Apartment building reaches out to local Single Family Residents

In community revitalization, property owners are seen as more valuable then renters, and most of our local involvement methods focus on property owners, except for interest groups which expand the range of participation, such as tenants unions, or anti-poverty groups.

I've wondered about the dilemma of community involvement in neighborhoods with a mix of renters and owners.  In the Carrollsburg neighborhood of DC, which was built on the grounds of a public housing project, and mixes owner-occupied (the majority of housing), with apartments set to look like rowhouses, managed by the DC Housing Authority, the resident association is for owners only.

Segregation of the poor.  It reminds me of "poor doors" in mixed income housing developments ("City Has Gone from Allowing ‘Poor Doors’ to Permitting ‘Poor Buildings’," City Limits, "‘There’s no way I can pay’: London residents despair of steep costs and forced use of ‘poor door’" and "Poor doors: the segregation of London's inner-city flat dwellers," Guardian).  

The playground at Baylis Old School development in south London ‘where an impenetrable hedge separates the owner occupiers’ kids playground from the narrow strip allotted to families in social and affordable rented housing in the same block’. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian 

Some developments in London even precluded low income residents from using public facilities associated with the building (" This article is more than 6 years old Too poor to play: children in social housing blocked from communal playground" and "Playgrounds only for the rich kids? What grotesque social apartheid," Guardian).

So this act by a local apartment building in Salt Lake is very interesting, where they had an open house and invited area residents, in part to convert them as "salespeople" for promoting living in the neighborhood and in their particular apartment building.

Relatedly, years ago I had the idea--when urban living was at the beginning of its resurgence--that apartment buildings should set up a couple of B&B apartments so people could experiment with the choice at a low cost.

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A charter school by my house in DC for its first years invited residents to participate in events as a way to increase involvement and likely reduce complaints from people not happy with living near an institutional use.