Living Cities is committed to measuring the impact of our investments. Fundamentally, we want to ensure that our work is changing systems and increasing opportunities for low-income people. We also are documenting what we have learned and sharing it with the broader field in an effort to help us all work and invest more strategically.
Living Cities designed The Integration Initiative to support cities that are harnessing existing momentum and leadership for change read more in this overview
Scale Pathways: Bringing Asset-Building Products & Services to Scale, is a new report from Living Cities to generate discussion among funders and practitioners on approaches necessary for scaling
Anchor institutions like universities and hospitals directly and indirectly generate considerable economic activity. New Framing Paper explores ways to harness their impact.
Our 2010 Annual Report, New Normal, provides our perspective on what the public, private and philanthropic sector need to do together in this second decade of the 21st century to address the contemporary needs of U.S. cities.
Over the last several years, Living Cities has been dedicated to fundamentally adapting how we work in an effort to keep pace with the changing world. Through new partnerships and initiatives, we’re actively learning what drives our cities and what creates enduring systems change. In order to help us better anticipate changes in the social and economic climate, we embarked on an environmental scan of likely trends that will particularly impact low-income people in U.S. cities over the next few years.
On April 10th, Living Cities hosted a webinar about the Transportation and American Jobs Project, a national effort to ensure that transportation investments using federal funds create quality jobs for American workers. The webinar provided an overview of the US Employment Plan (USEP), a model transit procurement program which incentivizes investments in domestic manufacturing jobs. This innovative model has the potential to have significant economic impact in the rebuilding of the U.S. manufacturing sector. Speakers included Professor Manuel Pastor, from the Program for Environmental & Regional Equity (PERE) at USC, and Madeline Janis, from Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE).
This paper is our strategic assessment of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities and its impact in helping to break down silos, commissioned by Living Cities and conducted by the Urban Institute.
The assessment focuses in particular on what can be learned from the Partnership’s Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program, which has awarded $195 million since 2010 supporting the development and implementation of regional plans addressing issues across the focus areas of the partner agencies.
The study finds that the Planning Grant Program helped its local grantees to break down barriers to collaboration within government and across sectors by incentivizing them to:
Create new collaborative structures, which intensified the representation of stakeholders typically left…
In Filling the Financing Gap for Equitable Transit-Oriented Development, Living Cities partnered with the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF) and Enterprise Community Partners(Enterprise) to learn how to make TOD projects that contribute to equitable outcomes easier to finance and build. The writers studied four regions - Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul and the San Francisco Bay Area – to help identify systematic financing gaps as well as recommend capital and policy solutions to address the issues.
Universities and hospitals are major economic forces in many American cities. Despite this reality, few, if any, regional economic development strategies are built around these stable and rooted "anchor" institutions, and fewer strategies still seek to harness these institutions’ economic power to create opportunities for low-income people.
Through their hiring, purchasing and other activities, anchors generate billions of dollars in economic activity with the potential to benefit low-income people directly. Through its Integration Initiative, Living Cities has partnered with several cities seeking to work with anchors to realize these potential benefits. A key learning from this work has been that, in order to achieve population-level results for low-income people, anchors cannot act…
Philanthropy and the practice of grantmaking have traditionally been very separate from investing in both culture and approach, but the emerging field of impact investing invites a productive collaboration between these two disciplines. Impact investing deals generate both financial and social returns and often require different types of capital, including grants, below-market and market rate capital. This Issue Brief explores the potential for greater coordination between impact investments and grants, with a focus on how grants may be structured to attract investment capital. To illustrate how grantmakers andinvestors can cooperate, this Brief profiles several ways that family foundations, philanthropic institutions, and public funders can use their grants to unlock dollars from the…
Welcome to the third issue of At the Table: Ideas and Insights from The Integration Initiative! Through At the Table, we aim to share our latest learning on how to make cities places of economic opportunity for all residents. Through TII, cross-sector teams of decision-makers in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, and the Twin Cities are working to transform key systems in order to produce better outcomes for low-income people. While the systems vary—from mobility to health to economic development to workforce—we continue to learn a lot from each site about the leadership infrastructure (what Living Cities calls the One Table approach), and innovative strategies to deploy capital necessary to make transformational change. Now we’re halfway through the first phase of The Integration…
This paper is the work of David Wood and Katie Grace of the Initiative for Responsible Investment at the Harvard Kennedy School and Robin Hacke of Living Cities. We appreciate the feedback of numerous colleagues and leaders in the community development field who have participated in our research, reviewed drafts of the paper and contributed their expertise to advance our thinking. We view this working paper as the basis for continuing dialogue and invite your reactions and comments.
