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Here's the Community News You Requested July 24, 2025 |
Please visit A Good Community: Making and Keeping One.
Usually the first article in this newsletter represents original thinking based on my observations in the city planning and community development fields. This month I'm making an exception because an article I read seems tailor made to stimulate your creative thinking about how to make your own community more livable. The Lee Kuan Yew World Communities Prize has recognized Vienna, Austria and Hamburg, Germany. A
Above: Notice several levels along the Hamburg waterfront, connected by steps. The lower level is designed to flood and provides recreation and a pleasant walkway, while higher levels prevent flood damage. If this would be a drastic step for you, see our page on street closures for public use for other ideas.
Also in Vienna, the Aspern Seestadt project, which aims to redevelop a former airfield into housing for 25,000 people, has activated some interim uses
while the proposed "new city" is coming to life. How about a somewhat temporary five-story hammock lounge that now serves as a project overlook and event space? Let that concept sink in for a minute.
Vienna's community engagement has been deep and lively. I love one of their survey questions: "Do you feel you can shape your surroundings?"
A major redevelopment in Hamburg, HafenCity, is being built atop former port and docklands facilities. The project combines the red brick buildings of the UNESCO-listed Speicherstadt district with new construction. A major goal of the project is flood protection through cleverly combining low-lying promenades for recreational use with streets and buildings that are elevated, typically by 25 to 28 feet.
HafenCity also manifests its social goal of mixing incomes. Since about 2011, a one third/one third/one third rule has been
effect for new housing developments. A third is devoted to each housing type: social housing (similar in concept to public housing in the U.S.), mid-priced rental units, and privately owned housing.
Other elements of the HafenCity experiment include micro-mobility systems, a university campus, and the inclusion of a major cultural attraction, the striking Elbphilharmonie concert hall. Another notable aspect of HafenCity worth copying is the emphasis on facilitation, coordination, and convening of a diverse group of stakeholders.
This article is very approachable, so if any of these ideas are of interest, it's an easy read.
A great code enforcement training resource is now being offered absolutely free to municipalities. Find out about this training guide to see if your town or city could benefit.
The Center for Community Progress, which focuses on issues of vacant property abandonment, worked with the City of Cleveland over the past year to develop this guide. It is aimed primarily at code officers and isn't suitable for experienced inspectors or those who inspect new construction.
However, if your city struggles with code enforcement controversy, which many do, it's worth seeing if this training tool will help.
Two other nice articles caught my attention this month.
Probably the first section on our website to be completed was a collection of articles on sprawl and its social, aesthetic, and economic costs. More recently, though, I have seen a chorus of articles maintaining that the only way to solve the housing affordability crisis is to allow sprawl so that more housing can be built.
Read a critique of this argument from the Bloomberg CityLab.
Wouldn't a better response be figuring out how to encourage and allow more infill housing without increasing the footprint of urban development? In almost all cases, I think so.
In
addition to typical arguments about the economic inefficiency of sprawl, we should be talking about how new vehicular traffic induced by sprawl is contributing to greenhouse gas emissions that we can ill afford right now. The role of sprawl in deforestation, another contributor to climate change, has been overlooked for the most part. However, some estimates are that almost half of the negative climate impacts of deforestation can be reduced by curtailing sprawl.
One last article of interest to many of you will be a discussion of a Missouri lawsuit about Low Income Housing Tax Credits.
If you aren't in the know about this, the tax credits are usually the major inducement now for developers to build low-income housing. To receive these tax credits under this LIHTC program, a
developer is required to keep the housing affordable for 30 years. But there is a big loophole: after 15 years, the owner can opt out of the affordability requirement if the state's housing agency fails to find a qualified buyer who will keep the units affordable within a year of being notified that the owner wants to sell.
This topic is even more timely in light of the increases in these credits included in the "big beautiful bill" in which these tax credits are construed as the cornerstone of any attainable housing initiative by the U.S. federal government.
If the resulting housing units are affordable for only 15 years, we have to ask if this is the magic trick we need to encourage more modest housing to be built.
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