Abstract
Plan monitoring is broadly believed to address plan obsolescence. We inquire to what extent neighborhood plan monitoring meetings enhanced implementation conformance over that achieved by original plans in the shrinking city of Youngstown (OH), via a monthly-based longitudinal evaluation of demolitions. We find that monitoring meetings’ recommendations diverged rapidly from original plans; that a combination of monitoring and plans maintained a stable conformance ratio; and that plan monitoring is more important for politically unstable implementation actors than independent actors. We conclude that plan monitoring is a valuable but challenging tool to react to uncertainty by offering suggestions for improved plan monitoring.
Introduction
There is always a “lag effect” in urban planning. Planners, in other words, shape tomorrow’s vision with today’s plan, based on yesterday’s knowledge. Lag effects cause plans to have a short life; plans remain unimplemented or only partially implemented. This situation has been called “new plan syndrome,” where planners are asked to prepare new plans without regard to why and when former plans became ineffective (Calkins 1979; Talen 1996).
To tackle the challenge of unimplemented plans, lag effects, and new plan syndrome, scholars have called for two remedies. The first is adaptive planning: continuously adjusting planning to uncertainty and an ever-changing world through incrementalism (Christensen 1985; Innes and Booher 1999; Lindblom 1959; Ryan 2006; Stults and Larsen 2020; Woodruff et al. 2022). The second is plan evaluation: assessing plan implementation as a prerequisite for improving future planning (E. R. Alexander and Faludi 1989; Baer 1997; Calkins 1979; Guyadeen and Seasons 2018; Laurian et al. 2004; Ryan and Gao 2019). Some scholars (Haynes 1974; Quay 2010; Seasons 2003) believe that plan monitoring provides an ideal combination of adaptive planning and plan evaluation, as monitoring continuously evaluates implementation and adjusts planning with emergent, new information. However, in this literature, plan monitoring is mainly treated as a tool for a performance check on a plan, whereas the potential role of plan monitoring to offer new suggestions for implementation remains underexplored in planning literature. The questions of who is responsible for plan and who it best serves require more focused attention. For example, plan monitoring is resource-intensive and may therefore exclude certain organizations and groups from successful implementation of plan monitoring. Additionally, an entity with resources for plan monitoring may have differing priorities from other groups with less power, influencing which plan elements get monitored and which do not. The questions of who monitors, how to monitor, and what is monitored are crucial elements of this area of planning practice.
Plan monitoring offers a creative way to address changes in an environment and priorities as time passes, but like most practices, it has its dilemmas. As previously noted, one dilemma is the critical question of what gets measured and what does not, and the ensuing impact on which aspects of a plan are ultimately addressed. Plan elements that are challenging to quantify require more time and focus: resources that not all communities possess. Additional vital questions for the study and practice of plan monitoring include when a plan changes from implementation to monitoring; when a city should begin monitoring; and who should be responsible for getting a plan “back on course” if it begins to depart from plan objectives.
This study addresses this lacuna in the literature by examining neighborhood planning in the shrinking city of Youngstown, Ohio, as an example of plan monitoring. Through the case of Youngstown, the questions of who monitors, how to monitor, and what is monitored are explored in detail. A longitudinal analysis of Youngstown’s quarterly-based neighborhood plan monitoring meetings between 2015 and 2017, and meeting recommendations for demolition are overlaid against demolitions suggested by earlier neighborhood plans and actual demolitions to compare how plan monitoring interacts with the original plans and implementation. We find that plan monitoring acted as an effective way to accommodate uncertainty; that a combination of monitoring and plans maintained a stable and high conformance ratio of implementation; and that plan monitoring is more important for politically unstable implementation actors (e.g., local government) than it is for independent implementation actors (e.g., a non-governmental organization [NGO]), because plan monitoring adds objectivity to politically driven imperatives.
Accommodating Uncertainty in Planning
Uncertainty in Planning
Uncertainty is a state of being that includes the undefined, unknown, and the unforeseeable. Few professions work so closely with uncertainty as planners, who shelter communities from uncertainty by determining the future. Yet planners must always perform their decision-making under conditions of uncertainty (Abbott 2005; Cartwright 1991; Chakraborty et al. 2011; Christensen 1985; Neuman 1998; Wildavsky 1973). Unlike scientists whose experiments control uncertainty by leaving only a few variables open, planners work in a more complex world in which most variables are not controlled, and in which “wicked problems” are not well defined (Pipkin 2019; Rittel and Webber 1973).
Abbott (2005) noted two fundamental uncertainties in planning: environmental uncertainty and process uncertainty, also known as “uncertainty for planning” and “uncertainty from planning.” Both the social and physical environments create environmental uncertainty as they are subject to unexpected and unknown changes, which results in uncertainty when plans are being formed. During the planning process, additional uncertainty is added. Plans require coordination, agreement, shared knowledge, and intent to follow through. These elements add uncertainty as one cannot be certain about the future actions of the organizations or individuals involved in the planning process.
Uncertainty also has additional dimensions, and by referring to precedent studies, its impact can be clarified via three dimensions:
Timing: Planning with prescriptive long-term predictions has more uncertainty than interventional planning with short-term predictions, since things change less over a shorter time (Abbott 2005; Rondinelli 1973).
Scope: Comprehensive planning, or strategic planning with a larger scope of interests, has greater uncertainty than planning with a smaller scope of objectives, for example, neighborhood planning. Comprehensive planning focuses on a large spatial area, but contains social and economic goals that problematize generating priorities in planning; thus, uncertainty is found in every aspect (Altshuler 1965; Friedmann 1971; Rondinelli 1973).
Decision-making: Planning that generates formal plan documents after a political or judicial process has greater uncertainty than technical planning with less political engagement, or informal planning lacking written plans (Innes and Booher 2010; Wildavsky 1973). This is because formal planning is subject to compromised decision-making in which political change can nullify planning efforts (Ryan and Gao 2019).
Accommodating Uncertainty: Plan Monitoring
Planners’ diverse perspectives regarding uncertainty shape their accommodation of this planning challenge. The planning literature outlines three perspectives:
Rationalists view planning as a way of future control, where to plan is to eliminate uncertainty and to predetermine outcomes. For rationalists, a successful planning process closely links plan objectives and outcomes (E. R. Alexander and Faludi 1989; Baer 1997; Hoch 2002; Wildavsky 1973).
Optimists embrace uncertainty. Some may welcome results whether or not these results conform to plans (Beauregard 2021). More uncertainty in planning may mean more opportunities, for if there was no planning uncertainty, then there would be no need for planners (Abbott 2005).
Pragmatists accept the fact that planning with uncertainty is part of the nature of the profession (Krieger 2022). Planning exists in parallel with discovering and dealing with uncertainty; it cannot be eliminated, but can be alleviated progressively (Lindblom 1959).
Today, the pragmatist view is widely popular in planning. Some scholars (Baer 1997; Seasons 2003) believe that tools such as plan monitoring can largely offset the negative consequences of uncertainty. Plan monitoring is a specific and favored way of plan evaluation. Monitoring refers to a continuous assessment of planning activities on a regular basis (Floyd 1978; Seasons 2003). Rittel and Webber (1973) view monitoring as a component of “ideal planning” in which errors in former decisions can be corrected in subsequent planning.
