Building Healthy Places Initiative
The ULI Healthy Corridors project is a two year project launched in 2014, and undertaken by the Building Healthy Places Initiative and the Rose Center for Public Leadership. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Colorado Health Foundation, ULI is investigating best practices to reinvent under-performing suburban and urban arterials in health-promoting ways.
Healthy Demonstration Corridors
Nearly every community across the United States is plagued by auto-dominated arterials and commercial corridors that add pollution, ugliness, and danger to the metropolitan landscape. This work will help advance efforts to foster places that promote health for the people who live, work, and travel on these streets.
This project builds on previous work at ULI on corridors, including Advisory Services Panels, Technical Assistance Panels, and Rose Center land use challenges. However, the primary focus of these efforts typical involve revitalization of the street, making the environment safer and more aesthetically pleasing, bringing in a complete streets approach. There has been less attention to the health outcomes that arise for those who live, work, and travel along these corridors, which this project strives to address.
Goals for this project include:
- Developing and refining approaches for creating a holistically healthy corridor.
- Identifying approaches that work for spurring real change along the corridors.
- Leveraging a new understanding among the ULI networks, nurturing and informing a community of practice around effective approaches to creating healthy corridors.
- Disseminating lessons learned from demonstration corridors throughout the ULI networks.
The Healthy Corridors project operates on both a national and a local level. Locally, four of ULI’s District Councils (ULI Colorado, ULI Idaho, ULI Los Angeles, and ULI Nashville) were engaged throughout the duration of the project and have identified a problematic corridor in their cities to focus on, referred to as Demonstration Corridors. Each Demonstration Corridor has formed a local leadership group of experts and is engaging other critical stakeholders through efforts, including local workshops, held in the summer of 2015, which focused on the corridor and how the health of the people living along it can be improved through partnerships, collaboration, and on-the-ground changes.
Additionally, a National Working Group of leading experts in land use, development, planning, health, community engagement, and design has been formed to oversee the project and the work in the Demonstration Corridors. The project has also engaged other experts on land use and development, including alumni of the Rose Fellowship
Vista Avenue Healthy Corridor
ULI Idaho and partnering with the City of Boise Energize our Vista Neighborhood project will be working on a 1.7 mile segment of a 4 mile, 4 lane arterial connecting the airport, Interstate 84, Boise State University, and downtown Boise. Vista Avenue exemplifies a typical strip commercial street, with auto-oriented retail, bars, pawn shops, a mix of converted and dilapidated housing, and very few pedestrian facilities. This segment of the corridor bifurcates the Vista Neighborhood, which has some of the lowest livability indicators (income, single family home value, etc.) in the city, and includes a mix of single and multi-family housing. Due to the function of this corridor as a gateway to the city and the lack of relationship to the surrounding neighborhoods, there is a lot of opportunity to improve the uses and infrastructure along Vista Avenue to make it more attractive to visitors, while simultaneously improving the health and well-being of residents who rely on the corridor as part of their daily lives.
National Study Team Visit
In February 2016, a national team of experts came to town to assist ULI Idaho and its partners in resolving the challenges for making Vista Avenue a healthier corridor. The national team members include: Patti Clare – Louisville, KY, James Moore – Tampa, FL, Danny Pleasant – Charlotte, NC, Michael Wojcik – Rochester MN, Stuart Levin – Raleigh, NC, Tracy Kane – Nashville, TN, Sara Hammerschmidt – ULI, DC, and Jess Zimbabwe- ULI Rose Center, DC.
After two days of interviews and investigations, the Team presented their findings including recommended action steps to the ACHD Commissioners, City Council Members, staff and the public. Among the many recommendations were the following:
- Viewing Vista is a through-way not a gateway which is the vision. And it could be a gateway not just to Boise but to the entire region and to Idaho, as a continuation of what is presented at the airport for arriving visitors.
- The big idea is that Vista could be configured as a 3 -lane road with protected bike lanes and 15′ of landscape/sidewalk with minimal delay to what travelers currently experience.
- Some of the sidewalk curb-cuts along the street may be out of compliance with the Americans for Disability Act (ADA) standards and pose a risk for persons in wheel chairs.
- There is substantial economic gain to be achieved by a re-configured Vista Avnue with enhanced pedestrian and bicycle environment.
- The Bench could become the Brooklyn of Idaho – the new creative district.
For more details, view the slide presentation made by the National Team: ULI Healthy Corridors National Study Visit Presentation Vista Avenue final