districts to allow ground floor residential uses or an easement of setbacks, and requiring a fully developed site plan to expedite the rezoning process. Additional incentives were discussed that mostly revolved around building trust with developers by reducing oversight for these types of developments. This strategy, considering the dangerous history of unsuccessful developments, is highly risky.
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second strategy, in addition to the existing Incentive program effort, is to specifically work with the BIDs and their developers to make a series of neighborhood-scaled Community Benefits Agreements. A Community
Benefits Agreement (CBA) is a contract signed by community groups and developers that legally requires the developer to provide specific amenities and/or mitigations to the community. It ensures that projects create opportunities for local workers and communities. Combined with the existing AHZI effort overseeing the impact of affordable housing on the community as a whole, and CBAs drawn between BIDs and their developers, this strategy would be a balanced way of ensuring the accountability of developers to contribute to community betterment. Using this strategy, they could require a certain percentage of the workers within the district to have housing provided to them, provide specific infrastructure to address precise homeless areas, or even start bridging diverse types of housing based on household income. However, according the focus group meeting notes, developers are already feeling constrained in the effort to rezone and address sustainable practices like adaptive reuse. The strategy of
Figure 5: Community Benefits Agreements framework
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