Cities by Consensus

Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding take planning to a new level.

By Lisa Selin Davis

In some spots among the tidy, modest houses of Riverside, Long Island, drug dealers and prostitutes roam in plain sight. Used needles lie in the street. Some homes without power are boarded up but inhabited by squatters. Crime is rampant.

This is no inner city, but rather an unincorporated suburban hamlet of less than 3,000 people about 77 miles east of New York City. There have been several plans to turn Riverside around, including one initiated by the local government in 2008 that, the New York Times reported, included a "downtown-style center with housing and stores, a village green and a main street that planners say would create 'a sense of place.'"

It never happened, not just because the economy was still miserable but because the vision for the reinvention had no precedent, no developer willing to take the risk of investing there, no community members convincing them that this was what they wanted.

A new day

So Riverside, like several other Long Island villages, is trying a new approach. This time, the developer got in on the ground floor, helping the local government to rezone the ailing downtown, working with the community — as local governments would normally do — to envision what should be created there. In many ways the government has outsourced the entire planning process to a private company, and that company is crowdsourcing the plan.

The private company is Renaissance Downtowns, a seven-year-old real estate development firm based in Plainview, Long Island, started by Donald Monti, a self-described "recovering developer" (before realizing there was both a market and a need for suburban revitalization, and that crowdsourcing was a useful way to achieve it, he was building traditional suburban subdivisions and strip malls).

Renaissance steps in at the beginning of the rezoning and revisioning process, helping to create a master plan and then drafting community members to figure out how to populate it. The company creates a website, in this case Riverside Rediscovered, for each area it's working in, then asks residents to submit ideas. Those ideas have included restaurant rows, libraries, tech centers, and almost always a supermarket. Town members vote on the concepts, after which Renaissance determines if favored ideas are economically feasible. The firm calls it "crowdsourced placemaking." There is a patent pending for the process.

This crowdsourced, and often crowdfunded, approach to urban planning is increasingly popular. Spacehive, a British company, allows its users to suggest a civic project and helps them fundraise to realize it. Change by Us, operating in New York City, Phoenix, and Philadelphia, asks participants to submit ideas, or support ideas already in the works, to improve cities. BetterCities has a similar mission in Singapore and in Kuala Lumpur and George Town, both in Malaysia: It's a "grassroots campaign to improve urban living and environment."

And Kickstarter, a crowdfunding site — often for nascent businesses or art projects — has planning projects, too. The organizers of the "Lowline," a plan for an underground park on New York City's Lower East Side, raised over $155,000 for a full-scale demonstration project, $55,000 more than requested.

Elsewhere

Some of these companies are geared specifically toward urban planners. On Citizinvestor, "a crowdfunding and civic engagement platform for local government projects" that "empowers citizens to invest in their community and create real change," government officials upload projects that fall outside the purview of the city budget: park cleanups, playgrounds, even oxygen masks for pets (as part of firefighters' tool kits).

Citizinvestor is a crowdfunding site as well as a crowdsourcing site; the citizens pay for the improvements. A recently launched sister project asks residents to suggest their own ideas and, if there's enough support, the city may take them on.

"We want people to have a say in what's going on in the city," says Citizinvestor cofounder Tony DeSisto. Instead of a city foisting a project on the public, he says, "This is a citizen saying, 'I'd like a dog park here,' getting fellow citizens to like it, and then the municipality can say, 'That is a great project. ... If you raise the funds we're going to go ahead and build it.'"

One of the first cities to use the site was Central Falls, Rhode Island (pop. 19,416), which declared bankruptcy in 2011. (See "Pension Poster Child" in the March 2013 issue of Planning.) Stephen Larrick, director of planning and economic development and an early adopter of the site, wanted to reengage a disaffected public. Through discussions with the constituents, the department decided on a $10,000 project to add recycling bins, which also functioned as public art, to litter-strewn Jenks Park.

"For this to be worth it to us it was about more than the money," says Larrick. "We were thinking very intentionally about crowdsourcing and crowdfunding as a means of engaging the public in the process." The project was fully funded and fully implemented.

How it works

Like most crowdfunding sites, Citizinvestor charges a fee only if a project is fully funded: in this case, eight percent, with three percent going toward credit card fees. Renaissance Downtown's model differs in several ways. It's leading the crowdsourcing efforts, but it's also paying for them.

In exchange for its request for community participation and the shaping of the vision, Renaissance claims development rights to much of the municipally owned land within the redevelopment zone. "We don't get paid by anybody," says Brandon Palanker, vice president of marketing and public affairs for Renaissance Downtowns. "We put out all the money to get the work; the only way we make any money is real estate." The organization has a financial stake in the project — if it doesn't fly, it loses its investment, which may amount to millions of dollars per project.

"That's our upfront risk," says Sean McLean, Renaissance's vice president of planning and development, who leads the redevelopment teams in Riverside and the Nassau County village of Hempstead, one of Long Island's more urban areas. "It's not about how much it will cost me to build. It's about creating value in a much more comprehensive manner."

The Renaissance focus is the triple bottom line: economic, social, and environmental success. In the village of Hempstead, the firm controls 12 percent of the land mass. "We want to encourage other people to develop, so we need to make it big enough and worthwhile enough to encourage other people to come in and invest," says McLean.

This method also differs because it takes a wider view instead of building the piecemeal projects that populate most city-crowdsourcing sites.

Suburban plight

Meanwhile, few of these sites are dealing with suburban spaces, which require a slightly different touch. Many of the urban issues suburbanites fled have followed them to Long Island: poverty, a surge in immigration, a dire need for public transit, and a lack of multifamily housing (only 17 percent of housing on Long Island is multifamily, which contributes to brain drain as young people flock to the city).

