corridor’s purpose was to zipper these two neighborhoods together, but today, they still stand very much apart.
For several months now we have researched and analyzed a number of Pittsburgh neighborhoods in order to locate our Six Percent Place. What are we looking for? A place that will both benefit from and support an influx of new residents. This place should have sufficient existing infrastructure to be a draw, but also significant issues that need mending It will be a neighborhood on the edge of tipping one way or the other.
We have pored over ownership maps, mapped assets and liabilities, walked the streets, talked to the community and documented what we have found. We’re still looking.
Six percent is the number, the tipping point. If a neighborhood can get that many creative workers, it becomes an attraction in its own right, according to a study by CEOs for Cities. We’re experimenting with this idea in a Pittsburgh neighborhood. Our blueprint for a Special Impact Zone will focus on how to make this neighborhood such a Six Percent Place.
At the end of this first phase, cityLAB will hand over an implementation strategy to their neighborhood partners which will consist of a toolbox of incentives. This toolbox will be a mix of physical and social initiatives that when implemented will draw people to this neighborhood of great potential.