Banner

Archive for the ‘Community and Attitudes’ Category

« Older Entries

Bricks, Mortar, and Spinach

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

Rethinking Community Development in an Era of Policy and Market Uncertainty

It is time for an New Kind of Community Development altogether.

Yes, we should rethink what it is we are doing.  It is time for thoughtful community developers to advocate for wholesale change within our ranks.  It is no longer sufficient to work at the edges:  the underlying conceits of the “community development ’system’” work against actual realization of safe and stable neighborhoods, stable and thriving families, and housing in a proper and sustainable context.  I am suggesting that the combination of our history and what we have accomplished, what we have failed to get done, tomorrow’s scarce resource environment, and today’s uncertainty all warrant really going back to the drawing board as community developers.

And when I say going back to the drawing board I do not mean rethinking how to make the New Market Tax Credit better, or the HOME program more effective.  I mean throwing them both out and starting over.  And I don’t mean throwing out HOME and NMTCs but keeping the LIHTC and CDBG.  I mean throwing them all out.  Hard to imagine a more hackneyed approach to really tackling neighborhood distress than the alphabet soup of AHP, NSP 1,2,3, and surely (eventually) 87, QAP, EITC, and HOPE VI.

Here is what I do know.

    • If we shut down HUD tomorrow, if we eliminated all the tax credit programs we use to stimulate housing or historic preservation or jobs, and if started fresh, we could hardly do worse.  That alone should be enough to scare the ever living you know what out of every one in the field wed to the status quo of chasing HUD and related dollars because, well, that’s what we’ve always done.
    • If we are serious about community development – whether as housing professionals or social service workers or leadership development experts or sustainability advocates – we’ve been at this long enough to know some things.  It may have once been the case when without data and knowledge we designed policies and programs for which we are to be forgiven.  But that is no longer true.  We know quite a bit about what works and what does not.

It’s my view that community development as we have come to think about and practice it no longer works.

    • Not when one of four households in America is in real trouble.  Not when we have another 7.5 million foreclosures to address.
    • Not when the city-suburb split in high school graduation rates is so troubling.
    • Consider that in Baltimore, two in three will not complete high school.  In Philadelphia the figure is one in two.  In Atlanta, three in five.  Yet in the surrounding suburbs of Baltimore, 81 percent get a high school diploma.  Philadelphia, 82 percent.  Atlanta, 70.

We community developers are circumscribed within a fundamentally flawed if not broken system of interrelationships and assumptions, and dependencies.   So long therefore as our response is reactionary, it’s hard to see how we can succeed.

I also know this.  Even if we all together don’t know what in place of the current system would comprise a new one, the starting place is to admit we have a problem.  And the opportunity to make this admission and start rethinking is now.  Now when we are staring at $2T in cuts over the next ten years, much from HUD and Treasury and entitlement programs upon which community development now depends.

What do I mean when I say it is both necessary that we rethink community development and do so now?

We have to begin by asking ourselves what is it that we are trying to accomplish?

When I started in this field my first project was the development of a shelter for the homeless.  I’d come to Washington with no firmer a view of what I wanted to accomplish other than to make a difference.  I now believe that is among the worst and most irresponsible of all rationale’s for community development.  Lacking any focus or sense of cause and effect, a generalized notion of making a difference means satisfaction can come from doing anything.  This I believe is part of the DNA of community development that must be changed.  Doing anything is not good enough.  When there were homeless men on the streets early in my career, the main reason was not lack of affordable housing.  It was deinstitutionalization.  Nor was it lack of shelter beds.  It was drugs and alcohol and mental illness.  But how did we respond?  By building a building.  By spending money on housing units.  And how did we decide how many to build?  Well, it was extremely scientific.  There were a lot of bums on benches so there must be a need for a lot of beds.  When we were done we ‘d built a 1,200 bed shelter for the homeless.  But we’d also killed an entire section of a city, aggregating more than a thousand troubled men in one spot.  Had we paused to ask a very simply question – what problem are we trying to solve – we might well have focused not on bricks and mortar, but services, and if on bricks and mortar, maybe a few dozen smaller places.  I can’t say this for sure.  In fact I believe even with the pause button on, the focus would have been on building a building.  Why?  Because it was easier.