But there is also, among many suburban residents, a passionate attachment to the landscape as it is: the low density, the yards, the single-family homes that drew people there over the last 60 or 70 years. If the suburbs need to be reinvented, what better way to do that than with the input of the wary residents themselves?

Market research by the National Association of Realtors and others shows that many Americans want to live in walkable neighborhoods, with services nearby. But, as the Urban Land Institute noted in Shifting Suburbs: Reinventing Infrastructure for Compact Development, "For compact development to occur, developers and municipalities must determine how to plan, fund, and finance the often costly and complicated infrastructure required for suburban compact growth."

In Hempstead, residents submitted their ideas to revitalize a section of the decaying downtown to the website Renew Hempstead. Those include a community garden, a satellite college campus, a conference center, and a "healthy soul food restaurant." Renaissance, working with another private real estate company, UrbanAmerica, has a contract with the village of Hempstead to serve as master developer, to transform downtown into a "vibrant mixed use walkable neighborhood."

The Master Concept Plan lays out a vision, created after Renaissance "met with dozens of stakeholder groups, engaged hundreds of local residents, conducted planning workshops and learned about the wants and needs of local residents," for "new construction, adaptive reuse, open space and public plazas."

Still, the first project is a 336-unit market-rate residential project, with a mixed use building and assisted living facility soon to follow; all are owned and developed by Renaissance. According to the company, the project will evoke the sleek glass towers that rose up in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg — known colloquially as the hipster capital of America — in the past decade.

The ideas that got the most "likes" were a recreation center, a movie theater, and a center for arts and technology jobs and careers. All good ideas and ones Renaissance would like to make, but the company needs to begin with projects that can realistically get done.

Issues with the model?

"You have to ask how much input is the developer really seeking," says Sarah Williams, an assistant professor of Urban Planning at MIT. "Are they seeking input from all of those stakeholders that might be invested in a particular project? They might be more interested in their market and not look at the whole picture of equity." One problem with crowdsourcing sites, she says, "is that people make suggestions and nobody responds to them."

"It's a dangerous precedent because you have a private sector motivated in part by profit, assuming a role that's typically performed by the public sector, which, ideally anyway, is not beholden to profit making," says Daniel D'Oca, an urban planner and professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, who conducted a class on problems and potential on Long Island.

How do you balance the needs of a community, which might mean affordable housing, parks, and preservation (or a farmers market, fabric store, day care center, and bagel shop, as they hope for in Riverside) — things that don't necessarily generate much profit — against those of a developer?

Williams concedes that developers are usually behind the process of rezoning or redeveloping tracts of municipal land, or at least brought in as master developers soon after the site is reenvisioned, and very often they are interested in meeting the needs of the people. "A developer has his own needs, but they might be mutually beneficial to communities."

Going digital

Besides questioning whether a community's needs are taken to heart, the other major issue with crowdsourced urban planning concerns digital adoption. In poorer communities like Central Falls and Riverside, there are huge digital divides. While in traditional planning there's always a contingent of self-selected community members who engage in the public process — those who care enough to show up at community meetings — crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are available to anyone with enough time and energy for a few clicks of the mouse.

But those people also need training and access to that mouse. "In some ways the data from these [programs] is very biased because it usually targets a specific group of people who know how to use the technology," says Williams. And, she points out, with private interests so fully entwined, "they engage a public that might not otherwise be engaged, but they do it through the framework of their own biases."

In Riverside, where a quarter of the population is below the poverty line and the median household income is $33,308, some residents don't have smartphones or computers. The "likes" and votes on the Riverside Rediscovered website, for instance, may be from those most digitally proficient, and in some cases the wealthiest or most successful.

To lure disaffected or digitally unconnected residents into participating, McLean's team walks through some of the more dangerous pockets of their work areas — in groups — to speak directly with residents. They do so "in order to actually discover firsthand who's living there, in what conditions, and why has the voice that once was there dissipated," says McLean. "That's the first step in activating that voice."

They work with law enforcement groups so they can make direct contact with the active drug dealers and gang members, and they hold monthly meetings for all residents. "We're fully engaged in the hard areas of the community, the areas that people don't want to talk about. If we don't address them, they're not going to be as effective as we need them to be in the redevelopment process," McLean adds.

And these are communities where residents need quite a lot of coaxing to participate. Decades of unfulfilled redevelopment promises have left people in Riverside wary of the planning process. It is "a very disinvested and untrusting community because they've lacked success and support from government and from private industry in the past," says McLean.

In the cynical interpretation of the process, the developer's process of crowdsourced placemaking would be a ruse — something promised to the local government and community in exchange for control of the land and a hand in rezoning the area to suit their own needs. But, says D'Oca about Renaissance, "These guys seem to have their heads and hearts in the right place; they seem genuinely interested in building a good community." But that doesn't mean another developer wouldn't abuse the power.

Renaissance is aware of that criticism. "We want to make money," says Palanker. "We're a for-profit business — that's what makes this country great — but we also want to do the right thing." Most of the constituents' ideas for Riverside — perhaps minus the clinic and the farmers market — are businesses that tend to struggle. So how economically feasible are they?

So far, Renaissance can't say. None of their crowdsourced plans have been realized; the projects they now have in the works are their own. So, yes, the crowd may have contributed the ideas, but much of the profit will stay with Renaissance until other developers and business owners invest.

They've worked hard with local governments to expedite the approval process so other developers and property owners can partake of the rezoned, reinvented downtowns. Perhaps the millions of dollars Renaissance Downtowns has laid out will lure other investors.

"The fact that we are there to make money is very encouraging to most of the community elders and stakeholders," says McLean. "They want to know that something will actually get done."

Lisa Selin Davis is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, New York.