This “Accidental Developer” Wants To Show You How To Revitalize Your Neighborhood
Mike Keen, a small-scale developer in South Bend, IN.
After years of teaching urban studies and sustainability at Indiana University South Bend, Mike Keen decided to walk his talk and began to have meetings at his house to discuss how to make his local neighborhoods a more prosperous place.
“I became what I sometimes refer to as the accidental developer,” said Keen. Because once he started revitalizing his neighborhood through small, incremental development, he never stopped.
All too often, the job of development is handed to large developers with large swaths of cash to implement an all-at-once, large-scale development—which might not always work for the city. Additionally, big developers tend to stay away from neighborhoods like Keen’s, which was experiencing a decline seen in many North American neighborhoods, evidenced by empty lots, old houses, closed-down buildings, and a lack of third places.
Keen knew something needed to change for South Bend neighborhoods to become more prosperous places. So, Keen started with the smaller first steps of attending conferences, and reaching out and connecting people. Along with hosting small-scale developer conversations at his home, Keen helped facilitate the Incremental Development Alliance to conduct workshops in South Bend to teach the community about how to build a neighborhood through small-scale development. He helped get the neighborhoods talking, and people partnered up to take small action steps to rebuild their community.
They followed the concept of “finding your farm,” a phrase coined by the Incremental Development Alliance, wherein each local group takes notice of a few blocks in a neighborhood, and just like a farm, figures out ways to help the ecosystem grow.
“Because we call this ‘farming,’” said Keen. “The idea is that you don't come in, develop a piece and move away when you're done with the building, but [you stay and] build the community.”
In Keen’s “farm” sits an old abandoned bakery building: his latest incremental development project. Because the infrastructure was rotting and old, there was talk of tearing the building down. Keen even wondered if it would be best to knock down the large brick building and work with his partners to build affordable homes. But, Keen and his partners decided that there was still more life left in the old building—and it deserved a chance to be a thriving community space.
“[We’re going to] turn it into a kind of space that would have a whole bunch of different-sized commercial spaces,” said Keen. “Maybe a little bit of makerspace, you know, places for barber or beauty shops, but also offices, some artists studios, some health and wellness offices, and maybe a little food café, coffee shop, something like that.”
The goal of this project, and any project that has been conducted in Keen’s “farm” is simple: transform the neighborhood into a more prosperous place from the bottom up, not the top down.
The path to get where Keen is today wasn’t all that simple; it was messy and hard work. “If I would have gone to the city or I tried to do the bakery six years ago, when I first got started,” said Keen, “I'd be out of business and people would be laughing at me.” It took years for Keen and his partners to reach the point where revitalizing an old bakery building was the next smallest step in making his neighborhood stronger.
“A farmer who takes on a clay soil, you know, they don't just go in and grow in one year and become an organic farmer,” said Keen. “They go in, and the first year and the second year, they compost and keep on developing. And each year it gets better and better. And that's how we work with small-scale development.”
At the upcoming Strong Towns National Gathering, Mike Keen (as part of the Neighborhood Evolution team) will be speaking about incremental development, and how you can start to grow and revitalize your neighborhood in his talk, “A 12-Step Process to Create the Ecosystem for Incremental Developers to Succeed.” If you’re interested in attending and learning more about how to create incremental growth in your neighborhood, check out more information here.
Seairra Jones serves as the Staff Writer/Story Producer for Strong Towns. In the past, she's worked as a freelance journalist and videographer for a number of different organizations. She currently resides between small-town Illinois and the rural Midwest with her husband, where they help manage a family homestead. When Seairra isn’t focusing on how to make our towns stronger, you can find her outside working on the farm, writing fictional tales in a coffee shop, or reading in a hammock.