However, plan monitoring requires substantial involvement in planning and cohesive coordination in order to implement. Plan monitoring raises at least three questions:
Monitoring what? Many plans’ objectives are either too obscure to monitor and it is unclear what to monitor, or objectives are too comprehensive and complex to monitor, resulting in the need to monitor too many issues.
Monitored by whom? Unless there are specific mandates to monitor ongoing plans, planners usually only care about new plans and the plan-making process. Residents may want to monitor plan implementation, but they face a number of barriers. Aside from neighborhood plans and other small area-focus plans, most plans involve a great number of stakeholders who would benefit from monitoring but fail to do so because of conflicting interests, resulting in a collective action problem. Even in the case of neighborhood plans, investment is needed in order to equip residents with planning knowledge; engaging entities with that knowledge requires time and resources, and such entities may be difficult to identify. Additionally, transparent implementation information from local government and other implementation actors is needed for monitoring to occur.
Monitoring how? Monitoring is costly, time-consuming, and restrained by limited resources in a typical planning department (Guyadeen and Seasons 2018; D. Lee 1994; Seasons 2003).
Some scholars have additionally found that ideal plan monitoring is unrealistic to achieve, as it requires a continuous and systematic assessment while also requiring updating of different indicators (Hoernig and Seasons 2004). Therefore, Seasons (2003) appeals to planners to use simple, practicable models in plan monitoring, so as to work within limited existing resources. Plans with small areas, clear objectives, and fewer variables are also prioritized.
Planning practice’s difficulties with plan monitoring are reflected in academic research: there are comparatively few empirical studies, most of which focus on environmental planning (e.g. Brown, Kyttä, and Reed 2022). Additional research could examine some of the barriers inherent in plan monitoring, particularly its resource-intensive nature; the diligence and effort required to sustain monitoring; and the role of community interest in plan monitoring.
Particular Uncertainties in Planning for Shrinking Cities
Uncertainty is inevitable in planning and policy making, and disadvantaged cities are more vulnerable than prosperous ones (Beauregard 2021), making uncertainty more troublesome in those places. Compared with growing cities, shrinking cities losing population and resources may have extremely low budgets. Shrinking cities also experience greater uncertainty in their built environment and socio-economic systems due to crime rates, fiscally deprived government, political instability, and a surfeit of priorities (Barnes, Roose, and Turner 2021; Barton, Rizzuto, and Valasik 2024; Gao and Ryan 2021; Gao, Jansen, and Ryan 2023; Garboden, Fan, Budavári, Basu, Braverman and Evans 2024; Hollander et al. 2009; Kinahan and Mawhorter 2024; Mallach 2018; Ryan 2012; Stern and Lester 2021). Accordingly, such cities may not have fiscal resources to ward off problems caused by uncertainty, such as the Flint Water Crisis (Morckel 2017). At a larger scale, shrinking cities have uncertain futures, challenging prediction and planning in these cities (Wiechmann 2008). Neither residents nor politicians know whether the city can return to a growth trajectory or whether they will continue to decline.
At the neighborhood scale in shrinking cities, “uncertainty for planning” arises as vacant properties incur vandalism, arson, and other criminal activities, adversely impacting surrounding neighborhoods (Kuhlmann 2023; MacDonald et al. 2023; Mallach 2006; Rigolon et al. 2021; Stern and Lester 2021). On the other hand, “uncertainty from planning” in shrinking cities occurs when neighborhoods and the city government/council competitively lobby for limited resources for dealing with dilapidated properties, as well as when property owners appeal code enforcement judgments or redeem tax delinquent properties from being foreclosed, further delaying action (Dewar 2006; Gao and Ryan 2020).
Tracking the Changing Relationship between Plan, Implementation, and Monitoring
Plan, Implementation, and Monitoring
To date, most plan monitoring practice in the United States and beyond, such as Ontario (Canada)’s Performance Monitoring in the Planning System (Hoernig and Seasons 2004) and the UK’s Monitoring Regional Planning Guidance on Targets and Indicators (Wong, Baker, and Kidd 2006), focus on constructing a set of indicators to track and measure the performance of a region, to identify the challenges and opportunities of plans and policy implementation. More broadly, monitoring can work without regard to plans and policies, acting as surveillance in a state over set periods (Haase et al. 2008). However, these studies and practices overlook plan monitoring’s role in adjusting former plans for future implementation. Additionally, the performance of plans and policies are related to other factors that monitoring cannot easily distinguish. Whether and how plan monitoring has proposed new recommendations for implementation, and how these new recommendations will affect implementation, has not yet been examined.
Many precedent planning studies propose an idealized planning process that constitutes a cycle of movements, including planning, implementation, and monitoring (Haynes 1974; Meyerson 1956; Rittel and Webber 1973). Here, monitoring is not only the end of a planning process but also a new start for the next session of planning. Therefore, within an idealized planning process, we propose that the contents of plan, implementation, and monitoring will overlay each other (Figure 1). However, we also recognize that this overlay cannot be static throughout different stages of a planning process. We therefore propose three possible relationships of plan, implementation, and monitoring:
a. Monitoring as repetition (Figure 2, left). Regardless of how a plan is implemented, monitoring strictly follows the original plan’s recommendations. An example might be the early stage of a plan-implementation process, when plan monitoring has little feedback from implementation, and thus hews closely to original plans.
b. Monitoring as shaper of new ideas (Figure 2, middle). Regardless of what original plans suggest, plan monitoring can offer its own recommendation for implementation. An example might be in the late stage of a plan-implementation process when accumulated uncertainties have nullified the original plan, making new suggestions from monitoring more effective than original plan ideas.
c. Monitoring as isolated and irrelevant (Figure 2, right). Regardless of what original plans suggest and which ideas are implemented, monitoring may offer suggestions unrelated to the plan that are disregarded for implementation. An example might be a situation in which neither plan makers nor implementation actors participate in plan monitoring.
A conceptual model of plan, monitoring, and implementation.
Three possible relationships between plan, implementation, and monitoring.
Tracking the Changing Relationship of Plan, Implementation, and Monitoring
Since planning is a dynamic process, the relationship between plan, implementation, and monitoring also changes over time. This relationship has been little explored by precedent studies. To unravel this dynamic process, our study consistently tracks this relationship through a longitudinal assessment. Many empirical planning studies apply longitudinal assessments using only two moments in time: the first, when a plan is released, and the second, when implementation is underway or finished (Alterman and Hill 1978; Chapin, Deyle, and Baker 2008; Laurian et al. 2004). Very few plan evaluation studies observe implementation at multiple points in time. This is likely due to the fact that most such studies focus on long-range plans with broad goals, making these studies difficult to monitor and difficult for analyzing implementation at short intervals. Overall, collecting time-series planning and implementation data is challenging and time-consuming.
Some planning-related studies have applied longitudinal analysis to frequently updated time-series datasets. Based on the time intervals of data, these studies can be categorized into two groups. The first focuses on micro-level subjects, including human behavior and built environment change, by using direct observation or interpreting frequently updated data. This group has short time intervals of data that range between hours (Mehta 2007; Mehta and Bosson 2021) and one year (Hendricks and Meyer 2024). The second group uses longer time intervals, often using Census or related data, and centers on macro-level subjects such as socioeconomic change and resident attitudes. The time scale of this data ranges from one or two years (Dong 2016; Nelson and Ehrenfeucht 2020) to decennial (D. Lee 2020), or even longer intervals (Ewing and Hamidi 2014).
