V. Conclusion: Making Community CountCities, regions and communities need new strategies to counter disinvestment and to capture the benefits of market change. Traditional strategies of growth management can be enhanced by new analysis, creating scorecards to identify disparities at both the local and national levels, and crafting policies and coalitions to address these. A complementary approach is to identify reasons that can be appreciated by market institutions for reinvesting in and partnering with local economies. The intangible benefits of communities and regions, upon analysis, can also be scored for their tangible and economically monetizable access into home ownership opportunity, which has the potential for significant marketplace leverage. An important tandem benefit of this approach is to make apparent the potentially value which can be captured at the community level. In economic opportunities ranging from environmental improvement to energy efficiency to transit-oriented development, support systems for the "franchising" of opportunities, analogous to today's housing development finance intermediaries, are beginning to emerge. The coalescence of such new capacity with the desire to assemble a more robust community development capacity is a dynamic phenomenon that will require careful support and nurturing to achieve its potential. A new research agenda that systematically identifies the previously "hidden" benefits of community reuse and associated market valuation tools will help "put the place back into marketplace" quickly enough to achieve a more effective urban and metropolitan strategy; the intent of this framing is to help organize our options for strategically organizing around and investing in sustainable communities and regions.
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