cityLAB’s 6% Place book is now available for your e-reader!
Buy it for your Kindle, Nook, and iPad, or buy a beautifully-bound copy of the book here. And you can still download the book for free here. Happy reading!
a do tank, not a think tank
Save the date! Eve Picker, cityLAB’s intrepid CEO, will be a panelist at a discussion on low-income neighborhoods and how they participate in regional economies, including their untapped market potential, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s Pittsburgh branch on June 20th. Eve will be giving a presentation on cityLAB’s 6% Place experiment — find more about the event here and register for it here.
Connecting to Markets Series:
Exploring Low-Income Neighborhoods in the Regional Context
Wednesday, June 20, 2012, 11:00-3:30pm
Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Pittsburgh Branch
717 Grant Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15219
We hope to see you there!
(The event is sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and the Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development.)
UPDATE 6/21/12: See a photo from yesterday’s event here.
In late February, cityLAB toured the empty Rogers School building in Garfield with a group including representatives from the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, the Garfield Jubilee Association, and two artists who work on Penn Avenue. Built in 1914 and used as a school until 2009, the Rogers School building is very big, beautiful, and uncannily quiet.
Click here to see some photos from our visit.
A quick update about our 6% Place experiment:
Since the new year, we have been working with CMU’s Urban Design Build Studio to make sure that the students’ work on the 6% Place incentives is ready to show to potential funders, planning a strategy for the 6% Place with the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation and UDBS, and meeting with potential funders to get some of our 6% Place projects off the ground.
We hope to have good news to share soon!
On Friday, The Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation held a ground-breaking ceremony for forty-five new homes in Garfield. As this article in the Post-Gazette describes, this effort is the “last leg of a decade-long, $24 million scattered-site effort that has coincided with a 45 percent drop in crime” in the neighborhood.
Read more about the BGC’s efforts and Garfield residents’ reactions here and here.
cityLAB recently received an email from a long-time Pittsburgher who now lives in Harare, Zimbabwe. He writes:
Dear Garfield Neighbors,
Please find my contribution to your community creating its future: Invest. Brand. Plan.
Good luck with the process!
Mike Staresinic
Harare, Zimbabwe
Pittsburgh from 2012
Garland Clubs. Recovery takes time. Start small start now: combine joined parcels for gardens, greenways, community vegetable gardens and the like, as a viable investment strategy to attract neighborhood investment clubs. For the price of acquisition, tax, fencing, and some weed whacking, each patch of green neighborhood pulls the rest up. Over time, the surroundings come up due to these Garlands. As new housing picks up, it has green neighbors. Those who hold the green get their investment back as a neighborhood develops around them (eventually selling or developing their land), while residents walk the garlands in an upcoming, natural, strengthening neighborhood. I am prepared to organize the first Garland Club.
Garland Brand. Garfield needs a new brand. Named for an inconsequential President who nobody remembers (quiz: ask meeting participants for that president’s first name), please play with options: 25% Garland. Gardens. 20% vacant can be readily made into a wonderful number when it = 25% FREE, 25% SPACE TO BREATHE, 25% NATURAL 25%. Natural material is the neighborhood’s natural strength. Pump it up to 25% Garlanded Garfield.
Holistic, Full-Cycle Planning. Pittsburgh should not be proud of its speed of demolition, rather speed of redevelopment. Figuring out the full cycle before buildings unfortunately go down transforms demolition from a loser into a winner.
Thanks for contributing your ideas, Mike!