Building Inclusive and Healthy Neighborhoods, Block by Block: Findings from 11 Neighborhoods Nationwide
A new report from Brookings Metro examines LISC’s community-centered economic inclusion initiative, which centers neighborhoods as the key setting for driving strong regional economies. The lessons in this report make one thing clear: To truly transform the prosperity and well-being of entire cities and regions, it’s past time to abandon top-down or “trickle-down” approaches and embrace the actionable, community-rooted models that have demonstrated impact in cities and neighborhoods nationwide.
Image above courtesy of Jana River Medlock Photography
Introduction
In the U.S., a person’s ZIP code significantly shapes the trajectory, quality, and length of their life. Neighborhoods are the building blocks of strong cities and regions, determining people’s access to education, jobs, clean air, and upward mobility. But far too often, they are overlooked as essential ingredients of regional and national prosperity.
When policy conversations hover only at the regional level or higher, the intersections between economic opportunity, health, public safety, and climate resilience—which converge to impact people’s lives on a hyperlocal scale—can be missed, as can the need for cross-sectoral action to address these issues. Focusing on neighborhoods allows practitioners and policymakers to target the scale at which these socioeconomic issues are concentrated and assemble the cross-sectoral coalitions needed to achieve the population-level economic and public health outcomes that form strong regional economies.
This report outlines lessons, outcomes, case studies, and recommendations from a national community-centered economic inclusion (CCEI) initiative—co-led by Brookings Metro and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) for the past five years—that embodies this theory of change and treats neighborhoods as the key setting for achieving inclusive regional outcomes. Eleven neighborhoods across six states and Washington, D.C. implemented the CCEI model—each assembling a diverse coalition of community, city, and regional practitioners that aligned catalytic investments in economic development, affordable housing, workforce development, food access, placemaking, and other drivers of community well-being in historically disinvested neighborhoods.
Our findings—derived from in-depth interviews with 100 stakeholders implementing CCEI on the ground and quantitative investment data from the 11 neighborhoods—demonstrate the transformative impact that place-based models like CCEI and similar approaches can have by improving economic and public health outcomes in historically disinvested neighborhoods. But these findings also reveal a set of policy, practice, and funding barriers that must be addressed to enable these approaches to scale.
Taken together, the lessons in this report make one thing clear: To truly transform the prosperity and well-being of entire cities and regions, it’s past time to abandon top-down or “trickle-down” approaches and embrace the actionable, community-centered models that have demonstrated true promise in cities and neighborhoods nationwide.