The Livable Neighborhoods Program

New York City is changing. The Livable Neighborhoods Program is designed to help communities plan for equitable and sustainable change — now and into the future. Livable Neighborhoods directly connects you and your community with 20 years of the MAS Planning Center’s technical assistance expertise.

Via a toolkit, in-person training, and an on-line network, you’ll have current, New York City-specific information on a range of planning topics, from community organizing, to using census data to better understand your neighborhood, to reviewing environmental impact statements, to economic development, to creating plans and working toward their implementation. If you want to become more involved in your neighborhood, this is the program for you.

History

Created with the input of grassroots planners and community advocates and first launched at Hunter College in 2007, the program provides participants with in-person training, a take-home comprehensive community planning toolkit, and access to a web-based network for ongoing discussion. Although community board members are a core constituency of the program, the LNP is free and open to public with a special preference given to those individuals who are part of community-based organizations, neighborhood associations, and other grassroots community groups.

A part of the Planning Center’s overarching commitment to neighborhood-led planning, the LNP grew out of a 2004 summit on community based planning where more than 100 planners, academics, community activists, and city government employees underscored the need for better training and resources for community members. The Planning Center launched the program in 2007, receiving participation from a diverse group of neighborhoods from all five boroughs.

A Serious Need

The population of the average New York City community district is comparable in size to Bridgeport, New Haven or Waterbury, Connecticut — cities which have hundreds of employees and multi-million dollar budgets to provide services. The responsibilities of New York’s community boards are met by a small staff, typically consisting of the district manager and two administrative assistants. Any extra personnel, such as a planning expert, must be paid for out of the board’s annual budget of approximately $200,000.

For 30 years the city has relied on its 59 community boards, their members, and civic-minded New Yorkers to make critical planning and budgetary decisions on a range of geographically based issues without regularly providing them with up-to-date training on key land use topics or the latest map-making technology. Instead, the boards must draw on their modest funding to pay for these tools and for a knowledgeable planner to put them to effective use.

How It Works

The Livable Neighborhoods Program, generously funded by the Altman Foundation and Mizuho USA Foundation of the Mizuho Corporate Bank, is designed to address these gaps and to demonstrate that when sufficient resources and training are provided to communities, their ability to make good, consensus-based planning decisions increases enormously.

The resource component of the program is a comprehensive planning “toolkit” containing chapters on major planning topics such as community organizing and visioning, data collection, zoning, 197-a planning, “brownfield” planning, historic and cultural resources preservation, electronic mapping and the budget process.

A Meaningful Role

Enhanced training and resources serve grassroots planners in their efforts to transform and revitalize neighborhoods. Another key outcome — demonstrating that effective neighborhood planning depends on sufficient resources — may help convince decision-makers to commit city funds to community planning. In our task force-led Campaign for Community-Based Planning, we are simultaneously advocating for reform leading to a more meaningful role for all New Yorkers in the city’s planning and land use decisions.

The Livable Neighborhoods Program will help prepare people to take on new planning responsibilities as part of a broad civic agenda, and to take control over the future of their neighborhoods.