CHA engages in community-driven planning and design processes. The content and context of these processes may be unique for each community, but united by the aim of capturing community goals, priorities, and visions for their area and translating them into an actionable plan. With each phase, community stakeholder meetings are held with CHA resident leadership groups, other community groups, City of Chicago departments and City agencies. The three phases of community-driven planning can essentially be summarized as listen, suggest, and improve:
- Listen to community members, focusing on obtaining their general input in terms of their goals, priorities, vision, ideas, and concerns relating to the area and scope of work for the process. This phase also involves doing substantial background research, to help ensure we are properly drawing from prior work and understand the context for the process.
- Suggest and obtain feedback on first draft planning and design concepts that have been created in response to the community input received in the first phase in addition to needs in the area and across Chicago. These first drafts are conceptual, so they will not include details that still need to be figured out for the final plan.
- Improve the prior draft planning and design concepts based on the feedback received from community members in the public meeting at the end of the second phase, in addition to further input obtained from community members and stakeholders in this third phase. The resulting improved draft planning and design concepts will be incorporated into an almost final draft plan, which will be presented at a public meeting to obtain another round of community input that will be used to finalize the plan.
For information on CHA’s current planning and design processes, please see below:
- Altgeld Gardens Open Space Planning is a community-centered planning and design process for the public spaces and street network in Altgeld Gardens.
- Cabrini NOW is a community-driven planning and design effort to improve the Cabrini neighborhood through new housing and economic development on CHA properties.
- State Street NOW is a community-driven planning and design effort to accelerate new mixed-income housing and economic development along the State Street corridor, from Cermak Road to Garfield Boulevard.