West Philadelphia Neighborhood Technical Assistance Center by Lakshmi Reddy

Neighborhood Technical Assistance Center Strengthening Community-University Partnerships in West Philadelphia

11.308 Ecological Urbanism Final Project Fall 2022 Lakshmi Gangamreddypalli Master in City Planning Candidate 2023 Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT

Contents Introduction

Community-University Partnerships

The Proposal

Why Penn?

Structure of NTAC

Scale and Focus

NTAC’s Activities

Evaluation

WPLP’s Way Forward

References

INTRODUCTION West Philadelphia is an inner-city area with a diverse racial and cultural composition. It is home to the University of Pennsylvania and some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. It faces a multitude of intersecting issues related to gentrification, housing, poverty, unemployment, deteriorating infrastructure, vacant land, and environmental degradation. Local government initiatives alongside efforts by the many active community based organizations have been attempting to address these problems for several years now. Additionally, the University of Pennsylvania is an important institute invested in community development in the West Philadelphia neighborhoods. The proposals made in this report aim to leverage the resources available at Penn and strengthen community-university partnerships in order to improve local communities and help solve significant urban problems. The motivation for this project is rooted in the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP) and its mission to “rebuild community through strategic design, planning, and education” (WPLP 2022). WPLP, which was initiated by Professor Anne Spirn in 1987, is a valuable demonstration of long-term partnership between academia and urban communities which is committed to improving the quality of life in distressed neighborhoods. For over 30 years, this initiative has brought together university faculty and students, West Philadelphia community allies, and municipal officials from Philadelphia Water Department to develop innovative solutions to local urban issues. WPLP forms the foundation of the class, Ecological Urbanism¬, for which this report is produced. The significant positive impact of WPLP on West Philadelphia communities, specifically Mill Creek, encouraged me to explore the role of community-university partnerships in community development efforts and the factors that contribute to their performance in implementing these efforts.

COMMUNITY-UNIVERSITY PARTNERSHIPS Across the US, there are a growing number of colleges and universities which are collaborating with community-based organizations and municipal government agencies to take collective action on issues or challenges faced by the community. These collaborations often take the form of long-term partnerships where university research and technical expertise is combined with local community resources to advance community development goals and to create mutually beneficial outcomes. My inquiry into successful community-university partnerships in the US brought me to the East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP), an interdisciplinary community development initiative of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) involving the university faculty and students, and the community residents and municipal officials from the City of East St. Louis in southwestern Illinois. It is an ongoing project that started in 1987, although its most active and effective years were between 1990 and 2000. This duration marks Professor Kenneth Reardon’s decade-long involvement with the project and his ample documentation of ESLARP (Reardon 1998, 2000 & 2005) has been a critical resource in grounding this proposal in evidence-based research. ESLARP is a valuable demonstration of how creating a sustainable community-university partnership aimed at community development and neighborhood improvement can lead to long lasting positive change. In this respect, and in terms of its scope, approach, and founding timeline, ESLARP shares significant similarities with WPLP. These parallels allow WPLP to benefit directly from the learnings of ESLARP, both with regards to replicating successful interventions/approaches as well as learning from its shortcomings. Launched as an initiative to provide technical assistance to East St. Louis-based organizations engaged in community revitalization efforts, ESLARP evolved into one of the nation’s most highly visible and widely respected community-university development partnerships. Participants in the project effectively applied “bottom-up/ bottom-sideways” approach to community development in a context where economic resources are extremely scarce, political power is tightly controlled, and there is considerable social distance between the majority of local residents and outsiders recruited to provide planning and development assistance. Among ESLARP’s many achievements is the effective implementation of a Neighborhood Technical Assistance Center (NTAC) in East St. Louis, which forms the inspiration for this proposal made in this report. Established in 1995 to support program’s community-building efforts, the Center provided free technical assistance to over 40 neighborhood associations, social service agencies, and municipal

