The Fenway Community Development Corporation (CDC) held the first of three community meetings last Thursday to ask for resident feedback as it starts to draft a “Strategic Five-Year Plan” for how to develop the neighborhood.

Fenway CDC, an affordable housing and community organizing nonprofit, said it would use the feedback from residents at the meeting to begin drafting the plan and would present its first version at a second meeting in May.

“It’s really about, ‘What do you want to see?’” Harry Smith, a consultant hired by Fenway CDC to help construct the five-year plan, said.

Smith said Fenway CDC had begun working on the plan in October by hosting one-on-one interviews and focus groups with residents.

“We’ve collected a lot of data so far, and a lot of themes are emerging, not surprisingly,” Smith said in his opening remarks.

“Affordable housing, and the displacement and gentrification of the neighborhood, is a huge concern. The fear that it’s becoming too transient, that there’s no place for young families to live.”

The meeting hosted about 100 Fenway residents at a lecture hall in Simmons University. At the front of the room stood two large white notepads, reading, “What is the one thing you wish we had in the Fenway?” Over the course of the meeting, residents put up 40 sticky notes in response.

The most common points were more housing and better transportation, including more parking. Multiple people wanted to get the Fenway’s many college age residents more involved in community events and to build a more supportive neighborhood for them. Others requested more unique community spaces, like a theater or a gym.

During the meeting, residents were asked to comment on four elements of the five-year plan. Those elements were branding, resident programs, community organizing, and housing development.

Housing is one of Fenway CDC’s biggest focuses. It has developed over 600 affordable units in the neighborhood and recently took on its first project elsewhere in the city to reconfigure a set of empty buildings in Beacon Hill. Residents at the meeting said they wanted to see more housing for recent graduates and young families.

The nonprofit also handles community organizing. So far, its biggest project has been lifting the ban on rent control in the state. However, at the meeting, Fenway CDC staff asked residents for input on its new plan for “institutional campaigns.”

” What we hear about in the community often is institutional accountability,” Cassie White, the organization’s director of policy, said.

“Over the decades, people have seen certain higher-ed institutions expand and literally take over land in the neighborhood. They’ve seen agreements between the community and the institutions, and then they’re broken and not upheld. There’s just a lot of distrust and power imbalance. We’re not quite sure what this campaign will look like. We just know that it’s a really important thing for a lot of folks in the neighborhood.”

Smith said Fenway CDC would present a first draft of the plan at its annual meeting in May and would then incorporate resident feedback into a final draft to be presented at a third meeting later in the summer.