Better Neig
The Better Neig model is a response to the binary of urban renewal: the scorched-earth masterplan that erases history and displaces residents, and the laissez-faire decay that leaves neighborhoods to fracture under neglect. Neither approach produces a durable public realm. Instead, Better Neig proposes a third path — a fabric-first, community-led regime of incremental improvement that treats the neighborhood as a living asset rather than a blank site.
The Incrementalism Thesis
Traditional urban renewal treats a neighborhood as a deficit to be erased and a new order to be inscribed. That approach is brittle; it relies on massive capital injections and a homogenization that destroys the very social capital that makes a neighborhood viable. Better Neig reverses the logic. It accepts the existing fabric as the primary constraint and the primary resource.
The thesis is that the most resilient public spaces are grown, not planted. Small, repeated interventions — a reclaimed parking lane, a shared easement, a repaired storefront — create a distributed network of public value that no single masterplan could replicate. Incrementalism also lowers the barrier to entry for resident agency. When the scale of intervention is human and manageable, the neighborhood can reclaim its own evolutionary trajectory.
Tactical Zoning and Shared Easements
One of the core policy innovations of Better Neig is the replacement of rigid Euclidean zoning with a more fluid, community-shaped regime. Traditional zoning often prevents the mixed uses that make neighborhoods walkable and economically diverse. Better Neig advocates for "community zoning" — a negotiation between the planning authority and a neighborhood assembly that sets broad use-categories rather than prescriptive land-use rules.
Complementing this is the shared easement — a legal mechanism that allows multiple residents or owner-operators to jointly manage a piece of the public realm. Instead of a municipal parking lot or a vacant alley, a shared easement can be a communal courtyard, a micro-garden, or a cooperative workshop. Ownership and liability are shared, and the management is neighborhood-led. This turns the public realm from a neglected municipal responsibility into a communal asset that the neighborhood can improve and adapt as needs change.
The Fabric-First Approach
Better Neig is fundamentally a fabric-first model. Rather than demolishing the existing streetscape, the approach identifies the neighborhood’s architectural and social anchors and builds around them. It uses preservation as an economic driver — the unique, lived-in character of the neighborhood becomes the "amenity" that attracts investment while anchoring the community's identity.
This means repairs come before replacements. It means retrofitting the existing building stock with modern functions rather than replacing it with a new typology. This also preserves the embodied carbon of the neighborhood, but more importantly, it preserves the embodied memories and social networks that reside in the weathered brick and the familiar storefront. The goal is a neighborhood that feels like a neighborhood, not a product.
Measuring Success
The evaluation metrics of Better Neig differ from the usual urban planning scorecard. While property values and crime stats still matter, the primary measure of success is social capital: the depth of neighborhood self-organization, the number of shared easements in use, and the diversity of resident-led projects.
The ultimate test of the model is durability. A masterplan is a snapshot of a developer’s vision; a community-led incremental regime is a living process. Success is when the neighborhood is no longer waiting for a grand intervention but is actively shaping its own future through a thousand small improvements.
Better Neig is a rejection of the "clean slate" ideology and a commitment to the slow, messy, and deeply meaningful work of neighborhood life. It is urban planning as a conversation, not a decree — a model that builds the neighborhood with the people who live in it.