Across the country, cities have turned abandoned bridges, railways, and waterfronts into innovative public parks. This includes well-known parks like The High Line in New York City, Gas Works Park in Seattle, and The 606 in Chicago.
The Big Idea: While many of these parks have added much-needed green space to lower-income neighborhoods, they can come with a big downside: increasing property values in a way that prices out long-time residents. The High Line Network and Urban Institute recently released a nearly 50-page report on how workforce development could be an equally big solution to combat this problem.
The goal is to not only provide the community with green spaces, but also lasting jobs and opportunities to grow their own wealth, stay in the community, and enjoy the parks.
Five cities, led by Washington, D.C., ran a three-year pilot project to develop scalable and replicable workforce training models. While many projects have yet to break ground, the report highlights work the initiatives have already done to forge partnerships with other community organizations, provide both job training and wraparound supports, and create data tracking systems for job placement and earnings outcomes.
That work started with partnering with organizations that already knew the neighborhoods and how to create individual economic mobility. For San Francisco’s Indian Basin Waterfront Park, that meant partnering with unions and a local construction pre-apprenticeship program. In Dallas, the Trinity Park Conservancy partnered with a number of organizations including the Lone Star Justice Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for reform in the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
“They’re connected to people from our communities who need access to jobs. We wanted to work with people who are trusted in the community,” Sam Acosta, director of community and government relations at Trinity Park Conservancy, said at an event that brought together leaders from the five cities for the report release.
The groups also quickly learned that providing jobs wasn’t enough; workers needed help with transportation, childcare, and even legal services to be able to get to those jobs. Others needed training on resume writing and interviewing, a need that prompted initiatives like the 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, D.C., to involve corporate partners.
Others decided to take an earn-and-learn approach. In Buffalo, New York, Friends of the Riverline partnered with Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology (BCAT) to create a free landscape maintenance technician program that would prepare local residents for immediate landscaping jobs in the city, as well as for the park in the future. In the first year of the pilot, Jeff Lebsack, executive director of Friends of the Riverline, said the program went well. But in the second year, it was a “flop.”
“Sometimes free is too expensive,” Lebsack said. “We realized that free workforce training isn’t necessarily a good deal when you’ve already got a job you don’t want to miss and you have childcare responsibilities and now you have to take this training.”
So for the third year, the organization and BCAT created an earn-and-learn model where students were paid $20 an hour to participate in the classroom and field training. With this approach, they received more applicants than they could accept.
The pilot projects also focused on how to create jobs, like roles in administration and management, that would last beyond construction.
“We were awarded funding to do construction, which is great, but that is low-hanging fruit,” said Jacqueline Bryant, executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a partner in the creation of India Basin Waterfront Park in San Francisco. “We wanted to be more dynamic and think broader about where opportunities are.”
One snag that the project faced, however, was balancing costs of the project itself with economic development efforts. Over the course of the pilot, which launched shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic, construction costs soared, leaving less money for economic development initiatives.
Other challenges for all pilot members included data collection to help guide workforce development decisions. The Highline Network report outlined the need for formal data-sharing agreements with training partners, but privacy issues and differences in how organizations collect data made it difficult to streamline.
While workforce was a central part of the planning for the cities in the pilot, most members of The Highline Network do not fold in workforce development initiatives. With the report release, the network and Urban Institute are hoping that more will consider it.
The Kicker: “There are nuances to all our cities, but we have a common thread,” Bryant said. “We deal with the same social issues in disenfranchised communities, where there are a lot of people of color and where the city didn’t always plan well historically. It reminds us how important it is to continue to hold ourselves accountable for what we’re committing to in these communities.”