Scott Kratz has spent more than a decade proving that a bridge can be more than steel and concrete—it can be a platform for equity. As the founding director of the 11th Street Bridge Park, an elevated park in Washington, D.C., spanning the Anacostia River, and as Executive Vice President of Building Bridges Across the River, TPR spoke with Kratz, who has overseen the investment of more than $100 million in affordable housing, workforce training, and anti-displacement strategies. For Kratz, physical construction is only part of the work. Real progress, he emphasizes, “moves at the speed of trust”—built slowly through resident engagement, transparency, and honoring local voices. His successes extend far beyond the ribbon-cutting, as Kratz continues ensuring that long-term residents see their ideas put into action, their homes protected, and their communities thriving for generations to come.
“It’s one thing to build the bricks-and-mortar infrastructure….But building the civic infrastructure around these projects is just as important.” - Scott Kratz
Scott, for our readers unfamiliar with D.C. and the 11th Street Bridge Park project, please introduce yourself.
I’m the Executive Vice President of Building Bridges Across the River, a nonprofit in D.C., and the founding director of the 11th Street Bridge Park. I’ve been leading this project for the last 12 or 13 years—taking a community-driven vision for this new civic space and making sure that at every step, we’re putting power into the hands of the community. That means holding the city and our partners accountable and keeping this project moving forward with patience and persistence.
At the same time, as EVP of the larger nonprofit, I also oversee our urban farms, our development department, and ensure that we’re investing broadly in the community. I joined in December 2014, so I’ve been at this for about 12 years.
Having assumed sizeable responsibilities over the last decade – to repurpose a bridge into a new Park venue for healthy recreation, environmental education, and the arts – share how your mandate, approach, and execution strategies have evolved?
It’s one thing to build the bricks-and-mortar infrastructure. That’s straightforward—we know how to do that, even if there are always ways to improve the process. But building the civic infrastructure around these projects is just as important. That takes real intentionality. You can’t just say, “That’s not my job.”
Ten years ago, when people raised concerns about gentrification and displacement, my reaction was, “Yes, that’s important, and somebody should do something about it…But I’m just building the park, and I’ve only got one other staff member.” What became clear is that it was critical to widen the aperture and think about the larger impact, and that’s much harder work. Nonprofits are uniquely positioned, compared to the city or federal government, to maintain long-term, trusted relationships with the community. We have boots on the ground. We can be nimble and responsive in a way big institutions often can’t. In every city we’ve worked with, there’s an enormous and very justified mistrust. People who look like me have come into communities making promise after promise, and for all sorts of reasons, those promises weren’t kept.
A colleague, Nathaniel, who runs Partners for Southern Equity in Atlanta, once told me, “change moves at the speed of trust,” and he’s right. It’s taken this long to build trust in the community.
Trust comes from shared experiences over time and keeping your word. It’s fragile, and it’s something we hold very dear. Two of the questions we ask ourselves constantly—every week, if not every day—are: Who is this project for? And who is going to benefit? The answer must always be: our long-term residents.
Update readers on the project’s progress and when stakeholders will see shovels in the ground.
Well, when you’re transforming an old, aged-out freeway in the nation’s capital—over a navigable body of water, between the National Park Service and an active Department of Defense installation—there are a lot of chefs in the kitchen. We’ve had roughly 30 permits to secure, and I’m happy to say we’re down to the last two.
The final major step is a transfer of jurisdiction: the National Park Service is providing four to five acres on the east side of the river in historic Anacostia to the city. That’s where we’ll site our Environmental Education Center, a 1,000-seat outdoor amphitheater, kayaking and canoe launch, and pollinator gardens. That transfer will be introduced to the D.C. Council in mid-September and should be finalized by late October or early November, and once that’s complete, DDOT and our partners can solicit a general contractor—likely in November. We expect to select a contractor by early Q2 of next year and break ground shortly thereafter.
The good news is we are 100% funded. The $15 million ORLP grant through the Land and Water Conservation Fund closed the gap, and all three of our federal grants are under signed agreements. We’re fully funded and ready to go, which is incredibly exciting!
On process, you’ve held more than 1000+ stakeholder meetings and updated the equitable development plan in 2018 and 2024. Elaborate on what has been learned regarding how a non-profit builds, over more than a decade, trust and community buy-in.
