Park Place

Park Place was the HOPE VI community we observed downtown on our visit. I was very impressed with Park Place because of the fact that it had achieved what all the other new urbanist communities we had studied had failed at, economic diversity. Park Place had 3 programs: Market value, middle income, and low income. With these 3 programs they were able to successfully establish a mixed income community. While racial distribution was not achieved, this is still better than all the communities we observed and especially Trussville Springs. Trussville Springs, while still in the works, is a pretentious community built to satisfy a market of new urbanist of the white upper class. Park Place is a genuine community in which you can feel the authenticity of something built to help the poor and eliminate the policy of concentrating poor people in an area. This community is further held up by the fact that it is in downtown which is already an urban landscape that was not planned or artificially built with a "New Urbanist" plan. Park Place is within a clinic, YMCA, Park, and two schools which gives this community a towering sucess over all the other communities we observed in the class.