By Tom LoBianco
Not long after Melissa Velez was promoted to senior planner for the City of Allentown, Pennsylvania, she got a call from the mayor suggesting she apply to the offered by Building State Capability (BSC) at the Center for Public Leadership.
Velez, who has worked in various jobs in planning and zoning for the city, was staring down a rewrite of the city’s 262-page zoning code, a daunting task made all the more complicated by the rapid changes to the city since the Covid pandemic.
Years earlier, the pandemic transformed this center of the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, like so many other American towns and cities–spurring a massive influx of new residents and a tight squeeze in the housing market.
Affordable housing, including 'alley homes' that are only 20 feet wide and used to sell for $60,000 to $80,000, now sells for upward of $180,000, leaving Allentown's working class struggling to afford the massive spike in housing costs.
During the IPP program from May to November 2024, Velez took an initially sprawling task of rewriting the entire zoning code and worked through the BSC’s PDIA () approach to get at the core of one of Allentown’s, and the nation’s, toughest issues: building affordable housing.
“I'm focusing on the entire zoning code, and there's just so much there,” Velez explained. “In the IPP classes they were talking about how it's not always the best thing to look at the whole picture, but instead to break it down into little pieces that you can focus on and make an impact.”
Finding hidden capability
Since 2012, Building State Capability has been training public leaders around the world to construct and deconstruct the problems vexing their communities and discover hidden answers through a process the program’s leaders liken to problem solving therapy.
“We’ve been doing this for 13 years,” said Salimah Samji, executive director of BSC.
Samji, who worked in international development before starting BSC with faculty director Matt Andrews, noted that she often found local leaders who were plenty aware of the challenges they faced in helping their citizens; they just needed to know what they could do to fix them.
“We just kept seeing that it is not a lack of understanding preventing them from delivering. It was, ‘How do I deliver these services to my citizenry?’” Samji said. “Identifying problems turns out to be a hard thing.”
Samji used the example of leaders who say they need more teachers, “You need to ask yourself, ‘Why do we need more teachers?’”
When you start to “peel the onion” you realize there aren’t enough teachers. Then, if you keep going, you ask “why is that a problem?” Well, because children are not learning.
“Now, you have identified the problem,” Samji said, “but that problem is multifaceted.”
By working through the PDIA process, with a guiding hand from the BSC team, local leaders can identify the core problem and its root causes, engage with stakeholders, iterate, and land on practical solutions –revealing their own capabilities in the process.
“It is about creating spaces for ideas to emerge, to create spaces for dialogues and conversation to emerge,” Samji said. “It is through this emergence that people realize that they have the capability to solve these problems, that they do not need to rely on a funder or an outside consultant—McKinsey or whatever—to come and tell them what they should do, that they can actually co-solve problems themselves.”
The PDIA Toolkit developed by BSC is widely used around the world, and free to access. BSC has also outlined examples of the PDIA in use in its podcast series.
“It's a process that helps [local leaders] have that ‘a-ha!’ moment. And what we find is, once they start to see that they had an idea, that they tried it, they've already got ownership of the problem.”
From Papua New Guinea to Wyoming and cities from coast to coast, the BSC team have trained local leaders on their process of identifying the core problems then working to find actionable answers to address them.
Shopping the "fishbone diagram"
The PDIA process uses the “fishbone diagram” (formally known as the ) to visually represent the problem, its causes, subcauses, and any interlinkages that may exist.
, she circled the towering issue at hand when she started the IPP program, “zoning code being accepted and passed by the city council” as the head of the fishbone.
A number of “bones” fanned out from there: “job growth”, “better building design”, a city built for parking instead of public transit. At the tail end of her initial diagram sat the bone she would pick off and focus on, “affordable housing.”
From there, leaders share their diagram with colleagues and stakeholders in their area to get feedback.
For Velez, this included the normal public comment period that comes in any major zoning overhaul but also included outreach from the state capital in Harrisburg to hear from state lawmakers, developers and non-profits to strike a balance that would result in new affordable housing.
Compromises on parking requirements, the amount of affordable housing included in developments, and new uses for existing structures have Velez feeling good.
The city is optimistic that developers will build affordable housing, whether it be the entire project or a portion. With the addition of accessory dwelling units for owner occupied properties, the city is also optimistic that the city will be able to move from a majority renter city.
“There were so many great aspects to the program and I still use some of the tools,” Velez said of BSC’s IPP program. “It was a wonderful experience, I’m so happy I was chosen.”
Now, almost a year after Velez started the program, she is almost ready to submit the entire zoning code rewrite to the city council for final approval.
BSC’s PDIA Toolkit, professional programs and resources have been used for a variety of issues faced by public leaders.
In Providence, city Director of Art, Culture and Tourism Joseph Wilson, Jr. translated his training at BSC into efforts to fund and sustain the .
On the other side of the globe, New Zealand’s principal policy advisor to the Ministry of Business, Mark Lea, used his training in BSC’s Leading Economic Growth program to address problems with the country’s productivity performance.
To download the free PDIA Toolkit and learn more about Building State Capability, visit the website: