Urban Action Agenda (UAA) – Progress Update July 2015

By Paul Hesse and Mike Welti, Pattern Staff

The Pattern Board of Directors adopted the Urban Action Agenda as one of two main strategies supporting its 50th anniversary goals, and since September 2014, Pattern has been working hard on moving the UAA from concept to reality. Staff was hired at the beginning of the project, with Paul Hesse joining the team in mid-September 2014, and in May 2015, Michael Welti, AICP was brought on board. As Senior Planner and as Vice President for Urban and Regional Planning, Paul and Mike comprise the core team working on the UAA, with support from the rest of the Pattern staff, the Pattern Board and other regional partners.
Pattern Fellows
Starting in October 2014, Pattern re-engineered its Fellows program to be aligned with the UAA, with each Fellow assigned to a community to gather baseline conditions data and to conduct a deeper examination of three UAA communities: Fishkill, Middletown and New Rochelle. Individual Fellows have been asked to present their work in villages like Liberty in Sullivan County. The subsequent two Fellows classes will also be incorporated into the UAA.
Information Gathering and Outreach
In November 2014, Pattern hosted a well-attended first project briefing with mayors, supervisors and municipal staff from the twenty-five (25) participating UAA communities, and throughout the project thus far, Pattern has been meeting individually with UAA community partners to provide updates on the project and discuss specific issues facing each community. Also throughout the project, Pattern has been meeting with various community groups working in UAA locations, including Community Voices Heard, Habitat for Humanity, Hudson River Housing, Latinos Unidos and others. In January 2015, Pattern organized and hosted an outreach event at SUNY New Paltz as part of Regional Plan Association’s (RPA) 4th Regional Plan, which had over 60 attendees including many UAA community partners, to discuss the future needs and goals of the Hudson Valley.

In February 2015, Pattern began working with a web developer to establish a dynamic and interactive web presence for the project, allowing a platform for Pattern to engage the public and UAA community partners. Once launched, various data will be available for use by the public, including UAA community-specific profiles that Pattern has been developing in coordination with RPA. Pattern has also gathered data on a number of different topics for the UAA communities, including spare water and wastewater capacity, which was presented during Pattern’s annual infrastructure conference; housing cost burden for renters and owners; property taxes; building permit data; jobs and local economy data; and school district data.
Unique Initiatives
In March 2015, Pattern launched a pilot effort in one UAA community – the City of Newburgh – with the Times Herald-Record (THR) called “Newburgh Block by Block,” which will complement the work of Habitat Newburgh and the Newburgh Community Land Bank. The project seeks to highlight current successes in reclaiming distressed parts of the city and advocating for strategies that work. The THR devoted four pages to the project in its April 26th 2015 edition.
Coordination with Regional Priorities
Pattern has worked with the Mid-Hudson Regional Economic Development Council (MHREDC) to ensure that investment in urban centers is identified as a priority in the Upstate Revitalization Initiative (URI). In May 2015, Pattern hosted a well-attended workshop on the 2015 Consolidated Funding Application round and the URI for UAA communities. Also in May, in addition to several previous occasions, Pattern hosted some of the most distressed UAA communities – those communities identified as “Opportunity Areas” by the MHREDC – to discuss strategies for inclusion of their particular needs in regional plans.
Events
On June 23rd, Pattern hosted the first UAA event of 2015 called “Downtown Turnaround: Restoring the Promise of Our Population Centers.” This event focused on hot topics in urban communities, including transit-oriented development and downtown parking policy; housing issues such as redevelopment in urban centers for mixed-use mixed-income projects, and urban infill and adaptive reuse of downtown or urban center properties. The event also featured keynote speaker Tom Murphy, senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute and former mayor of Pittsburgh from 1994 to 2006. Pattern plans to hold a second event – a roundtable discussion for the UAA communities – this Fall.