Weinland Park is not the model of equitable and inclusive neighborhood revitalization that communities should duplicate, but it is an example of what an attempt can look like in the middle American city.
Over the past decade, interventions in the Weinland Park neighborhood by government and philanthropic partners, such as The Columbus Foundation, have resulted in measurable physical, social, and economic change. This report, detailing the results of the 2016 Weinland Park Collaborative Neighborhood Survey conducted and analyzed by The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University, provides a snapshot of community change since 2010 and a portrait of the community today. In using this two-pronged approach, Kirwan Institute has attempted to tell a more complete story of Weinland Park.
The key to understanding many of the results of the 2016 Weinland Park Collaborative Neighborhood Survey is to understand that the survey intended to measure resident perception of the Weinland Park neighborhood. By asking a representative cross-section nearly one-hundred questions, the survey generated a rich data set that reveals the way residents understand the community they call home. The analysis of this data set reveals that there are as many opinions about the neighborhood as there were survey respondents. Despite 422 unique perspectives, Kirwan Institute reveals significant patterns by looking at the data in a systematic way described above.
A Portrait of Weinland Park sets the table for conversations about the future of Weinland Park and other community revitalization e orts in Columbus and the United States.