The Collins Center established The Growth Partnership (TGP) to work with community groups, private developers and investors, and government agencies to promote cooperation and to create consensus. Through these cooperative relationships, The Growth Partnership will succeed in building mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly, public transportation-oriented downtown neighborhoods that will benefit these and the communities beyond these often declining areas.
Growth Partnership Highlights
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Overtown Civic Partnership and Design Center
The Overtown Civic Partnership and Design Center assists neighborhood residents and institutions to visualize, plan and execute a comprehensive community and economic development program to create a vibrant mixed-income, and mixed-used neighborhood.
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The goal of TGP is to promote the development of E3 Livable Communities — neighborhoods that blend together the principles of economic sustainability, environmental sensibility and equitable sensitivity into a livable, attractive, marketable mix. Through these efforts, TGP will help improve the lives of urban residents as well as relieve growth pressures that threaten the sensitive wetlands of the Everglades along Southeast Florida's western borders.
New Direction for Growth
TGP endeavors to direct growth back toward older, urban areas in a manner that enhances the quality of life for existing residents while accommodating new residents. This new growth is to be accomplished in an environment that involves more dense development patterns, incorporates a mix of uses, has a diversity of incomes and cultures, is pedestrian-friendly, and transit-related.
TGP believes this to be the best approach because: disinvested urban core communities contain the highest amount of community assets such as water views, proximity to downtown, entertainment, relatively good or undervalued property; existing residents are usually minorities with low income; disinvested neighborhoods typically have apparent deterioration and neglect; disinvested neighborhoods are the new frontier for private development activity.
TGP Revitalization Approach
The Growth Partnership approach to revitalizing these neighborhoods involves collaboration between community residents, public sector officials and private developers. The driving force behind the development must be the private market which is crucial to attracting private developers. Private developers are essential to the process because of the critical real estate development and financing experience they bring to the table.
The process through which TGP revitalizes a community involves thorough research, deliberation, collaboration, bold action and the development of new tools. This process was successfully used in identifying transitional neighborhoods in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties. Transitional neighborhoods are good prospects for revitalization and defining features of these neighborhoods include: being well located near employment and urban amenities, exhibiting clear signs of revitalization intent, a presence of urban pioneers, the existence of some economic, social or locational feature and/or event that send a signal to the market place and the community that there is pent-up demand, an area attractive to diverse cultures. In selecting a TGP project, an initial scan of the county is completed and extensive interviews are conducted with community groups and leaders, civic organization representatives, the financial and business community, and local, regional and national developers. In addition, a thorough review is completed of studies and plans developed by local organizations such as a community redevelopment authority, downtown development authority, economic development organization, enterprise or empowerment zone, or other organization charged with planning, funding and executing wide-area revitalization programs.
The Growth Partnership emphasized the positive roles that private developers, their financiers and their advisers must play in housing the approximately 2 million new residents expected to arrive in Southeast Florida by 2015.
Local neighborhood and community groups in places like Miami's Overtown also have important roles to play. They know their neighborhoods well, can encourage local residents to work positively with private developers, can generate public and philanthropic support, can help to assemble and clean up land, and can assist in encouraging governments to support positive redevelopment by zoning and other decisions. The Growth Partnership therefore is also emphasizing the positive roles that neighborhood and community groups must play.
It is the blend of these two forces—private real estate developers and local community groups- that can cause significant redevelopment in urban core neighborhoods for the benefit of new residents and of those who now live there, many of them poor and minority. The Growth Partnership will concentrate on helping these groups form partnerships to redevelop specific urban core areas together.
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