DES MOINES NEIGHBORHOOD REVITALIZATION PLANNING PROGRAM REVIEW
Des Moines, IA
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are the city's planning and revitalization efforts getting results?
SUMMARY
In 2017, we were tasked with evaluating neighborhood revitalization programming in Des Moines to gauge past performance and identify adjustments for emerging market conditions. The process revealed the need for changes to a revitalization system that was ill-suited to dealing with existing circumstances at the time: sustained strength on one side of the city, explosive growth downtown, and vast areas of chronic soft market conditions everywhere else.
Recommendations included an overhaul of the City’s revitalization framework and programming, a new way of planning for neighborhoods, and a new toolbox for implementing neighborhood plans. We were subsequently retained to complete new plans for four neighborhoods and design and set up a new neighborhood revitalization organization called Invest DSM.
Hard Decisions Using Both Heart and Head
Our data-driven analysis of the Des Moines market, within the context of the regional market and suburban competition, clearly laid out the challenges in many of the city's core neighborhoods. Neighborhood improvement needs across the city exceeded the available resources, so prioritization was critically important.
We facilitated a working group process with local leaders and practitioners where community values and political realities could be blended with and weighed alongside the objective data. As a result, the City's new neighborhood investment strategy had a firm foundation of support for implementation.
Post-Project Impacts
A Fresh Approach Leads to Action
A new citywide neighborhood revitalization strategy for Des Moines acknowledged that spreading insufficient resources across too many neighborhoods would not achieve the desired results, and that a stronger emphasis on "middle neighborhoods," or those that are vulnerable yet recoverable, would be the best way to meet the community's goals within its resource constraints.
Following adoption of the study, czb was invited back to Des Moines to craft four neighborhood plans as models for the new approach, and to help establish a new non-profit organization called Invest DSM to handle the plan implementation.
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