• Overview

PolicyLink is engaged in a partnership with the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation to synthesize key learnings regarding the Market Creek Plaza development, and educate funders, practitioners, and policymakers about the policy implications of this groundbreaking project.

Market Creek Plaza is a 10-acre commercial real estate development project in a culturally diverse, underinvested neighborhood of San Diego. It is among the nation's first real estate development projects to be designed, built, and ultimately owned (in the most literal sense) by community residents. The Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation (JCNI), an operating foundation with a neighborhood strengthening mission, is the developer of the project and has provided comprehensive support for Market Creek Plaza as a vehicle for community transformation.
In early 2006, the California Department of Corporations approved JCNI and Market Creek Plaza for a historic Initial Public Offering that will allow community members to become stakeholders and stockholders in the development, creating a unique asset-building opportunity for the Diamond Neighborhoods. 
Market Creek Plaza is anchored by a large supermarket and includes ethnic restaurants, a fitness center, and an open-air amphitheater. While implementation is not yet complete, this resident-led effort has already resulted in important breakthroughs relevant to the community building/community development field:

• Minority contracting : 69 percent of the construction contracts for Market Creek Plaza were awarded to local minority-owned enterprises, totaling $7.1 million.
• Local hiring: 91 percent of the initial employees at Food 4 Less were hired from the community. All these jobs are unionized and include living wages, health care, and pension plans.
• Civic participation: 2,000 adults and over 1,000 youth have participated in land planning, leasing, marketing, research, advocacy, and ownership design. Extensive cross-cultural teams have played an ongoing role in project implementation.
• Neighborhood Reinvestment: Residents have designed a locally controlled foundation, which has been chartered and approved as a 501(c)3 Neighborhood corporation, to grant a portion of the profits from the development back into the neighborhood.

Through its partnership with JCNI, PolicyLink is disseminating emerging lessons from the Market Creek Plaza resident ownership strategy to practitioners and funders in the community building/community development field. PolicyLink completed a case study detailing the dual economic and social goals of Market Creek Plaza as an example of equitable development practice on the ground.

PolicyLink has also worked directly with Market Creek Plaza 's Ownership Design Team (composed of area residents and facilitated by JCNI) to map out a framework for evaluation of the development's ownership strategy. PolicyLink assisted the Team in thinking through the meaning of ownership and in defining the outcomes anticipated by enabling residents to own units in the development. Through an inclusive process, residents developed a conceptual model for evaluating the ownership strategy, which involves the testing of their plans against actual experience. While PolicyLink will not conduct the evaluation, it will provide assistance to JCNI and residents as they select an evaluation team able to work in a way that empowers residents to learn new skills and act as decision-makers in the project. The results of the evaluation, in addition to providing key information to JCNI and residents about the process and outcomes of the ownership strategy, will contribute a valuable knowledge base for practitioners, funders, and policymakers about the risks and possibilities of involving residents as partners and shareholders in local development activity.