departments. Jointly funded by the East St. Louis Community Development Block Grant Program, the University, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the center housed a community organizer, a neighborhood planner, a nonprofit management specialist, and an architect providing assistance for development activities. Though no longer functioning, its contribution to local economic and community development is well documented (Reardon 2000). NTAC’s popularity beyond the city’s borders was also a strong indicator of its effectiveness—it received funding to expand its efforts outside East St. Louis, and municipal officials from the Champaign-Urbana area also expressed interest establishing a similar community planning/design assistance center in their area. In West Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania has initiated and supported several programs, with varying degrees of success, aimed at improving social and economic conditions in the surrounding neighborhoods. This project seeks to strengthen the community-university partnership in the area by proposing a West Philadelphia Neighborhood Technical Assistance Center. The Center, modelled after ESLARP’s NTAC, seeks to capitalize on Penn’s interest in community development and tap into its existing networks and efforts in this direction.

Map showing the neighborhoods that have completed neighborhood planning processes through NTAC’s support. Source: ESLARP 2004 via Edwards & Lawson 2005; “The Evolution of Planning in East St. Louis”

THE PROPOSAL: West Philadelphia Neighborhood Technical Assistance Center

Based on the East St. Louis NTAC, this Neighborhood Technical Assistance Center seeks to provide organizational, research, planning, and design assistance to the increasing number of residents and community-based organizations participating in physical, economic and/or social development projects that enhance the quality of life in West Philadelphia. As a locally based resource which is established and supported by the University of Pennsylvania, it would assist residents, non-profit groups, faith based organizations, and municipal agencies in formulating strategies for meeting their technical and training needs in order to strengthen their capacity to develop workable plans and proposals addressing local urban problems. The center’s goal would be to enable the achievement of the communities’ visions for their neighborhoods by bridging the knowledge/skill gap between the local residents and technical experts from the University.

WHY PENN? There are various reasons why the Penn would be the ideal institutional home for the Neighborhood Technical Assistance Center, including those speaking to Penn’s duties and responsibilities to local communities as well as reasons indicating the proposal’s use value to Penn.

Reasons based on Penn’s responsibilities towards West Philadelphia: 1. “Penntrification” 2. Reparations Reasons based on Penn’s opportunities in West Philadelphia: 3. Anchor Institute 4. Civic Engagement 5. Student Learning

Map shows the sheer expanse of Penn and its associated developments within West Philadelphia. (It also includes Drexel University.) Source: Author

1. “Penntrification” Penn is a major agent of gentrification in West Philadelphia. It has over a 100 year history of expansion into the predominantly African American communities in the surroundings. Redlining and Penn’s revitalization projects in the area have had a devastating impact on local communities. This history is well documented by the West Philadelphia Collaborative History project by Penn’s Graduate School of Education (WPCH 2022). Penn’s aggressive property expansion and wealth hoarding that has burdened surrounding Black community with over-policing and Philadelphia city budgets with under-funding came to be known as “Penntrification”. The impact “Penntrification” is most evident in the neighborhood of Black Bottom. Once a predominantly African American neighborhood, Black Bottom was subject to large-scale urban renewal efforts undertaken by Penn (alongside Drexel, University of the Sciences, and Presbyterian Hospital) in the 1960s. It was razed to make space for the neighborhood now referred to as University City. The continuation of decades-long gentrification in the area is evidenced by the recent attempts to evict residents of University City Townhomes (Workers World Philadelphia Bureau 2022).

Maps showing the expansion of Penn. The campus almost doubled in size between 1955 and 1970. Source: Netter Center 2008

2. Reparations There’s a further case for reparations for the historic wrongs committed by the institution. Since establishment 1749, Penn has had a long and complicated history with West Philadelphia. For decades, it has denied its relationship with slavery and profiting off the labor of enslaved Africans (Penn & Slavery Project 2017). Today, the billion-dollar Ivy League school continues to encroach into its working-class surroundings. Additionally, Penn, which is one of the city’s wealthiest institutions, is exempt from property taxes due to its non-profit status. Its payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs) remain disproportionately low compared to the amount of property it owns in the city. Reparative planning (Williams 2020) calls for projects that aim to assert Black self-determination and self-development and “rethink the role of African American communities in setting planning goals and enacting planning policies”. This would necessitate a systemic approach that is beyond the scope of this proposal. The Neighborhood Technical Assistance Center would be a more humble intervention that allows Penn to begin addressing the material and symbolic demands of the reparations movement.

