EHI was hired to complete simultaneous community visioning studies for East Hills and Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar (LLB), two predominantly Black Pittsburgh neighborhoods that have struggled with disinvestment over the years. The studies served as a pre-planning process: preparing a unified vision for each community and empowering diverse, representative community leadership to support the framework for future neighborhood plans.

Then COVID-19 changed everything. EHI pivoted from planned in-person events to a series of six online public visioning meetings — three in each community — a real challenge in neighborhoods with high concentrations of elderly residents and households without internet access. Rather than accept that some voices would be left out, EHI worked closely with the Community Consensus Groups to close the gap: distributing printed fliers throughout the neighborhoods, providing phone numbers so residents could call into meetings, and sending a mass EDDM mailer advertising the full meeting schedule to every household.

The meetings themselves were built for participation, not presentation. The first round featured a SWOT analysis; the second, an interactive mapping exercise pinpointing the specific locations residents wanted to see improved; and the third put EHI’s urban designers to work sketching potential improvements in real time with attendees. The mapping exercise was also developed into an online survey so residents who couldn’t attend could still shape their vision.

The completed Community Visioning Study now empowers the LLB and East Hills Consensus Groups to move forward with implementation — a community-authored foundation for the neighborhood plans to come.

A vision only counts if the community owns it. In East Hills and LLB, they do — because EHI made sure every resident had a way in, pandemic or not.