HAND Member Spotlight: National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities, the Collaborator, Providing Strategy to Strengthen Communities
For most of the past year, the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities (NIMC) has been consulting on Washington, D.C.’s New Communities Initiative, a mixed-income transformation initiative for four severely distressed housing communities – Barry Farm, Lincoln Heights/Richardson Dwellings, Northwest One and Park Morton. Along with colleagues at Trusted Space Partners, NIMC has been able to provide strategic consultation to the New Communities Initiative team in the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development and its partners – District of Columbia Housing Authority, development teams, resident leaders and other local organizations.
Based at the Case Western Reserve University’s Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences in Cleveland, Ohio, NIMC aims to help reduce urban poverty and promote successful mixed-income communities by conducting high-quality research and making information and evidence easily available to policymakers and practitioners. Along with several research and evaluation studies, the group conducts “state of the field” scans, provides technical assistance and strategic consultation, maintains a mixed-income network among practitioners, policy makers and researchers and manages an online mixed-income development database and library. NIMC has evaluated and consulted with with mixed-income redevelopment in several cities including Chicago, San Francisco, Akron, Boston, Seattle and New Orleans. The recent book, Integrating the Inner City: The Promise and Perils of Mixed-Income Public Housing Transformation, co-authored by Robert Chaskin and NIMC founding director Mark Joseph presents findings and policy implications from three mixed-income case studies in Chicago.
In D.C., NIMC has been able to draw on its research and evaluation findings, broad experiences in several cities and its extensive network of mixed-income practitioners and policymakers to help the District and the Housing Authority. To help promote the local government’s renewed commitment to a successful and inclusive transformation of the public housing developments, NIMC is focused on strategic design, shifting the operating culture and building strong community engagement.
Brand new to HAND, the group is looking forward to sharing its work and learning from the association’s members. By being part of HAND, NIMC also hopes to accelerate its learning curve about the work, experience and insights of the membership.
“We are excited to be plugged into this network and hope to find ways to share and disseminate all that we have learned and continue to learn about promoting successful mixed-income development!” – NIMC
HAND is pleased to spotlight the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities as a member who certainly contributes to our organization’s COLLABORATION, INNOVATION and TRANSFORMATION within the metropolitan area!
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