West Canfield Historic District, Detroit, and the West Garfield Park neighborhood in Chicago: Opportunities for demonstration projects on wide-scale neighborhood improvement and quality infill architecture | May is National Historic Preservation Month

-- "63 things to do during National Historic Preservation Month"

-- "May is National Historic Preservation Month: The future of historic preservation"

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West Canfield Historic District, Detroit.  A Reddit thread showed photos of houses in the West Canfield Historic District in Detroit.  The impetus for the district was an antiques dealer, Beulah Groehn, "How One Woman Gave Rise to Detroit's Historic Preservation Movement" NTHP

[In 1965,] an antiques collector and retired executive secretary named Beulah Groehn drove into the city from Franklin to shop at an estate sale. The house, at 627 Canfield, was a beautiful but decrepit Victorian in the gritty Cass Corridor. The neighborhood was built for well-heeled Detroiters of the late 19th-century, but over the course of 90-some years, the mansions of Canfield Street had become boarding houses, bohemian crash-pads, and drug dens. There was no newness on West Canfield. But Beulah Groehn had discovered something she loved. Instead of buying antiques at that estate sale, she bought the house.

For the rest of her life, at a time when many of Detroit's planners and politicians felt that the city's past stood in the way of urban progress, Beulah fought to save places like West Canfield -- not simply because they were old, but because she believed that saving old places would attract residents, create jobs, and make neighborhoods safer, stronger, and more beautiful. Her legacy includes not only stately, brick-paved West Canfield Street -- today one of Detroit's most desirable blocks -- the city's local historic preservation ordinance, and along with it, the Historic Designation Advisory Board and Historic District Commission, the legal mechanisms and governing bodies that help make saving Detroit's old places possible.

West Garfield, Chicago. An article caught my attention awhile back, "This homebuilder wants to revitalize his West Garfield Park neighborhood. He just had his first sale," in Crain's Chicago Business about the development and sale of decidedly modern rowhouses in the West Garfield district of Chicago.  

West Garfield is a neighborhood that's seen better days.  It has a lot of historic building stock in various states of repair, including both healthy and distressed, and it has a number of infill buildings, like these rowhouses that represent modern design.  It has clusters of high performing physical assets that can be built upon once again.

3806 W Washington Boulevard, West Garfield Park, Chicago.

I was thinking that the West Garfield neighborhood would be a great place to do a test on a massive scale, not unlike Germany's IBA, a wide ranging revitalization initiative operating at the scale of multi-districts, that does a bunch of projects, and about ten years shows them, with others still in the pipeline.  

-- IBA - Hamburg

Or again, Germany's International Garden Festival ("DC has a big "Garden Festival" opportunity in the Anacostia River," 2014), which works similarly.  Historic equivalent architecture or new stuff.

Although I guess the neighborhood isn't the safest according to the Chicago Sun-Times, "Voices from Chicago's most violent neighborhood."

-- West Garfield Park, Encyclopedia of Chicago

Too bad I'm not in Chicago because there is a foundation that would fund something like this, albeit they'd need a lot of money and have to work with others.  The Knight Foundation is built on the profits from various newspapers owned by two brothers (Once upon a time I delivered the Detroit Free Press).

The Foundation pretty much only invests in places where they had a newspaper.  Chicago Daily News was their paper in Chicago--even though they sold the paper to Marshall Field, they still make grants in Chicago.

And the Foundation funded a short term preservation initiative called the Preservation Development Initiative, which applied Main Street and other historic preservation approaches to cities and neighborhoods in a bunch of cities in the early 2000s.  One impressive example was working with Mercer University in Macon, Georgia ("Beall’s Hill Neighborhood Revitalization Project," MU, Neighborhood Revitalization Guide, Historic Macon Foundation, "Historic Macon Foundation will expand revitalization efforts in Macon’s Beall’s Hill neighborhood with $3 million from Knight Foundation," Knight Foundation).

-- Investing In Revitalization Efforts: Case Studies from Knight Cities, Knight Foundation

Revitalization lessons from the Knight grants:

Local Context 

• Think beyond the central business district: 
• Build broad coalitions to ensure longevity: 
• Proactively mitigate displacement risk:

Accelerators of Impact

• Cluster investments: 
• Support multiple organizations working toward shared goals: In communities with an array of fiscally healthy and high-capacity organizations, 
• Cultivate relationships with educational anchors

Concentration of investment

• Embrace flexibility and innovation: 
• Achieve long-term impacts by investing in programming, arts, the public realm and infrastructure: 
• Investing in multiple avenues to revitalization:  

One of the neighborhood's assets is the Garfield Conservancy.  

Pair a PDI like initiative with a community safety partnership approach ("Creating 'community safety partnership neighborhood management programs as a management and mitigation strategy for public nuisances: Part 3 (like homeless shelters)") and it could be quite successful ("Chicago needs a homebuilding revolution," Crain's Chicago Business).

In fact, it'd be a good place to test my concept of an ideal neighborhood revitalization program.

-- "The need for a "national" neighborhood stabilization program comparable to the Main Street program for commercial districts: Part I (Overall)"
-- "To be successful, local neighborhood stabilization programs need a packaged set of robust remedies: Part 2"
-- "Creating 'community safety partnership neighborhood management programs as a management and mitigation strategy for public nuisance programs: Part 3 (like homeless shelters)"
-- "A case in Gloucester, Massachusetts as an illustration of the need for systematic neighborhood monitoring and stabilization initiatives: Part 4 (the Curcuru Family)"
-- "Local neighborhood stabilization programs: Part 5 | Adding energy conservation programs, with the PUSH Buffalo Green Development Zone as a model," 2021

Although a specific point on deep crime would probably need to be added.