Later as a developer of affordable rental housing, the projects were apartment buildings.  Some new construction.  Some rehabilitated stocks.  In those cases the job was to address the growing affordability challenges in the 1990s in strong markets.  Only we didn’t confine our production to strong markets.  National policies were created in response to exploding housing costs in LA, San Francisco, NY, Chicago, and DC.  Suddenly, tools designed to work in those markets were available to cities everywhere.  Buffalo and Detroit got to building new apartments, there being a national affordable housing shortage.  The problem was – and remains – that housing markets are extremely local.  You can’t have a nationally defined problem.  Heck you can’t have a state defined problem.  Someone working for $11 an hour in B&S Auto Parts in the Asheville area doesn’t care about housing costs in Wrightsville Beach.  Yet that’s how we developed housing, based largely on average calculations of supply and demand and housing cost in relation to household income.  The Enterprise Foundation took one look at the growing gap between housing costs and wages in the Baltimore area and concluded that the right thing to do was to build affordable housing in Baltimore.  Of course at the time Baltimore had more than 40,000 vacant housing units and the value to income ratio in the city was about 2-1, so in fact there was no need for more affordable housing in Baltimore.

In the suburbs?  You bet.  But is that where HUD dollars went?  Is that where tax credit equity went?  Is that where the CDCs were started?  Is that where affordable rental housing was built?  Had the City, or Enterprise, or the HUD regional office, or Senator Mikulski’s office just pressed the pause button for a just a second, they would have drawn two conclusions.  First, in the City of Baltimore, the problem was low wages resulting from low education levels which attached to a poor quality labor force, low levels of job creation, and a need for economic development.  Second, in the suburbs the problem was job creation – and often service sector job creation – amid the absence of any affordable rental product.  Across the region the problem was congestion owing to jobs-housing spatial mismatches.  And throughout the region was a deeply held view that affordable housing was public housing, and public housing was dangerous housing where black people lived.

Do I believe a smarter more granular development strategy would have resulted had we all stopped to think about it?  No.  If one part of our DNA as community developers is a generalized notion of doing good, another is that we tend to do good along the path of least resistance, and it is this path that almost never results in meaningfully changing the underlying governing variables that require our attention.  So why did we build affordable housing in Baltimore where it was not appropriate?  Because it was easier.  Our bar has always been too low as community developers.  To make a difference.  To make sure the homeless are in from the cold.  Our field has become a collection of accommodation specialists.  And our advocates on Capitol Hill fierce voices for meaningless tinkering at the edges.

Still later, the issues moved from responding to homelessness and then affordability, to the broader palliative so creatively labeled sustainability.  First with New Urbanism.  Then with Smart Growth.  Then the Transect.  Then Green Jobs.  Then LEED approved design.  Rather than confine the genuine benefits of New Urbanist theories to issues of suburban retrofit where they belong, or of Smart Growth to regional carrying capacity, these and their cousin gestalt became codewords for the 1990s version of Modernism, which of course is just the architectural term for Sir Thomas More’s fictional island in the Atlantic. We applied all manner of building codes to what were, and largely remain social problems.  Is it any wonder that the banal cul de sacs of the suburbs still produce literate, well-behaved kids who graduate from high school and go on to prosperous careers while the kids of the inner city remain far outside the economic mainstream, lacking not just what should be taught in school (reading and writing) but what should be a foundational element of home life:  showing up on time for work, being able to pass a urine test, getting along with others, thinking critically and creatively.

The problem has never been that kids in tough rural areas lack for front porches and walkability.  It’s never been the case that young boys and girls in West Durham can’t walk to school.  It’s that they are being raised by parents who don’t have jobs, and who often don’t have jobs because they never graduated from high school, and who didn’t graduate from high school because they had parents who never did, either.  We can green the jobs.  We can LEED certify the buildings.  We can implement form based codes.  We can even require picket fences.  But until our kids read at grade level, and until they delay having kids until they are married, and until they delay marriage until they are employed, our challenges as community developers are not likely tackled with more housing products, no matter how green they are, and no matter how many times Van Jones says it’s a beautiful feedback loop of hiring and employment and sustainability.

This is not to pick on housing development or Van Jones.  Housing development is needed.  And green housing is preferable.  And deep shades of green most preferable of all.

But what we really need is an affordable housing development systems that make sense inside a sensible community development system.

To build such a system, we have to not be content to simply respond to the crazy times we are in by advocating to protect the monies we have become used to.  Heck, that’s what the “affordable housing lobby” is all about. We can do better.  Instead we have to think about housing differently.  And this means asking some questions.

First, why are we building new housing?  Who is the customer?

Second, when we build new housing, or rehabilitate older stocks, who are our neighbors?  What is the resulting market we are helping to reshape?  What kinds of characteristics will define that new market?

Third, what is the scale of analysis that confirms need?  Are we working in response to problems defined at the block level, the neighborhood level, the city level, the region?  What?

Fourth, is the housing the real goal?  Is our goal economic development of the family for which a more affordable house payment is our aim?  Is the goal access to equity for first time owners?  Can these goals be achieved alternatively?

Fifth, how is the goal being delivered?  Are there better delivery devices out there?  In some places the private sector may well be especially suited to deliver a great product.  In others perhaps it is the non profit sector.  In still others maybe it is a redevelopment agency or a housing authority.

