The Dynamic Neighborhood Taxonomy (DNT) project provides new analysis on how urban neighborhoods operate, how they change over time, what factors determine their success and how these dynamics vary across different types of neighborhoods. In doing so, the project also created a new generation of analytic tools for businesses, investors, funders, governments and community development practitioners to use in better targeting investments and interventions in urban communities. The findings and tools from this major three-year collaborative project, sponsored by Living Cities, are detailed in an Executive Summary, Report and Appendices.

This presentation, prepared for the Aspen Institute Roundtable and Funders’ Exchange on Community Change, Poverty Reduction and Prosperity Promotion, presents a new framework for thinking about neighborhood change, as well as a new set of findings from the Dynamic Neighborhood Taxonomy project.

This paper and related presentation, prepared for Opportunity Finance Network and CFED, introduce a new framework for bipartisan economic development policies, centered on the idea of “inclusionary growth”.

These two complementary papers written for the Brookings Institution’s Urban Markets Initiative examine the role of information resources in spurring markets and creating investment strategies to boost urban neighborhoods. The papers offer a framework for market-based community economic development, presenting business-planning tools for inner city communities. 

This major study, conducted with Christopher Berry for CEOs for Cities, examines the changing drivers of economic success in American cities and metropolitan areas, and how these affect decision-making for leaders across all sectors. The report illustrates our findings on what is happening in and to cities, what made some cities thrive in the 1990s, and what factors appear to make the critical difference for the future.

In planning its activities for the next decade, Living Cities commissioned RW Ventures and the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program to undertake the design phase for a ten-year project that would invest in information to drive inner-city market investment, asset-building and policy reform.  The work presented in this report resulted in the creation of the Urban Markets Initiative.

This study, completed for CEOs for Cities, features a data scan of economic indicators and activity in cities. The study finds that the assets of cities are enormous, varied, and concentrated in particularly critical sectors. It also finds that cities feature economies disproportionately concentrated in “new” activity, and that cities are both hubs and drivers of regional economies that transcend political boundaries.

This paper examines how current information, primarily dependent on federal data sources, fails to accurately convey the opportunity in inner-city economies. It then suggests how building business-based data and models can address these information imperfections and help bring new investment to America’s most distressed communities. The paper closes by suggesting ways that private-sector leaders can work with the federal government and community organizations to improve data and market expertise and profitably invest in urban neighborhoods.  The work reflected in this paper led to the creation of MetroEdge.

  • Services

    Inventing new strategies, products, and enterprises to drive growth.

© 2023 RW Ventures, LLC