A new family of free online tools will help both private redevelopers and public agencies invest in the right communities at the right time.
Let’s say you represent a large, institutional real estate investor in today’s economic climate. What’s the main indicator you look for when choosing communities for your latest project?
The usual answer is employment, crime, population growth, quality of life and the like. But those are all rear-view mirrors. They only tell you what the situation was at the time the data were compiled. Current conditions and recent historical trends are all well and good, but no stock or bond investor ever made money based on what the markets did yesterday or last year. The dream is to have a reliable indicator of where a market or particular stock is going, price-wise.
So it is with communities. The current condition of a place is far less important than the trajectory of its real estate valuations and quality of life. A community that’s revitalizing-but that has a so-so quality of life-will likely provide better returns than a community with excellent quality of life, if it’s on the way down. The problem is in finding a predictive indicator of a community’s (or a region’s) likely trajectory.
Individuals can take IQ (intelligence quotient) tests. Used properly, it can help people identify the strengths and weaknesses that might affect their success in life.
Now, communities will be able to take an RQ test and come out with a score (maximum 1000) that represents their Renewal Quotient. It’s a measurement of a community’s renewal capacity, its ability to turn restorative activities and regenerative projects into actual revitalization-economic growth that increases quality of life and environmental health.
It’s not hard to find cities that have spent many millions of dollars restoring historic buildings, remediating and redeveloping brownfields, and renovating their infrastructure, but that have still failed to achieve revitalization. They had all the ingredients, but lacked the recipe.
Funding is obviously crucial, but achieving rapid, resilient renewal takes more than just money. There are numerous factors of at least equal importance-these are taken into account when calculating RQs.
Given enough time, most communities will eventually enter a period of revitalization. What redevelopers and investors need to know is which communities are ready for revitalization right now. That’s the question the RQ Test is designed to answer.
The RQ initiative is a joint project of Resolution Fund, LLC of Washington, D.C., and the King Global Revitalization Centre (KGRC), a 700-acre living laboratory for Revitalization Institute, the global Secretariat of which is located at Toronto’s Seneca College (see page 41).
The initiative is being rolled out in four phases, the first of which is already underway. ReNew Canada readers are the first to learn of this new initiative and can be among the first to take the free, online quiz designed to measure a community’s perceived RQ.
This article appears in our March-April 2009 Issue
