You select the city of Denton for this Assignment. Asset Building Community Development of Gary Paul Green & Anna Haines. 4th Edition Chapter 8: Physical Capital is the book for reference. Make sure you are in the range of 300 words. Plagiarism Check, please.
A reasonable question is how we locate physical capital? There are several approaches:
Driving the community and noting various physical structures such as buildings, roads, railways, and land.
Obtaining aerial views from photographs or satellite downloads. Here is one of many web sites to consult: MyTopo aerial images. (Links to an external site.) You do nhttps://www.mytopo.com/products/aerial-photo-maps.cfm?pid=google&gclid=CMq74dKd9LACFcVgTAodpl4I_ot need to purchase anything. This is just for you to explore.
Consulting road maps, typographical maps, and special area maps for places
Google Earth (Links to an external site.) https://www.google.com/earth/ is more robust and may offers some additional perspective of place.
The city’s comprehensive land use plan or comprehensive plan should be publicly available and will provide the current features and future vision of the city.
Types of physical capital include housing, commercial buildings (retail, manufacturing, and warehouses), public buildings, railroads, airports, port facilities, bodies of water, wetlands, undeveloped land, cemeteries, and other physical entities that can be identified.
We will have a video from Paul Sprekhals of of the Federal Home Loan Bank in our module on Financial Capital. He will talk to us about various financial tools to support housing affordability in community development projects. With respect to physical capital he provides recommended next steps for communities and individuals to remove barriers to affordable housing (that are not necessarily financial tools):
Personal education and community engagement on this issue
Local policy including zoning laws that permit density (more units per acre) and smaller units in the community (to expand housing choice across size and price points)
Housing Trust Funds – dedicated revenue to building more affordable units in the community
Engaging local partnerships with developers and nonprofits that work in the area of housing development and rehabilitation.
You may want to consider these solutions relative to your research on housing in your communities.
The U.S. Census (Links to an external site.) https://www.census.gov/topics/housing.html is an important resources on housing condition and affordability. You can explore important housing characteristics including financial, occupancy, and physical condition. You may find important conditions of the housing in the first spreadsheet on Selected Housing Characteristics. You may need to search at the county level relative to the city or community you select for the research project. You may use County level data if city level is not available.
Assignment Criteria
Read the material below and based on the earlier modules and our lecture and your pre-class discussion and continue to research the physical capital in your community. Please highlight at least 3 more features of physical capital in your community you selected for your mapping project and explain them in context of community development. Please make at least one assessment on housing as a feature of physical capital. You can focus all three examples on housing capital or identify 2 other aspects of physical capital. I have provided some prompts below for you to consider in your research. Conclude with one recommendation the community should consider to address any observations you have made about the availability of affordable housing in your community. Summarize your findings in 200 words. You should provide a direct reference to the material and cite your reference APA style.
Examine an organization in your community that is either building housing, advocating for housing, or possibly helping to place people in housing. What aspect of housing does the organization focus on? Does this organization collaborate with other organizations? If so how do they benefit from the collaboration. Is the supply of housing adequate and affordable in your community? Are there rental units? Are there any noticeable trends to indicate that new housing is displacing the current resident (i.e. gentrification).
Identify other notable physical capital such as buildings, roads, railways, etc. You can focus on the 3 features I ask you to identify above. What role do these features play in community development? Do any features cut off communities/neighborhoods from each other or bring them together? Do any of these features foster social capital? How would you describe them as assets relative to their purpose as a resource. Are their any nonprofit organizations helping to leverage these assets for the community?
Provide one policy recommendation to the city (city council) in response to any observations you may have regarding housing affordability, adequacy, availability, or accessibility in your community. Select only one or two issues as the basis of your recommendation. Please do not oversimplify and only write – the city needs more affordable housing. Please be more specific based on your overall assessment and recommendation.