Please respond to Robin Hacke, rhacke@livingcities.org.
At the Table will feature reflections, conversations, profiles, articles and updates on what key stakeholders are learning at their tables (and beyond) through The Integration Initiative. Our one caveat is that these pieces reflect thinking during specific points in time in the midst of complex multi-year work. We invite you to join the conversation and hope you’ll share your own insights and ideas by commenting on the blog (www.livingcities.org/blog), posting a comment on Twitter @TII_LC or hashtag #TIILC or emailing the Living Cities team-we’ve included an email address with each article.
In cities across the country, practitioners in the field of asset-building are developing innovative approaches to expanding savings opportunities in low-income communities. Unfortunately, these programs and services rarely reach enough scale to transform entire cities, regions, states, or even neighborhoods. By releasing the new report, Scale Pathways: Bringing Asset-Building Products & Services to Scale, we hope to generate discussion among funders and practitioners on approaches necessary for scaling.
Anchor institutions like universities and hospitals directly and indirectly generate considerable economic activity. However, the potential impact of this economic activity for regional economies is often not fully realized, in part because the benefits and opportunities created by that economic activity are not aggregated or geographically concentrated in the anchors’ home region. Meanwhile, insufficient attention is paid to how regional residents—including low-income residents—might access such opportunities. We believe that a major barrier to maximizing the economic impact of anchors is a lack of alignment between anchors and the broader economic systems and stakeholders (e.g., small business development, regional economic strategy, etc.) in cities and regions. The purpose of the Living…
The following provides an overview of why small businesses are important to regional economies, a framework for thinking about the types of small businesses, and some suggestions for practitioners about how to think about supporting the growth of small businesses.
Foreword
Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation instigated this project to encourage the financial industry to scale up financing of building energy efficiency retrofits. Deutsche Bank has a long history of supporting multifamily / affordable housing through its community development finance capabilities, and throughout the world the Bank has played a leadership role on climate issues. Scaling up building retrofits has become a compelling aspiration for the Bank, because of the alignment between our carbon reduction and community development goals.
Building scientists, auditors, enlightened building owners, and contractors have been retrofitting multifamily buildings in New York City for many decades, but the retrofit industry has largely relied on public subsidies, a limited resource that…
This document outlines the business plan proposal for a new entity and provides information for decision makers to seek the following:
Enabling legislation for the entity,
Its role and responsibilities as a service provider for Oregon state, county, municipal, and special district project sponsors; and
A capitalization and operating plan for its first five years.
Key areas covered by the plan include:
Mandate and vision
Principles and assumptions
Start-up Strategy Governance of the entity
Funding mechanism
HR Strategy
Logistics
Next Steps/Implementation Plan
The purpose of this draft discussion document is to describe the recommended methodology and rationale for Partnerships British Columbia’s (Partnerships BC) guidance for the quantitative analysis of infrastructure project procurement options.
The document is intended to support a rigorous standard and consistent approach forunder taking the procurement options analysis that is required as part of the business case development process for procuring publicly-funded infrastructure in British Columbia. To this end, the document:
• Outlines Partnerships BC’s guidance methodology for the quantitativeanalysis of procurement options,
• Provides guidance for conducting the quantitative analysis work as part of thecomprehensive business case analysis for a project, and
• Demonstrates how the…
In a time of constrained public budgets, leveraging private-sector financial resources and expertise to deliver a range of infrastructure projects has growing appeal. However, these public/privatepartnerships (PPPs) are often complicated contracts that differ significantly from project toproject and from place to place.
In the United States, many states lack the technical capacity andexpertise to consider such deals and fully protect the public interest. To address this problem, countries, states, and provinces around the world have created specialized institutional entities—called PPP units—to fulfill different functions such as quality control, policy formulation, andtechnical advice.
