ENS 301.01
How is Grand Rapids' addressing the Housing Crisis in the 2024 Master Plan?
Introduction: Urban Planning
What is urban planning?
Urban planning, in simple terms, is the process of developing and designing urban areas to best meet the needs of a community.
To generate these results, urban planners work with their local Zoning Ordinance, which divides land into "zones" that have specific regulations for new development.
These different Zone Districts include Residential (single-family or multi-family)
Industrial (manufacturing and distribution centers)
Commercial (retail, office, etc)
Mixed-Use (hotels with restaurants below or shops with apartments located on upper-level)
Special Districts (civic centers, libraries, etc)
Urban planners establish their visions and goals for long-term development within their Master Plan, which provides a framework for future growth within a city.
Grand Rapids Housing Crisis
In the fall of 2024, Grand Rapids will be publishing their new Master Plan which has not been updated since 2002.
Naturally, much has changed over these 20+ years and the City of Grand Rapids plans to address these concerns in the new Master Plan.
One of the main concerns of citizens living in Grand Rapids is the housing crisis.
In Housing Next’s 2022 Housing Needs Assessment, they predicted that 35,000 new units were needed county-wide and within that estimation, 14,000 units should be added in the City of Grand Rapids alone (Housing Needs Assessment, 2022).
Grand Rapids must also address affordable housing to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion for people of all income levels to have access to living in the City.
Research Question
How does Grand Rapids plan to address the housing crisis in their 2024 Master Plan?
Literature Review
Missing Middle Housing
When cities first began to grow, post World War II, they were built around automobiles and the development of single-family homes boomed. However, cities being built this way resulted in a negative consequence that created a phenomenon known as Missing Middle Housing (Parolek, 2020).
Parolek outlines this idea in his book of cities needing to develop housing types such as duplexes, fourplexes, and bungalow courts, to accommodate affordable housing solutions. By developing these types of houses, people have better access to the city as they create equal opportunities for people of various income levels.
The author explains that “Small, incremental Missing Middle infill is also an excellent business opportunity for a small local business. I often recommend that community-development corporations or local banks consider supporting or even incubating these small businesses'' (Parolek, 2020, p. 58).
By addressing Missing Middle Housing concerns within Grand Rapids, the City can best meet the needs of residents with various levels of income while providing walkable and livable neighborhoods. Any city, especially Grand Rapids, can use this structure to help them build more affordable housing that fosters prosperous communities.
One of my professors at Grand Valley State University, Professor Chad Frederick, has done extensive research with an area of interest in sustainable urban development. In one of his papers, Frederick explains that diversifying the housing stock in a city will also increase the availability of missing middle housing. Not to mention, “diversity in housing stock has significant associations with lower unemployment for workers aged 25 and older” (Frederick, 2022, p. 15).
Additionally, the creation of missing middle housing allows for various housing types such as townhomes and duplexes that replace detached single-family homes while establishing compact livable neighborhoods for residents of all income levels.
Although there may be some barriers to developing this housing type such as zoning regulations, it is worth establishing diversified housing options that will fulfill the needs of community members throughout Grand Rapids.
Urban Sprawl
Urban sprawl is another issue that resulted from the development of cities post World War II. This resulted in the rapid expansion of cities and resulted in low-density residential housing, single-use zoning, and increased reliance on single-occupancy vehicles for transportation.
In building housing types that bring people back into city limits, Grand Rapids can provide people of different ethnicities, income levels, and other factors with housing opportunities.
The idea is that “If people have good transportation access, they can live someplace relatively more affordable and still participate in the economy and social life of a nearby city” (Metcalf, 2018, p. 74).
This way, cities are drawing residents towards their business centers with better transportation and stimulating economic activity in the city. We can apply these ideas in our city to encourage a flourishing central city that all citizens can enjoy.
Community Engagement Forums
Grand Rapids
Through conducting the public engagement forums, the Planning Department was able to gain valuable insight into the public’s opinion on different subjects that will help the Department navigate the future of development in the City.
In reading the feedback from the Grand Rapids citizens who participated in the community engagement forums for the 2024 Master Plan, it was evident that the public desires infill projects and redevelopment of abandoned sites.
To meet the needs of the public Grand Rapids should draw inspiration from the idea of holistic planning principles where city centers are compact to support public transit and walkability, mixed housing development is present to accommodate diverse demographics, and infill and redevelopment projects are carried out to revamp urban areas (Banai, 2017).
These types of projects will make the citizens of Grand Rapids feel heard and draw more people into living in the city. Although some worry that drawing attention to living in a city center will raise rent prices, “studies demonstrate that while urban containment in practice may raise housing prices, it also tends to preserve affordable rental housing stock with adequate infill development, and has no inflationary impact on housing price” (Kushner, 2010). Therefore, Grand Rapids needs to take the feedback from its constituents and build more affordable housing that promotes a vibrant, compact city.
