University-Community Partnership Works to
Revitalize Youngstown
CUDC Quarterly, 3:1 - Winter, 2003
This past spring the UDC commenced a collaborative effort to develop a master plan for Youngstown’s Wick Park neighborhood, one of the city’s most architecturally significant communities. This plan is integral to a multi-faceted program directed by the Youngstown State University Center for Urban Studies under the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Outreach Partnership Centers (COPC) program.HUD launched the COPC program in 1994 to support collaborations between institutions of higher education and their surrounding communities. The department recognized that colleges and universities can bring
significant assets to partnerships with the communities that surround them and sought to develop methods to encourage such partnerships.
Colleges and universities employ community residents and attract faculty, staff, students, and visitors who, collectively, have considerable purchasing power. By their very nature, they are centers of innovation and culture, and they attract a diverse population of creative and talented individuals. These institutions can anchor their communities by providing a market for housing and retail, creating an accessible job base and supporting unique amenities found only in "college towns."
The COPC program also recognizes that, in today’s highly competitive academic world, place matters. Schools that can offer an attractive off-campus setting will have a competitive advantage over those that must contend with surroundings that are barren, blighted or boring. Colleges and universities are place-based institutions. To prosper, they must offer a physical environment – a definable college town – that can attract high caliber students, faculty and staff.
Youngstown’s Wick Park Model Neighborhood COPC project is just such a collaboration. Youngstown State University is partnering with the North Side Coalition and the neighborhood’s other major institutions to identify revitalization strategies for this neighborhood north of the YSU campus. The UDC team, led by project manager David Reed, has been working with Wick Park’s local development corporation, the North Side Coalition, Youngstown State, Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, and other community stakeholders to develop an urban design plan and development strategy to encourage housing development and preservation and reinvestment in the neighborhood as a whole. Meanwhile, other COPC initiatives are addressing the need for economic development, crime prevention, mental health, and community organizing. –Hunter Morrison
Click Here for a description of the Wick Park plan.
