Healthy Neighborhoods: Real Estate Market Health
Community Impact was an initiative that existed in Chattanooga from 1999 to 2011. They measured neighborhood strength based on four factors. Today, we’re exploring one of those factors: real estate market health.
To recap, we’ve been giving quick looks into factors that can make a neighborhood strong and how your Challenge projects can address these factors. So far we’ve covered: neighborhood safety, community leadership and today, real estate market health.
A snapshot into real estate market health
Real estate market health is a big topic to tackle in one short post. If your brain immediately went to “gentrification,” so did ours. Gentrification is a complicated conversation, so instead of trying to provide concrete answers — we’d rather open up the discussion and get you thinking. Here are a two articles published by Metro Ideas and Strong Towns that dive in a bit deeper. Both are long — but if you’ve got the time, they are both thought-provoking and helpful in framing the discussion of how we approach neighborhoods respectfully and responsibly.
The main take-away from our research — beyond it being a complicated topic — was that it doesn’t always take big initiatives with even bigger budgets to make a difference in a neighborhood’s real estate market health. Often it’s the small things — like bus stops, crosswalks, and street trees — that get overlooked. Often the small things can have the greatest immediate impact.
And while a $3,000 Challenge grant may not be enough to revitalize an abandoned building or fund an affordable housing project — we believe that there could be a lot of smaller projects that would strengthen real estate market health and benefit all residents.
Examples of real estate market health projects
There are a lot of components involved with real estate market health that goes far beyond the housing market. Here are a few projects that showcase this around the country.
- Project Porchlight — increases neighborhood safety by keeping streets well lit.
- Share Shed — helps residents maintain their homes by making tools easily accessible.
- Street Trees — maintaining streets and bringing communities together through tree planting.
We hope these projects can get you thinking about ways you can help improve the real estate market health of your neighborhood!
If you are someone who lives, works, or plays in the 37404 area, we want to know how you think your neighborhood could be strengthened using common spaces. Applications are now open. Learn more and apply at causeway.org/challenge.