These are just some of the questions that would have to be asked if we were aiming to have a coherent housing system designed to work for working families that made sense.

And that would still leave us with the requirement to rethink the community development system in which housing work would exist.

For example, is the goal – as many of the sophomores at the University of Iowa would have had us believe during the caucus in 2008 when they voted for some amorphous sense of Hope – just to make an undifferentiated difference, or something tangible?

Is community development about eradicating poverty forever?

Or just helping the Johnson family move out of a trailer in Tyron and get into a more dignified home closer to a job in Hendersonville?  If it is really about addressing poverty, is the focus of work on getting Tonya Johnson’s reading skills up, or making sure she knows where the food bank is?  Any honest assessment of the wider community development system would have to acknowledge that we’ve done a great job teaching people how to collect food stamps, but a terrible job teaching them how to grow spinach.

I suggest the problem isn’t that we don’t know how to build a good system, but often that we aren’t focused on the problem we want to solve.

In the Johnson’s case, who may indeed have a housing challenge, the problem may be that she hans’t a clue about gardening and cooking, doesn’t know how to read at a level necessary to get the job that is available, can’t pass a urine test, is unmarried, and is about to have a third child.  While there may be, and probably is an affordable housing problem here to tackle, I’d submit we can fix that and still wind up in trouble.  If Pruit Igoe means anything, surely it is this.

Which brings me to the test of any new system – housing or otherwise – I believe we must now start building.  When we have used the tools we are so good at creating, have we triggered a result where the there is fundamental lasting change?

Let me give you an example.  In one of my client communities – this in Louisiana – Habitat for Humanity has been very productive.  So productive in fact they have 15% of the housing market.  It is also the case that while the structures they built replaced shacks, it is also true their structures are well on their way to becoming shacks themselves.  And it is likewise true that 95% of the crime in this one community comes from the new Habitat homes, the owners of whom haven’t a clue about gardening and cooking, don’t know how to read at a level necessary to get the job that is available, can’t pass a urine test, are unmarried, and are about to have a third child.  This is not to indict Habitat.  Nor residents with many difficult challenges.  It is, however, to be candid.  With a few exceptions, this is what we have created in our housing systems because we ask only that housing get built, and we ask only that housing get built because at the outset we define the problem – and the resulting work – incorrectly.

Consider that when I started in this field, the five poorest states from 45th to 50th were New Mexico, West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.  Today the five poorest states from 45th to 50th are New Mexico, Alabama, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Mississippi.  These happen also to be the five states with the lowest Science and Engineering Readiness or SERI scores.  The three fattest states?  West Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi.  I assure you in all these cases we’ve built a lot of housing and issued a lot of food stamps.

Meanwhile Baltimore has 25,000 vacant housing units and the Enterprise Foundation wants to build more. Of course they will be green!

Buffalo has 28,000 vacant housing units and the City has a plan to demolish 50 a year.  That’ll work!   In 560 years Buffalo’s supply imbalance will about right, provided that is that it stops losing population, that is; but given that Buffalo has lost an average of 12% of its base every ten years since Eisenhower was President I am not holding my breath.

In some instances, there has been extraordinary success. The work of Don Terner and later Carol Gallant at BRIDGE.  Martin Eakes and Stephanie Barnes Simms work at Self Help in Durham, and Mountain Housing right here.  But they are the extreme exception.

While these are indeed fast-changing times, and while there is much uncertainty, I am not ready to agree that today things are any more uncertain than before.

Pick whatever period you wish.  Desegregation and Jim Crowe.  The emergence and implementation of the Great Society.  The coming to fruition of 40 years of anti-New Deal backlash under the rubric of Reagan style federalism.  Soft vanilla urban initiatives under Bush and Clinton.  Deindustrialization.  Loss of mill and factory jobs.

We’ve gone from red-lining, to the testimony of Gale Cincotta and the rise of community development lending.  We’ve gone from building new public housing shaped by the church of Corbusier, to tearing it down.  From large and lethargic public agencies to small and ineffective nonprofits funded by larger and more lethargic public agencies.

We’ve taken our eye off the ball and as a consequence, things are very much like they have always been.

  • After the Civil War, the poorest states in our re-connected Union were Mississippi, Louisiana, and  Alabama.  150 years later, these are still our poorest states.  This is not to say great accomplishments have not been realized like the transformation of Greenville-Spartanburg through BMW, or the Research Triangle Park, or the emergence of a clean Birmingham.  But it is largely the case that were there was poverty there is poverty.  It is largely the case that where markets were dysfunctional, they remain dysfunctional.
  • Since the creation of HUD, and despite $500B in community development spending the last 25 years, East Baltimore is arguably worse for the wear.  South Baton Rouge as weak as ever.  Houston’s Fifth Ward distressed.  East St. Louis, Flint, Gary.  Deracinated.  Pick the city.
  • 100,000 Habitat for Humanity houses, and countless Junior League and other such types content with their donation of time later, and few to zero of the communities where poor families have benefited from such largesse are measurably better.

