Strong Towns Chats Lead to $100k Grant for Sioux Falls Neighborhood
Sioux Falls, SD. (Source: Maxpower2727/Wikimedia Commons.)
In 2018, a small group of concerned citizens met in a South Dakota coffee shop to talk about some of their city’s problems. They found each other through a Strong Towns Local Conversation, and discovered they were all passionate about trying to improve their neighborhoods’ prospects on the ground.
Despite all the challenges of starting from scratch with a long checklist of local problems, a group in the Whittier Neighborhood of Sioux Falls coalesced. They discussed a variety of small-scale plans in an area with a lot of great attributes, but a host of issues. Today those same conversations continue, but with an excellent reward: the local advocates who met over coffee now have a $100,000 local grant to work with.
The group branded itself the Community Revitalization Collective (CRC), and it received the “Big Ideas” grant from the South Dakota Community Foundation. The Collective will take a unique, wellness-focused approach to addressing human problems in the Whittier Neighborhood, focusing on improving communications, empowering local voices, and executing small-scale projects.
Jordan Deffenbaugh, a long-time Strong Towns member and conversation leader, sets local action at the core of the project: “How can residents take control of the future of their neighborhood, rather than the city dictating their future?”
Deffenbaugh and fellow Strong Towns member Clinton Brown also serve with the BAM Institute of Civic Biodesign, which oversees the CRC. Fortified by the $100,000 grant, and working with partners such as Habitat for Humanity and the Union Gospel Mission, Deffenbaugh and Brown’s group has outlined a three-year plan in the neighborhood.
“This first year is real grass-roots, good old-fashioned community building. Pot lucks, we’re gonna make benches, get people gardening… We want to get people talking with each other,” says Deffenbaugh.
Like many old neighborhoods in North American cities, Whittier’s situation is a mixed bag. Sixty percent of homes are owner-occupied, and there are several thriving local businesses. But it is also the location of a majority of the city’s social service infrastructure, and, according to Deffenbaugh, at any moment may host 70% of South Dakota’s entire homeless population. It is this group, which is most dependent on walking and public transportation, that the CRC believes stands to benefit most from safety-focused design changes.
The CRC is setting up shop in a neighborhood storefront that it’s calling the Whittier Neighborhood Resource Library. One of its first initiatives is setting up a tool collection to loan to locals for small-scale home improvement projects. The site will also be used for community gathering and organizing.
As a partner in the CRC, Habitat for Humanity is putting a special emphasis on helping existing homeowners improve their properties. Part of the focus will be to assist with aging-in-place improvements such as wheelchair ramps and grab bars, “to help keep people independent and living in their homes as long as they can,” says Marcus Brandenburg, Neighborhood Revitalization Coordinator for Habitat for Humanity Greater Sioux Falls. He says that while Habitat is well known for building new homes, its Neighborhood Revitalization Program reflects a broad commitment to improve neighborhoods through small-scale, owner-driven projects. The typical cost for such projects is $700 to $800 (visit siouxfallshabitat.org to learn how to apply or volunteer). If the CRC is successful, Brandenburg says Habit will seek to expand its program to other Sioux Falls neighborhoods.
For the second year of the plan, the CRC will share all the data and community interviews it collects and facilitate a discussion about how best to address the neighborhood’s collective needs. This step is particularly important in light of communications problems between the city and the neighborhood, but also, says Deffenbaugh, between the city’s various departments.
In year three, Deffenbaugh hopes the CRC will be engaged in “collective action,” launching neighborhood gardens, murals, community centers, and maker spaces. It will also work with city agencies to better target their efforts, and facilitate fundraising for more ambitious projects. But more than any on-the-ground improvements, Deffenbaugh emphasizes human connections. “Success would be citizens of Whittier across many different cultures engaging with each other and breaking bread with each other,” he says.
Brandenburg also celebrates the collective nature of the project: “It’s a beautiful partnership because we all bring different skill sets and resources to the table.” Another metric for success, he says, is “to be able to leave in a couple of years where the residents feel they have the ability to sustain any progress, and know the different resources that are available to them in Sioux Falls.”
While Deffenbaugh is excited by the momentum in Sioux Falls, he encourages all local advocates to start small and stick together. “I want to emphasize to Strong Towns readers that this isn’t some big complicated machine. How this all came to be is neighbors getting together to talk about their city once a week,” says Deffenbaugh.
Strong Towns Community Builder John Pattison doubles down on this notion: “This is the simplest and arguably the most powerful way to start a Strong Towns conversation in your city: just start a regular conversation.”
Read more: “How Strong Towns Principles Relate to Sioux Falls”
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.