To understand the varied relationship between plan, implementation, and monitoring, we must find frequently updated time-series datasets on plan implementation and monitoring. However, depending on how we view implementation, such datasets may be difficult to find. There are two perspectives on evaluating implementation, known as conformance-based perspective and performance-based perspective. Conventional monitoring studies prefer the performance-based perspective, which relies on analyzing many indicators but makes it difficult to acquire time-series datasets for such studies. Additionally, from the performance-based perspective, any desirable result, even if departing from the plan, is viewed as a success (Berke et al. 2006). The relationship between plan, implementation, and monitoring is very challenging and complex to unravel from a performance-based perspective. In contrast, from a conformance-based perspective, the relationship is much easier to understand. The more has been realized pursuant to the plan, the more overlay there is between implementation and plan. The more has been mentioned pursuant to the plan, the more overlay there is between monitoring and plan. And finally, the more has been realized pursuant to the monitoring, the more overlay there is between implementation and monitoring. Another significant advantage of a conformance-based perspective is its application of fewer indicators to evaluate implementation, simplifying the data acquisition process for understanding the relationship between plan, implementation, and monitoring.
Neighborhood Plans, Implementation, and Monitoring in Youngstown
Youngstown, Ohio, is a deindustrialized city that once had the third largest steel production in the United States (City of Youngstown 2005; Rhodes and Russo 2013). In the 1970s, economic decline hit the city, devastating Youngstown’s steel and related industry and causing significant job loss and depopulation (Linkon and Russo, 2002). From 1960 to 2020, Youngstown’s population declined more than 60 percent from 166,689 to 60,068, making it one of America’s fastest shrinking cities. In urban planning, however, Youngstown is considered a model for shrinking cities due to its 2005 comprehensive plan, Youngstown 2010. This document projected a “right-sized” land use layout and further decrease in population. Youngstown 2010 garnered national awards and attention from planning scholars (e.g., Schatz 2012; Shetty and Reid 2013), naming it “the first US shrinking city to break with the growth machine” (Wiechmann and Pallagst 2012). However, implementation of the plan was found to be questionable: Rhodes and Russo (2013), for example, found that Youngstown did not establish a clear mechanism to implement the plan.
Youngstown continued its planning efforts following the 2005 Youngstown 2010 Plan. This plan divided the city’s territory into eleven clusters (each containing several traditional city neighborhoods) to permit more detailed suggestions at a neighborhood scale, establishing a framework for future planning efforts (City of Youngstown 2005). Constrained resources and government staffing shortfalls delayed neighborhood planning until after 2010, when the city government outsourced its planning duties to a newly founded NGO, the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation (YNDC). This outsourcing trend can also be found in other cities (e.g., Oklahoma City, see C. A. Lee and Harris 2024). Following the release of several “Neighborhood Conditions Reports” in 2013 that analyzed land use and related factors (van Maasakkers, Oh, and Knox 2020), YNDC and the city government published a series of “Neighborhood Action Plans” (“Plans”), in collaboration with other NGOs including the Mahoning County Land Bank and AmeriCorps. The Plans prioritized housing and property as their major focus and further subdivided these foci into two tiers of strategies for every vacant property (YNDC 2014, 9). Primary strategies are major interventions including demolitions and code enforcement, while secondary strategies are minor interventions actionable by neighborhood associations, for example, board up and clean up (Figure 3).
A sample Neighborhood Action Plan housing and property strategy of Youngstown’s “Garden District” neighborhood.
Each of the Plans has a five-year term of implementation. In order to foster implementation, teams were established for each plan area to track and monitor progress via neighborhood meetings (“Meetings”). Teams typically included three groups of participants: representatives of major implementation actors (Mahoning County Land Bank and the local government); neighborhood representatives; and coordinators of plan implementation, for example, staff members from YNDC (2014, 29).
Although the Plans originally possessed five performance benchmarks in diverse areas (YNDC 2014, 30), the process of plan implementation was simplified to focus on a “priority property list” (“PPL,” explained further below). The list targeted around twenty-five of the most blighted properties in each plan area for discussion in the Meetings (T. Hetrick, personal communication, January 25, 2021). The PPL is updated between Meetings, retaining an approximately equal number of properties. As a PPL-listed property is addressed through demolition, code conformance, or other action, the listed property will be replaced by another (YNDC 2014). Theoretically, once all plan-mentioned properties had disappeared from PPLs, Youngstown’s plans would have completed implementation from the perspective of housing and property. One precedent study demonstrated that the Plans were more successfully implemented from a performance perspective than from a conformance perspective, since the number of deteriorated properties was largely reduced within Plan areas, but not all Plan-mentioned properties were addressed by implementation entities (Gao and Ryan 2020).
According to the Plans, Meetings were to be held quarterly during the five-year plan term, for example, from 2015 to 2020. However, Meetings abruptly stopped at the end of 2017. Different reasons were provided by interviewees for the discontinuation of the Meetings. The most frequently mentioned reasons included changes in mayoral administration; a decline in Meeting necessity due to many properties having been addressed; and Meetings losing momentum due to declining commitment. These reasons indicate initial challenges of implementing and maintaining a plan monitoring approach. Government commitment, an agreed-upon understanding of when plan monitoring is no longer needed, and a sustained time commitment from stakeholders are important considerations for plan and all are part of Youngstown’s plan monitoring story.
With respect to implementation of the Plans’ “housing and property strategy,” two entities address vacant and abandoned properties in Youngstown, much like in other U.S. shrinking cities. These are the Youngstown city government and the Mahoning County Land Bank (“Land Bank”) (Accordino and Johnson 2000; F. S. Alexander 2011; Mallach 2018). Although not all vacant and abandoned properties represent legal violations, most such properties typically are either in violation of building or zoning codes, or owe property tax (Mallach 2006). In Youngstown, the city government and the Land Bank typically reach consensus on dividing responsibilities for these properties. City government addresses code violating properties, while the Land Bank takes title to foreclosed tax delinquent properties (Schilling, Frater, and Leeper 2015; Gao and Ryan 2020). The city government will demolish a code violating property if one of two conditions are met. One is emergency demolition, when a code violating property has severe structural damage, often caused by fire. In this case, the city’s street department will demolish the property after the fire chief’s inspection. A second case is city contract demolition. If the owner of a code violating property does not bring it up to code over a long period of time, and if the property is in a priority area for the city (such as being within a Plan area), the city’s code enforcement department will demolish it after inspection and condemnation. Additionally, the Land Bank will demolish some of its properties if they are not marketable or are considered to be in a “tipping point” neighborhood. These are described as areas where a middling level of property vacancy was perceived as being salvageable through public interventions, including code enforcement, foreclosure, board-up, and so on (Gao and Ryan 2020).
