Cities Across the U.S. Making Strides in Supporting Resilience

Investing in resilient buildings, infrastructure, and community amenities to address the many impacts of climate change—including sea level rise, heat waves, storm surge, and drought—is crucial in safeguarding the built environment and in promoting the health and economic vitality of our cities.

Recent ULI technical assistance and Advisory Services panels have increasingly included a significant focus on the need for resilience; identifying strategies to reduce environmental vulnerabilities in communities across the United States.

Leaders representing eleven recent technical assistance efforts participated in ULI’s Catalyzing Resilience Workshop in February to share their progress—and to spur further action—on implementing resilience-focused recommendations. Attendees included representatives from community groups, local governments, real estate development firms, and others, who all previously participated in ULI technical assistance efforts between 2018 and 2023. These activities were made possible through generous grants from The JPB Foundation, which support ULI’s work to foster greener, more resilient, and more equitable communities across the US.

Participants included representatives from the following technical assistance efforts:

· Rondo Land Bridge, Saint Paul, Minnesota (2018). Provides restorative development recommendations related to reconnecting and revitalizing the Rondo neighborhood with a “land bridge” to reignite a vibrant African American cultural enterprise district along the corridor of Interstate 94.

· Parks and Boulevard System, Kansas City, Missouri (2019). Focuses on strategies to create an equitable park system, including by leveraging parks to invest in green infrastructure and stormwater management.

· Downtown Fort Lauderdale, Florida (2019). Explores how to enhance parks and open space in the city’s urban core, including by redeveloping downtown’s Huizenga Park and addressing sea-level rise, tidal inundation, extreme precipitation, and extreme heat.

· Camden, New Jersey (2019). Provides recommendations on operating and maintaining Cramer Hill Waterfront Park and leveraging the park as a community asset.

· Equitable Park Access, Grand Rapids, Michigan (2019). Focuses on developing a land acquisition strategy to support equitable park access and investing in park space to manage stormwater.

· Improving the Cuyahoga River Infrastructure: Bulkhead Management Practices, Cleveland, Ohio (2021). Explores best practices for financing, rebuilding, and maintaining bulkhead infrastructure along the Cuyahoga River.

· Elizabeth River Trail, Norfolk, Virginia (2021). Centers on recommendations to enhance equitable access to the 10.5-mile (17 km) Elizabeth River Trail and to use the trail to provide flood control and mitigation infrastructure.

· Coalition-Drive Path to an Equitable City-wide Greenway, Brooklyn, New York (2022). Examines opportunities to formalize the New York City Greenways Coalition to create a 400-mile citywide greenway network to support climate resilience through design and landscape elements, such as native plantings and shade trees lining the pathways.

· Rosedale Park, San Antonio, Texas (2022). Provides strategies for redesigning and activating Rosedale Park, a 60-acre (24.3 ha) park serving San Antonio’s Westside, historically a predominantly Hispanic and low-income area of the city.

· Glen Echo Park, Maryland (2022). Highlights opportunities to strengthen Glen Echo Park’s arts programs and facilities, including by integrating climate adaptation strategies into the park’s mission.

· Riverfront North Partnership: Preparing for a More Resilience Frankford Boat Launch, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2023). Explores the redevelopment of the Frankford Boat Launch and focuses on resilient and green infrastructure and improving access to the Delaware River waterfront.

Attendees identified several key strategies—and explored potential stumbling blocks—to advancing resilience and increasing equitable access throughout the community, including working to gain community buy-in, accessing funding sources for resilience-focused investments, and navigating multiple stakeholders.

Identifying Community Assets and Promoting Buy-in

ULI’s Ten Principles for Building Resilience report highlights the need to leverage community assets to enable communities to bounce back from extreme events and to be more prepared for shocks—sudden and extreme events or disasters.

Community assets include physical features, as well as relational assets, like local leadership, social networks, and an area’s culture and history. Gaining community buy-in by leveraging community assets is essential in moving resilience projects forward.

Gaining buy-in begins with acknowledging the current and historical context of a place to build trust. Workshop attendees from the ReConnect Rondo effort in Saint Paul are advancing plans to revitalize the Rondo neighborhood, which was divided by Interstate 94 in the 1950s and 60s, displacing one out of seven people that made up St. Paul’s Black population. The neighborhood also was subject to redlining.

Goals of the Rondo effort include establishing an African American cultural enterprise district that creates resilience and redevelopment by reconnecting the neighborhood and embracing water as an asset—including by investing in green stormwater infrastructure and “green streets.”

