When you sit in front of the city council or local media and present your findings, heads nod. Concentrations of poverty make no sense. “When there are concentrations of poverty,” you tell your client, costs for services rise, crime increases, and a range of negative impacts result, not least of which is the huge missed opportunity for so many living in such terrible situations to find opportunity and make their way forward. But when it comes to acting on the recommendations – whether in the form of inclusionary zoning, or density bonuses, or mixed-income encouragements – then the heels dig in. Can’t. Nuh uh. Property rights. Property values. Fear takes hold. You can see it in their eyes. Those people near me? Not on my watch. When you open the discussion of what it is they are concerned about, I have learned it is the image they have of the troubles sure to follow. In their minds any low income family in their neighborhood is tantamount to importing all of West Baltimore right next door. Much of the work is to modulate an even handed conversation about the differences between affordable housing and the challenge of tackling poverty, the difference between today’s poverty of a family and endemic and chronic and systemic poverty. and the difference between the diffusion of poverty and the deconcentration of it. These are hard conversations.
Archive for May, 2009
Fear of Poverty
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009Tea Leaves in Cleveland
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009In January 1992, The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a piece by Columbia’s Nicholas Lemann, titled “The Myth of Community Development”. It was then – timed to provoke critical thinking about the Clinton Administration’s vanilla urban policy of Empowerment Communities (EZ/EC) – a poignant evaluation of community development, and it asked hard questions.
Questions about the capacity of local organizations, the wisdom of economic development efforts in the hands of anemic CDCs. Neither wholly right nor wrong, the piece put on the table a necessary skunk: was it sensible to try to revitalize the inner city using the tools and thinking then at hand?
Sadly, the community development field largely ignored the piece, dismissed it, or otherwise resettled comfortably into our low-income housing tax credit barcaloungers and proceeded for the next 15 years to define the whole of community development as a production problem to be solved by a corps of community-based organizations, few with any real estate capacity whatsoever.
Exactitude and Rectitude
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009reflecting on projects completed the last several years – a housing policy for the city of bridgeport, a series of deep dives for the pennsylvania housing finance agency, an implementation guide for a mothballed economic development strategy for a city that can’t presently be mentioned, analysis of the landbank in eugene for harvard university, and others – i believe deeply that buried in the nation’s appetite for systems change are a series of critical lessons.
one is that the appetite to do things differently is very different than the capacity to do so. when you reflect on the limited gains by the otherwise ambitious agenda of new urbanism, or on the stalled implementation by housing agencies across the country to heed the evolved knowledge of common experience and science that concentrated poverty is to be avoided, or on any number of other stalled or came-up-short efforts, you see that HAVING DECISION-MAKING TOOLS IS NOT THE SAME THING AS HAVING THE CAPACITY TO PULL THE TRIGGER.
once i gave a speech in austin texas, and laid out a wonderfully coherent vision and even a decent plan. proud of myself someone in the audience stood up and in front of about 300 people said, at my expense: “your presentation was lovely. (more…)
Pennsylvania Sad
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009somewhere between mennonite farms and corrupt cement contractors, bound by the delaware and the alleghenys, the commonwealth of pennsylvania saddens the way apples ripen. some of our nation’s most beautiful rolling terra is firmly in the grip of a billboard aesthetic, which is to say captive to the craven interests of the motel set that would advertise on late night TV for everything from ‘why rent when you can buy’ opportunities to ‘government auctions woohoo’. when you cross the mason dixon line heading north you feel transported not to the inherited lands of educated quakers and other underground rr’ers, but, instead, to south of the border myrtle beach tawdry get your fireworks here. you cross from new jersey into monroe county and you have been transported to alabama with foliage and hillsides. the cracker set has taken over the county commission and from the poconos to york it’s the pre-diabetic rural south with their ATVs and yellow ribbon fight songs. south from NY. west from NJ. north from MD. its one enormous concrete road construction fiasco after another, tied together by the common theme of whatever can be placed on a billboard and read between bites of chicken nuggets. poor william penn.
Originally posted on November 1, 2007
