Taking on a planning role in their region’s response to housing challenges can be the natural first step for EDDs. EDD staff have extensive professional planning experience that local communities can count on for making impactful contributions to local or regional housing planning. Rather than paying an outside consultant to come into the community and make recommendations or create plans, communities can rely on the experience of EDD planning staff who are already familiar with the local and regional context. While in many cases it can be appropriate to bring in outside consultants, communities contracting directly with EDDs for planning support can be more cost-effective and more efficient in sourcing stakeholder and community input. Additionally planning under the regional organization creates stronger planning synergy and integration opportunities with other regional planning efforts like the CEDS, hazard mitigation planning, and long-range transportation planning.
EDDs have a multitude of options available to them in taking on a housing planning role for communities. First, EDDs must identify a scope by considering what local communities and regions are missing and aligning those missing pieces with existing planning staff capacity at regional organizations:
After conducting this needs assessment at the local and regional level, EDDs can align their communities’ needs with the existing experience and staff capacity at their disposal:
EDDs have shown through regional planning processes like the CEDS that they can be the regional voice for smart growth, economic resilience, and future-thinking economic development. In this same vein, EDDs and regional organizations across the country have shown how this experience and expertise at the regional level can be used to convene communities with disparate goals around a single, unified, consistent set of housing strategies and goals. Taking on this regional convener role starts with two key first steps:
Instead of framing your stakeholder identification process as “Who should be at the table?” instead ask, “Who can contribute to the table?” In identifying stakeholders to participate in housing planning work or regional housing convenings, regional organizations can set the tone from the very start. Who is at the table will determine the direction and feasibility of what ultimately comes off the table. Additionally, who can contribute will also impact the implementation phase of these recommendations. If stakeholders are prioritized based on their key perspective or experience, scope, mission, capacity, authority to act, and funding available to them, regional organizations can prioritize implementation and feasibility of strategies and recommendations from the beginning.
Once a region has its stakeholders together, the regional convener can help guide discussions toward overarching consensus. What does everyone at the table agree on? Does everyone see the origin of housing problems in the region the same way? Can there be common causes to rally around? Building consensus may naturally be difficult as each stakeholder is approaching the housing conversation with a different perspective and motivation. Taking each participant’s perspective into account and moving these sometimes-disparate ideas toward agreeable solutions and action is the main role of the regional planner.