Lessons in Neighborhood Revitalization

Penn IUR announces the publication of Paul Brophy’s “Revitalizing America’s Neighborhoods: A Practitioner’s Perspective,” a distillation of lessons from Paul Brophy’s 50 years working to strengthen America’s neighborhoods. Brophy—a principal at Brophy & Reilly, a Penn IUR Fellow, graduate of Penn’s Planning School, and a leader in the field of economic and community development—has written this essay that offers an historical and contemporary perspective on today’s neighborhood improvement challenges.

Brophy takes an analytic approach, identifying three types of neighborhoods—distressed, middle, and strong—and corresponding methods of managing preservation and change. He focuses on distressed and middle neighborhoods, arguing that, despite widespread attention to the problem of gentrification in hot-market places, neighborhood decline continues to be a major issue for many of the country’s cities. Brophy emphasizes the importance of place on people’s life opportunities and shows how to support struggling places to advance opportunity.

He writes that distressed neighborhoods need substantial investment (too little won’t make a difference) to turn them around, and this needs to be guided by a coordinated vision shared by residents, institutions, and other local stakeholders. He offers several examples of what this approach looks like in practice, drawing especially from his long-time work in Baltimore. Middle neighborhoods—those frequently overlooked places straddling the line between growth and decline—ought to receive more attention from city planners and community development professionals than they do, he says, in order to preserve them and keep them from sliding into distress.

Brophy offers both big-picture principles as well as stories and examples that demonstrate the application and functionality of those principles. His perspective, as the subtitle of his paper suggests, is that of a practitioner. While his practice is guided and informed by academic research, it is from his on-the-ground application of this research that the principles he identifies emerge. “I would have been useless in the classroom and on the written page without in-the-neighborhoods practice,” he writes.

Penn IUR is pleased to make his experience available for others to learn from.