Both code enforcement and tax foreclosure require resources from public or quasi-public entities. Unfortunately, these entities typically face financial challenges in shrinking cities. Therefore, a major policy challenge in shrinking cities is the mismatch between scarce public resources and a large number of vacant and abandoned properties. To address this problem, some public entities have applied methods labeled as “Urban Triage” to recall public service and investment from highly abandoned neighborhoods in favor of better-off neighborhoods (Kirkpatrick 2015; Schmidt 2011). In Youngstown, the Triage approach was applied in the Plans’ selection of neighborhoods, geographically focused on the previously mentioned tipping point areas. This process was not without criticism: some Youngstown council members criticized Plans and other public resources that addressed deteriorated properties for being unevenly distributed and for neglecting some city wards (Skolnick 2015). As a result, Plan creation and implementation necessarily involved political conflicts and trade-offs that added complexity to the process of actual demolition. At the same time, monitoring demolition implementation had a value for neighborhoods that wished to protect their priority for Plan-designated demolitions.
Methodology
To understand how plan monitoring affects the plan implementation process and to explore the changing relationship between plan, implementation, and monitoring, this study examined neighborhood plans’ (“Plans”) demolition-related suggestions, and implementation and monitoring in Youngstown, Ohio. This seemingly narrow focus is justified as follows. First, this focus accords with previous suggestions (e.g., Seasons 2003), to simplify variables in plan monitoring. Second, demolition is a significant dimension of planning in shrinking cities. It comprises a last resort of public intervention in dealing with vacant, abandoned properties, involving a great deal of public resources (Garboden et al. 2024). Finally, demolition implementation is a singular event that can only happen once, in contrast to other plan strategies, for example, property clean-up or board-up. Demolition can therefore be more easily tracked, aiding the research process.
Implementation and plan monitoring in neighborhood plans is poorly understood. As Youngstown’s neighborhood meetings (“Meetings”) were expected to monitor the Plans’ implementation, the study sought to understand whether and why Meeting-mentioned demolitions conformed well or poorly with Plan suggestions. In other words, did Meetings implement Plan ideas, and if so, why or why not? In addition, this study evaluated the implementation of Plan and Meeting demolition recommendations from a conformance perspective. In other words, did actual demolitions conform more with recommendations in the Plan or in the Meetings? A precedent study indicated that neighborhood plan-suggested demolitions were implemented well from a performance perspective, but inadequately implemented from a conformance perspective, especially by local government (Gao and Ryan 2020). The present study also examined whether and to what extent Meetings improved Plans’ implementation, and whether these Meetings also had differential effects on Youngstown’s implementation actors, the local government, and the Land Bank. In other words, did some actual demolitions occur that were not in conformance with Plans, but were in conformance with Meetings? Additionally, the study asked which actor, the Land Bank or local government, administered demolitions more in conformance with Meetings, and why?
Although these research questions are specific to Youngstown with a seemingly narrow focus on urban vacancy and demolition, the focus on demolition permits an examination of how implementation and monitoring function within a larger planning process. The study’s selection of variables for measurement permits understanding of plan and implementation in a concise way, providing a stronger basis for the overall understanding of the role of plan monitoring.
The study hypothesizes that not all Plan-suggested demolition would be monitored in Meetings. It also hypothesizes that new uncertainties would lead Meetings to increasingly recommend both novel demolitions and to include less blighted properties that were suggested for demolition by Plans but that were not included in early Meetings due to a low quota of around twenty-five in the PPL for monitoring. (In some neighborhoods, the number of suggested demolitions in Plans was more than twenty-five, exceeding the capacity of the PPL.) Therefore, early Meetings would monitor some of Plan-suggested demolitions and when these suggestions were completed, Meetings would update the PPL to include other Plan-suggested demolitions. This hypothesized overlapping relationship between plan and implementation is shown in Figure 4. The study hypothesizes that the plan-monitoring relationship would be dynamic, and that overlap between plans and monitoring (neighborhood meetings) would increase over time, reflecting the cumulative implementation of plan suggestions through monitoring. Additionally, the study hypothesizes that even as overlap between plan and monitoring gradually increased, that monitoring (neighborhood meetings) and implementation would also gradually deviate from neighborhood plans over time, reflecting the existence of uncertainty and of new, vacant priority properties being added to the neighborhood monitoring meeting roster.
Diagram of study hypothesis of the dynamic relationship between plan, monitoring, and implementation.
In this study, short-time-interval data permitted evaluation of plan and implementation of demolition in Youngstown. We determined an appropriate time interval for analysis as follows. Although Youngstown’s actual demolition data is documented on a daily basis, the Mahoning County Land Bank uses a bundling method in which contractors demolish a dozen or so properties at a time. This causes the number of actual demolitions to fluctuate. Additionally, monitoring meeting minutes are provided on a quarterly basis. To reconcile these different time frames, we decided to use one month as the study time interval for data analysis.
As of early 2021, the City of Youngstown and YNDC (2021) had collectively released thirteen Neighborhood Plans (“Plans”). We selected seven of these Plans for the study based on certain Plans being released at around the same time, and because those Plans explicitly recommended demolitions to named entities (as opposed to nonspecific demolition recommendations). These seven Plans are summarized in Table 1.
Neighborhood Plans and Monitoring Meetings (“Meetings”) in Youngstown.
As previously mentioned, neighborhood meetings (“Meetings”) ceased at the end of 2017. Although each of the neighborhoods should have had twelve Meetings between 2015 and 2017, Meeting notes indicated that none of the seven case neighborhoods had this full number. Most of the seven case neighborhoods had quarterly-based Meetings during 2015 and 2016. In 2017, Meeting time intervals became semi-annual and then stopped entirely. Thus, the study examined a mean of ten sets of meeting minutes for each neighborhood. Most Meeting minutes consist of five sections. The second section comprises the Meeting focus and effectively consists of plan monitoring, noting each priority property’s progress since the last Meeting. Examples of progress include moving through the Land Bank demolition process; demolished by the Land Bank; or deemed in compliance by code enforcement (thereby avoiding demolition). In some Meetings, new priority properties are added to replace resolved ones in this section. Priority properties are also addressed in the fourth section of each Meeting, where expectations are stated for priority properties in the coming quarter.
Using content analysis, we extracted demolition-related property information from Meeting notes, primarily from the second and fourth sections. Information included implemented demolitions, properties within a demolition-related process, and priorities for demolition. In contrast to plans, meeting minutes did not provide unique parcel IDs; instead, properties were labeled informally by address. We therefore cleaned Meeting minute data in order to link each property to the city’s parcel and demolition data. These data were provided by Youngstown State University, under contract with the City of Youngstown to manage city geodata. We then consecutively evaluated aggregated subsets of a demolition dataset by overlaying Plans’ suggestions with aggregated Meeting minutes’ suggestions and actual demolitions on a monthly basis.
To understand the causality of implementation and monitoring, we applied qualitative data analysis. We conducted interviews in 2020–2021 with residents, neighborhood association leaders, council members, local government members, staff members of Youngstown government, the Land Bank, and the YNDC, supplementing previous interviews conducted in 2017–2018. Residents were selected through an attendance list provided in each of the meeting notes. Residents that frequently attended Meetings were selected as interviewees, and these residents subsequently recommended others for interviews. Local government leaders were selected both through meeting notes and through proximity to plan areas, that is, leaders of Youngstown wards adjacent to neighborhood plans areas. In total, we conducted twenty-six interviews with sixteen interviewees, some of whom were interviewed multiple times due to their significant roles in neighborhood planning. The interviews were semi-structured and our interviews usually started with asking interviewees to recall their memories of participating in neighborhood planning or monitoring meeting process.
