Community Planning in Mesa

Everyone pays lip service to the notion that community involvement is a critical element in determining how urban areas evolve and change – that residents, and the businesses and institutions representing them, have a say in what gets built when, where and why.

In older cities with histories of neighborhood activism and activists, such as Jane Jacobs in New York and Saul Alinsky and Gale Cincotta in Chicago, local governments have institutionalized systems for engaging local people in planning everything from new houses, businesses, and parks to highways and rail systems.

But what about newer cities, where such planning traditions don’t exist? There’s no blueprint that local governments can apply to ensure thorough and robust community engagement in shaping how they grow. But in Mesa, Ariz., they’re working to create one.

With 440,000 residents, Mesa, just east of Phoenix, is Arizona’s third largest city. It had been struggling to create a five-year consolidated plan necessary to receive federal funding for a variety of projects.

“Historically, that planning has been done without active community voice,” said Tammy Albright, director of Mesa’s Department of Housing & Community Development, which is responsible for creating those five-year consolidated plans. “Everyone, including the city, wanted that to change. But it’s very difficult to get people to engage. We’ve put it (notices of meetings for public comment) in the newspaper and on our website and maybe one person shows up. They don’t know what a consolidated plan is.” 

Enter a couple national community development intermediaries (Enterprise and LISC), a handful of Mesa-based organizations engaged in local economic, housing and transportation development, and Joel Bookman and his colleagues.

For the last few years, Enterprise had been kicking the tires in Mesa, identifying local community development organizations that were involved in new business, affordable housing and social services development, while at the same time assessing the city’s efforts to come up with a new plan to spend federal grants. This was at the same time Valley Metro was extending the light rail system from Phoenix to Mesa.

“This seemed to be an ideal time to start working with the community development organizations,” said Enterprise’s Ed Rosenthal. Rosenthal figured that if local groups got additional technical assistance and training not only would they strengthen their development skills but they could also, with their community roots, be a catalyst for shaping the city’s five-year consolidated plan. In short, a win-win.

So he enlisted Teresa Brice, then-executive director of the Phoenix LISC office, and the consulting team of Joel Bookman, Helen Dunlap and Amanda Carney – specialists in community engagement and business development – to work with the neighborhood groups and the city.

The team presented a series of workshops – open to community development organizations, arts groups, transit advocates, developers, city employees and anyone else – ranging from the basics of community organizing, to how to conduct a meeting, to the value of telling your story.

All within the context of helping the city write its five-year consolidated plan.

David Crummey, of the local Neighborhood Economic Development Corporation, was in the vanguard of whipping up local enthusiasm for the workshops and influencing the consolidated plan.  He credits the workshops with not only boosting the skills of local community groups, but with allowing them to get to know each other.

“At the first one – What is Comprehensive Community Development – aimed at nonprofits and government employees, you could see a few light bulbs going on,” he said. “How do we come together, instead of just distributing the money? But the conversations at those meetings, and the people who met each other, were the most important part.”

Crummey sees the planning experience as simply a prelude to an era of larger public engagement in Mesa development. 

“The biggest thing that needs to be conveyed is that a group of people with a common purpose can bring about change,” he said. “If the community wants to see things happen, it needs to work together and speak in a concerted voice. This experience has changed the level of interest in downtown Mesa. And it’s reduced the fear that the community is some ugly beast that would bite you.”