Vibrant Neighborhoods Forum (VNF) study in Detroit
A project conducted in 2017, launched the Vibrant Neighborhoods Forum (VNF). This project examined three U.S. and three European cities to explore how civic engagement can reduce social disadvantages in neighborhoods. In Detroit, Michigan, the VNF project engaged three individuals of various backgrounds: one city government representative, one community development corporation representative, and one neighborhood activist representative.
Together, they were tasked with selecting a common neighborhood issue to address. The collaboration created in the Detroit VNF helped to facilitate a participatory engagement project between government employees and residents so that all voices could be heard. Through Brady & Burke’s (2021) project, they were able to realize that:
Civic engagement, as the Vibrant Neighborhoods Forum suggests, extends well beyond merely hosting meetings to garner interest in, support for, and input on city government policies, plans, and programs. Whether the neighborhood initiatives are large or small, it is about leveraging the assets of the community, namely the residents, to not only gather input, but to actively include them as stakeholders, as agents for action, and, ultimately change. (p. 27-28)
Although there is no one-size-fits-all method to any urban planning process, it can help to draw inspiration from other cities, especially cities that have similar population sizes and goals for development. The city of Grand Rapids can draw inspiration from this project and learn from Detroit’s success. Grand Rapids, being the second largest city in Michigan, can draft a plan similar to the VNF project in hopes of establishing prosperous civic engagement in their plans.
The purpose of community engagement forums
Many cities throughout the United States have adopted community engagement forums into their urban planning processes. When urban planners gain insight into how the public feels about their neighborhood and city in general, they can make informed decisions in future projects to satisfy the community and their needs.
An article on the subject describes the four purposes of conducting these types of forums: to identify and collect data, establish legitimacy for future planning efforts, planners allow community members to have their voices and concerns heard, and facilitate a diverse set of people to come together on the matters (Konsti-Laakso & Rantala, 2018, p. 2).
Consequently, community engagement transfers knowledge from planners to citizens in hopes of generating open communication that will lead to new ways of solving problems within the community.
Methodology
The methodology used for this paper is inspired by the surveys used in previous rounds of engagement that the Grand Rapids Planning Department has conducted for their 2024 Master Plan.
Surveys are an important tool to use in civic engagement as they ask participants about their opinions and behaviors through a short questionnaire.
For the Planning Department, they must collect information from a wide variety of people to aid their decisions for future plans.
It can be useful to use a mix of open and closed questions to gain information from the citizens participating in the survey.
Surveys need to be somewhat concise and to the point as “Participants are unlikely to fill out a survey that is lengthy, and you’ll have a more difficult time during your analysis if your survey contains too many questions” (Driscoll, 2011, p. 14).
Typically, a survey that takes between five to ten minutes to complete is ideal and the proposed survey in this paper will reflect this suggestion.
Justification
For the urban planning field, it is essential to gain feedback from people of all backgrounds to reduce skewed or biased results meanwhile increasing equity and inclusion. Since Grand Rapids has three wards, it is essential to collect data from each section of the city to allow for the best representation of all citizens.
The current process for the 2024 Master Plan, consists of the planning department hiring Community Connectors and Neighborhood Organizations to help them facilitate engagement with small group meetings and one-on-one interviews with people in the community for each round of engagement.
Some of the Community Connectors include the North East Citizens Action (NECA), Seeds of Promise, Dwelling Place of Grand Rapids, many individual residents of each ward, and more. In addition, Neighborhood Organizations present in these forums include the Creston Neighborhood Association, Eastown Community Association, Midtown Neighborhood Association, and other organizations.
By October, the city will have completed four rounds of community engagement for the 2024 Master Plan. By taking inspiration from these forums, I am proposing a survey be handed out at each round for the next revision for the next Master Plan.
I have decided to conduct a survey because this research methodology allows for open-ended feedback to be collected from participants. Open-ended questions in this survey are essential as “This type of question gives respondents more space to fully explain their responses. Open-ended questions can make the data varied because each respondent may answer differently” (Denny & Clark, 2021, p. 6). This way, the planning department can gain a wide range of information from citizens who reside in each of the three wards in Grand Rapids.
The population that I would recruit from would be any citizen living in each of the three wards in Grand Rapids. I would especially include people of various ethnicities, races, backgrounds, income levels, education, employment, gender, and marital status. It is crucial to survey people of various backgrounds because “when the [planning] process engages local residents from underrepresented groups, urban planning can set the stage for exploring solutions before inequitable and unsustainable patterns are locked in” (Rudd et al., 2017, p. 280).
