(excerpted from comments to the nation’s Community Action Agencies)
Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to be with you today here this morning. I’ve been asked to join you and talk for a bit about the connections between the work you do as Community Action Agencies and the challenges of neighborhood revitalization.
To get there I am going to detour a bit. I want to start by drawing attention to an article in last week’s Washington Post. There’s nothing special about it, nothing at all.
But I found it especially illuminating. The title was “Jobless rate steady in DC, up in Md, and Va.” The key piece of information was that the unemployment rate in DC was 11.1, third highest in the nation behind California and Nevada, while Maryland’s was 7.3 and Virginia’s 6.5. Embedded in this simple set of facts is an incredibly powerful lesson for us community developers, but a lesson that while essential, is one I suspect few of us are comfortable confronting.
So before I return to that article and that lesson and the discomfort that may be there, I want to detour a bit further. Meanwhile, in the back of your minds, I’d ask you to start thinking about what these rather mundane statistics might have to tell us about our work as community developers. Here is a clue: ask yourselves who lives in Washington, DC that unemployment would be almost two times Virginia’s?
In my line of work in low and very low income communities, one of the hardest challenges I face is the painful work of truth telling, which is, of course, the other half of the painful work of truth hearing. I generally approach this work not with answers, but with questions, and over the years I have found that such an approach can be unsettling. For example my grandmother is quite poor. She lives in a trailer in southern Louisiana. She’s had eleven children. Nine are poor. But if it is unacceptable for me as her grandson to ask with moral overtones how come she had so many children when she never had money, I can only imagine how off limits that line of inquiry is for you on the front lines who aren’t family.
At the core of so much of the work are a range of hard-to-hear realities for many communities, and, I suspect, on a one on one level, for many families and individuals. Which tees up my first question to you this morning: What do you think are some of those hard-to-hear realities? Who is served by naming them? Who or what is served by saying nothing? What is your experience embracing or dodging these sorts of questions?
Before I relate the content of that Washington Post article, let me tell you a little bit about a collection of five neighborhoods in Norfolk, Virginia and my work there the last few years.
Norfolk is a medium sized American city of roughly 300,000 people. It has a long standing economic relationship with the US military. It’s a coastal city. To give you some orientation, it is part southern, as you’d expect, with all that implies. And I mean all. It is part military, with all that implies. And of course, it is coastal.
In recent years Norfolk worked through much of the less successful side of its urban renewal history, and has done a truly splendid job with its downtown.
In several instances it has implemented a real commitment to high quality urban planning and design and architecture. It shows. And there’s a been a real focus on economic diversification, so what once was almost entirely a military-based economy now has a substantial financial sector, and an emergent higher education component.
The “old” Norfolk has for 20 years been slowly evolving into the “new” Norfolk. It is not there yet, but the upsides and downsides of such a transition are there to see. And so here is my second question for you community developers this morning: What do you think those upsides and downsides might be? What are the implications? Who wins, so to speak? Who loses? What do you suppose might be some hard conversations you can imagine having as community developers trying to guide Norfolk forward?
Now, part of the process Norfolk has gone through since the 1970s meant revitalizing several newly prominent near downtown neighborhoods. The main one is named Ghent.
Ghent is a fabulous near downtown residential neighborhood with two high performing commercial corridors and an intact historic housing fabric. There’s mostly single family homes, but enough medium density older 1920s apartment buildings to give the neighborhood serious retail purchasing power owing to numbers, provided residents are of means. It’s neatly circumscribed between downtown and a set of rail yards along an older industrial area that today is mostly benign and which holds great development potential.
The commitment to good physical planning principles in Norfolk the last three decades is evident in much of the mixed income housing that’s there in Ghent, and consequently this part of Norfolk is quite racially diverse.
But you should have some of the rest of the story. It is important that I identify some of the other “truths” about Ghent. For in each “truth” are elements of lessons for each of us as we think about neighborhood revitalization, and your role as change agents for Community Action Agencies, and the hard-to-ask questions, and hard-to-hear realities.
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- One is that there are no poor people there. It’s too expensive. And as a matter of actual and de facto policies, poor people are not wanted. I don’t want to leave this dangling and suggest this is good or bad. For now I am just telling you a story.
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- Two is that there used to be poor people there. When that was true, Ghent was not a thriving neighborhood by some standards; but acceptable if not thriving according to other standards. Here I am locating yet another question: What is an acceptable normal for a neighborhood? Who gets to decide? How is this related to the work of neighborhood revitalization?
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- A third truth about the Ghent neighborhood in Norfolk is that while any actual displacement of poor families from Ghent occurred many years ago, the bitterness of displacement both continues to be felt, and felt not even by people who were themselves actually displaced.
