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Partnering with Governments on Strategic Planning

In 2005, TRF collaborated with the City of Baltimore's Department of Planning and the Department of Housing and Community Development to create a Market Value Analysis (MVA) for the metropolitan area. The goal was to have the MVA serve as a critical element to the City’s Comprehensive Master Plan, the first to be developed by Baltimore in three decades, and to help to guide the targeted allocation of public resources.

The City of Baltimore’s Department of Planning was impressed by the MVA TRF had created for Mayor Street’s Neighborhood Transformation Initiative in Philadelphia. Based on a similar idea, the City created a neighborhood typology of its own in 2002, employing a smaller set of variables, analyzed at a larger geographic level than TRF’s MVA. That version used the city’s neighborhoods as boundaries rather than using block groups. While this allowed comparisons with a wide range of data compiled at the neighborhood level, housing market details were often obscured. For example, a neighborhood that could often have three or more distinct types of market activity within it would show only one typology instead of its range, limiting the ways to use the analysis for investment decisions within a neighborhood.

The City of Baltimore's decision to collaborate with TRF, a leading innovator in the use of data and information, to create the 2005 Baltimore City MVA, could not have come at a better time. Market trends over the last few years had been indicating that Baltimore was beginning to bounce back as a residential destination. Fewer people were leaving the city, home values were rising and houses were selling quickly. At the same time, throughout levels of local government, the need for market-driven, rather than subsidy-only, strategies for urban revitalization was becoming increasingly evident.

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Working alongside Baltimore's Planning and Housing Departments, TRF provided leadership with the analysis, while the City engaged civically-involved Baltimoreans and neighborhood organizations along the way to ensure the accuracy of the approach. The symbiotic process between the City and TRF resulted in an analytical tool completed in late 2005 that quickly emerged as a valuable resource for both.

For the City, the MVA is playing the role of a powerful and proven guide to both daily operations and long-term planning. The City’s Department of Planning is using the MVA as a tool for the Master Comprehensive Plan it developed. The MVA is also guiding the City’s Capital Improvement Program (CIP) which funds physical improvement projects. City Departments such as Public Works and Health, applying for CIP funding, use the MVA as a market lens as they develop their project plans. The MVA is allowing project planners to understand how a neighborhood’s market can affect their plan and consequently what potential impact the project itself would have on its surrounding market.

Baltimore's Department of Housing is using the MVA along with a set of graphic contextual overlays to better understand where it needs to focus its activities, from code enforcement to subsidy-balanced residential development. For example, the MVA is being used as a tool to inform the planning for disposition of City-owned property. In instances where a property is located in a competitive, emerging, or stable market, properties are sold through the private real estate market. For properties located in distressed or more transitional neighborhoods, the property is disposed of through a bidding process conducted by the Department each month.

“It was a harmonious collaboration with significant results,” says Peter Conrad, City Planner with the City of Baltimore ’s Department of Planning, describing their partnership with TRF to develop the MVA. “TRF’s analysis was sound and the MVA reflects a true understanding of what a city needs to make thoughtful decisions about preservation and revitalization. Their work is a testament of their commitment to generating local economic growth and improving lives.”