As engagement takes place throughout the master planning process, it is important to make the surveys as available and inclusive as possible in the forums which may include posting it on the planning website in addition to tasking participants at the events to complete the survey.
The proposed survey will consist of the following questions: What is your favorite thing about where you live? What would you like to see change in your neighborhood? How can the planning department address you and your community’s needs better? What housing type suggestions do you have, if none leave N/A.
Conclusively, by asking these questions, the planning department will receive insightful feedback responses that describe the participant’s emotions, thoughts, and opinions on their neighborhood and explicitly have each participant state how the planning department can make their life and neighborhood a better place to live while addressing the pressing issue of the housing crisis in Grand Rapids.
This survey will still be applicable when the planning department goes to high schools and colleges in attempts to increase responses from two categories of ages: those under 18 years of age and young adults whose ages range from 18 to 24 as these two criteria often receive the lowest amount of respondents.
In a previous study, they rolled out a survey on social media to target this demographic since this age group excels in using social media.
Especially in recent years where there has been “an increase in public interest in urban issues, along with online communication and social media gaining on popularity as a venue for public debate. Nevertheless, the presence of digital divide still underscores the existing socio-demographic divisions that pose the risk of excluding some groups from participatory processes” (Czepkiewicz, 2017, p. 555).
Nonetheless, this additional engagement event will help to target the younger audience but it is important to note that this method may be less inclusive.
Some potential threats to validity may include that colder weather and winter months typically result in low turnout and participation.
This has been true of the second round of community engagement that began in November and wrapped up in late February 2024. As discussed above, it is difficult to collect data from participants who are under 18 years of age and the demographic of young adults from ages 18 to 24 years old.
Other ways to resolve this threat to the data is to reach out to different high schools, universities, and especially professors who teach urban planning courses or have related coursework.
Another threat to the survey would be experimenter bias whereas planners in the team may have preconceived notions about certain neighborhoods; however, being a new intern in the office, means that I am coming in with none to little previous knowledge of these neighborhoods so participants have a pair of fresh ears to express their concerns to.
Lastly, there may be some factor of selection bias with the nature of surveys but the goal is to have the most representation of all races, income levels, ethnicities, ages, and more, as possible.
References
Banai, R. (2017). The Aerotropolis: Urban Sustainability Perspectives From the Regional City. Journal of Transport and Land Use, 10(1), 357–373. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26211735
Brady, A. M., & Burke, L. (2021). Vibrant Neighborhoods Forum: Leveraging Civic Engagement for Social Impact. German Marshall Fund of the United States. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep28524
Czepkiewicz, M., Jankowski, P., & Młodkowski, M. (2017). Geo-questionnaires in urban planning: Recruitment methods, participant engagement, and data quality. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 44(6), 551-567.
Denny, M., & Clark, L. (2021). How to analyze data in a primary research study. Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 4.
Driscoll, D.L. (2011). Introduction to Primary Research: Observations, Surveys, and Interviews. Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, 2(2011) 153-174.
Frederick, C. (2022). Economic Sustainability and “Missing Middle Housing”: Associations between Housing Stock Diversity and Unemployment in Mid-Size US Cities. Sustainability, 14(11), 6817. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14116817
Konsti-Laakso, S., & Rantala, T. (2018). Managing Community Engagement: A Process Model for Urban Planning. European Journal of Operational Research, 268(3), 1040-1049.
Kushner, J. A. (2010). Affordable Housing as Infrastructure in the Time of Global Warming. The Urban Lawyer, 42/43(4/1), 179–221. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41307738
Metcalf, G. (2018). Sand Castles Before the Tide? Affordable Housing in Expensive Cities. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32(1), 59–80. https://ezproxy.gvsu.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.26297969&site=eds-live&scope=site
Ogura, L., & Isley, P. (2019). Housing Market in the Grand Rapids Area. Seidman Business Review, 25(1), 5.
Parolek, D. G. (2020). Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis. Island Press.
Rudd, A., Malone, K., & Bartlett, M. (2017). Participatory Urban Planning. In A. Russ & M. E. Krasny (Eds.), Urban Environmental Education Review (pp. 279–287). Cornell University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt1qv5qhq.33
The City of Grand Rapids. (2022). Housing Needs Assessment: Housing Next. Bowen National Research. https://www.housingnext.org/_files/ugd/d93581_035b42c5c5d546b0b4ab57cea0e89010.pdf
Tighe, J. R. (2010). Public opinion and affordable housing: A review of the literature. Journal of Planning Literature, 25(1), 3-17.
West, E. (2008). America’s Greenest City. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/1007062/americas-greenest-city