We’ve been implementing these community preservation and equitable development strategies for about the last 10 years, right? We launched our first Equitable Development Plan in December 2015, and by February 2016, we started the East of the River Homebuyers Club. The goal was to demystify the process of buying a home for the first time, which can be a really scary endeavor. Now, we’re providing down payment assistance, closing cost assistance, and even writing grants.
Since then, we’ve seen 182 Ward 8 renters become homeowners, capturing intergenerational wealth. It’s a great example of how the community can come up with an idea, and if we meet with them, and it’s a good idea and we have the capacity, we can start implementing it quickly.
Our first iteration of the plan focused on housing, small business, and workforce training, but we missed arts and culture. Then we asked: How do we keep the history, culture, and the flavor of the neighborhoods? Because when you lose that, that has enormous downstream consequences. We added arts and culture strategies to our second version, while also updating the other three categories.
Our latest version, launched last year, includes new health and wellness strategies and frameworks for environmental justice, which continues to expand our work. We exist not in silos, but in a larger ecosystem. We need to be looking at the social determinants of health and thinking about the whole person.
On that note, describe what a typical community meeting might include. How do you repeatedly attract stakeholders into the room, and what advice would you share on sustaining participation?
First, we try some basic things by asking: how do we remove as many barriers as possible for residents to sustain their participation? That means providing food, not scheduling meetings at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, but instead in the evenings or on weekends, and providing childcare if needed. To avoid asking residents to come to another meeting, we connect with existing ones. We give presentations at places like the Ward 8 Interfaith Council or the Anacostia Coordinating Council—meetings that people are already attending—so they don’t have to carve out more time. It sounds simple, but it’s a big deal.
If we’re asking for sustained participation, we have to value people’s time. I would never ask a consultant from New York City to come work for free. But that’s what we so often ask of community members. If I’m asking a resident to sit on an arts and culture committee and help create strategies for a year, I need to pay them. I need to honor and recognize their contribution. Ten years ago, that was a hard fundraising case to make. Philanthropy has evolved. Funders now recognize the value of someone’s time, and one way we can honor that is with compensation.
The other piece is making sure people can see their suggestions manifest. Like many communities around the country, our residents have been planned to death. You could stack all the plans done by the city, nonprofits, or CDFIs, and many of them have never been implemented. People get burned out.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that the most precious resource is time. Residents need to feel their time is valued—that their participation leads to something real. When we co-created the first set of economic strategies with the community, we created immediately actionable items. That way, people could quickly see their ideas come to life and say, ‘Oh, that was my idea—they’re actually doing something with it.’”
The 11th Street Bridge project’s approach seems very intentional, specifically in how participants observe the product of their inputs as real and tangible benefits. Examples of the aforementioned?
I have several examples. The first is that we just opened our eighth urban farm in a part of the city with only one full-service grocery store serving 75,000 residents. Compare that to Ward 6, where I live, just across the river—there are ten full-service grocery stores. East of the river, there’s a 20-year life expectancy gap depending on where you grow up. That’s bonkers. So we harvest food from our farms and distribute it through “Food and Family Fridays.” We set up a farmers market that gives people real agency and choice, and it’s all free. We also hand out seedlings, do cooking demonstrations, and share recipe cards. Last year alone, we served about 3,000 residents.
Another example: a Ward 8 friend told me her neighbor didn’t have air conditioning. In the summer, it could get up to 115 degrees inside her fifth-floor apartment. By law, apartments need heat but not AC…and east of the river is, on average, 13 degrees hotter than other parts of D.C. As heat waves become more frequent and intense, we raised grant money and started distributing free energy-efficient AC units. We’ve given out 54 so far, along with gift cards to help cover power bills. The impact has been enormous. One resident, Mr. Wren, who has narcolepsy and couldn’t sleep in the heat, told me that after we installed his unit, it was the best night’s sleep he’d had in months, if not years. That’s the kind of work we’re trying to expand.
As people read about our work in places like The Planning Report, The New York Times, or The Washington Post, they’d see a bit of their own city’s challenges. We’d start getting calls that usually began, “Tell me the top three things I need to do to stop gentrification,” and I’d gently reframe that: it’s not about a list.
Scott, please reframe the “question” for TPR readers.
It’s, how do you engage your residents…whether you’re in Milwaukee or Detroit or Buffalo or LA—to identify strategies so that long-term residents aren’t just surviving, but can thrive in place?
