Who Do We Represent and Who Are Our Clients?

These are two different questions for us. As a 501c3 with a commitment to neighborhoods, we represent the full range of a community's stakeholders, making sure that all are heard and that the resulting development plans reflect the priorities of the residents to the greatest extent possible. Regardless of who pays us, our responsibility is to the collective whole.

The people that hire us are those who also care deeply about communities, their economic viability, and their long-term sustainability. Often these communities are ones that we have coined as "heritage" cities and neighborhoods -- areas that once thrived but now suffer from changing market conditions, including constraints resulting from post-industrial contamination. Our clients have confidence that the targeted community is a place of value and that stakeholders and professionals working together can unleash its potential. NCI can be hired in several ways:

• To oversee entire comprehensive redevelopment planning processes, in which case our contracts may be with municipalities, public-private partnerships, community development corporations, and/or philanthropies.

• To participate as a subconsultant in development teams led by other land use professionals such as planning firms and land use lawyers. In the Capacities section of this website we list some of the ways in which we can support the work of others, such as managing the community engagement and identity process or helping define standards and procedures for Requests for Proposals (RFP's) and the like.
  

What We Do and How We Do It: Organization and Process in General

We use our extensive commercial development experience to operate as an "owner's representative" to our clients - providing the technical capacity to create and oversee a complex planning process. One of our strengths is that we know what we don't know and can assemble an exceptional team to meet the specific characteristics and needs of any city, town or neighborhood, something our leadership has been doing for over 25 years. We then serve as the link between that team's expertise and the interests of the community's leadership, its residents and other stakeholders.

View the NCInstitute Process Organization Chart >>

Why We Emphasize Land Use and Land Preparation:

NCI knows project development – "going vertical." However, we've chosen to place our efforts on the "horizontal," on land development planning and land preparation in a comprehensive way. We do this because we know how valuable it is to establish a development framework for building projects: the best projects can fail in an unstable, poorly planned area. An adopted framework plan allows developers, architects and others to successfully create great projects because it provides an attractive, predictable, cohesive context with appropriate infrastructure. We also know that few communities have this master development capacity in-house. Although it may be far easier to delegate master planning to the private sector, the risks of a community losing control of its own identity or future are great. We believe we can help meet that need.

Our process for master development planning is straightforward.

View the NCInstitute Timeline Process >>