Designers
Designers
Designers
Designing for Trust
A bilingual BID transparency toolkit for Washington Heights merchants and property owners.
Key Words
Designers
Salma Alihodzic
Ellie Walborksy
SUMMARY
Washington Heights is one of the last majority-Dominican commercial corridors in Manhattan. Gentrification is already reshaping Broadway. A BID is being explored. BIDs fail not because the model is broken but because of fear and misunderstanding. We built a Merchant Transparency Toolkit for CLOTH to change that. Two tools: a bilingual cost calculator and a bilingual flip publication, built for merchants and property owners separately because their stakes are not the same. Broadway belongs to the people who built it. This toolkit is designed to keep it that way.
challenge
CLOTH’s outreach team needed tools that could work across in-person visits, email, and a ballot mailing, in English and Spanish, without training. The deeper challenge was design: how do you communicate honestly about BID costs and risks, including rent pressure and governance structure, without creating panic? BIDs have accelerated gentrification in similar neighborhoods. The community knew this. Any tool that hid the complicated information would lose trust immediately. The design problem was honest communication, not persuasion.
Outcome
A bilingual cost calculator using CLOTH’s actual assessment formula, displaying monthly cost as the primary figure alongside what the assessment funds. A bilingual flip publication covering six sections across two audiences. Both tools were tested through three rounds of iteration including feedback from Jackie Tesman at CLOTH, a Parsons prototype fair, and the April 22 steering committee. The committee’s feedback directly shaped the final versions, updating assessment language and removing a single property value figure that overstated what the research could honestly support.
MEET THE Designers:
Salma Alihodzic
Ellie Walborksy