Quantitative Research Findings
Our longitudinal evaluation of neighborhood plans and monitoring meetings implementation reveals the following findings:
a. Monitoring meetings gradually deviated from Plans: monitoring meeting-suggested demolitions increasingly do not conform with Plans’ suggestions (Figure 5A);
b. Monitoring meetings gradually replaced Plans’ role: the number of actual demolitions (both City Government and Land Bank) in conformance with monitoring meetings continued to grow, while demolitions in conformance with neighborhood plans stagnated after late 2016 (Figure 5B);
c. For implementation actor Mahoning County Land Bank, plans slowly became obsolete and monitoring meetings had a small impact: the number of Land Bank’s demolitions in conformance with monitoring meetings did not grow quickly until the beginning of 2017, indicating that neighborhood plans remained highly relevant to demolition policy for the Land Bank until that time (Figure 5C);
d. For implementation actor Youngstown City Government, plans quickly became obsolete and monitoring meetings had a greater impact: City Government demolitions’ conformance ratio with monitoring meetings soon surpassed that of neighborhood plans, indicating that for City Government, monitoring meetings were a more effective policy guide than Plans. Only 35 percent of City Government demolitions conformed with either monitoring meetings or neighborhood plans, compared with more than 80 percent for Land Bank (Figure 5D);
e. Monitoring meetings had different effects on implementation actors: Monitoring meetings suggested demolitions for the Land Bank had a greater conformance ratio with neighborhood plans than did City Government suggested demolitions, indicating that Land Bank followed first plans and then monitoring meetings as a policy guide, while City Government increasingly followed monitoring meetings as well (Figure 5E).
Quantitative research findings: A). Monitoring meetings gradually deviated from Plans; B). Monitoring meetings gradually replaced Plans’ role; C). For implementation actor Mahoning County Land Bank, plans slowly became obsolete and monitoring meetings had a small impact; D). For implementation actor Youngstown City Government, plans quickly became obsolete and monitoring meetings had a greater impact; E) Monitoring meetings had different effects on implementation actors: Monitoring meetings suggested demolitions for the Land Bank had a greater conformance ratio with neighborhood plans than did City Government suggested demolitions, indicating that Land Bank followed first plans and then monitoring meetings as a policy guide, while City Government increasingly followed monitoring meetings as well (Figure 5E).
Plan Monitoring’s Gradual Divergence from Plans
As of early 2015, most neighborhood monitoring meetings (“Meetings”) suggested demolitions were consistent with those of neighborhood plans (“Plans”) published that year or before. As time went by, a growing number of Meetings’ suggested demolitions did not conform with Plans. The number of Meetings’ suggested demolitions that conformed with Plan recommendations peaked and then stagnated beginning in mid-2016, long before the projected end of the Plans’ five-year term of implementation (Figure 5A). This divergence indicated that Plan recommendations decreased in relevance after mid-2016.
From a performance perspective, Meetings performed well; their accumulated number of suggested demolitions was similar to that of Plans at the end of 2017 (Plans 204, Meetings 200). However, from a conformance perspective, Meetings only partially achieved their original purpose of monitoring Plan implementation. At the end of 2017, the conformance ratio of Meetings with Plans was only 38 percent, while Meetings also added 124 suggested demolitions by the end of 2017. The low “late” meeting-plan conformance stood in contrast to an approximately 80 percent “early” conformance ratio in early 2015.
In conclusion, over three years during which Meetings occurred (2015–2017), plan monitoring gradually shifted from administering plan implementation to generating distinct, novel suggestions. In other words, Meetings alleviated uncertainty by adding newly emergent properties to the suggested demolition priority list. However, a question remained: how much did implemented demolitions conform to Plans, or to Meetings?
Plan Monitoring’s Effect on Implementation When Plans Are Obsolete
Neighborhood plan (“Plan”) and quarterly-based monitoring meetings (“Meetings”) conformance followed two different paths (Figure 5B). After a few months of high fluctuations due to small amounts of data, the Plan and Meetings’ conformance ratios stabilize and diverge. Plan conformance ratio (orange curve in Figure 5B) hovers at around 60 percent until the end of 2016, after which it steadily declines to 43 percent by the end of 2017. In contrast, Meetings’ conformance ratio (blue curve in Figure 5B) climbs from around 30 to 46 percent, passing the Plans’ conformance ratio by August 2017, shortly before the Meetings ended.
The differing pathways indicate that Meetings gradually replaced Plans in guiding demolition implementation in Youngstown. During the first two years, of those demolitions conforming with Meetings (turquoise bars and blue bars, Figure 5B), 85 percent also conformed with Plans (turquoise bars). In the first year after Plans were issued, Meetings largely acted in a plan monitoring role in which they repeated suggestions from Plans (similar to pattern in Figure 2, left). However, the number of Plan-conforming demolitions stagnated after late 2016 (turquoise bars and yellow bars, Figure 5B), while the number of demolitions that conformed with Meetings’ suggestions continued to grow (turquoise bars and blue bars, Figure 5B). By the end of 2017, more demolitions conformed with Meetings than with Plans. This indicates that over time, plans had a decreasing effect on implementation, while monitoring gradually replaced plans in guiding implementation (shifting from the pattern of Figure 2, left to Figure 2, middle).
Despite variances in demolition conformance ratios between Plans and Meetings, combined demolition conformance ratios remained stable (black curve, Figure 5B). As previously noted, Meetings filled a growing gap between Plan recommendations and demolition implementation (hatched area in Figure 5B). By the end of 2017, when the Plan demolition conformance ratio had dropped to 43 percent, Meetings conformance had improved the overall ratio by 23 percent, to 66 percent. Plan monitoring in Youngstown appeared to be an effective supplement to the Plans, achieving stable, predictable implementation ratios even as Plan conformance declined. Notably, conformance ratios never rose above 66 percent, indicating that one out of three demolitions was consistently independent of both Plans and Meetings. This discrepancy is addressed in the section of 1Qualitative Research Findings. Below, we address an additional question: Did the implementation actors of city government and the Land Bank have differing roles in the plan monitoring process?
Plan Monitoring’s Distinctive Effects on Implementation Actors
The Mahoning County Land Bank (“Land Bank”) and City of Youngstown government (“City Government”) participation in the plan monitoring process differed in two ways: timing and relevance. During the study period (2015–2017), the Land Bank carried out two-thirds of all demolitions in Youngstown (175 out of 261). Land Bank-implemented demolitions (Figure 5C) mirrored the overall demolition pattern (Figure 5B). Interestingly, City demolitions already conformed more with Meetings than with Plans only six months after Plan issuance (Figure 5D), whereas Land Bank demolitions took longer to shift conformance from Plans to Meetings.
The relevance of Meetings for improving conformance also differed. From the perspective of demolition quantity, Meetings improved conformance for both Land Bank and City Government. By the end of 2017, Meetings increased the Land Bank demolition conformance ratio by 22 percent (81% from 59%), while Meetings increased the City Government ratio by 26 percent (35% from 9%). From the perspective of relative performance, Meetings were more important for City Government than for the Land Bank. The City Government demolition conformance of 9 to 35 percent constituted a 288 percent improvement over the three-year Meetings process. Land Bank conformance was improved only from 59 to 81 percent, or 37 percent, over the same period. In Figure 5D, the greater improvement in City Government conformance can be seen in the increase in black and blue lines after end of 2015.