3. Anchor Institute Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships recognizes Penn’s position as an anchor institute, a role which it intends to strategically leverage in order to improve local communities and help solve significant urban problems. Anchor institutes place-based institutions with a vested interest in their geographical communities. According to “Anchor Institutions Toolkit” (Netter Center 2008), “anchors” in communities possess the following characteristics: • have a large stake and an important presence in the community; • have significant economic impacts on employment, revenue gathering, and spending patterns; • consume sizeable amounts of land; • own crucial, relatively fixed assets and are unlikely to relocate; • are among the largest purchasers of goods and services in the region; • generate jobs; • attract businesses and highly skilled individuals; • providing multilevel employment possibilities; and • are a center of culture, learning and innovation with enormous human resources. Rationale for engagement as per “Anchor Institutions Toolkit” (Netter Center 2008): • It is good business. • It fosters the socio/economic health of surrounding community and improves 10

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quality of life. Healthy environment is critical to the attraction of visitors and retention of residents, employees and students. Anchor’s future and the future of their communities are intertwined. Reasons of enlightened self-interest. Anchors can enhance their overall missions by helping to improve the quality of life in their communities. It is the right and moral thing to do.

The rationale offered by the toolkit describes how community engagement can be a useful opportunity for the university to advance its interests. The utilitarian lines of reasoning which situate the desirable community outcomes as positive externalities, though functional in building an economic case for engagement, fail to clearly condemn the displacement of residents in the surrounding neighborhoods.

4. Civic Engagement Increasing community engagement provides an opportunity to enact Penn’s commitment to community development. It allows the effective practice of empowerment planning and the application of participatory action research alongside direct action organizing. Besides making research and technical expertise more accessible to community members, NTAC as a local resource would be a useful way to make community based resources more accessible to Penn. This has the potential to strengthen ties with community resources and more effectively channel other development efforts.

5. Student Learning NTAC allows the introduction of students to public service and provides an additional resource for teaching urban practice to students at Penn. Indeed, two of the biggest accomplishments of ESLARP include nurturing a new generation of East St. Louis civic leaders and giving hundreds of students a transformative professional education experience that resulted in many careers in public service and community development. It can also provide teaching material for faculty whose courses are based on field work and grounded research, like the Ecological Urbanism course which is based on WPLP.

STRUCTURE OF NTAC University Partners On the university side, the proposed project intends to build a longitudinal collaboration between Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships and PennPraxis at the Weitzman School of Design. Netter Center’s expertise in community engagement dovetails well with PennPraxis’s experience in advancing social impact design. Existing joint initiatives between the two organizations are evidence of this shared potential and provides a good foundation upon which NTAC can be launched. Both Netter Center and PennPraxis can serve as the dual institutional home for NTAC, and can bring in faculty and students with varying skills, from a diverse range of backgrounds. Simultaneously, NTAC can advance the mission of both the organizations.

Netter Center for Community Partnerships: Netter Center (2017) is the vehicle for advancing civic and community engagement at Penn. It aims to implement democratic, mutually transformative, place-based partnerships between Penn and West Philadelphia through three key strategies: 1. Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) which has transformed university education by solving real-world problems. 2. Neighborhood and school improvements through University-Assisted Community Schools (UACS). 3. Engage institutional resources at Penn in sustained community development partnerships through the aforementioned Anchor Institution Approach. ABCS courses are offered across various departments at Penn and offer a useful channel to connect interested faculty and students with NTAC. The organization is also very well-positioned to provide the necessary community engagement expertise to NTAC. Another existing program at Netter Center which can support NTAC is the Nonprofit Institute which provides workshops to members of local nonprofits in courses aimed at the improvement of organizational and personal capacity.

