Highly vacant neighborhoods present challenges for balancing social, environmental, and economic considerations for land reuse. Since the 1960’s, many post-Industrial cities such as Detroit have seen extreme population decline, creating severe economic loss and disinvestment in their communities. Strategies and opportunities for stabilization and revitalization, especially those that can be created and implemented by community groups, have become particularly important in these legacy (shrinking) cities. This report uses a case study site on the Lower East Side of Detroit to examine how the Community Development Advocates of Detroit (CDAD) Strategic Framework, a new land use and development framework for highly vacant cities, can be used to influence the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) criteria to allow it to better consider the social, economic, and environmental context of a legacy city. The land use typology described in CDAD’s Strategic Framework inform the criteria in the LEED-ND valuation tool measuring the sustainability of a neighborhood in order to create a new framework: Sustainable Neighborhood Development for Legacy Cities (SND-LC). SND-LC provides recommendations to further integrate social capital, social equity, and ecological considerations into the two frameworks through various planning and design techniques. Joan Nassauer’s concept of “cues to care” is instrumental for examining social capital in vacant neighborhoods and in identifying opportunities to grow social networks. Recommendations for land use reconsiderations call for the integration of social variables such as neighborhood cohesion and access to resources, as well as ecological variables such as stormwater and green space connectivity. Recommendations in SND-LC encourage retrofitting and illustrate how sustainability can be achieved through a more strategic use of vacant land areas rather than through compactness or new development. The new credit rating system applies the economic and social conditions of a legacy city to a new valuation system that can allow highly vacant neighborhoods across the country to achieve a sustainable neighborhood status.