Start with Neighbors, then Follow their lead



Yesterday, Mayor Craig Greenberg stood in Russell and announced 25 new permanently affordable homes on Elliott Avenue. In that presentation, there was one thing not apparent: Russell: A Place of Promise, the neighborhood's community land trust, is leading the project. Its partners include The Housing Partnership, Inc., Louisville Metro Government, which is investing $1.45 million, and the Louisville Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which is adding $1 million.

The homes are the part people will see. The part that made them possible started years ago, on front porches, when organizers knocked on doors and asked Russell residents what they wanted for their neighborhood. Then they kept listening, and eventually they handed residents the keys to the process itself.

The most important asset is already there

Asset Based Community Development starts from a simple idea: the people who live in a neighborhood are its foundation. Residents know which blocks are changing, which elders everyone trusts, and what a new development will mean for the family next door. No consultant can bring that knowledge in from outside.

Russell has plenty to build on. It was once a hub of Black-owned businesses that created jobs and a center of Black homeownership. It is also a neighborhood that lived through redlining and urban renewal, and through decades of plans made about Black residents instead of with them. A resident-first approach takes both parts of that history seriously.

How Russell did it

Two leaders have carried this work from the start. Cassandra Webb and Theresa Zawacki, RPOP's Interim Co-Executive Directors, have led the initiative since its beginning, bringing backgrounds in community organizing and urban planning. That pairing matters. Organizing and planning worked side by side from the first day, instead of planning going first and outreach coming later.

Webb has explained that the team chose from the beginning to invest in people first, because community development too often treats people as an afterthought. Zawacki has described the work as building shared decision-making and shared learning with Russell residents.

The early work was slow and personal. Since 2018, RPOP has canvassed the neighborhood, held events large and small, and set up neighborhood pop-ups with resources. Those conversations grew into organized groups of residents. In 2020, the Russell for Russell Resident Coalition brought together 26 Black Russell residents between the ages of 22 and 72, and their work produced the Russell Partnership Pledge, a set of shared values that still guides RPOP.

Residents didn't only give feedback on someone else's plan. RPOP's structure as a nonprofit community land trust, and its founding board members, came out of a multi-year shared learning process in which Russell residents worked with RPOP to define the organization's future. Today RPOP's board is made up mostly of community members who take part directly in land use planning.

A community land trust works like this: residents buy the house while the land stays in trust, which lowers the cost of owning a home and caps resale prices so the home stays affordable for the next family. Residents picked this tool because it answers the question they kept raising. How do we welcome investment without being pushed out by it?

What a resident-first process asks of us

Russell's path breaks down into four steps. Each one builds on the one before it, and none of them can be skipped.

Step 1: Go find people where they are.

A meeting notice on a website reaches the people who already come to meetings. Knocking on doors reaches everyone else. In Russell, this meant years of canvassing, pop-ups, and events before anyone talked about a plan.

Step 2: Let residents set the priorities.

Once people are at the table, ask what matters most to them, and accept the answer even when it differs from what the city or a funder expected. A plan built on residents' priorities is stronger because neighbors will defend it.

Step 3: Hand over the lead.

Input sessions ask residents what they think. A resident-led process asks residents to decide, then gives them seats on the board that carries out the decision. In Russell, that board is made up mostly of community members.

Step 4: Plan for years, and budget for them.

RPOP launched in 2018. The homes announced today are breaking ground in 2026. That time was work, not a delay, and funders and the city have to pay for it the same way they pay for construction.

Metro already knows how to do this

For city leaders, the best news in Russell's story is that Metro helped start it. RPOP launched in 2018 with incubation from Cities United and Louisville Metro Government, and fiscal sponsorship from the Community Foundation of Louisville. Fiscal sponsorship means an established nonprofit handles the money and paperwork so a new effort can get started before it has its own nonprofit status.

Metro also lent its own people. Zawacki left her position as Senior Policy Advisor to Louisville Forward to serve as an Executive on Loan to the initiative during its early years. And Metro has committed land: the former American Cigar Company site at 30th and Madison is owned by Louisville Metro Government with a formal commitment to RPOP, and residents plan to make it a mixed commercial and residential campus.

Staff time, patient support, public land, and trust in residents' decisions made today's announcement possible. None of those are unusual tools. Metro can offer them to other neighborhoods on purpose.

The ask

Before Metro funds the next neighborhood plan in Louisville, build the RPOP steps into the contract from the start. Pay for door knocking and years of organizing, not only the final document. Require that residents set the priorities and hold seats on whatever body carries the plan forward. And when public land is on the table, offer it first to the residents who wrote the plan.

Russell's neighbors did the hard work of deciding what their neighborhood needs. Twenty-five families on Elliott Avenue will soon live in the result.