PennPraxis, Weitzman School of Design: PennPraxis (2021) is a center for applied research, outreach and practice at the Weitzman School of Design in Penn. Its work draws on the School’s five departments and programs—Architecture, Landscape Architecture, City & Regional Planning, Historic Preservation, and Fine Arts—in order to:

1. Support design action and thought leadership to advance inclusion, innovation, and impact in communities underserved by design. 2. Enable projects that utilize interdisciplinary design, art, planning, and heritage preservation in responding to major challenges of the built and natural environments, and the communities that inhabit them. 3. Create multidisciplinary opportunities for students and faculty to collaborate on action research and projects “beyond the market”. The organization will help bring built environment focused planning and design expertise to NTAC to respond to pressing issues in West Philadelphia. An existing program at PennPraxis that is particularly suitable for collaboration with NTAC is the Housing Initiative at Penn (HIP) which aims to provide design and planning assistance to advance housing strategies and goals.

Community Partners On the community side, NTAC would begin with engaging community based organizations which are already partnering with Penn in some capacity, before reaching out to identify new partners and forge new relationships. Major community stakeholders could include leaders of local Community Development Corporations, block captains, neighborhood activists, school principals, area businesspersons, social service professionals, and church pastors. Like WPLP, this project will begin with a focus on Mill Creek before expanding to include other West Philadelphia neighborhoods.

Public Partners NTAC’s relationship with the local government will be crucial in easing implementation of the Center’s potential projects by helping leverage public power and resources. Local governments can also play a critical role in financing as private anchors are not always eligible for all streams of funding. Municipal officials can serve as valuable partners in community development efforts. Furthermore, NTAC can also find political support from Philadelphia City Council, specifically the representative of the Third District, which covers much of West Philadelphia. Currently, this position is held by Councilwoman Gauthier, whose vision for West Philadelphia aligns well with that of NTAC. This presents the proposal with an opportune window to capitalize on, through support from Councilwoman Gauthier’s office.

Membership The leadership of NTAC would comprise of a community advisory board, faculty from Penn, and community development practitioners from Netter Center. The community advisory board could be the same as that of Netter Center in the beginning, and later evolve to better fit the needs of the community. Long-term staff could include community development practitioners from Netter Center and design fellows from PennPraxis. Short-term staff could be comprised of students and volunteers engaging on a project-to-project basis.

Note on Funding Since the mission of NTAC falls well within the scope of Netter Center and PennPraxis, financial support for the project can be sourced through the existing channels of funding that are familiar to these university groups. A potential source for additional support can be through Councilwoman Gauthier’s office.

Organizational Chart of NTAC Source: Author

SCALE AND FOCUS The proposed Center will begin with a focus on a smaller geographic area within West Philadelphia and then expand to include other neighborhoods based on the needs and performance. This attempt to phase the project is rooted in the evidence that the East St. Louis NTAC’s success, upon which the current proposal is based, was demonstrated at a scale less than 5 times the population of West Philadelphia. Thus, Mill Creek, the neighborhood at the core of WPLP’s efforts and threatened by rampant speculation, gentrification, and displacement will be the Center’s first priority. The Center itself can be located at the building serving the Men of Mill Creek, an important community organization working with youth in the Mill Creek community to prevent violence and open up employment opportunities.

Map shows the boundaries of the Mill Creek neighborhood within West Philadelphia. The proposed location of NTAC, i.e. Men of Mill Creek, is also shown. Source: Author

NTAC’s ACTIVITIES Similar to the Center which forms the basis for this proposal, the West Philadelphia NTAC aims to meet the community organizations’ ongoing technical assistance needs to strengthen their organizational, research, planning, and design skills. The functions of the Center are two-fold: 1. Providing tailored assistance to neighborhoods, beginning with Mill Creek, based on the specific issues they face. 2. Providing more general training and assistance to support broader capacity building goals.