Rather, the “feeling” is not one owing to having been displaced but rather, more of a shared-lot sense by a class of people who today have no personal recollection of displacement, but who feel absolutely certain that any improvement in their neighborhoods can only come about at the cost of their removal.
Removing poor blacks from Ghent is like taking the poor white Irish out of South Boston: both clear away huge impediments to one kind of economic development while simultaneously raising a whole host of questions about what might constitute community economic development. And we have not even touched on the moral railing in all of this, where we’d try to answer the question: what is just?
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- And four is that this “empathic fear” as I have come to call it – and which I see in every distressed neighborhood in America, and that I know to exist in the minds and hearts of the communities of people living in those neighborhoods – constitutes a massive part of what holds many of these communities back. By this I mean we have a paradox deeply embedded in the challenge of community development: our “customers” are on the outside of the economic mainstream looking in. Yet like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who never really left Kansas, and who all along possessed the power of the red slippers, the keys to prosperity are far more internal than perhaps we give credit for. Which is relevant because our tools – housing tools, financial literacy tools, weatherization tools to name a few – only constitute – at best – a helpful hand into the mainstream. A more affordable home, a greater capacity to make wise financial decisions, and reduced home heating costs are just three examples of assistance that offers no guaranteed entry into the mainstream.
And herein is the paradox: poor people are on the outside of the economic mainstream – whether the measure is income or wealth – but the tools we have, while helpful, don’t really get them across the threshold. For that, poor people have to make changes they rarely seem to make, and which society – and our field especially – rarely if ever seems to require. We have developed a whole kit of tools that help accommodate being poor, but to get further than that requires asking some pretty tough questions and raising some pretty tough issues. And by tough I mean uncomfortable.
In my view this is one of the great on-going challenges we face in the field of community development: figuring out where “place”s ends and “people” begins, and, vice versa, where “people” end and “place” begins.
Of course this is all the more difficult because in truth they cannot be separated. They are distinct. We have work to do that is about real estate. And we have work to do that is about the people who own and rent that real estate. Our imperative therefore includes figuring this out, and in doing so, one thing I’ve concluded after so many years working on revitalization challenges, is that while we’ve done a great job teaching people how to collect food stamps, we’ve done a terrible job teaching them how to grow and cook spinach. So now as you begin to connect the dots, what I am really starting to get at is this relationship between people and place, between a person’s sense of self and how they relate to their home and their block and their school and their shopkeepers, and how, in turn, these homes and streets and parks and stores say something about life there in that neighborhood. So my next question is this: What signals are being sent? Who “reads” these signals? Do these signals matter? And if so, how and why? If they don’t matter, then what are you saying about markets?
So going back to that Washington Post article, remember that the unemployment rate in DC is above 11 percent and 6.5 in Virginia. More than the numbers is the larger narrative we have to pay attention to. What accounts for so many in DC being unemployed by comparison, especially when this is one large and melted market of jobs and labor supply?
Why is this so important? How is this central to community development, and how could it be central to your work in particular, those of you on the front lines working with people, seeing people’s credit scores, knowing the details of their lives, their hopes, their challenges? I want you to imagine my grandmother and her 11 children knowing that she is poor and so are nine of her kids. Where does “she” begin” and where does the “neighborhood” she lives in end? Try to imagine her. Now try to imagine her trailer. Now try to imagine the area of town she lives in.
When I reflect on these complex issues, I’ve come to some conclusions.
One is that poverty as a problem to solve is a very different problem than affordable housing. Poverty is not having money and not having ready access to money and not having the means to make money. If you build housing that is less expensive, you have helped a family in the following way. You have reduced their housing costs, and indirectly increased what’s leftover for something else. Instead of having to choose between rent and food, or rent and clothing, more can go into those other things.
Is this important? Of course it is. That’s not in question. But what is in question are the deeper more relevant issues at hand.
Let’s suppose we do reduce the cost of the housing, say, from $640 a month to $550 a month. We can do this through a variety of mechanisms. For example, we can buy less costly land on which to build our new apartment building. Suppose in one scenario the land is $1M. If we build 100 units, that works out to $10,000 per unit in land costs. If we amortize that over 30 years at today’s rates that’s about $60 a month for the land. In another scenario in a better part of town, the land costs $2.5M. In that case the land is now $150 per month per unit. The difference per month to the renter is $90 a month. But let’s look further at that example. In the first scenario, on less costly land, we have to ask “why is this land less expensive?” Invariably the answer is because the site is not in as great demand as the other site. Which begs the question: “why not?”
We know the answer to this. What we must explore are the implications.
So why is parcel B less costly than parcel A? Probably parcel B is in a less desired part of town. It turns out that what makes it less desirable is a big part of the answer to the larger question, the one about there “place” ends and “people” begins, and vice versa.