I had just come back from Milwaukee last year, working with a Rails to Trails project along the 30th Street corridor. It was an old railroad line that went through what once was this country’s most prosperous Black neighborhood, that’s since fallen on tough times. They flew me up there, put me up in a hotel, and I worked with them to create their equitable development plan. They just got a million-dollar grant to help implement those strategies, which is great. But what about all those cities that don’t have a Rails to Trails project, or the financial resources to learn from our lessons?
We didn’t want people making the same mistakes at the same time across the country. We applied for a grant from the Kresge Foundation, a longtime supporter of ours, to create an open and transparent process and encourage nonprofits from across the country to apply to what we called our Building Strong Communities pilot program.
Elaborate on the Building Strong Communities pilot program? What benefits does it provide to the cities that participate?
The benefit for the participating cities is that we come out and spend a year with them—sharing our lessons learned, walking through the seven-step process, helping facilitate meetings, doing a series of site visits, and convening larger meetings with key stakeholders: philanthropic organizations, city leaders, nonprofits, and faith leaders.
All the constituencies we’ve found are critical at the table in D.C. By the end of that year-long process, our goal is that each city will have its own community preservation or equitable development strategies, created through deep engagement with its residents. We had about a dozen cities and nonprofits apply earlier this year, and we selected five. We’re now midway through working with them, and that’s allowed us to be more transparent about the process and provide equal opportunity.
We’re already hearing from other cities—asking if they’ll be able to apply in the next round, and we’re hoping that will be the case. It’s been such a powerful program, and for me, there’s a lot of not-so-positive news when you wake up in the morning. To be on the phone with these amazing change agents who are working diligently and persistently to create more just and economically thriving communities has lifted my spirits.
Across the different cities, what are you finding regarding the number of initiatives to create just and economically thriving communities?
The projects are very different, but in Detroit, for example—I just came back from there last week—we led a series of meetings with the city and local nonprofits about redeveloping I-375, the so-called “freeway to nowhere.”
It blasted through a historic middle-class Black neighborhood in the 1950s, and now they’re planning to bring that sunken freeway back up to grade. But the challenge is: the Michigan Department of Transportation knows how to build freeways. They know how to do roadways and traffic studies. What they don’t have the expertise for is small business preservation, reparations, and affordable housing goals. We’re now working with a number of nonprofits and the city’s planning department to develop complementary strategies—similar to what we’ve done in D.C.—to make sure long-term residents can stay and thrive in place.
Then, take Columbus, Mississippi, where Pastor Welch, a local activist, is leading the effort to redevelop a 100-acre brownfield site that used to be a creosote factory. That’s going to take time—there’s remediation, planning, and funding involved. Or look at the I-375 project in Detroit, already 10 to 15 years in the making.
These kinds of projects take a long time. But sometimes, there’s a reason for that. The extended timeline creates space to invest in residents, neighborhoods, and community—and that can be a good thing. It wasn’t easy to see that while we were in the thick of our challenges, but the upside is clear: it gave us the chance to make deeper, more community-driven investments.
With the 11th Street Bridge Park timeline—which took longer than originally expected—how has that extended timeline impacted the project and influenced investment in pilot programs?
I was cleaning my office not long ago and came across a Gantt chart from 2019 that projected the park would be open by 2021. Personally, that’s been frustrating—this has taken much longer than I expected…but the delay created space for us to invest more than $104 million directly into the community.
If construction had started back in 2015 or 2016, we wouldn’t have been able to launch the full suite of anti-displacement strategies or raise the capital needed for such a large-scale community investment. Today, we’re investing more money into the neighborhoods around the park than it will ultimately cost to build the park itself, and we haven’t even broken ground yet. That’s the lesson we’ve applied to other cities in our pilot communities.
Yes, the timeline may be longer than anticipated, but those years are not wasted. They’re essential for building trust, raising resources, and creating strategies that benefit long-term residents. When we look ahead to other cities, we expect extended timeframes, but we also see them as opportunities to build something deeper and more durable.
How do you evaluate/measure the impact of your work and establish lasting legitimacy with both funders and all stakeholders?
From the beginning, we’ve worked with a senior team from the Urban Institute under contract to set clear, measurable goals for each of our strategies, track progress, and provide a feedback loop on what we’re getting right and where we’re falling short.
Just as important, the Urban Institute conducted its own focus groups, and we were deliberately not in the room. That ensured participants could share candid, anonymous feedback about what we were doing well and where we needed to do better. Beyond evaluation, they’ve regularly published white papers documenting our successes, failures, and lessons learned. That transparency matters.
