Now City Labs · Brighton Communities

Brighton Communities

Working material for the board and invited collaborators.

Now City Labs research

District precedents

A scoring table and a set of empty case slots. The cases get chosen for this situation, not carried in from another one.

Working document · September 2026
Method

How a precedent earns a place on this page

A comparable has to be comparable in the way that matters here: a mission owner growing a portfolio inside an existing lower income neighborhood, holding community trust that took twenty five years to build.

That is a different situation from a new district on vacant or industrial land, so the usual district precedents do not apply and are not listed. The scoring table below is the filter. A case that scores badly is still worth writing up if it failed instructively.

TestWhy it matters here
Owner typeA nonprofit or community owner rather than a developer or a public agency, because the capital available and the time horizon are different.
Existing residentsGrowth inside an occupied neighborhood, with the people who live there staying, rather than growth on empty land.
Buy before buildWhether the case acquired property ahead of developing it, which is the ordering Brighton's own strategy proposes.
Distributed ownershipWhether ownership was spread across more than one entity, and what that did to the number of funding doors available.
Tenure mixRental and ownership in the same program, which is what the South Holly model attempts.
Documented outcomePublished figures years after completion, not a launch announcement. A case without published follow up data does not go in the table.
Case slots

Six slots, to be filled in phase two

Each slot gets the same treatment: what the owner controlled, what it cost, where the money came from, what happened to the people who already lived there, and what the published figures say some years later.

Candidate categories, not cases. Community land trusts and shared equity ownership programs. Nonprofit owners that grew a scattered site portfolio in one neighborhood. Mixed income infill on land the owner already held. Programs that paired rental preservation with an ownership pathway. Senior services organizations that became housing developers, which is Brighton's own history. Phase two picks specific cases inside these categories and writes them from source. No case has been researched, verified or approached yet.