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Policy Framework
Started in June 2002, the New Communities Program (NCP) is a ten-year initiative operated by the Chicago office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and funded in large part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. An ambitious community development initiative, NCP uses neighborhood planning and plan-driven projects and programs, called “quality-of-life plans,” to improve a wide range of outcomes in 16 Chicago neighborhoods. NCP projects include housing production and preservation, employment supports and job training, commercial development and revitalization efforts, education reform, transportation improvement, and beautification efforts. Within each NCP community, a lead agency coordinates the program among other local organizations and citywide support groups.
NCP is based on the premise that lead agencies can build and enhance diverse community networks that will leverage strategic public and private investments, thereby catalyzing community change and revitalization efforts in the targeted neighborhoods. This approach is expected to create neighborhood change and allow for community impacts that are greater than the sum of individual projects. To achieve what program designers call “scale of leverage,” NCP projects are expected to influence economic behavior and socially-beneficial practices by neighborhood residents and local businesses, by changing perceptions about neighborhood and by creating opportunities for actors to act upon these new perceptions.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
In partnership with LISC, the MacArthur Foundation, the Metropolitan Chicago Information Center (MCIC), and others, MDRC is working to build a body of knowledge about the implementation, achievements, and challenges of the NCP approach to neighborhood revitalization in Chicago. The study will document and explore strategies for bringing about measurable improvements in community vitality, neighborhood safety, household income and wealth, and public and private investment, among other goals identified in the NCP quality-of-life plans. Towards this end, the research will:
- Monitor patterns of change on key outcomes in the NCP communities, looking for early signs of whether the community change goals are being met and how NCP neighborhoods’ trends compare with city-wide patterns. While many forces beyond NCP could account for changes that might be observed, the research will attempt to understand how NCP strategies work in combination with other economic and social forces to contribute to trends in a variety of neighborhood contexts. To do so, the research will pay special attention to the local and regional context within which NCP is implemented.
- Document the implementation of NCP itself — that is, how the NCP model and activities evolve, what challenges emerge and how they are addressed, how activities are sustained, and whether and how these efforts support the community change objectives and activities of the initiative, among other questions. The research will pay particular attention to how capacities are built and relationships established within the neighborhoods and with outside institutions, and to whether and to what extent these capacities and relationships leverage additional investments in the communities. Overall, the research will try to examine the feasibility of the NCP approach to community change, and “what it takes” to develop it, sustain it, and make it a productive force within distressed urban neighborhoods.
- Understand and document key stakeholders’ perspectives on the quality of life in these communities and how it may be changing. Through focus groups and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in the neighborhoods — and relevant and knowledgeable outsiders — the research will probe varying perspectives on each NCP neighborhood. For instance, how do different stakeholders perceive neighborhood change? Do they see improvement in and around their neighborhood? How do they define improvement, and what does it mean to them? Whether community change reflects “improvement” is not always straightforward and often involves value judgments. Qualitative interviews with representatives from a broad mix of relevant organizations and neighborhood stakeholders would be helpful for understanding those perceptions.
For methodological reasons, the study will not permit a formal assessment of the independent effects attributable to NCP alone. The main problem, which afflicts most community change studies, is the difficulty of identifying an appropriate counterfactual showing the nature and degree of community change that would have occurred in the targeted areas in the absence of the set of interventions of interest. Such a benchmark is essential for measuring the distinct “added value” of the intervention itself. Nonetheless, much can be learned from this evaluation about the variety of factors driving the process of change. Using this collective evidence, the research will attempt to make a compelling case showing how a variety of social, economic, policy, and other factors may be working together to support community change — or may be working at cross-purposes and impeding it. In addition, it can assess whether the NCP neighborhood efforts, in particular, are well aligned with other drivers of positive change.
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
The neighborhoods targeted by NCP (see map below) vary along a number of dimensions, including community and market conditions, demographics, social and economic circumstances of residents, organizational capacity and infrastructure, development-related challenges, and redevelopment strategies and opportunities.
The study will be both qualitative and quantitative, looking at the plans and their implementation, as well as changes in measurable outcomes in the communities over time.
- To ensure that the qualitative analysis achieves its goals, MDRC will conduct ongoing field research to keep a close eye on the activities on the ground. To capture the complexity of the interventions and the service environments at each site, this research component will use several data sources — individual interviews, structured observations, archival documents, focus groups, and contextual data. Efforts will be made to capture different perspectives of the initiative, including those of project staff, program administrators, residents, community partners, employers, investors, and public officials.
- MDRC will lead efforts to conduct a range of quantitative analyses on community change trajectories, drawing on multiple sources, including a comprehensive database assembled by MCIC. The longitudinal data will make it possible not only to measure patterns of change over a long time, but also across places. For example, it will permit a comparison of changes across the NCP areas themselves, as well as between NCP and non-NCP areas. As part of the early design phase, MDRC and its research partners will identify community-level indicators that match the nature of strategies that NCP communities implement, while identifying additional indicators to be tracked across all neighborhoods.
What's Next
The initial phase of this study is from 2006 through 2008. In 2006, MDRC is completing the research design and begins field research and data collection. MDRC expects to share early lessons from the study by mid-2007. MDRC and the MacArthur Foundation are also considering the possibility of longer-term follow-up, which would cover 2009 to 2011.
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