Reconnecting Communities with Affordable Housing

Throughout the mid-20th century, transportation authorities constructed massive infrastructure projects through urban centers, particularly, but not exclusively, highways. In recent years, a growing urban planning consensus has soured on such projects for displacing lower-income minority residents and creating barriers throughout communities. This motivated the United States Department of Transportation (DOT)’s new competitive grant program, Reconnecting Communities. It aims to fund projects that remove or modify thoroughfares to improve neighborhood connectivity. As part of these efforts, many cities are looking at how to integrate or upgrade affordable housing in such neighborhoods. Two case studies include early recipients of highway renovation funds: Syracuse, NY and Rockford, IL.

According to the DOT, Reconnecting Communities grants pay for capital funding and technical aid to government authorities and metropolitan planning organizations “to restore community connectivity through the removal, retrofit, mitigation or replacement of eligible transportation infrastructure facilities.” Capital grants can also finance-related “community benefits and environmental improvements” related to infrastructure projects.

For FY 2023, the DOT authorized $3.35 billion in grant funding for Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhood Access and Equity programs, spread across 132 successful applicants. The 2023 notice of funding opportunity states that planning funds can be used for housing planning, but it’s unclear whether capital funds can be used for housing construction.

“It’s really for the infrastructure improvements,” says Sarah Leys, director of community and economic development for the City of Rockford.

However, urban highway removal and reconfiguration projects can catalyze housing construction. After part of San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway was converted into a surface boulevard, residential land use on the footprint more than doubled. Reconnecting Communities projects in Atlanta and Portland, OR will alter roads whose construction cut off access to affordable housing.

Highways create an unfavorable environment for nearby housing: an Urban Institute paper finds that people living within 300 meters of a highway face elevated exposure to harmful pollutants and have higher incidences of “health problems, including lung disease, stroke and premature birth,” and deal with more noise pollution.

Recognizing the growth opportunities for affordable housing amidst such projects, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) established a related initiative. In 2022, the agency established the Thriving Communities Technical Assistance (TCTA) program, which aims to “support coordination and integration of transportation and housing in infrastructure planning and implementation.” The program provides technical assistance to government entities receiving competitive funds for transportation projects aiming to “address housing needs in disadvantaged communities.”

TCTA helps communities find sites for and preserve affordable housing. It also helps identify policy measures they can take to promote affordable housing, such as removing regulatory barriers or establishing special tax districts. TCTA further aids in coordination between multiple stakeholders, which among other benefits allows officials to communicate changes clearly to community members and can often be crucial to a project’s success. 

TCTA has been available on a rolling basis for over three years, according to Pamela Blumenthal, director of priority projects and the innovation division for HUD’s Policy Development and Research Office. HUD enters into cooperative agreements with technical assistance providers to offer this assistance.

Blumenthal says the initiative’s goal is to “make sure that local governments are thinking about housing” during Reconnecting Communities projects and similar efforts. Thriving Communities assistance is intended to help a city identify goals, not take a top-down approach. “It’s not HUD-driven goals, it’s really a resource that we’re offering to the cities,” Blumenthal emphasizes. “Technical assistance builds staff capacity; we’re not going to come in and do a housing needs assessment or a housing supply evaluation.”

Both Syracuse and Rockford are integrating housing construction into their plans and are using Thriving Communities’ assistance to do so. National Housing Trust (NHT), Abt Global (which has a cooperative agreement with HUD, according to Blumenthal) and Equitable Cities are providing this assistance in both cities. Blumenthal adds that a second team, led by consulting firm ICF, is providing Thriving Communities assistance in Redmond, WA and Salt Lake City.

Leys credits TCTA with helping Rockford identify stakeholders, promising practices from peer communities and a framework for assessing viable locations for housing. Rockford is developing a housing plan in tandem with the Reconnecting Communities project, having completed a needs assessment. Preliminary opportunities and goals include infill construction and facilitating construction in tax-increment finance districts.

 Thus far, the housing plans have attracted scrutiny from some community members, according to Leys, as has the notion of reconnecting the impacted neighborhood. Additionally, elected officials have mixed opinions about multifamily or rental construction. “We’re not the kind of downtown where we have a lot of 60-unit buildings,” she says.

Both projects promise to drastically transform the surrounding neighborhoods. Syracuse’s project entails the removal of a portion of Interstate 81 through the city’s 15th Ward. According to NHT, Interstate 81’s construction demolished a predominantly Black neighborhood, “displacing more than 1,200 families and 400 businesses.” Today, the 15th Ward has high poverty. The project will create a new streetscape, which officials are calling a “community grid,” including mixed-use construction and improved transit.

According to the Congress for the New Urbanism, the grid plan drastically transforms the neighborhood. As part of the grid development, an outdated public housing complex will be demolished and replaced with new units. The new units, like others to be built, will be “more diverse building types that look like what it is intended to be – a neighborhood.”

In Rockford, Reconnecting Communities funds are going to the reconfiguration of an antiquated interchange, whose construction similarly demolished 109 homes, says Leys. NHT states that the project entails implementing better cycling and pedestrian connectivity. The city hopes to promote “gentle density” and mixed-use construction following the interchange reconstruction, Leys says, potentially facilitated through New Markets Tax Credits.

In an additional project, Reconnecting Communities funds are paying for plans to assess relocating a railyard and construction of an intermodal transit facility, “as well as the configuration of additional right of ways for alternative uses and mixed-use development,” reports Mass Transit magazine. Leys says some developers are looking at possible Low Income Housing Tax Credit projects in the surrounding area; she is hoping that more developers will begin looking toward Rockford.

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The potential to redevelop removed highways affords potential for affordable housing redevelopment, particularly as the federal government is assisting in redevelopment planning.

Multifamily developers can benefit from engaging with the planning process. For Rockford’s part, Leys recommends working with the city to communicate the type of project they would be interested in, particularly as the city prepares to release requests for proposals around its plans. With over 130 projects financed, there are multiple opportunities for the multifamily sector to explore.