A less desirable place is going to have fewer amenities. The stores that are near this site will be tired. They will be run-down. It is very unlikely that they will communicate confidence and vibrancy. It’ll be near fewer if any quality stores. It’s be near fewer if any quality parks. It might be near some things that people just would rather be away from like a noisy highway or a factory, or drug dealing in those parks. What we have to understand is that characteristics of the surrounding environment will help set price.
This presents us with a dilemma. All else being equal, which parcel to choose. And something we have to explore at some point: why?
Suppose we choose the more expensive lot. That is going to give us more costly units. We can do a project, and that may have value in some broader sense, but the more expensive lot generates $640 a month rents, or an apartment a single mom can afford who earns roughly $11/hour. But if we buy the cheaper lot, we can generate a $550 a month rent and that means someone earning about $9.50/hour can afford that apartment.
Why do this? Well, the cheaper land allows that single mom to pay $1,100 less in rent in this hypothetical example. And that’s real money.
Let’s take this a step further. What are the other ways we can alter the equation?
Another is to add more units. Let’s say instead of 100 units, we go up another floor and develop 130 units. In this case the land cost /unit cost is now $7,700, way below what it was when we penciled out 100 units and land cost/unit was $10,000. When we amortize this, our costs go down from $60/month to $44. Now we can move my $550/month rent down to $534/month, and that means someone earning $9.25/hr. We’ve created a slightly denser building, and developed it on an undesirable lot, but we have accomplished two things. First we created 130 units of affordable housing, and 130 is a lot more than 100. Second, we reduced rents from $640/month on the costlier lot to $534 in the denser building on the cheaper lot. This allows the single mom who’s our client to now potentially pocket another $192 a year, so over a year she really now has an additional $1,400 in savings.
What might she do with this extra $1,400 that we’ve created through a focus on land price and density? Over five years at current interest rates that’s more than $7,000! This is getting to be serious money.
By buying the cheaper lot and by going denser, we’ve effectively put $7,000 in Susan Johnson’s pocket. With this she can buy a car. She can put down $1,000 on a $65,000 condominium, and save the other $6,000. She can do a lot. And suppose we have been especially thoughtful and structured an IDA match. We can quickly imagine Susan Johnson being in a very different position five years down the road. That’s one way to look at it, and an important one. It’s based on real data. It’s aspirational and optimistic. But not in entirely unrealistic territory.
But two questions quickly surface.
The first has to do with the project. We went from a project of 100 apartments for very low income families to 130. And we went from a project on costly land in a desirable part of town to more affordable land in a less desired area. To get rents as low as possible we’ve also spent a bit less on landscaping and on materials. We have created the following cocktail: on the upside, we have 130 units of housing for families with very meager wages and little to no savings. In short, they have few options in most metropolitan regions. Also on the upside we have more than $900,000 in collective equity held by 130 families, all else being equal, and there’s enormous power in that, used properly. But what about the downside? How wise is putting 130 families at $7-10/hr in one building? History would suggest not very wise at all. We will have crime. We will have behaviors that send signals to the wider market. We will have very limited retail purchasing power. The commercial strip nearby will grow tired. Plus the low rents came in some respects owing to lesser quality construction materials, and so the building will have more than normal wear and tear. And as the site – remember the more affordable of the two – was in an undesirable part of town to begin with, overall demand for that part of town has likely gone down. So your challenge is to decide which course to pursue: more or less affordability?
The second has to do with Susan Johnson. She is at $9 an hour. But in all likelihood this is only one part of the story. Just like the story of the Ghent neighborhood in Norfolk, Susan Johnson is complicated.
It turns out that she has not one child but three. Her FICO score is in the low 600s. She does not know how to grow or cook spinach. Her boyfriend who sometimes provides extra cash almost got a job at a local company but failed a urinalysis. She is 29 but she reads at a 6th grade level She has very low level math skills. In the 130 unit building we have built, she is likely to be across the corridor from Albert Robinson. He’s an extremely hard worker, that is when he shows up, and his employers are generally pleased when he shows up, except that he rarely if ever shows up on time. And when he is home, his unit generally has a lot of his kids stuff out front, and he usually parks up on the front lawn rather than in the driveway. Twice the past year the police had to show up at Mr. Robinson’s after neighbors called about the yelling and screaming late at night.
So what’s really emerging is a very intertwined story of people and place. We may be using property cost reductions to achieve affordability. We may be aiming at affordability to chip away at poverty. But if our main tools for reducing costs – density and resulting volume on one hand, and less desirable locations on the other – result in driving down demand by the market to join that community, we may have obtained affordability at the price of a community’s health.
Which brings us to the central question you must face as you contemplate people and place: what problem are you trying to solve? Are you trying to intervene in the lives of families in ways that increase their chances of joining the economic mainstream? Are you intervening in the lifecycle of a neighborhood to grow value there, and as a result, increase wealth?