There are numerous counter arguments of course, and they deserve a hearing.

We can – and should point to the good work that LISC and Enterprise and others have done.  The production volume facilitated by the Low Income House Tax Credit.  The rise of the community development corporation.  It’s a long list we can create if we are trying to disprove my contention that the system is broken.

The larger point I want to make is that combined – today’s turbulence and its specific nature, and the constancy of distress in certain markets and certain families – we have more than enough data to convincingly assert that the time has come for us to reinvent community development.

What would a new kind of community development look like?  For starters, not very much at all like it is today.

Now the dominant metric is outputs.  The number of meetings we attend and the number of units we produce.  We must shift to outcomes.

When we make the shift to an outcome orientation, we no longer are focused on how many units we create, but how they function in the wider market.  Once we start to think about housing in the context of markets, we confront a whole new set of challenges far more difficult that the one’s we now use to frame our work.

    • In a market context we have to worry about collateral.  Therefore our units have to be very high quality.
    • In a market context we have to think about acquisition costs, and so we have to look for affordable sites.
    • But affordable land or buildings are usually affordable because they are in locations that aren’t desirable.  Therefore we have to think about the implications of that.
    • We now have to think about resale value in ten and 20 years. Therefore we have to think about capital replacement costs, as well, and that means we now have to think about income.  Therefore we have to raise the rents.
    • And if we are in the affordable housing business, we have to therefore think about how to raise rents without creating the situation we’re in business to fix.

Well it turns out that concentrating a lot of low income people in one place is directly correlated with getting to low rents.  It’s also the case that procuring lousy land is also correlated with low rents.  However, these can easily become prescriptions for the delivery of ticking time bombs.

You may all be saying to yourselves, “not me…not my organization.”  But the truth is most CDCs have bills to pay that only get paid with HUD’s CHDO dollars, CDBG resources, proceeds from tax credit projects, or grants from foundations that haven’t a clue about how to development markets but which are mission driven to help poor people.  So as a matter of course this is exactly what we build – problems for some other generation to cope with, either in the form of a decayed structure, or residents who still can’t read, or both.

My prescription is that we have to become slaves to outcomes.

But know this:  such an approach can be very unsatisfying.

For a focus on outcomes means making hard – really hard choices.  And when we have fewer resources, those choices become even more maddeningly hard.   Indeed I submit it is precisely because outcomes are so hard that we avoid focusing on them to the degree such challenges as poverty and neighborhood distress and housing affordability remain.

Consider that if we can strengthen the neighborhood by building a mixed income project, but in so doing we deliver 14 affordable units but not 34, we are, in effect, choosing to not help 20 poor families.  We are, in effect, choosing the stability of the neighborhood and the future of the project and the life trajectories of those 14 over an alternative route.  I know which one I would recommend but that doesn’t make it easy, and it doesn’t make it right.  But what we have now is a landscape of lots of units in lots of projects housing a lot of people unable to do a lot of basic things, which, as it turns out, are the necessary building blocks for succeeding in life:  being able to read, being able to grow and cook spinach, being able to pass a urine test, being able to wait to get married until later in life, and being able to wait to have kids until the marriage can handle such pressures.

We have to show a willingness to confront these challenge so the turbulence we are in now is not wasted.

We are at an inflection point in capitalism, in urban and industrial policy, and so too should we community developers be thinking along revolutionary lines.  In my 20 years in community development I am sorry to say that the central hallmark of the field is the constant messing around at the edges, the regular filing and sanding of existing programs.

We have developed some incredible tools, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the New Market Tax Credit.  But even these are rather more pointed towards accommodating the status quo of poverty and distress than alleviating it.

Why?  Because the status quo breeds system contentedness and challenging this means pushing against a whole assortment of assumptions.

Suppose our work for the next 10 or so minutes was to paint by numbers, to fill in where needed.  What questions would have to be answered?

Certainly one set has to do with outcomes.  With goals.  What are we working towards?  What would success look like?

Is success fewer poor families?  Do we measure this by the actual number of poor families or by the percent of poor families?

Is success the same number or percentage of poor families but in better housing conditions?  Is it the same number or percentage but in better housing conditions that are in economically segregated neighborhoods?

The departure I would argue our times and today’s turbulence mandate is that we do not conflate all these.  That we exercise discipline in shaping policy and programs so that as we attempt to solve for the problem of housing inadequacy, we do not operate under the misguided belief that we are mitigating poverty.