With regard to Plans, the Land Bank has a greater conformance ratio than City Government (Figure 5E). As previously mentioned, Meetings gradually changed from monitoring Plan implementation to replacing Plan recommendations, a shift even more dramatic for City Government. In summary, Meetings’ conformance differences indicate that Meetings improved implementation conformance overall and that they were more effective for City Government than for Land Bank.
Qualitative Research Findings
Why Monitoring Diverges from the Plan: Ongoing Abandonment and Changing Priorities
Informants indicated that Youngstown’s socioeconomic problems caused challenges for neighborhood-level planning, including both neighborhood plans (“Plans”) and quarterly-based plan monitoring meetings (“Meetings”). Newly vacant housing was subject to unexpected deterioration, a form of environmental uncertainty. New abandonment shifted neighborhood plan implementation priorities and necessitated changes in Meetings’ suggested demolitions. As a Meeting coordinator stated, “The plans were essentially like snapshots in time . . . [in] our first neighborhood meeting, it maybe seemed like different properties were more important, like some had deteriorated rapidly in six months or so” (January 25, 2021). The necessity of prioritizing these newly vacant “additional properties” led to gradual, increasing conformance gaps between Plans and Meetings, as well to divergence between Plans and implementation (demolitions).
Process uncertainty also contributed to Meetings’ discrepancies with Plans. The Plan creation process had engaged a larger number of participants through its broader objectives, for example, lowering crime rates and repairing infrastructure. However, Plans did not consider implementation. Plans, in other words, followed an advocacy-driven and rationally driven planning process, leaving pragmatic planning for Meetings. As a result, Meetings prioritized easy-to-solve vacant properties, not those with the most severe deterioration. The most pragmatic properties to demolish were those with clear title and no tax-foreclosure or code-enforcement appeals. These properties were therefore prioritized in the Meetings process. A Meetings coordinator described these properties as “low-hanging fruits,” saying that “Sometimes we put properties on the [neighborhood] meetings, because they were ones that were going to be easy to tackle first . . . over time, we probably moved further away from the original plan” (January 24 and January 25, 2021).
Discrepancies between Monitoring and Implementation: Absenteeism, Alternative Communication, and Political Egalitarianism
Process uncertainty not only affected Plan implementation but also led to discrepancies between plan and implementation. Although plan monitoring meetings (“Meetings”) occurred with relative frequency, more than 30 percent of actual demolitions nevertheless did not conform with either Plans or Meetings. One surprising cause was absenteeism from Meetings. In addition to the Meetings, most Youngstown neighborhoods had monthly-based general meetings with a larger number of attendees and more general topics. One neighborhood association leader stated the distinctions between the two meetings and how he solicited community input: We have a monthly meeting for our neighborhood group . . . that’s when we’re trying to do the mass appeal . . . when you look at how many people are there week in week out with a monthly meeting, I’d say we average about 40 . . . we’ve gone door-to-door two other times and done mailings twice . . . you don’t get enough bang for the buck from it, but you maybe get two or three people here or there . . . we end it with, if anyone is interested in attending these (monitoring) meetings at YNDC, and in the history there’s been like three people that have expressed interest, stepping through housing data and details is a very niche component. (March 15, 2018)
Participant information from Meetings’ notes revealed that regular Meetings had about ten participants, most of whom were neighborhood association leaders, in addition to the single coordinator from the YNDC. Other sporadic participants included neighborhood residents, council members, and representatives from city government and the Land Bank. The latter two were key implementation actors, but their representatives were often absent from Meetings, 1 limiting the Meetings to “internal conversations” according to one informant. Staffing shortages accounted for at least some of these absences: a staff member from an implementation actor admitted that “there’s almost a dozen neighborhoods we’re doing these meetings and plans for, there’s no way I could have attended all of them . . . so we would spot [sporadically] attend” (March 10, 2021). Compared with the neighborhoods’ well-established mechanism for soliciting community members to engage in Meetings, implementation actors’ participation was not compulsory and loosely organized, also accounting for their absences. As a staff member from an implementation actor admitted, “We were encouraged by YNDC to participate in the (monitoring) meetings so that the residents were getting information directly from us . . . we’re not there as often as those teams meet . . . we did not attend as frequent[ly] as local residents” (January 24, 2018). With key actors absent from Meetings, demolition priorities could not always be easily shared with those responsible for implementing demolition.
Meetings participants were aware that “internal conversations” were insufficient to achieve demolition goals, so they developed coping strategies. First, the frequency of Meetings decreased: in most neighborhoods, Meetings frequency decreased from quarterly to semi-annual before the end of Meetings in 2017. This shift made meetings higher priority and reduced the burden of too-frequent meetings. Second, some residents used alternative channels of communication instead of Meetings to reach demolition actors. Neighborhood association leaders could use their social and political capital, for example, to reach decision-makers at City Hall and the Land Bank. As a city councilperson noted, Some neighborhood leaders do very well with communicating directly to the right departments and agencies . . . they realized that lot of them [staff members of Land Bank and Youngstown City Government] are administrative functions which are not trying to split hairs here [e.g., are absent from Meetings]. (August 20, 2020)
Residents using alternative channels may have suggested demolitions or prioritized properties not mentioned in either Meetings or Plans, thus increasing gaps between plan and implementation. A neighborhood association leader confirmed that “not every single time [at a Meeting] there was a representative from the land bank [or city government] . . . so you know you have to do stuff outside of the meetings” (July 29, 2020).
Another manifestation of process uncertainty lay in unequal neighborhood conditions and on unequal numbers of properties recommended for demolitions at Meetings. Although neighborhoods with Plans were selected according to the standard of “tipping points,” these neighborhoods nevertheless differed substantially. Some were chosen to promote political egalitarianism, with each ward receiving at least one neighborhood plan. According to informants, such political egalitarianism led to each neighborhood’s PPL needing to have twenty-five to thirty properties for discussion. This number may have meshed with reality in neighborhoods with only moderate abandonment, but worse-off neighborhoods had many more foreclosed or code-violating properties, requiring an enlargement of the PPL in these places. As a neighborhood meeting coordinator said, Some of the original demolition properties still got sent to demolition, but they may not have appeared on the priority property list . . . some neighborhoods had a 25/30 priority property list limit . . . but we may send 60 properties to demolition . . . [only] the worst ones [made] it on the priority property list. (January 25, 2021)
This necessary accommodation of troubled neighborhood conditions necessarily decreased conformance between implemented demolitions and Plan or Meetings’ suggestions.
Monitoring’s Differential Effects: Stability (Land Bank) and Volatility (City Government)
Informants noted that implementation actors had distinct mechanisms of managing their suggested demolitions, generating additional process uncertainty. For example, most Land Bank demolitions were former tax-delinquent properties that required a two to three years’ foreclosure process before conveyance to the Bank. Ohio regulations required the Land Bank to submit a demolition list to the Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA). This list had to be approved before the Bank could engage contractors to conduct demolitions and be reimbursed by OHFA. Between 2015 and 2017, the Land Bank was constrained to follow a demolition list mostly derived from 2014 Neighborhood Action Plans. Any additional properties suggested through the Meetings were caught up in the foreclosure process during this period. This process constraint likely explains why plan monitoring meetings had a smaller impact on Land Bank demolitions: the Bank was statutorily unable to quickly follow up on Meetings’ suggestions.
