Archive for October, 2009

czb began work in 2008 with the beautiful Fingerlakes City of Geneva, NY. David Boehlke, Karen Pooley, and Charles Buki evaluated the city’s housing stocks and made a bold set of recommendations for overhauling this small community’s approach of housing and neighborhoods.

In July 2009 the City Council by a 7-2 vote supported the creation of the City of Geneva’s Office of Neighborhood Initiatives, fully funding a broad range of revitalization activities developed by czb.

As so much of western and upstate NY, parts of Massachusetts and Connecticut, western Pennsylvania and communities in Ohio are in the same soft market condition as Geneva, there is much to learn from the hard work and brave effort taking place in Geneva today.

czb is very pleased to report the good fortune of bringing exciting projects to a close this fall, while starting new ventures that offer great learning opportunities for us.

In January czb partnered with Lindsey Mosby of Philips Design and Joanna Schull of Schull Strategy and formerly SYP, to help Park City undertake a community visioning project as part of the their planning work. In July czb made a preliminary presentation to the City Council and this October Charles Buki and Jo Schull made a final public presentation to the Park City community, delivering a new czb innovation: the 3eQ planning tool for Park City .

During the summer czb intensively worked in Atlanta for the Annie E. Casey Foundation to evaluate the severe foreclosure problems residents of SW Atlanta face. czb performed a deep dive for AECF and delivered a comprehensive revitalization strategy for the Pittsburgh neighborhood. This project was led by Charles Buki and David Boehlke with world class analytics once again provided by Karen Beck Pooley, PhD.

This October, czb was informed that it has been selected by the City of Norfolk to begin a comprehensive neighborhood revitalization effort starting in January 2010. This is a project of great significance to czb, given the challenges in Norfolk, the history of housing discrimination there, and the city’s new commitment to healthy neighborhoods and resolve to apply czb techniques to understanding markets and crafting revitalization strategies. The czb team for Norfolk will include czb principals along with Joanna Schull, Mel Freeman, and Don Poland, and will partner with Ted Koebel, PhD from Virginia Tech.

czb continues to experience the splendor of Western and upstate New York in our on-going work with the City of Jamestown in the Chautauqua Lakes area and Geneva in the Finger Lakes region. Both communities have retained czb in 2009 for work on market stabilization and revitalization. Jamestown received special support from czb’s 2009 Summer Intern Sylvia Tatman Burrus, a senior in the Architecture and Planning program at the University of Washington in Seattle. With Sylvia’s help, czb was able to perform a 100% inventory of more than 8,500 structures to augment the czb deep dive.

In a very challenging effort, czb has completed this fall another in a series of efforts for the Greater New Orleans Foundation. In this case czb evaluated housing and retail conditions in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. St. Bernard Parish was the hardest hit by Katrina of all New Orleans area communities, with 74% of all structures damaged beyond repair. czb has been working the GNOF to shape a stabilization effort for St. Bernard Parish under very difficult market circumstances.