Bob Weissbourd, who served on the Obama Transition HUD Agency Review Team, specializes in technical economic analysis of urban assets and markets, and in creating products and institutions to successfully grow urban and regional economies.  Based on his major national research and his work developing comprehensive inclusive growth plans in ten regions as co-leader with Brookings Institution of the “Metropolitan Business Planning” initiative, Bob has designed a training for Choice Neighborhoods entitled “Economic Place Making: How to Develop a Neighborhood Business Plan.”  The training examines how the knowledge economy is fundamentally changing the drivers of prosperity, creating new opportunities for regions and neighborhoods, but also making much of the conventional wisdom no longer effective. This training offers a new framework for understanding and influencing the dynamics of neighborhoods in their regional economic contexts. The training illustrates data and tools for analyzing neighborhood assets in the context of regional markets to help Choice Neighborhoods craft strategies, products and initiatives tailored to their varying neighborhood types and regional opportunities, including with respect to employment, cluster-based business opportunities, entrepreneurship, spatial efficiency, retail and real estate. The training includes hands-on activities and interactive sessions to develop a “light” Neighborhood Business Plan for each participating neighborhood to illustrate how the elements fit together, to demonstrate how to do some of the analytics, and to surface tailored strategies.

View the March 2014 Convening agenda.

Materials:

• Download the slide presentation.
• Download example data and handouts.
• Download data sources.
• Download example sources.
• Download regional labor demand data (MS-Excel WinZip). During the convening, we provided grantees with the top 25 growing occupations in their region. This document (each sheet contains data for each of the participating neighborhoods) expands on the information provided and includes absolute employment and growth information for all occupations in the region, allowing grantees to dig deeper into their human capital opportunities and challenges. This full dataset will allow grantees to see which occupations are disappearing from their region and which are growing, and to consider how to migrate workers in the former group to jobs in the latter.
• Download background reading from the Dynamic Neighborhood Taxonomy Report (http://rw-ventures.com/ftp/DNT%20Final%20Report.pdf). Chapter 8 of the report lays out much of the logic that informs the training. Chapter 7 describes the neighborhood types addressed in the typology session of the training.