In recent decades, American cities have expended considerable resources on housing and community development efforts in deteriorated neighborhoods. However, they generally have not targeted the critical mass of such resources at particular neighborhoods necessary to bring them to the point where private housing and commercial markets begin to operate without government funds. Instead, resources are spread somewhat thinly throughout low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, helping each one a little, but not curing any.
In 1999, the City of Richmond, Virginia, decided to target the bulk of its federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds and its Home Investment Partnership (HOME) funds, as well as significant amounts of capital improvement funds and other resources (focused code enforcement and accelerated vacant and abandoned property disposition) on just seven, carefully chosen neighborhoods. Through this initiative, called Neighborhoods in Bloom (NiB), the city planned to concentrate significant resources on these neighborhoods until it achieved the critical mass of public investment needed to stimulate self-sustaining, private-market activity there. At the same time, the Richmond office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), acting through Richmond's community development corporations (CDCs), targeted its housing investment subsidies (lines of credit, loans and grants) largely to the same neighborhoods.
This study assesses the impacts of these efforts after five years, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative method used here is an adjusted interrupted time series (AITS) model, which compares home sales prices in the targeted neighborhoods with prices in neighborhoods that were not targeted for public subsidies, from 1990 (nine years before the NiB program's initiation) through 2003 (almost five years after the program's initiation).The results of the modeling process are quite clear. Although average home sales prices increased at a healthy clip citywide after 1996, they increased 9.9 percent per year faster in the target neighborhoods after the onset of the NiB program than they did elsewhere in the city. In fiscal year 1990/91, home sales prices in the target areas averaged less than half of the citywide average. By FY 2003/04, however, home sales prices in the target areas averaged 70 percent of the citywide price average.
Furthermore, when city investments (of the type that are the focus of this study) in a given block* within the target areas exceeded $20,100, the average home sales price in the block increased by over 50 percent and then continued to increase thereafter. LISC investments are correlated with an additional price increase in blocks where city investments also exceeded $20,100. This strongly suggests the presence of critical thresholds that public and nonprofit investment must exceed if they are to have measurable impacts on the housing market. Finally, the quantitative modeling process indicates that city and LISC investments in the target neighborhoods may have had positive impacts on home sales prices within 5,000 feet (about one mile) of the target areas as well.
A qualitative analysis of the impacts of the NiB program and LISC investments, consisting of interviews with real estate and finance industry professionals, public officials, nonprofit housing providers and neighborhood residents, largely confirmed the positive picture painted by the quantitative analysis. In a majority of the target neighborhoods, the critical mass of CDBG and HOME funds administered by the city, in addition to funds provided by LISC, allowed most nonprofit CDCs to rehabilitate and construct more housing more quickly than they had done previously. This level of housing activity encouraged — at least in part — private, for-profit developers and investor-owners to begin to rehabilitate dilapidated housing, often in the same blocks where the CDCs were operating. Some private, for-profit housing development activity — both in and near the target neighborhoods — is the result of stimuli other than the city's and LISC's investments. The target neighborhoods contain the only remaining historically significant housing in the city that has not already been renovated and gentrified. Moreover, all of the target neighborhoods are located within close proximity to the central business district (CBD) and most enjoy excellent views or other amenities as well. So some of the differential increase in average home sales prices during the past five years would undoubtedly have occurred even in the absence of the city's NiB program. Still, the City of Richmond's and LISC's investments appear to have made a significant contribution to the appreciation in market value in the target neighborhoods. Available evidence indicates that this has occurred without significant displacement of existing residents. More over, by subsidizing home ownership through their investments, LISC and the city have attracted many first-time home buyers and promoted the goal of creating mixed - income communities.
The results of this study lend support to the notion that the public and nonprofit sectors should target their resources so as to achieve a threshold level beyond which the private market can operate without subsidies (except where they are needed to maintain affordability or to preserve historic structures). Yet to be determined, however, is a definition of neighborhood health sufficiently precise that it could guide local governments in determining both when and how much to invest in a neighborhood, as well as when it is time to declare success and move on to other areas. That task must await further research and further pioneering work by cities such as Richmond.
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