Greetings and Welcome to 2010! It’s going to be a really good year. It is true that communities across America have a lot of work to do, but it is also true that we are fortunate in the vast opportunities before us.
The Rust Belt has been suffering for a long time. But the turnaround has begun. We know growth for its own sake may not be the path. And the lessons from places struggling with population loss are now relevant far beyond Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York. There are good reasons to believe we may be able to adapt.
Arizona, California, Nevada and large portions of the west understand all too well the dilemma an excessively soft Midwest and Rust Belt pose. The challenge of succession means if you can’t retire and sell your home in Pittsburgh where it’s cold, you can’t very well buy your next home in Phoenix where it’s not. Our work as community developers in 2010 includes making our clients aware that this issue of succession is not merely regional across the country, but local across our towns and cities and metropolitan areas, and especially so in more isolated placed that mainly have internal housing markets.
As markets adapt, so must the community development field, and again, there are good reasons to believe we can. The portfolios of the nation’s largest affordable rental housing syndicates are in the tank, and they will require our attention. And on two fronts. First to be sure the weaknesses in the portfolios don’t undermine the neighborhoods these developments are in, we must be aggressive in the manner of how we refinance them so that we don’t too heavily concentrate needy families in struggling communities and find ourselves in 2020 right where we were in 1980: with millions of older rental units that are hard to market, prohibitive to repair, and a drag on local vitality . Second, we need to be aware our portfolio of low income housing required a lot of political capital to finance and build, much of it owing to NIMBYism; we must pursue our important goals of social equity while maintaining this portfolio at the highest standard possible so we don’t wind up with the pyrrhic victory of units no one wants to be near.
Combined with at least two profound environmental challenges: water scarcity in the west and high heating costs in the east, our attention as community developers to the work of linking equitable housing pursuits with economic development is our greatest opportunity in this and in coming years. How to spend scare dollars most wisely? How to build housing that serves to create and strengthen balanced local housing ladders? How to construct and tear down in ways that truly build up? How to be genuinely responsive to need, yet sufficiently mindful of the role of demand?
Again, these are opportunities.
In Santa Fe, NM really creative thinking about adaptive reuse, housing affordability, social equity, and water scarcity are driving innovation on the affordable home ownership front, and alongside a purposeful emphasis on local is being woven into everything.
In Geneva, NY residents are working together to incorporate LEED-based landscape design thinking into community organizing, and doing so in the context of using small amounts of highly targeted public dollars to drive market change.
In Park City, UT the focus is all about balance and sustainability: how to manage a remarkable quality of life in ways that are equitable and sustainable? And there, genuine leadership is being exercised at each level of government, within the private sector, and among residents: there is an acute understanding that beauty doesn’t come cheap, it takes work, and fairness is no less important than economic viability.
Whether or not we lost our way recently is debatable.
What’s clear is that in communities across the country, small experiments matter.
The facade improvement program in Jamestown, NY’s downtown has much to say about place. The commitment to “getting it right” in Norfolk, VA is an inspiration to anyone in community development who stops to deeply ponder the nature of our work and the complexities of place and community. The aspirations of Ascension Parish, Louisiana to steer their community to a strong future they can sustain is a lesson in the challenge of balancing quality of life and cultural preservation.
And in the far south end of Arizona, in Ajo, an old mining and company town, cross cultural work among the Tohono O’odham Nation, Anglicans, and Mexicans is resulting in significant cooperation on border issues, environmental stewardship of the Cabeza Prieta and Organ Pipe, and economic rebirth.
Less important in 2010 will be what has not worked. We know. Of greater value this year is what does work. We know this, too.
