The Corridor Housing Initiative was the brainchild of Gretchen Nicholls, executive director of the Center for Neighborhoods, a nonprofit organization that supports neighborhood-based planning to create more livable places. The initiative aimed to assist in the planning and development of higher density affordable housing. To achieve its goal the Center set out to teach local people why density can be a good thing. The core of the initiative was a SimCity-like exercise in which residents could play the entrepreneur — creating a development plan and seeing what happens if a proposed infill project gets snipped down to a density neighbors prefer.

Design for Health (DFH) is a collaborative project between the University of Minnesota, Cornell University, and the University of Colorado that serves to bridge the gap between the emerging research base on community design and healthy living and the everyday realities of local government planning. The Design for Health program integrates human health issues into planning and environmental design using innovative, practice-oriented tools.