A serious outcomes discussion will be hard.  Harder than hard.  Why?  Because this means choices and this means hard choices.  And the one set of choices we must make also happens to be the one set of choices we community developers are not hard wired to make:  battlefield reality choices.  I submit to you that until you on the front lines begin to modulate the distress inevitable to the challenges presented by triage, our communities will not have the capacity to authorize this conversation.  We will continue to “help” everyone and accomplish little.

As hard as an outcomes conversation is, it pales in conversation to the one we must have about inputs.  For while outcomes is about allocating resources based on strategy, inputs is about allocating accountability based on responsibility.

In our failing schools in Norfolk or Durham or Phoenix, who is responsible for Johnny not being able to read?  Is is a cadre of poor educators?  Is it the community of adults not involved in their neighbors’ children’s lives?  Is it the parents, many who probably never should have been parents in the first place?

In our current and worsening obesity epidemic, who is responsible for the fat kid in fourth grade who can’t learn because her electrolytes are out of balance and whose breakfast was two candy bars and a Red Bull and whose dinner will be a 4,000 calorie salty, trans-fat bomb?  Is it Hardees?  Coca Cola?  Is it the school that provides pizza for lunch?  Is it Mom who is alone, Dad who abandoned the family?

In our struggling tax credit housing, who is responsibility for the failure to set enough capital replacement reserves to address aging roofs and boilers?  Who is responsible for the social costs of concentrating 120 low-income families, none with legitimate 12th grade reading or math skills, into one apartment complex that happens to be in an already overly poor neighborhood?  Is it the non profit housing agency that developed the property?  The state housing finance agency with the QAP full of perverse incentives for creating such projects?  Politically active middle and upper middle income neighborhoods that control the zoning debate and keep mixed income rental housing out of their neighborhoods?  The mortgage interest deduction that distorts markets in order to satisfy the real estate and home builders lobbies?

Invariably these inputs conversations are linked to the outcomes dialogue.  So the question remains:  what does a new kind of community development look like?

I believe to answer this, we must focus on the goal we are trying to achieve, and I am convinced the first order of business is to focus all of our attention not on parents and grandparents but on kids.  And for their success, all energy must point towards helping them become productive adults.

The implication for community developers is twofold:  if you must build housing units, then in these turbulent times, do so with the following principles in mind:

  1. Rehab whenever possible before you consider new construction, regardless of the incentive system.  Rehabilitation is more labor intensive, puts more people to work, reuses materials, does not consume land, and so does not tend to worsen jobs-housing spatial mismatches.  If the incentives remain disproportionately in support of new construction, work to change that.
  2. Build more multifamily units than single family units.  Multifamily units consume less land, reduce unit costs, increase affordability, and create the potential for sufficient purchasing power to be created in support of neighborhood-serving retail.  If the incentives remain disproportionally in support of single family development, work to change that.
  3. Locate your units where the jobs are.  Most struggling families cannot afford to travel significant distances to find work.  Most of the work they find will be work that pays between $8-$20 an hour, hardly enough for gas at $4-5 a gallon, to say nothing of car and insurance payments.  This you know.  If the disincentives remain disproportionally in weighted against your efforts to locate units near jobs, work to change that.
  4. Build mixed income projects.  The last thing mom needs – or wants – is to go to work as a cashier from nine to five and come home to a neighborhood full of cashiers and a lot of unemployed neighbors.  Kids need to see success to imagine being upwardly mobile

The next few years of community development will be marked by tight credit.  While there will be some loosening of underwriting, the days of low FICO score and meager savings being enough and tiny downpayments for a home are over.  And rightly so.  Demand for good rental units will remain, and that brings with it a whole host of ancillary opportunities.

The opportunity to push against sprawl.  The opportunity to push for inclusionary zoning.  The opportunity to push for mixed-income neighborhoods through mixed-income development.  The opportunity to take a labor but not materials-intensive approach.  These are ways we should be going about our work.

And each creates a chance to educate and to lead.  To ask questions of defenders of the status quo.  To force the state housing finance agency to lend differently, to allocate tax credits differently.  To push against local planning commissions and city councils who would keep all the poor in the one neighborhood or ward that is invariably on the other side of the tracks.

Of course this approach costs more in the short run.  So our system will be asked to adapt.  It will be asked to validate an approach that is more costly on the front end, and so you will find on top of an outcomes and an inputs challenge, we have a math problem.

With scarce resources in a world where this is the new and lasting normal, how those resources are deployed is the central policy question all our work requires us to confront.  What do I mean when I say we have a math problem?