Mill Creek focused Activities •

Design and construction assistance:

Widespread deterioration of housing conditions in Mill Creek is resulting in compromised structural integrity of buildings and an increasing number of vacant houses. Given separate ownership of the houses, the sporadic nature of the deterioration, and different repair and restoration needs, these issues need to be tackled at the scale of singular houses. Design and construction assistance can thus help improve the living conditions of the local residents. This program will benefit from the involvement of faculty from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and historic preservation.

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Assitance with homeownership related issues:

Mill Creek faces a range of issues related to homeownership, including tangled deeds, predatory lending, and tax liens. Tangled deeds result in situations where a homeowner dies without leaving a will, thus leading to a phenomenon where the heirs do not have title to the house. Locally known as heir houses, these situations are expensive and time consuming to resolve. This prevents the heirs from accessing programs for low-income homeowners, such as aid for weatherization and home maintenance, often resulting in housing deterioration and vacancy. Predatory lending refers to the deceptive practices that burden homeowners with mortgage loans which they cannot afford. It is targeted at Black and Latinx homeowners and often results in loss of homes and home equity.

Tax delinquency among low-income homeowners can make them vulnerable to tax liens which are legal claims against their property, and can often result in homeowners losing their home in a tax or “sheriff” sale. This program to assist with homeownership related issues will benefit from the involvement of faculty from the fields of law, real-estate, and planning.

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Neighborhood planning:

Assistance for planning at a large scale can help communities realize their vision for their neighborhoods through revitalization plans, open space programming, and green infrastructure related improvements. The process of planning and producing plans can help build capacity among the residents to envision neighborhood improvement and communicate these aspirations through planning documents. Further assistance can be provided to community organizations and municipal agencies for implementation of the plans. This program will benefit from the involvement of faculty from the fields of planning and landscape architecture.

General Activities •

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Information dissemination: Maintain, frequently update, and disseminate information regarding available funding, opportunities, programs, resources, and contacts for community development programs at various levels—local, county, state, and Federal. Data collection: Maintain and frequently update local resource inventories and needs assessments Grant-writing assistance: Direct residents to programs providing grant-writing assistance, i.e. grant-writing office or Nonprofit Institute at Netter Center, for proposals aimed at both public and private funders. Promote partnerships and community development networks: Network with regional and national funders and technical assistance providers to build and maintain connections for community development. Training programs: Develop and offer training programs to meet the needs of local residents and leaders in neighborhood planning, community development, and non-profit management. Topics can range from proposal writing to marketing and strategic planning. Financial management: Support local non-profit organizations with basic financial and management assistance.

The staff to conduct these activities can include community development practitioners from Netter Center, design fellows from PennPraxis, students from Penn, and volunteers from Penn as well as the community.

Evaluation • • • • •

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Metrics for evaluation of NTAC’s performance should be decided by the leadership comprised of the community advisory board and the University’s faculty. It should be informed by frequent feedback from the community members, which will allow the program to be responsive to evolving needs. Assessments should attempt to disaggregate the various initiatives to allow for a more nuanced evaluation. Both distributive outcomes and procedural outcomes need to be evaluated. Besides the basic goals/outcomes and cost/benefit analysis, it will be important to look into the institutional capacity generated and organizational learning produced through the Center’s projects. This can be achieved through interviews with the people involved in the initiation and implementation of the projects through NTAC. Comparison against the counterfactual can be beneficial.

Furthermore, the evaluation should attempt to answer the following questions in order to better assess the Center’s capacity-building efforts as well as its efforts at empowering community members: • How much community participation did NTAC experience? • Did the participatory processes help generate a shared vision? • Did the collaborations ease implementation? • How many proposals did NTAC generate? • How many proposals were implemented? • Do the community members feel empowered? • Did the projects encourage other modes of funding? • Did the implementation and the results make gains on issues of equity?

