Neighborhood Metrics: A Sneak Peek at LC’s Upcoming Annual Meeting
By Mary Jane MacArthur, Lawrenceville Corporation
In celebration of 22 years of community development work, the Lawrenceville Corporation invites local neighbors and businesses to its annual meeting this Monday, June 6th. Guests will learn about LC’s community involvement while enjoying local food, drinks, music, and raffle prizes. As usual, the event provides opportunities for networking, member participation in board elections, and a presentation from community leaders who are driving Lawrenceville’s sustainable, equitable development.
This year, we will also have something new and exciting to introduce: a sneak peek of our sweeping report on neighborhood metrics, which describes neighborhood life and development from several different angles. With the tentative title “Lawrenceville Neighborhood Metrics,” the full report will be published later in the summer.
In recent years, Lawrenceville has transformed from a place ridden with post-industrial decline to a thriving, vibrant community. While neighborhood revitalization offers much to celebrate, we at LC know it has also created issues of displacement, rising unaffordability, and uneven distribution of neighborhood gains. Focusing on the past decade, the report dives into details about the loss of Black residents, children, and seniors to rising unaffordability; the growth in jobs, income, and cost of living; and updates to infrastructure and real estate development.
Many of these findings are not necessarily new. For better or worse, these changes are reflected in the lived experience of our community members. The report’s unique contribution is its quantification and contextualization of these observations. The voices of community members will continue to be invaluable to Lawrenceville Corporation, but numbers can help our community and organization better respond and shift priorities to meet changing needs.
The full report will include three main sections. The first, Living in Lawrenceville, describes changes in community demographics and housing markets, as well as metrics on civic engagement and public health and safety within the neighborhood. The second section on Economic Vibrancy reports statistics on Lawrenceville’s main business corridors and development projects. Finally, the section on Infrastructure and Environment discusses transit and mobility, land use, and environmental factors such as energy and air quality. Content from each section will be displayed at the annual meeting, along with information about how our organization is responding.
Our report has brought together information from census and municipal data, expertise from our contacts across the city, and insights from our own programs and research. We are providing this information to the public in hopes that it will empower community members to access and interpret the vast data at our fingertips, to understand its context, and to respond as needed. To keep our work relevant for our neighbors, we expect to return to these sources and continue to track neighborhood changes.
We encourage any community members interested in our report or our other evolving programs to attend the annual meeting celebration. The event will be on the rooftop of 3700 Butler Street from 5:00 pm to 7:30 pm. To register and learn more about Lawrenceville Corporation’s annual meeting celebration, please visit our Events page at Facebook.com/Lawrenceville.Corporation.