This Brookings report recommends that U.S. states should:
Establish dedicated PPP units to tackle…
Recent studies indicate that there is a $1 trillion need for infrastructure on the west coast in the next 30 years and declining federal support. A 2008 study on infrastructure for the Portland area alone found a gap of over $20 billion. Experts note that there is substantial private capital available to close the infrastructure financing gap, if states and cities can create the right conditions to attract such investment. Oregon’s integration and innovation infrastructure program aims to do just that.
This document addresses common questions about Oregon's approach to investing in infrastructure.
Recent studies indicate that there is a $1 trillion need for infrastructure on the west coast in the next 30 years and declining federal support. A 2008 study on infrastructure for the Portland area alone found a gap of over $20 billion.
Experts note that there is in fact private and institutional capital out there to help close these financing gaps; what is missing is the right mechanics to attract such investment. The key to growing a better pipeline of investable, innovative infrastructure projects is stronger local and state technical assistance, regulatory innovation and reforms in how governments conduct capital facilities planning.
To address these gaps, the state of Oregon has begun a process to integrate Governor, Treasurer and agency efforts around infrastructure acceleration…
Like the rest of the nation, Oregon is suffering from crumbling and outdated infrastructure. This article is Gov. John Kizhaber's take on how to re-think the infrastructure of the state.
This is a summary document of our strategic assessment of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities and its impact in helping to break down silos, commissioned by Living Cities and conducted by the Urban Institute.
The assessment focuses in particular on what can be learned from the Partnership’s Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program, which has awarded $195 million since 2010 supporting the development and implementation of regional plans addressing issues across the focus areas of the partner agencies.
Anchor institutions like universities and hospitals directly and indirectly generate considerable economic activity. However, the potential impact of this economic activity for regional economies is often not fully realized, in part because the benefits and opportunities created by that economic activity are not aggregated or geographically concentrated in the anchors’ home region. Meanwhile, insufficient attention is paid to how regional residents—including low-income residents—might access such opportunities.
This report examines that issue using the ideas that emerged out of a Living Cities Design Lab
In 2010, the philanthropic collaborative Living Cities(www.livingcities.org) launched the Integration Initiative,an effort to transform the systems that shape the livesof low income people in five U.S. metropolitan regions –Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis-St. Paul,and Newark. A key goal of the Integration Initiativewas to learn what is needed to move beyond piecemealapproaches to vital issues, and to engage multiple sectors –public, private, philanthropic and non-profit – in work that creates an integrated platform for stakeholders towork together on systemic change.
The work of Living Cities and its members is taking place at a time when digital technologies and social networks are seemingly transforming every aspect of our lives. Unfortunately, this transformation has yet to spill over significantly to change the relationship between city residents and their governments, or to improve the quality of low-income people’s lives. With this challenge in mind, Living Cities convened in August a group of members of the Urban Policy Advisory Group, along with their chief innovation and technology officers, for a half-day session at the Harvard Kennedy School. The goals of the session were to deepen our collective knowledge of civic tech and its potential for cities –particularly as a means to improve the lives of low-income people, deepen civic engagement,…
Civic technology – the use of digital technologies and social media for serviceprovision, civic engagement, and data analysis – has the potential to transformcities and the lives of their low-income residents. Under commission fromLiving Cities, we interviewed 25 people with expertise in cities, issues facinglow income people, and technology in June and July of 2012. This Field Scanpresents our synthesis of these interviews – in effect, a snapshot of the civictech field.
In September 2011, Living Cities embarked on a developmental evaluation of its current portfolio of work. This evaluation effort is intended to help Living Cities (members and staff):
Learn from its results,
Increase its differential impact, and
Create a culture of learning and innovation internally and in its network.
The “real-time” component of the evaluation is helping Living Cities achieve these goals by guiding Living Cities in applying what it is learning in current work and, building a culture of learning and innovation in the process--to make the embedded learning process “just how we do our work here.”