WPLP’s Way Forward Some of the key learnings from ESLARP that are directly applicable to WPLP relate to Professor Reardon’s (1998 & 2005) insights into the project’s eventual decline: • Dampening interest in ESLARP among junior faculty due to lack of recognition of the importance of public service in promotion decisions (tenure decisions based more on publications than public service). • Increasing emphasis on physical improvement projects (due to change in faculty leadership) limited the success of capacity-building efforts. • Lack of sustained involvement of faculty/university partners, along with discontinuous site presence made it difficult to preserve community relationships. • Unreliable staffing pattern due to high turnover rate of part-time research assistants made maintaining continuous presence and service in the community difficult. Given the similarity of challenges, there is much scope for WPLP to learn for ESLARP’s weaknesses. Ever since Professor Spirn moved from Penn to MIT, WPLP has struggled to maintain site presence, a key factor affecting the health of community-university partnerships. Ongoing efforts in the project are a testament to the strong interpersonal relationships between the professor and community partners. Additionally, questions of succession, i.e. future leadership, for both WPLP and its community partners loom large. WPLP’s success depends heavily on sustained leadership from two individuals, namely Professor Spirn on the side of the university, and her community counterpart, Frances Walker, arguably WPLP’s strongest community link. Though not surprising, this situation begs larger questions: • Is a project/partnership indeed “successful” if it cannot endure significant leadership changes? • At what point during a longitudinal project should there be emphasis on building capacity for future leaders? • How can projects/partnerships be built such that they ease transfer of responsibilities without leading to poorer performance? The West Philadelphia Neighborhood Technical Assistance Center can help strengthen WPLP while addressing some of these difficult questions. Envisioned as an extension of WPLP, the Center can help re-establish the project’s site presence and offer a way for Penn’s faculty and students to easily engage with this long-standing partnership. In the process, it can also help incorporate some of the learnings from ESLARP by creating a platform that creates sustained involvement of faculty, allows continuous site presence, and uses adjusted staffing patterns (long-term leadership and staff alongside short-term project-based involvement of students). Future stages of NTAC can expand the scale of involvement in a phased manner to other neighborhoods in West Philadelphia. In the process, it can attempt partnering with nearby anchors like Drexel University to pool resources and collaborate to meet shared goals.

References Edwards, M., and Lawson, L., 2005. The Evolution of Planning in East St. Louis. Journal of Planning History, 4(4), 356–382. Netter Center, 2008. Anchor Institutes Toolkit: A guide for neighborhood revitalization. University of Pennsylvania. Netter Center, 2017. Netter Center for Community Partnerships. University of Pennsylvania. URL https://www.nettercenter.upenn.edu/about-center (accessed 12.6.22) Penn & Slavery Project, 2017. Penn Libraries. URL http://pennandslaveryproject. org/#intro (accessed 12.5.22) PennPraxis, 2021. Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. URL https://www.design.upenn.edu/pennpraxis/home (accessed 12.6.22) Reardon, K. M., 1998. Enhancing the Capacity of Community-Based Organizations in East St. Louis. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17(4), 323–333. Reardon, K. M., 2000. An Experiential Approach to Creating an Effective Community-University Partnership: The East St. Louis Action Research Project. Cityscape, 5(1), 59-74. Reardon, K. M., 2005. Empowerment planning in East St. Louis, Illinois: A People’s Response to the Deindustrialization Blues. City, 9(1), 85-100. Williams, R. A., 2020. From Racial to Reparative Planning: Confronting the White Side of Planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 0(0). Workers World Philadelphia Bureau, 2022. Protest of ‘Penntrification’ shuts down UPenn convocation. Workers World 20. URL https://www.workers. org/2022/09/66534/ (accessed 12.5.22) WPCH, 2022. West Philadelphia Collaborative History. Penn GSE. URL https://collaborativehistory.gse.upenn.edu/about (accessed 12.7.22) WPLP, 2022. West Philadelphia Landscape Project. URL https://wplp.net/about/ (accessed 12.7.22)