We’ve tried a lot of approaches—some worked, some didn’t, and having that structure has been critical. It’s allowed us to experiment, evaluate, refine ideas, discard those that aren’t effective, and adjust the ones that need improvement. We just wrapped up a major contract with them, and in about two months, we’ll release a major publication from that work, produced in collaboration with the High Line Network, sharing lessons learned. While we don’t currently have them under contract, we’re already in discussions about the next phase.
It’s one thing for me to claim, “We’re doing great work.” It’s another when a respected third party provides an honest accounting—the good and the bad—that we can then share publicly, helping others avoid the same mistakes.
Our website is regularly updated with tangible outcomes. For instance, the over 230 homes acquired through the Douglass Community Land Trust, or the results of our 43 construction training cohorts, through which more than 500 residents have gained employment in the construction trades. Every year, we also host a large town hall, reporting back to the community and funders on what’s working, what isn’t, and where our projects stand overall.
Looking forward five to ten years, what do you envision as success for D.C.’s 11th Street Bridge Park project?
This project will only be a success we can share with cities across the United States if we actually build the bridge. We must secure these final permits; otherwise, it becomes a cautionary tale: “They were going to build a bridge, but then they got busy with the Community Land Trust, construction training programs, working with Black-owned businesses, and so on…”
That’s why, over the last year, we’ve been so focused on breaking ground on the park. We made a promise to the community—one shaped by the input of thousands, even tens of thousands, of residents.
In 2028, the park will be open, and our nonprofit will be running the park. The city will own the asset, but we will run it in perpetuity. In the coming weeks, we will be signing a public space permit that allows us to delineate responsibilities to run the park.
After the opening later this year, what’s next?
It’s funny, we were at a community meeting the other day, and someone asked, “When the park opens, does that mean all the equitable development just stops?” And we said, “No, no, no. That’s when we have a platform to host small businesses, provide technical assistance, run our community leadership empowerment workshop, and more.”
That’s what’s exciting. Opening the park is the time to triple down on these investments.
Pivoting to the recent fires in Los Angeles, communities like Altadena are now facing the challenge of rebuilding while also trying to protect their history and residents’ generational wealth. From your experiences, share the lessons learned on how to honor the past while bringing diverse stakeholders together to plan for a resilient future.
Being an Angeleno, part of it as a fourth-generation Californian, I was just devastated by the fires. So, I feel for the community that’s there. A couple of thoughts here, but first:
This is top of mind for me because I just came back from Detroit, where I’ve been thinking a lot about how we honor the past. In Detroit, the I-375 freeway wiped out a thriving Black middle-class neighborhood. Similarly, in places like Altadena, there was an opportunity for Black families to build generational wealth in communities they created, and that was evaporated. History can’t be lost in the rebuilding process.
Second, there are a lot of different folks coming in with a lot of different ideas. What we’ve learned is that it’s essential to bring all the key stakeholders around the table, so people aren’t working at cross purposes. Everyone wants the same thing—supporting homes, continuing economic development, but we have to avoid ending up with a vacant landscape for the next 20 years.
Last, it comes down to the old adage—“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Taking the time to engage residents, nonprofits, the city, and all the key players—to get it right is critical. It can be frustrating, because people want action quickly, but showing early progress and building wins along the way keeps people engaged and prevents burnout.
Last question: A new book by Michael Lewis, drawn from The Washington Post reporting over the past two years (Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service) profiles people like you: unsung public servants who have served with dedication and success the “public interest.” How have you succeeded?
I see my job as being a convener, bringing people together. We could not do this project without our city partners, and we’ve had amazing city staff doing really good work under very tough circumstances, especially now. That’s where the benefits of public-private partnership come through. The city can bring significant resources.
For example, the District of Columbia is funding half of the construction costs for the Bridge Park, and that’s meaningful. They bring expertise and scale, and what we bring to the table is longevity. We run an organization called the Town Hall Education Arts & Recreation Campus (THEARC) on a 99-year lease with the city, operating what’s become the largest privately funded coalition of social sector nonprofits in the country.
During COVID, we launched what was, at the time, the largest privately funded, unconditional cash transfer program in the United States. Through our nonprofit partners, we distributed about $3.5 million directly to residents—no strings attached. That was possible because we had already built the trust, the relationships, and the infrastructure to move quickly when the community needed it most.
Politicians, by nature, come and go. But as community-based non-profits, we can provide consistency, and that’s how we build trust—over the long term. We’re not going anywhere.
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