Today we house 100 families with $15M, $3-4M of which is subsidized.  The result is we have a 100 units in a distressed neighborhood.  100 poorly built units that will require more maintenance than the system budgeted for. 100 units with close to 100 poor families in them. 100 poor families many miles from 90 jobs.  100 families of whom maybe 25 actually have job skills.  100 families of whom most are not married, the surest path to multi-generational poverty.  100 families of whom most have kids before the family so much as opened a savings account, nevermind had income enough to set aside.  100 families most of whom cannot really read and write at an 8th grade level.

In this coming era of less resources than ever, the math problem is striking.  Now we have the same 100 families.  The market suggests the costs are about the same – $15M – but the subsidy we have is less, down to $2M.  With gap financing downsized, we can now serve not 100 families but 80.

The math is really a fork in the road.  Down one path we can use the exact same tools and feed into the exact same system as before, and try to serve those 80 families with half to two thirds of the subsidy we’ve grown accustomed to.  We serve those families the exact same way, but we serve less of them.

The result?  We have 80 units in a distressed neighborhood.  80 poorly built units that will require more maintenance than the system budgeted for. 80 units with close to 80 poor families in them. 80 poor families many miles from 60 jobs.  80 families of whom maybe 20 actually have job skills.  80 families of whom most are not married, the surest path to multi-generational poverty.  80 families of whom most have kids before the family so much as opened a savings account, nevermind had income enough to set aside.  80 families most of whom cannot really read and write at an 8th grade level.

The other path is different, and so we have a hard choice to make.  A choice that has to do with outcomes – what are the goals we’re working towards.  A choice that has to do with the inputs that shape our work – how do we as community developers think about the issues of accountability and responsibility.

This other path would rehab existing homes rather than build new.  It would focus on multi-family rental rather than single family and rather than on home ownership.  It would develop where there are jobs, not where the land is cheapest.  And it would build mixed-income projects.

This other path is harder and more expensive.  So not only would it stress the system and invite push back from your partners and other usual players and allies, but its higher costs would mean reduced output.  Instead of 80 families, perhaps we are now talking about 60 or 70 families.  And for any of us in this field, that means, in effect, saying no or looking the other way in some form from the other 30-40 families part of our original 100.

But I would submit that for those who think we would not be serving 30-40 and leaving them out in the cold, let me suggest a different perspective.

In my view we are failing nearly all of the 100 families we try today to serve.  We certainly are failing any of them whose children’s trajectory suggests they will become just like their mom.

The future I suggest, going down the harder path, the one to make us think and work differently, the one to really compel us as community developers to mature to a whole new way, tries not to reach 100 poorly but 60-70 well.

I can only speak for myself.  I would much prefer to do the work that would result in 60-70 successes than 90 failures of every 100 attempts.  Now I am totally aware of the risk this approach entails and the exposure to criticism of folding utilitarian math on the moral compass of the community development field.  But I reject that argument.  The basis for this choice is not that 60-70 successes is better than 10, but that it is less than just to validate a system grounded not on a social contract or even grace, but luck.  Good luck if you’re born in the shadow of Self Help’s great work in Durham, bad luck if you happen to be born in Fayetteville where no such organization exists.

We are at a historic inflection point.  You have the chance to keep doing more of the same, or really, truly do something different.  When your housing production is connected – deliberately and measurably – to the knowledge of how to grow and cook spinach, you’ll be there.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Community and Attitudes, Planning and Design Critique, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

The Leaf Blower and the Land Rover

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

In some analysis three years ago for a client between NYC and Boston, we thought (and said, and said again) that the housing seemed over-valued.  No, we were told, emphatically, by the economic development folks.  Absolutely not.  We have an acute affordable housing shortage we were told; there is no bubble.  What signs are there of such a bubble, they asked sarcastically.

During the field work for that report, I happened to be going through some of the neighborhoods on the south end of the city, in mid February.  It was exactly what you think of when you think of coastal New England that time of year.  Leafless and seemingly lifeless (save an occasional winterberry holly) wooded lots between distressed three flats provided some relief from colorless and grim and weather beaten shiplapped.

Importantly, all was as it ought to have been.  The cheap part of town, with dilapidated housing, on the wrong side of the interstate, windblown Tyvek on it’s last staples before sailing toward Long Island.  Older make cars and their crooked license plates, brining in sea salt.

DSCN3200

Suddenly a flash of orange.  A man wearing an orange hat is running through the wooded lot.  It’s about 35 degrees.  Last week’s snow is still on the ground.  It’s 11 in the morning and it’s gray everywhere except for those holly berries and this man’s orange hat.

I wanted to see what this was about.  The man was clearly not jogging on the side of the road.  I was out there with my parcel maps and notebook, doing field work.  Not every day you see a man running through a wooded lot at top speed.  I stopped the car and put it in reverse to have a better look.

