Downtown Grand Rapids Inc. Planning Manager Tim Kelly emails a weekly GR Forward update to the project Steering Committee. Here's this week's communication:

Good Morning Everyone:

I hope you are finishing up a great week.

This week we continued our engagement efforts by meeting with our friends in Heritage Hill. We had great participation at the meeting, and received more constructive feedback on the draft vision statement and goals. That concludes the second round of neighborhood meetings, with the third and final meetings starting on Tuesday at SWAN/JBAN, and continuing again on Wednesday in Roosevelt Park. The content for this last round of meetings will focus on the strategies we are proposing to accomplish our goals and vision. Below is a listing of the dates, times, and locations.

As reminder, the meetings are open to anyone, not just those that live in the neighborhood. We hope can join us!

• SWAN/JBAN: Wednesday, February 18 at 6:30p at Sibley Elementary

• Roosevelt Park: Thursday, February 19 at 6:30p at Cesar E. Chavez Elementary

• West Grand: Monday, February 23 at 6:30p at Harrison Park Elementary

• Creston: Wednesday, February 25 at 6:30p at Riverside Middle

• Black Hills: Thursday, February 26 at 6:30p at Black Hills Community Center

• Heritage Hill: Tuesday, March 10 at 5:30p at Cornerstone Church

• Belknap Lookout: Wednesday, March 11 at 6:00p at Belknap Commons

This week we also held the fourth installment of our GR Forward Thinking Speaker Series with Peter Kageyama. Peter gave an inspiring talk about ways that we can show we love our City. Among his suggestions were to embrace temporary interventions, be better storytellers about our successes, and to look for value in projects and events beyond just the financial. As with our other speakers, we will post a video of Peter’s presentation online as soon as it is available. We hope to see all of you for our fifth and final speaker, Dan Biederman, on March 12, 2015 (see attached).

Looking forward to next week, there is a lot of GR Forward activity scheduled. In addition to the neighborhood meetings on Wednesday and Thursday, we are also hosting a series of focus groups on a variety of topics. Among them, Downtown retail, the student experience, diversity, social services, art, and water quality. We are looking forward to having these important discussions with the participants, In addition, there are also Downtown and River Corridor Steering Committee meetings on Thursday where we will further review our strategies and discuss some of our upcoming engagement activities.

Web Numbers

The latest web and social media numbers are below. Though we continue to see positive trends, our activity slowed a bit this week. We expect those numbers to pick up a bit with our upcoming activities.

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/grfwd

Twitter - https://twitter.com/grfwd

Instagram - http://instagram.com/grfwd#

Resources

I have two resources to share with you this week.

First is an ongoing project from NPR exploring urban life in the 21^st Century: http://www.npr.org/series/155914958/npr-cities. There are a lot of great stories on the site covering topics as varied as mixed-income housing in Chicago, and “Town and Gown” relationships in Philadelphia. Most of the stories are only a few minutes long, so if you need a 10 to 15 minute break during the day, I encourage you to explore some of the links on their homepage.

In addition, I also enjoyed this article from City Lab on rating neighborhood livability: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/02/the-tricky-task-of-rating-neighborhoods-on-livability/385392/?utm_source=SFTwitter

The article profiles a new website, PlaceILive.com, that is trying to aggregate open data from cities and information from social media to create a holistic, accessible tool that measures the "livability" of any apartment or house in a city. While at the moment it only has profiles for five cities (Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Berlin, and London) it is an interesting way to use available information to create a single metric for qualify of life indicators. The article acknowledges some of the shortcomings of the stats driven approach – namely that numbers can be deceiving. That said, some of the new revelations it might provide around what affects real estate values, and what criteria people are most interested in when selecting a neighborhood, could prove extremely valuable for cities and citizens alike.

As always, if you have any questions let me know. Otherwise, have great weekend!