I’d argue that fitting the two together requires not that we do one or the other. Nor does it require that we do them both.
Actually it requires that we do something else entirely.
It requires that we focus not on job creation per se. Nor on housing development per se. Nor on market stabilization either. Not in the social context of mainly poor people.
Rather it s that we focus on capacity. The capacity of the people we care about to do well. Here’s the paradox for you who work for Community Action Agencies.
All the money is in housing and neighborhood revitalization. Yet your core competencies – working with people – have never been more important. I am not saying to ignore neighborhood revitalization. I am not saying to ignore anti-poverty work. I am saying that your special skills are actually the glue that holds the whole together.
While bricks and mortar are important, getting Susan Johnson to not have a fourth child is going to do more for her and her community. While intervening in a looming foreclosure is critical to stemming an outflow of value from a neighborhood, really boring in on how the Robinson family spent money on Direct TV and a new truck instead of making mortgage payments is of equal if not greater value.
Let me close with a short story about another community I work in, this a rural former mining town in Arizona with very high rates of poverty and a range of cross cultural challenges, not least which is the challenge of the obesity epidemic on the Tohono O’odom Nation. In the town I’m referring to, there are three cultures – Hispanic, Anglo, and Indian. The history is not pleasant, with all the racial ugliness you may imagine.
In the mid 1980s the copper mine closed and with it went half the town’s population and any meaningful wages. This town has slowly tried to rebuild itself.
One of the great challenges in this isolated rural town with high rates of poverty is physical health. Not only is this a poor community but obesity levels are among the highest in the United States, surpassing even those of Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama.
Some have called this a food desert. Like much of rural upstate NY and rural western PA, for example, it can be easier to find Twinkies and Ho-Hos at the store than fresh vegetables. Or in this case, what is known as fried bread, a kind of deep fried trans fat sugar bomb preferred by Native Americans.
But two things worry me considerably about such labels.
First, while I concede choice is better elsewhere, I do not believe the rhetoric that people don’t eat fresh produce because there isn’t fresh produce in the stores. In my experience, the fresh produce is, in fact, there. In this small town there’s an aisle for Ho-Hos and a section for produce, with chiles and corn and fresh lettuces and squash and Brussels’s Sprouts and the like 12 months of the year. The produce is there for anyone who wants it.
Second, a place being called a food desert seems like a very convenient way to say that people no longer have the power to choose. That somewhere along the line the we human beings in 21st century lost our individual capacity to make choices and be responsible for those choices. It seems to me that people are no more forced to watch a program on television they dislike than they are required to eat Twinkles and cheese dogs and fried bread.
The key word here is “easier”.
Why? Because while it can be easier to find fatty and salty processed foods than to find tomatoes and broccoli and apples, it is not impossible in this little Arizona town to find fresh vegetables. The minute we cross the line and locate the responsibility for a poor diet with the grocer is the moment we have given up our own agency. I am reminded of that great Alice Walker quote, “the most common way people give up their power, is by thinking they don’t have any.”
It is true that the grocery store is not great.
But it is also true that it sells flour and milk and yeast and salt, and that every home in town has fresh drinking water. It turns out that these are the ingredients for bread.
And in this store there’s spinach and dried beans, great sources of iron and protein and vitamin A. And this same store carries canned tomatoes which supply extremely valuable lycopene. In the refrigerated section they carry eggs, which can be scrambled, baked, souffled, and even pickled, and in any event provide a great source of protein rich calories. And just in the next aisle are limes and lemons and the vitamin C they have, and fresh thyme and cilantro. Even in this poor community, among the poorest in the United States.
And wouldn’t you know it. Eggs and tomatoes and chiles and cilantro make a fairly decent meal. Water and oil and flour and tortillas are pretty easy. And half a mile away is a hardware store that sells cast iron skillets for $8.99
Why am I telling this story? Because the obesity epidemic is being described as a function of green vegetable availability, and not a derivative of choices and knowledge. Because we find it easier to talk about all that is missing in the lives of poor families than all that is present. Because we have become accustomed to creating food stamp programs instead of “this is how you cook” programs.
We don’t have food deserts. We have an accountability problem.
For the world to change, our communities must change. For our communities to change, we have to ask hard questions. We have to push against the commonly held view that to do so is somehow blaming the victim. Somehow making fun of the fat person. Somehow beyond the pale.
We’re in a fix of our own making. We know the way out.
You in this room are one of the few groups in America with the software to do this and the hardwiring to do it right.
You can build housing, and we need that. And you can focus your considerable talents on neighborhood revitalization. And we need that too.
But what we really need is a nation of people who can grow their own vegetables when the grocery isn’t so terrific, and in the event the sun’s not shining, we need a nation of people willing to break a few eggs.
