The Five-City Equitable Development Workforce Pilot (Five-City Pilot) brought together five equity-focused infrastructure-reuse projects for three years with the goal of developing a scalable, replicable workforce-training model to ensure neighborhood residents benefit from new infrastructure-reuse projects. This evaluation presents outcomes achieved and lessons learned over the course of the three-year pilot.

Why This Matters

Infrastructure-reuse projects, a subset of adaptive reuse projects, can be an important tool for creating greenspace in urban areas, particularly in areas with legacies of disinvestment and infrastructural and environmental racism. However, infrastructure-reuse projects also risk sparking “green gentrification,” the process by which new park and green space projects increase surrounding property values and price out neighborhood residents with lower incomes. To combat this phenomenon, leaders who value equity can focus on supporting inclusive economic growth in their surrounding communities. The five projects participating in the Five-City Pilot focus on workforce development as a conduit for community residents to access living-wage jobs both within (e.g., construction) and outside the project (e.g., hospitality).

Key Takeaways

Below are our key findings from the Five-City Pilot:

• The job placement rate for residents who completed the entire training sequence for each site was 62.5 percent.
• Three sites achieved job placement rates of around or above 70 percent.
• Sites that set goals for training completion and employer partnerships generally met them with escalating progress across all sites.
• Training recruitment and retention rates may have been boosted in some sites when, in year three, sites offered participants stipends to cover their expenses and lost work hours in preexisting jobs.
• No site reported out retention and wage-rate data, either because these elements were not covered in data-sharing agreements with partners (e.g., training providers), and/or staff did not have the time to track participant activities beyond the training period.

We learned the following lessons from the Five-City Pilot:

• Comprehensive community initiatives interested in supporting a hyperlocal workforce development effort should leverage the experience and expertise of citywide or region-wide workforce-training providers whenever possible.
• Contracts between the lead organization and core project partners, especially workforce-training providers, should include formal data-sharing commitments.
• Infrastructure-reuse sites should leverage their purchasing power to support job placement and other equity goals.
• Sites that offer participation stipends to cover the lost work hours of participants in training may boost their recruitment and retention rates.

How We Did It

Our research methods included analyzing site program data, reviewing documents, and extensively interviewing project stakeholders.