My seatmate, an irrepressible Chicago community developer who’d come east to help me think about the housing challenges in this ethnic community of neighborhoods, would have none of it.  “No! This is too strange, something’s not right, why the fk are you stopping the car?  Let’s get outta here!”

Moments later we saw why the man was running, and apparently for his life.  For 30 yards and a few seconds behind him was a bearded man with a crossbow, at full gallop through the shrubs, trying to shoulder-rest his bow and get a bead on the man in the orange hat.  We drove away, leaving Vladimir and Anatoly to work out on their own whatever it was that had come between them.

The issue that remains salient though is the matter of what is normal.

It’s perfectly normal for a New England coastal community to be gray in February.  For the poor side of town to be extra worn.  We expect this.  We order our days around these expectations.

And it is completely abnormal for a man in an American inner city neighborhood to be chased by another armed with a crossbow looking like a very angry Raskolnikov.  Yet as we drove on to leave the crossbow and the hare to their own destinies, we passed people walking down the street, and none of them were pointing towards the manhunting exhibition that had, one could surmise, simply faded into the background of our evolving urban milieu.

Which brings me to the leaf blower, my Nicaraguan house cleaner, the foreclosure nightmare we’re in, and cheap meat.  Or, put another way, to the suburban environment we’ve become immune to, decisions and their consequences, our time-honored tradition of kicking the can, and the double whopper.

In suburban Northern Virginia, November makes good on two promises.

The first is that the many maple and oak and other shade trees that are our beloved canopy drop their leaves by the ton.  It turns out this makes wonderful leaf mulch and like so many communities nationwide, my town sucks them up and transports them by the yard to the magic mulch making place across town whereupon they become next year’s ground cover for whomever wants it.

The second is that what should ordinarily be a rather quiet neighborhood is instead a place of constant noise.  From 10 am to 3 pm each day, the neighborhood is assaulted by five foot five inch Central American men in fall clothing wrapped in leaf blowing machinery.  Trucks arrive mid morning like military assault vehicles.  From each of their maws emerge a half dozen short men.  They strap on two-stroke John Deere blowers and start moving next spring’s mulch to the street.  They unleash a low roar that won’t stop for two hours.  These yard assault teams break for lunch and then all the way through dusk tornado the lawns of a middle class unable to reach for a rake, that is if they know how to use one.

This phenomenon has been in full tilt for at least a decade in middle America, by 2000 rich enough to hire Juan and Carlos and Miguel to keep the grass green, and too busy (in their minds) to clean their own homes.

What’s fascinating – and troubling – is that the voting district I’m in, where every day these battalions of Central American leaf blowers visit and contribute to the wasteful consumption of fossil fuels their machines demand – voted overwhelming for Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama.

My district’s voting habits could be a body double for Berkeley, but what we have on our streets are Nissan Armadas, Chevy Tahoes, Range Rovers, and oh yes, the leaves from the yards of all those left voting pro environment folks who no longer own a rake owing to the availability of so many short brown men and their portable John Deeres.  Now we have our share of Prius’s (is the plural of Prius Pruii?  (Scary close to Pruitt Igoe)), but they’re still outnumbered four to one by the big vehicles with the jingoistic yellow ribbons on them supporting troops that never come from our neighborhood.  Never.

In an important way these fossil fuel consuming two stroke strap on leaf blowers and the ceaseless noise they make are now part of the background.

They are a part of the suburban system that has so absorbed their presence they no longer stand out.  All of these yardmen should have been a sign of an awful lot of disposable income, a sign of an awful waste of precious carbon absorbing capacity.  Instead they are like the servants from an Edwardian downstairs, sneaking in and out with ladles of gravy and another mis en bouteille poached from a Buñuel screenplay.  They’re not seen and neither is the full impact of all those leafless lawns considered.  It’s our norm.  Welcome to the Monkey House.

And it’s all connected.  It turns out that one of the wives of one of the leaf blowers is a woman who has cleaned my house every other week for the last 12 years, too busy as I am (in my mind) to do it myself.

When she first started, she would arrive at my home in an older Honda or Toyota or Datsun, as would befit one’s expectation.

Some time in the late 1990s she arrived in a Land Rover.  I made a mental note of this, how interesting it was that the lady who was cleaning my house arrived in a car twice the cost of the one I was driving.  I mentioned it laughingly now and then to others, remarking “you gotta like this economy where my cleaning lady drives a Land Rover.”  But though I noticed it, and took enough notice to mention it to others I didn’t really ever think about it.  Never connected the credit scoring and predatory lending dots that in hindsight are so easy to see.

At some point I gathered she and her husband had purchase a home.  I did a few back of the envelops to see how the math could work on her and her leaf blower’s salaries, and it never really penciled out.  But I let it recede, no doubt in the same way my neighbors drove to the polls in their Chevy Surbuban to vote for Gore.  My 401-K was performing, so why bother to unpack the inputs that enabled a cleaning lady’s salary to go from a Land Rover to a Hummer and buy a home in one of the nation’s costliest housing markets. And I’m in the housing business!

