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PRIORITY GOAL #1 Community Revitalization OVERVIEW: Some Decatur neighborhoods have fallen into decline. What were once attractive and well-maintained, mostly owner-occupied, neighborhoods now experience urban blight.A significant number of properties in blighted urban core neighborhoods have transitioned to rentals, and in too many instances, landlords do not maize investments in properties adequate for long-term maintenance;the number of vacant and uninhabitable houses is still too great. An exodus of population and commercial activity contributes directly to deterioration. Appropriate interventions differ from neighborhood to neighborhood; and neighborhood revitalization is a long process fie. For this reason,the City Council has settled on a list of targeted strategies and neighborhoods, and on methods of process-fez measuring progress toward future recovery. In this way the council and the rest of the city can to see what strategies are the most successful, and which ones do not workz. Forward progress has been made over the past four years toward this goal; but much woriz remains. The City's strategic roadmap has four Izey pillars: 1. Demolish whatever must be demolished because it cannot be salvaged 2. Repair and rehabilitate whatever structures can reasonably be salvaged 3. Consider the Use of-more aggressive code enforcement, property inspections, registrations and other enforcement strategies to improve the local building stockz 4. Leverage private investment in the urban core with the selective development of "catalyst" projects that are large and visible enough to spur adjacent improvement Using neighborhood revitalization metrics developed by staff in 2019,the city measures the effectiveness of the city's efforts, evaluates progress trends and shapes new policy strategies. The following five metrics were used in 2019 and are used as performance measures moving forward: • Changes in equalized assessed valuation by neighborhood • Comparative condition of the housing stockz by neighborhood using the structure-by- structure evaluation methodology developed for this purpose in 2019 • Percentage of lots/area in each neighborhood that are vacant and unused • Comparative crime statistics by neighborhood • Percentage of homes that are owner-occupied by neighborhood Key Implementation Strategies (details for each strategy have been committed to writing and are available separately): 1. Repurposing land, envisioning alternative land uses,creating the kind of new and rehabilitated housing people want. 2. Use Give greater attention to corridor projects and other infrastructure improvements to catalyze community redevelopment Page 13