How Local Governments Can Facilitate Creative Placemaking on Vacant Property

Creative placemaking is the practice of enhancing a neighborhood’s quality of life through arts, culture, and intentional community development to meet the vision of the people who live, work, and play there. This practice takes various forms, including but not limited to temporary visual art installations, performance events, and permanent brick-and-mortar spaces.

Creative placemaking is distinct from other broader applications of arts and culture because of three core elements:

• It is place-based, meaning it serves and reflects a specific place and the people who live there.
• It is community-centered, engaging residents, business owners, and local leaders to inform use.
• It is integrated, working in tandem with other strategies for neighborhood revitalization such as housing preservation, economic development, and resident-serving programs.

For vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties (VAD) in particular, creative placemaking allows for revitalization that gives equal attention to place and people, balancing the creation of impactful spaces with honoring the quality of life, history, and culture of the people who inhabit them. The people of these communities do not feel left behind by revitalization, but instead feel fully integrated into it.

Because of this, creative placemaking is an important tool for achieving incremental outcomes that help influence properties and communities to reduce vacancy. At its best, creative placemaking fosters grassroots effort from residents looking to leverage creative expression to equitably reshape their community and imagine new possibilities for their vacant properties. This ideal vision, however, cannot exist without support from local government, programs and practices, and the surrounding policy environment.

During our work with creative placemaking practitioners, Community Progress observed a pattern of common roadblocks that hinder or altogether stop creative placemaking projects on vacant properties. The biggest challenges we have seen are:

• Difficulty navigating the policy environment
• Difficulty accessing land and supportive zoning
• Lack of funding opportunities for projects

These roadblocks often stem from government policy and practices (referred to simply as “policies” in this report) around the access to and use of vacant properties. For example, an artist might want to install large-format photographs in the windows of a City-owned vacant structure to uplift the legacy of the neighborhood’s former or current residents. However, that property has serious structural issues where collapse is an imminent possibility. Due to safety and liability concerns, it is reasonable that the City would decline that request. But some local governments have sweeping policies prohibiting any private access to VAD property owned by the local government, including vacant residential or commercial buildings and vacant lots without any structure. Thus, a neighborhood association trying to place a piano on a vacant lot to spur spontaneous artistic activation may be prohibited from doing so, even though the actual safety risk is quite different from preventing someone from entering a vacant building that might collapse.

Government policy can foster or prevent action. While the need for these liability policies is understandable, they often hinder more than help. However, a new trend is emerging as we see cities across the country begin creating policies that promote creative placemaking and address potential liability at the same time.

This publication is a response to a nationwide policy gap: There are few concrete, let alone innovative, policies across the country that help support creative placemaking on VAD property. How Local Governments Can Facilitate Creative Placemaking on Vacant Property: Recommendations for Policy and Practice aims to change that by providing scalable recommendations based on selected case studies to encourage local government officials and policymakers to create policy environments that facilitate creative placemaking.

This report details the three common core roadblocks communities pursuing creative placemaking encounter, highlights case studies of places with facilitative policies, and offers scalable recommendations for overcoming these roadblocks. While every local government must consider their unique community context and state-level regulations, this report provides applicable takeaways for communities of all sizes and situations.

This report is made possible through the generous support of The Kresge Foundation.