Earlier this month, GOPC facilitated an exploratory scenario planning session for the city of Lakewood. Lakewood is a first ring suburb of Cleveland, which has proudly and deliberately maintained itself as a mixed-income community.
However, in the last few years, median housing values have increased dramatically and previously naturally occurring affordable rental units have become unaffordable or converted into owner-occupied units.
Concerned about these worrisome housing trends, Lakewood’s Planning Department looked to outside facilitators to help guide their planning around the question: How do we ensure affordable housing for all Lakewood residents now and in the future?
Working with GOPC, the city of Lakewood utilized a new toolkit developed to steer and support legacy cities in undertaking exploratory scenario planning. This process helped stakeholders see how different conditions might affect the goal of sufficient, safe, affordable housing in Lakewood.
The toolkit, writing by University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign graduate student Emma Walters and Professor Arnab Chakraborty, for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is among the first guidebooks for exploratory scenario planning in a legacy city context.
Exploratory scenario planning asks: if the future took three or four different paths, how should stakeholders respond in each of these scenarios to achieve an agreed upon goal.
In Lakewood, city residents, stakeholders, and planning staff thought about the tools needed if a major, high-wage employer, like Amazon HQ 2.0 came to the region; they thought about what would need to happen if the housing market bottomed out, like it did in the 2008 Recession. They worked through two other scenarios with the guidance of GOPC Senior Manager of Outreach and Projects, Aaron Clapper, and Alison Goebel, Executive Director.
The workshop pushed participants to describe conditions as well as policy solutions and responses. This exercise uncovered policy and programmatic ideas that the city may implement. Importantly, several of these policies and programs are ones that city staff and housing stakeholders had not otherwise thought of or considered before the workshop.
The Planning Department will consider the comments and observations that came out the workshop, revisit research completed before the workshop, and release a planning document to the public in summer 2023.
GOPC thanks Lincoln Institute and the City of Lakewood for inviting us to help with this process. We are especially grateful to Arnab Chakraborty for his ongoing guidance on how to use the tool kit, and for driving more than 7 hours to join us in person in Lakewood!
