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August 22, 2007
Commercial Development Trainings
I developed this series of day long and multi-day workshops for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation's national Center for Commercial Revitalization to help community development corporations and local governments understand the unique challanges associated with neighborhood retail development. I have been delivering these training courses in communities around the country including: Philadelphia, Providence, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Jacksonville, San Diego, and Cincinnati.
Workshop topics include:
Developing a Neighborhood Retail Strategy (1 day)
Commercial District Revitalization 101 (2.5 days)
Introduction to Commercial Real Estate Development (2 days)
Developing a Retail Leasing Strategy (1 day)
Joint Ventures with Private Developers (1 day)
Financing Commercial Real Estate Projects (1 day)
Negotiating Commercial Leases (1 day)
Evaluating Commercial Tenants (1/2 day)
Commercial Property and Asset Management (1 day)
Overview of Commercial Real Estate Development (2.5 hours)
Overview of Commercial District Revitalization (2.5 hours)
Download flyer with detailed course descriptions
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 09:42 PM | Comments (0)
August 12, 2007
Resale Formula Comparison Tool
Click here to launch the application
This general purpose educational tool was designed to help community leaders understand the relative performance of different limited equity resale formulas. So much of what sets one model apart from the other is dependant on the assumptions you make about interest rates, home price inflation and income growth. This tool allows a side-by-side comparison between several models, and allows you to change these input assumptions and immediately see changes in the relative performance of each of the models in terms of both ongoing affordability and equity building for homeowners. The tool also allows you to look up historical data on home prices and median incomes for every metropolitan area in the country in order to get a better feel for what appropriate assumptions might be going forward.
The tool compares several of the most common resale formulas including a basic AMI index, an appraisal based formula, a mortgage based formula and a shared equity loan model.
The tool is intended to help policy makers to evaluate questions like:
· When housing costs are rising rapidly, which approach preserves affordability best?
· Which approach provides the greatest asset building opportunity in the face of rising interest rates?
· If incomes grow more slowly than we expect, which approaches will be most impacted?
You can make the analysis more relevant to your local conditions by customizing a number of background assumptions like cost of production for a new affordable unit, the level of subsidy available, and the monthly housing costs that homeowners will face.
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)
August 08, 2007
Swans Marketplace Jobs Program
Download PDF Document
Like many mixed-use development projects, EBALDC's Swans Marketplace relied on grants and subsidized loans from local and federal government agencies. These subsidies were tied to the creation of quality jobs but EBALDC decided that requiring small business tenants to hire disadvantaged workers could make the project impossible to lease. The alternative strategy was to encourage targeted hiring by identifying a team of placement, training and referral organizations and insuring that their clients were the best qualified candidates for any new jobs that were created at Swans. This strategy document outlined clear systems through which EBALDC would identify the skills that Swans employers would need, communicate those needs to referral and training partners and track the results of the hiring process for the purpose of reporting to the government agencies that had provided the subsidies.
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Posted by Rick Jacobus at 05:19 PM | Comments (0)
Lower San Antonio Neighborhood Plan
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Oakland's Lower San Antonio District is a multi-ethnic neighborhood with a population almost evenly divided between African American, Latino and Asian American families. Partly because of this diversity, the neighborhood has lacked the strong organizational leadership that is so present in other Oakland neighborhoods. Historically, the area has received less than its proportional share of public investment and social services.
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The Lower San Antonio Neighborhood plan grew out of a 2 year long community planning process involving over 1000 neighborhood residents. I led a team of planners and community organizers in an outreach process to bring together community leaders, nonprofit organizations, and cultural institutions from the area's many different ethnic groups. I facilitated neighborhood planning council meetings leading to development of a final plan which outlined the area's most pressing needs, identified what individuals and organizations were already doing to confront those problems and prioritized a list of new ideas for collaborative solutions to community problems. The plan directly led to the creation of several ongoing new multi-ethnic collaboratives including the Roosevelt Village Center youth collaborative, the EastLake Main Street Program, CIRCLES welfare to work initiative, and a neighborhood arts alliance. The strong cooperation evidenced by the LSA Plan was an important factor in the Annie E. Casey Foundation's decision to select Lower San Antonio as one of the neighborhoods in their national Making Connections Initiative. The Casey Foundation will invest millions of dollars in the community over a 5 to 10 year period.
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)
EastLake Revitalization Plan
 | In the mid 1990s, Oakland's EastLake District, then known as "New Chinatown," was the site of a string of arson fires targeting Asian Groceries. The fires were a dramatic set back for a struggling commercial district. As Director of Neighborhood Economic Development for the East Bay Asian Local Development Corp., I oversaw the development of a revitalization strategy in the wake of the fires. |
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 05:16 PM | Comments (0)
Coop Training Program
| | Limited Equity Co-ops are built around the idea of self-determination. Co-op residents can benefit from the stability of homeownership and exercise direct control over the management decisions that affect their lives. However, managing a multi-unit housing development is not second nature to most people. As Member Services Director for the Champlain Valley Mutual Housing Federation, I developed a series of trainings designed to help low-income residents become effective decision makers capable of overseeing the management of all aspects of the buildings where they lived. These hands on trainings covered issues ranging from the legal documents defining a co-op to financial management, fair housing and resident selection. |
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 05:14 PM | Comments (0)
CIRCLES Welfare to Work Collaborative
 | As Neighborhood Economic Development Director of EBALDC, I coordinated a community planning process focused on the challenge of welfare to work. The process involved all of the 35 social service agencies and immigrant associations serving the neighborhoods in identifying collaborative solutions. |
The planning process led to the formation of the CIRCLES collaborative, through which 12 organizations coordinated a comprehensive set of services ranging from English as a second language classes, work readiness counseling, transportation assistance, work experience job placements and ultimately job referrals. The program model involved several small immigrant service associations as direct case managers and language specialists but built a common infrastructure of relationships with larger institutions such as the local community college, employers and transportation support organizations. Collaboration allowed the smaller organizations to build on their relationships in the ethnic communities while benefiting from the resources and access to jobs that larger institutions could provide. I facilitated collaborative meetings and coordinated the preparation of funding applications that successfully secured over $2.5 million from 9 different sources to support the initial pilot program.
Posted by Rick Jacobus at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)
Community Development Exchange
As a program officer for LISC I developed the CD Exchange web site as a tool for the sharing of information between local community development professionals working on similar projects. The site, built around the Manila content management system, allows nontechnical users to post new documents and comment on posted resources.
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Posted by Rick Jacobus at 05:03 PM | Comments (0)