In contrast, most of the City of Youngstown’s demolitions were former code-violating properties, for which demolition decisions could be resolved within as little as six months. These properties also presented the City Government with greater uncertainty, as code-violating properties were often in a better financial status than those of tax-delinquent properties, leading to higher likelihood of these properties emerging from foreclosure and thereby avoiding demolition (Gao and Ryan 2020). The City Government therefore had more freedom than the Land Bank to implement Meeting-suggested demolitions, but this did not necessarily mean that the city followed the Meetings’ recommendations. A staff member from an implementation actor noted city volatility in demolition, stating that The city municipal government has the ability to abate nuisances . . . they can demolish property they do not own . . . an owner can fix the property or an owner can start to fix the property and exist in an appeals process that perpetually loops . . . so that can stop a demolition . . . [but the Land Bank was] bound to demolish only what [it was] able to own through tax foreclosure . . . (March 10, 2021)
Additional volatility in the City of Youngstown demolitions derived from its political instability. Beyond inspection of the condition of code-violating properties, the decision-making of the City’s demolitions is largely politically driven. As noted by a staff member from the City, The mayor has made the decision at the beginning of the year that our south side of town is completely hindered with properties that are just honestly collapsing on themselves . . . so he asked the Fire Chief to take a good look at that side of town to identify ones that he felt comfortable were emergency demos. (October 27, 2017)
Meetings served as a good supplement to these politically driven demolitions because they represented constituents’ interest, a primary goal for the administration. A staff member from the City also credited a role of Meetings in City decisions to demolish: Code enforcement and demolition are completely politically driven by the administration . . . ultimately where we were going and what we were doing was always dictated and directed by the Mayor, and it lined up with what was going on in the neighborhood committee meetings. (February 1, 2018)
Monitoring’s End: Political Turnover and Continuity
Although process uncertainty had a greater impact than environmental uncertainty in reducing gaps between neighborhood plan and neighborhood meeting-recommended demolition and actual demolition between 2015 and 2017, political uncertainty may have had the most powerful impact on plan monitoring. Political change that impacted Youngstown planning had occurred before: the shift from Mayor Jay Williams to Mayor Chuck Sammarone in 2011, for example, partially contributed to the 2005 Comprehensive Plan’s lack of implementation in a 2013 zoning revision (Ryan and Gao 2019). Monitoring was impacted by another political shift when the transition from Mayor John McNally to Mayor Jamael Tito Brown ended the neighborhood meeting process. Many informants stated that had McNally stayed for a second term, neighborhood monitoring meetings would likely have continued. As one interviewee stated, I’m pretty sure it [ending of neighborhood meetings] comes down to the mayor’s office, either terminating the contract or just failing to renew it or something . . . my understanding was that the city wasn’t interested in funding the continued planning and meeting anymore . . . [because] a new administration came in. (March 10, 2021)
The abrupt end of monitoring meetings (“Meetings”) in Youngstown did not mean their impact faded away. To the contrary, the Meetings subtly shifted the local political landscape by nurturing future political leaders through community engagement. Tom Hetrick, a former neighborhood planner for YNDC, is an example of this shift. Hetrick coordinated most Meetings and attended forty-eight out of sixty-four Meetings in the seven neighborhoods examined in this study, greatly contributing to the neighborhood planning and monitoring process in Youngstown. Hetrick’s vital role was also confirmed by a staff member from an implementation actor: Tom Hetrick was the coordinator, he facilitated all the meetings, did all of the scheduling all the outreach to the residents and the neighborhood groups that were involved in it, he took all the notes, all the agendas, and all of the tracking of properties and neighborhood complaints after and would do all the follow up, as well . . . Tom was always there. (May 12, 2021)
Hetrick’s deep engagement in community development evidently provided him with social capital and political credit for his future career, as he was a write-in candidate for Youngstown City Council president and won the election in May 2021. Will this shift of political landscape generate new planning efforts and innovations in planning? The answer is “quite possibly,” given that Hetrick, interviewed for this study, noted that I think those meetings helped Youngstown . . . [get] back on track and . . . start digging itself out of the hole that it was in . . . but yeah, just like you’ve observed, no one’s doing that now in Youngstown . . . this was so important that we need to keep going with it. (January 25, 2021)
Discussion: Plan Monitoring as Effective Means of Understanding Plan and Implementation
This study finds that in Youngstown, plan monitoring through neighborhood meetings was able to substantially ameliorate the endemic planning challenges of “lag effects” and uncertainty in plan implementation. This positive finding comes with qualifications. First, timing is critical to plan monitoring. In early 2015 when Neighborhood Action Plans (“Plans”) had just been released, plan monitoring meetings (“Meetings”) naturally focused on implementing Plan suggestions. In other words, there was no “lag effect,” and Plans remained relevant. As lag effect increased and Plans became less relevant, the Meeting process introduced new ideas. A growing number of demolitions began to conform with Meeting minutes instead of Plans, indicating the growing relevance of plan monitoring. By the end of the Meeting process in 2017, Plans were less significant as their demolition suggestions were decreasingly adopted. Instead, Meetings grew as a guide to demolition implementation, shown by higher conformance between Meeting suggestions and implementation. These respective shifts over time are shown in Figure 6.
Venn diagrams show dynamic relationships between neighborhood plan, monitoring, and implementation in Youngstown.
Plan monitoring has limits: in Youngstown, monitoring could only overcome some of the uncertainty associated with plan implementation. Despite Youngstown’s frequent plan monitoring, a large number of demolitions conformed neither with Plans nor with Meetings. This lack of conformance reflected planning’s longstanding “wicked problem” (Campbell and Zellner 2020; Pipkin 2019; Rittel and Webber 1973), where planners need to accommodate uncertainty and imperfection. In Youngstown, planning faced numerous uncertainties, and plan monitoring could not address every demolition need. Monitoring was itself imperfect: as Seasons (2003) noted, “ideal [plan] monitoring is often unrealistic and [is] rarely attainable in its entirety.”
Youngstown’s neighborhood meetings lasted less than the five years originally projected. However, the three-year Meeting series illustrated that planning can succeed not only through plans but also through process. Ultimately, more demolitions occurred in conformance with plan monitoring than in conformance with neighborhood plans, indicating that plan monitoring was at least as effective, and perhaps more effective, than plan issuance. Youngstown’s effective plan monitoring recalls Neuman’s (1998) question “Does planning need the plan?,” as well as Friedmann’s (2004) adage that “published plans are not necessary to good planning, and planning without plans may not be such a bad idea.”
Friedmann’s adage notwithstanding, the effectiveness of plan monitoring does not, in our view, obviate the need for plans. Monitoring may also benefit from plans, perhaps inheriting residual prestige and legitimacy from plans. Original plans can establish consensus around the importance of planning, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of later monitoring. This residual prestige seemed to have occurred in Youngstown: when asked about the distinction between neighborhood plans and monitoring meetings, one Meeting coordinator noted that “The Plans set the vision whereas the Meetings was (were) the mechanism for implementation and collective accountability to achieve the vision” (January 24, 2021).