Living Cities contracted with 4th Quadrant Partners (4QP), an organizational learning expert, to implement the developmental evaluation. Fourth Quadrant Partners has found…
There are times in almost every sector that forces of change come together to fundamentally disrupt the way that sector works. Former Intel Chairman Andy Grove calls this a strategic inflection point. Philanthropy is on the brink of its own strategic inflection point. Just as the internet changed the face of commerce, so it can change fundamentally the way that social change can happen. Today, organizations can wholesale social change or develop programs that almost overnight touch millions of people. These ‘wholesaling’ organizations share many common characteristics such as: (1) intent to impact the masses; (2) marginal, incremental cost to serve the next customer; (3) borderless service delivery; (4) grants plus’ business model; (5) redefining fundamental power relationships; (6) engage…
Moderator: Ben Hecht, President & CEO, Living Cities Panelists: Xavier de Souza Briggs, Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Gary Hattem, Managing Director, Community Development Finance Group; President, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation David Robinson, NBA Hall of Famer, Co-Founder Admiral Center The Honorable R.T. Rybak, Mayor, Minneapolis, Minnesota Nancy Zimpher, Chancellor, State University of New York (SUNY)
October 17, 2010
American Cities Are Ripe for Renewal, if Philanthropy Has the Will
By Ben Hecht
Richard Florida, the economic-development expert and author, refers to the financial meltdowns that have occurred throughout American history as Great Resets. He argues that they create a pathway for innovation and encourage new ways of doing business.
As examples, he points to the urbanization and rapid industrialization that followed the Long Depression of the late 19th century and the more recent technological expansion that followed the Great Depression in the 1930s. Without these crisis points, he contends, innovators would not have had the push necessary to move beyond their staid approaches to create something new.
Today, we clearly are in the midst of another reset and with it a…
Foreclosures, like the subprime lending that precipitated them, have been heavily concentrated in the same vulnerable neighborhoods targeted by community development efforts over the last 20 years. The resulting vacant and abandoned properties threaten the property values of neighboring homeowners, invite crime and discourage future investment.In 2007, Living Cities, a national philanthropic collaboration of 21 of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions, recognized the urgency of finding promising approaches to address the realities of the foreclosure crisis.
In Newark and other urban communities, low-income residents cannot afford to live in a healthful environment, and the costs of unhealthy living further destabilize families and entrench people in poverty. Newark’s Strong Healthy Communities Initiative (SHCI) will address these unequal conditions by using a “social determinants of health” framework to improve the economic and social well-being of targeted low-income communities through systems transformation as well as coordinated investments in housing, education, healthcare and healthy food options. In each neighborhood, the initiative will drive a comprehensive neighborhood revitalization strategy focused on alleviating the environmental conditions that create barriers to the educational and economic advancement of residents.
The Baltimore Integration Partnership proposes to create municipal and regional mechanisms to ensure that low-income communities benefit from large-scale economic development projects and the economic opportunities generated by anchor institutions. The initiative will work with the State of Maryland and City of Baltimore to achieve smart growth goals, including investments in transportation infrastructure; support for the redevelopment of neighborhoods at the city’s core (combating sprawl and utilizing existing water, sewer and utility systems); and finding new uses for vacant and abandoned property and buildings. Flexible funds for workforce skill development and training will be used to ensure that residents are ready to participate in the economic opportunities created and identified.…
The Cleveland initiative seeks to fully harness the power of nationally renowned anchor institutions to drive a regional economic inclusion strategy that develops jobs and businesses in the region for the benefit of low- income people. This is an integrated approach to economic development that involves generating community wealth through creation and scaling of employee-owned businesses and other suppliers to anchor institutions. It also involves the development of a Health Tech corridor that offers growing companies access to trained employees in close proximity to anchor institutions.
This effort will fight the out-migration of Detroit’s population to the suburbs and seek to “redensify” the urban core by improving safety, schools, employment, and small business opportunities. Specifically, the Woodward Corridor Initiative seeks to align anchor institution hiring and procurement, land use planning, transit corridor development, and neighborhood revitalization in ways that secure direct benefits for residents while attracting new investment. The initiative will also work to make Detroit more “business friendly” by coordinating five business divisions within the City, identifying bottlenecks, streamlining processes, and dramatically improving the climate for small business growth and private investment.
Living Cities support will advance the development of a regional, cross-sector framework for equitable Transit- Oriented Development that ensures that low-income residents, businesses and neighborhoods along the existing Hiawatha line and planned Southwest and Central lines benefit from transit-related investments. The initiative will advance corridor-wide frameworks to align public and private investments that support community-driven planning while providing a predictable environment to stimulate private investment. The initiative will also increase the capacity of affordable housing and small business intermediaries.
