Our general approach and philosophy of rebuilding mixed-income neighborhoods is a holistic one. Returning distressed communities to desirable ones takes more than just bricks and mortar. It’s about improving the quality of life and the social institutions.  It’s about addressing safety and security concerns.  It takes listening to the residents who still see value in the old community and understanding what it was that made it strong at one point in time and what it is that will make it strong again.  It is about reestablishing a sense of place and connections that have broken down over the years.  It cannot be done in nickel and dime fashion.  It takes vision, scale, and experience.

In order to achieve this true, holistic transformation, McCormack Baron Salazar blends a variety of specialties and areas of expertise:

Design and Construction: We design and construct buildings with a timetable measured in decades, not years.  From the beginning, we know that we will have a long-term interest in the ongoing maintenance and performance of the housing units and infrastructure, and our in-house design and construction experts demand the highest standards from our external planners, architects, engineers and general contractors. Our revitalization efforts are seamlessly integrated into the surrounding community, incorporating parks, neighborhood retail, and other community infrastructure and creating a “sense of place.” Our developments reflect the high expectations set by the community, signal to the larger community that people are investing in the area, and set the tone for future development.

Turn-Key Development Management: Through the years, many of our community partners, including schools, non-profits, and service providers, have expressed a desire to expand and develop their facilities and real estate to enhance their offerings to the community.  Recognizing that their skills lie in other areas, they ask us to serve as a turn-key development manager for these projects. We work in sync with these partners, from helping them select an architect and establish a financing model to managing the construction process through completion of punch-lists.  We have found that this allows these community partners to focus their energy on what they do best: teaching our students, providing health services to our families, coaching our children in sports, and, in general, providing their services to our communities.

Section 3 / MBE / WBE Participation: We believe in making the economic opportunities brought to neighborhood through redevelopment available to the people in that neighborhood.  With this in mind, we create strong development and construction participation plans.  These plans establish goals for us and our contractors to target Section 3 residents and business, minority-owned businesses and women-owned businesses.  We also understand the need for fostering local economic development and ensure our sub-consultants, contractors and others use local residents, business and other organizations to the fullest extent possible.

Identifying Public and Private Financial Sources:  We recognize that creating the large-scale change needed to successfully revitalize distressed urban neighborhoods requires collaboration and partnerships. Public-Private-Community Partnerships is a term we use to refer to the collaboration of government agencies, community organizations, community residents, political leaders, local foundations, and the private sector to create change in a neighborhood. To establish well-functioning Public-Private-Community Partnerships, we connect with strong political, community, and business leadership that support urban revitalization and have the ability to leverage private capital. By combining public and philanthropic dollars with private investment, our developments achieve the support and scale that are critical to their success.

Community Engagement: We understand that the success of urban renewal and revitalization efforts relies directly on the input and support of an individual community. Its residents and stakeholders must believe that they will benefit from its success by having a better place to live, a better job, a safer neighborhood, more customers, or more opportunities for themselves, their children, and their neighbors.

A community planning process that actively engages the community is critical to achieving that outcome. We follow an industry-unique participatory planning process that engages local residents as well as political, religious, cultural, and business stakeholders in the creative process of community planning to capture and celebrate local heritage and culture, and build the support and consensus needed to successfully implement each project.  We listen to these stakeholders to understand what they value about their communities, and what it takes to restore pride and “a sense of place” in the neighborhoods where they live. We work in cooperation with all stakeholders to ensure that the community has a voice in the revitalization plan.

Human Capital/CSS Plan: We understand that the physical revitalization of a community provides a unique opportunity to find new or better ways of meeting human needs through Human Capital/CSS Planning—creating a plan to develop, encourage and increase the skills and knowledge of the individuals in a community and the community itself. The idea is to revitalize an existing neighborhood from the ground up, not just by building new housing, but also by providing support for the community and its residents. By creating and implementing a Human Capital/CSS Plan, an urban revitalization effort becomes holistic and transformative—addressing the physical, social, and economic challenges faced by a community. We often collaborate with Urban Strategies, a recognized leader in strengthening and building families and communities, as our human services partner.

Relocation and Reoccupancy: A key goal for our mixed-income housing developments is to provide opportunities for current residents to live in high quality, affordable housing. We strive to maintain a significant percentage of our housing units for people already living in the community. We work diligently to minimize the disruption of everyday life activities for families during the redevelopment process. 

National and Local Design Experience: We work with premier urban design firms on both national and local levels. We strive to partner with local architecture and engineering firms to benefit from their deep understanding of their communities. This collaboration has become a standard part of how we approach planning a redevelopment process in an urban neighborhood.