Della Schall Young, founder and CEO at Young Environmental Consulting Group and a leader in the ReConnect Rondo effort, notes that understanding Rondo’s history and focusing on building strong relationships through community events is key to advancing buy-in. “We build trust by connecting at the table. There’s music, storytelling, and food. Community members get to know you because you’re in the community,” said Young.

In New York, the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative (BGI) is working with government partners and the NYC Greenways Coalition to engage communities in planning a 400-mile (643.7 km) citywide greenway network that advances climate resilience goals and provides safe mobility options for commerce, commuting, and recreation. This includes exploring investments in native plants and trees to line pathways, providing more permeable surfaces to absorb stormwater, and working to reduce the urban heat island effect.

Hunter Armstrong, executive director of BGI, highlights that making progress on the greenway network’s climate goals must be rooted in advancing equity. “The investments in greenway planning that are happening in [New York City] must bring safe, resilient, and attractive greenways to more under-resourced communities and also must be designed to be accessible for a range of users and abilities.”

ULI’s report 10 Principles for Embedding Racial Equity in Real Estate provides best practices on translating motivation to work on racial equity into action.

Accessing Funding Sources and Navigating Multiple Stakeholders

Investments in resilient infrastructure and buildings often involve numerous partners, including city governments, the real estate development community, community groups, state and federal agencies, and other stakeholders.

Multi-sector partnerships can bring the capabilities and competitive advantages of different actors to bear, creating and sustaining projects that can advance equity and secure funding, as well as marrying the resources and skills of various stakeholders with community goals.

A 2019 ULI national study visit in Camden, New Jersey explored strategies to support Cramer Hill Waterfront park, an former 86-acre (34.8 ha) municipal landfill and brownfield site that was transformed into park space, giving residents access to the Delaware River waterfront in 2021 for first time in decades. The park includes numerous features to promote resilience.

Joe Myers, the COO of Camden Community Partnership (CCP)—the organization that spearheaded the creation of Cramer Hill Waterfront Park—shares that “close, sustained partnerships and active nonprofit organizations meant that Camden residents were at the table throughout the planning and development of the park.” “Partnerships among ULI, community members and organizations, and the city, county, and state made the project ‘more than a park’,” says Myers.

For example, in 2009, the Salvation Army Kroc Community Center opened nearby on 24 acres (9.7 ha) of the former landfill, funded by $59 million from the estate of Ray and Joan Kroc. That started a conversation with the city, Camden County, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), and the community about reusing the rest of the site in a resilient and sustainable way. These discussions led to the NJDEP providing $74 million to fund the remaining landfill’s closure and cleanup, shoreline protection, natural resource restoration, and eventual park construction.

Myers also shared that CCP was able to leverage $1.1 million in philanthropic funding from the William Penn Foundation for park activation and programming. This also led to a $35 million United States Department of Housing and Urban Development Choice Implementation Grant for the complete rehabilitation of the Ablett Village in the Cramer Hill neighborhood, which is directly across the street from the park.

In Fort Lauderdale, the Downtown Development Authority (DDA) is leading the effort to renovate Huizenga Park, the city’s signature gathering space. Developing a new vision for the park was a major component of ULI’s 2019 Downtown Fort Lauderdale Advisory Services panel, which highlighted opportunities to demonstrate a more resilient water management strategy, provide heat mitigation elements, and increase social cohesion.

ULI’s recommendations became the guiding principles supporting the DDA’s vision to reimagine Huizenga Park, which will include a series of “outdoor rooms” connecting the nearby Las Olas Boulevard to the New River.

Jenni Morejon, president and CEO of the DDA stressed that there are significant opportunities and challenges associated with investing in a downtown park. “With a downtown park, we have the chance to create more societal connections by making this space usable 365 days of the year, not just during big events. We’re creating ‘everyone’s park, for everyone’s downtown’,” says Morejon. “Navigating multiple stakeholders requires creating true partnerships of confidence, chemistry, and capacity. ULI’s technical assistance work is indispensable in building such partnerships.”

“You can never ‘over engage’ with stakeholders and the public, and unless all key stakeholders participate, you’ll get a fractured vision,” adds Morejon. “Involving everyone throughout the process will lead to a better project and is also an important component of securing funding.”

The $15 million in funding to reimagine the park is an example of a public-private-philanthropic partnership, with one-third of the funding coming from the public sector, one-third from the private sector, and one-third from private donors. Support from public sector partners, including the City of Fort Lauderdale and the State of Florida will ensure that Huizenga Park remains a park in perpetuity. A formal groundbreaking is set for May 2024.