In 2008, responding to the impact of concentrated foreclosures on urban neighborhoods, Living Cities launched an initiative to catalyze, test and learn from 10 of the most promising local pilot efforts to reclaim foreclosed properties. The June convening, the second of its kind, brought together the grantees, other recognized local innovators, leading national practitioners, Living Cities member organizations and other public and private stakeholders. The goal of the convening was to explore the work of these leaders, identify and discuss common challenges and explore solutions.Though the local practitioners shared a common goal — to stabilize communities and create/preserve affordable housing by returning foreclosed properties to productive use — no two initiatives are the same. Some…
Founded in 1991, Living Cities is an innovative philanthropic collaborative of 22 of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions. Our members are not simply funders. They participate at the senior management level on the Living Cities Board of Directors and contribute the time of 80+ expert staff toward crafting and implementing our agenda to improve the lives of low-income urban residents and the communities in which they live.
This publication, New Normal, provides our perspective on what the public, private and philanthropic sector need to do together in this second decade of the 21st century to address the contemporary needs of U.S. cities. It is premised on the reality that none of us can afford to continue to do business as usual. We must act with urgency to bring about the meaningful changes that are necessary to ensure that our cities can compete in the global economy and become places of opportunity for low-income residents.
Living Cities was launched in 1991 as an informal partnership among seven foundations and an insurance company with a commitment to help improve under- invested urban neighborhoods and local community development organizations. It was an innovative approach that recognized the critical importance of making markets work by aggregating philanthropic investments to achieve meaningful results. Living Cities quickly emerged as a leader in addressing urban issues.
Over the years, Living Cities has engaged numerous addi- tional partners seeking to invest in and rejuvenate American cities. Today, we are the world’s largest philanthropic collaborative dedicated to improving cities and the lives of the low-income people who live in them.
This report, “Green Cities,” is our effort to showcase and support the innovative ways in which cities are creating an equitable green economy. The report is based on conversations with the brightest thinkers in the field, and the findings from our survey of 40 of the country’s largest cities. “Green Cities” takes a step back to see what cities have accomplished, while also identifying areas in which their efforts have fallen short.
TRANSIT-ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT (TOD) is an integrated approach to land use and transportation development that creates long-term prosperity for society at large. TOD that is equitable and sustainable fosters healthy and prosperous communities, in which diverse groups of people have greater mobility choices and access to opportunity. If done right, TOD can have a myriad of social, environmental and economic benefits for people and communities, from reduced costs of living, better access to jobs, and economic growth, to healthier lifestyles and, through reduced automobile use, important reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Given the profound demographic, economic, and environmental shifts the United States is experiencing, there is ample evidence that there is a substantial demand for TOD…
In Portland, Ore., 1,560 chronically homeless individuals left the street between 2005 and 2008 — representing a dramatic 70 percent reduction in the city’s popu- lation. This paper, which was written by Erik Sten, a Portland city commissioner from 1996 to 2008 and one of the main architects of that shift, seeks to explain how the city achieved such extraordinary success.When the Bush Administration required cities to produce a “10 Year Plan to End Homelessness” based on a blueprint produced in 2000 by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Sten and his staff were cynical about the Bush mandate. The mandate was given at the same time that the administration was cutting aid to cities. However, based in part by the credible source of the information, Sten and his colleagues set out to…
The New Economy Initiative (NEI) is a joint program of 10 national and local foundations that have committed $100 million to an eight-year effort designed "to foster economic growth by accelerating the transition of southeast Michigan to an innovation-based economy."
Despite decades of calls for reform, America’s public education system remains the target of sharp criticism for failing to adequately prepare young people for higher education and the jobs of the new economy. But hope is coming. Education entrepreneurs in recent years have been en- ergizing certain corners of America’s moribund public education system with innovation.
At first, stories about the current foreclosure crisis focused on half-built McMansions in suburbia. But, all along, the hardest hit have actually been low-income Americans — and the communities they live in. Now that the mortgage crisis has spiraled into a full-blown financial meltdown, the interconnections between the fate of individual homes and our nation’s financial health has become clearer.
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