While monitoring may have permitted “planning without published plans,” this did not remove the need for professional involvement in planning processes. In Youngstown, implementation actors’ participation in the neighborhood meetings process provided these meetings with both legitimacy and a sense of purpose. A neighborhood association leader spoke to the need for professional planning: “Doing the research on these properties is a capacity which we as a non-staffed, non-employee organization, we would not have that capacity at all” (March 13, 2018).
How might planning better accommodate uncertainty? One possibility is to further intertwine published plans and plan monitoring. Youngstown’s well-organized monitoring process still faced challenges: the large number of meetings led to fatigue, and the high political cost of sustaining meetings may have led to their reduction in frequency. Ideal plan monitoring might consider low-frequency meetings with mandatory participation from implementation actors, rather than high-frequency meetings without them.
Youngstown’s NGO, the YNDC, was an effective coordinator for plan monitoring. YNDC had participated in the original plan-making process and understood the original plan. YNDC was also well equipped with planning skills that facilitated monitoring. An ideal plan monitoring process would possess an equally competent coordinator, with the process history and professional skills to sustain the monitoring process and to communicate effectively with the multiple actors involved, at both the community and city levels. An ideal process might also consider a second process of monitoring implementation actors themselves to examine their effectiveness; the differential effectiveness between City Government and the Land Bank might have been abated by additional monitoring.
Today, Youngstown and many other Rust Belt cities are experiencing dual traumas of increased housing prices and ongoing population loss. In the next economic crisis, shrinking cities like Youngstown may be hit hardest, as they were in 2007–2009. It is therefore critically important that planning efforts, such as Youngstown’s neighborhood plans and neighborhood meetings continue there, and by extension in other shrinking cities. Ongoing weak state and federal urban policy is likely to make local planning increasingly significant, and local plan-making and plan monitoring may be the most effective strategy for neighborhood improvement under the circumstances. As one Youngstown City Councilor noted, Washington isn’t coming, nobody in a shining white horse is coming . . . we’re not going to see a result overnight, but we are seeing results and I think [that] until someone comes along with a better plan, this [neighborhood meeting process] is working quite well for us. (February 26, 2018)
Plan Monitoring: Challenges and Guidance
The extent to which urban planning can shape the future of cities is a longstanding question for planners. As this study has shown, plan monitoring can be central to planning, particularly if plan implementation experiences uncertainty or if resources are scarce. In Youngstown, plan monitoring shifted planning from a singular event to an ongoing routine, so long as monitoring continued. This routine improved the long-term impact of planning by increasing planners’ flexibility, accommodating implementation uncertainty, and by integrating this flexibility and uncertainty into the planning process by intention rather than accident. The case study of Youngstown indicates that plan monitoring can ameliorate uncertainty by reducing the ever-growing gap between plan and implementation as plans age, thereby maintaining conformance between planning and implementation. However, plan monitoring is challenging to execute, requiring intensive resources, substantial data sharing, comprehensive coordination between implementation actors, and measurable objectives.
As a conclusion to this study, our findings lead us to understand the following challenges, and to offer corresponding guidance, for those planners considering plan monitoring.
Framework
In many cases, plan monitoring is not predetermined as part of a plan-making process; rather, it is instituted when a plan has already been partially implemented. We recommend that the framework for potential plan monitoring should be set up during the plan-making process. Monitoring’s core objectives and key participants should be identified by this framework, so that implementation of a plan can include the carrying out of plan monitoring.
Objectives
Some plans either have a single substantive objective that is difficult to measure and monitor, or they have too many objectives, so that monitoring all of them becomes nearly impossible. We deem that plan objectives should be clearly determined either in an original plan or at the very beginning of a monitoring process, so as to be able to track their implementation. If a plan has only one ultimate but substantive objective, such as construction of a BRT stop, monitoring might divide the expected progress into stages and set objectives for each stage, respectively. If a plan has many objectives, monitoring can prioritize and set objectives for the most important one.
Process
Plan monitoring involves such intensive resources that potential implementation actors can find it difficult to sustain. In response, stakeholders should decide when to begin plan and how it should be built upon an initial, static plan. The resources required for plan monitoring should be identified and discussed prior to the initiation of monitoring. To provide committed resources to monitoring, stakeholders might leverage resources from local organizations or from governments who have interest in plan implementation.
Coordination
Although participants in plan monitoring will doubtless change over time, one or several coordinator(s) should be identified before monitoring begins. The coordinator role should not be assigned to a single person, but rather established as a role with flexible personnel. Given that some coordinators of plan monitoring may have potential conflicts of interest with participants, an ideal coordinator would come from a third party without direct interest in plan implementation, but with a close relationship with potential participants, to provide for trust between parties.
Data
Data sharing between plan monitoring bodies and plan implementation actors is challenging because such sharing often involves extra work for implementation actors. Additionally, regulatory issues may lead to a failure of data sharing. We suggest that a plan monitoring coordinator should request implementation actors to consistently record their progress, or ideally, to establish a platform that permits all parties of plan implementation to update their progress frequently. The coordinator should, if capacity permits, conduct data cleaning and preprocessing in preparation for plan monitoring meetings.
Timing
Setting up an appropriate cadence, or timing, for plan monitoring is challenging. Plan monitoring, as previously noted, requires commitment and coordination from a multitude of stakeholders. Monitoring should be frequent enough to maintain accountability, but not so frequent as to result in fatigue and withdrawal from the process. Monitoring frequency should achieve consensus among monitoring participants, but the cadence of monitoring should also permit flexibility during the monitoring process to accommodate participants’ changing needs.
Participants
It is challenging to solicit, and to sustain participation from, representatives from all stakeholders to attend, and to keep attending, plan monitoring meetings. The plan monitoring process should include representatives from implementation actors and other stakeholders in plan implementation (e.g., neighborhood group members). Together with coordinators, monitoring participants can organize a team or a committee. A minimal attendance level (quorum) for monitoring meetings should be established, particularly for representatives of implementation actors.
Consensus
Each participant of plan monitoring may have their own priorities. Therefore, achieving consensus is another challenge for monitoring. We suggest that during the plan monitoring process, certain elements should be agreed upon by all stakeholders, including:
a. Goals: what is the ultimate goal or goals of the plan monitoring process?
b. Responsibility: who is responsible for what? Accountability is necessary for plan monitoring to be effective.
c. Actions: how will plan monitoring recommendations be implemented? What changes will be made to steer things “back on track” if implementation actions deviate too far from original plan intentions?
Reaching consensus on these issues will not only facilitate plan monitoring but arguably enhance social capital in a community.
Re-Evaluation
Plan monitoring may overlook whether it is still functioning. Due to process and environmental uncertainty, prioritized targets and established coordination may change over time, without regular re-evaluations of monitoring and implementation. These should be conducted regularly to ensure that predetermined objectives, process, timing, and participants in plan monitoring are both implemented and reconsidered if needed. Such re-evaluation could involve collection of implementation and monitoring data to track conformance between plan and implementation. Additionally, monitoring participants should be interviewed to collect feedback. Re-evaluation information will ideally improve future plan and implementation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank Ben Rosen Filardo and Abby Ow for research assistance.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (52008086, 52178044) and MIT Greater China Fund for Innovation (Shrinking cities in the U.S and China).