At some point in the early 2000s my cleaning lady called to say she had car trouble.  The next time she arrived though she came in a Hummer.  While I was making five to ten times her salary, she was busy buying a car twice as expensive as mine and more than twice as expensive to fill up.

I had a cleaning lady who had been driving a Land Rover only to switch to a Hummer.  Out she would come, emerging from her assault vehicle in one part of my neighborhood to clean homes while her husband would emerge from another kind of assault vehicle two blocks away to clean lawns.  I would arch my eyebrows a bit every time I saw this, but I never really registered it in a canary in a coal mine sort of way.  Didn’t stop to really think about how it might be possible for her to afford these cars, to say nothing of owning a house in the half million dollar Northern Virginia suburbs on a noisy leaf blower’s wages.

The sheer oddity of this faded into the background.  Her Land Rover was as much an assumed part of life as the idiocy of blowing leaves when a rake will do just fine.  Of course she now drives a rather beat up minivan, long ago discarded no doubt by some soccer mom in Falls Church whose husband today blows his own leaves with his Home Depot Troy- Bilt, given the collapse of the value of their stock portfolio.

How it is that an army of Central American leaf blowers descending every day into suburbia could not arouse as much notice as Vlad the crossbowman remains a mystery.  But then again I was standing in line in a Burger King in Fredonia, NY not long ago trying to pencil out how it is that burgers could be so cheap and what kind of an industrialized business model must be in place for a double whopper to cost the same as an organic apple.

Then again I’ve not take responsibility for my role in the terrible condition of the teeth my cleaning lady can’t afford to fix.

Posted in Community and Attitudes | 1 Comment »

Community and Neighborhood

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Community and Neighborhood
Tuberculosis Water
2009 has brought czb to many places in America, and to some interesting conclusions.
Santa Fe reminded us about green chile posole and cold Dr Pepper at Cowgirl.  It took me into the raw beauty of Tesuque, a grace matched by a pervasive effete on the other side of the coin that still thinks community is shorthand for three part harmony.  (See Rodney King:  ”Can’t we all just get along?”).  Then again, it’s rather near impossible to ride the breeze down Bishop’s Lodge adrift in the pinon and lavender and not wonder if harmony is the point and that there’s nothing ephemeral whatsoever about the wonder one finds on the Pueblo.  Indeed the magic will shake you to your core.
You might not think the Rust Belt offers similar life conferring waters to the parched.  But I have found the struggling communities of Western Pennsylvania and Western and Upstate New York the very definition of courtesy.  These shrinking places – so glibly labeled as such by the no nothings in the community development field from New York City and Columbia, MD – may actually be on the cutting edge of Schumachering America forward out of their SUVs and into public libraries and high school gymnasiums to rediscover what we’ve known all along:  yesterday’s modernists were wrong when Corbu thought we could plaza people to consensus, and today’s Gropii are incorrect when they assert we can TND a subdivision into a community.
From the scented beauty of the Atalaya where one can see all things and that all things are possible, to the rusting Lake Effect where people know how to be genuinely thankful in a wonderful Midwestern sort of way, 2009 also brought us to the postdeluvian Louisiana Atchafalaya.  Another cold Dr. Pepper, some sweet potato fries and a po’boy so good it’ll make you cry.  From 10 degrees in January in Franklin Pennsylvania snow and ice to 95 and humid along the Causeway to Mandeville, people are hungry everywhere for authenticity.  Maybe not in the experience of place – maybe so.  But most certainly for real community.  Not facebook’s rolodex and not a pattern book, either.
2009 also reintroduced Ascension, where the white egrets and Live Oaks slow one down, and allow for people to have a nice conversation in Lamendola’s grocery and the best fried shrimp I’ve had in years at the Seafood Corner Exxon on Airline Highway.  There, the struggle is the same, and just as righteous:  how to keep our community together, hold onto what’s important.
This is the lesson Park Silly reinforced in relecting a genuine communitarian to Mayor, affirming that our beliefs are what guide us, our “faith in a seed”, our own ecologies of commerce moreso than the transect.  We rediscovered the endless tension between our (good angel’s) hearts and the economic imperative to pay as we go, not kick the can any longer, and nowhere was this lesson reinforced more than in the impoverished SW Atlanta neighborhoods surrounding but not truly ever invited to be a part of downtown.  There we have confronted the truly ugly as captured in racially defined predatory lending by HSBC and Wells and Chase and Citi, and equally true beneficence in the effort to partner in these communities and help regain a measure of health and confidence (which, incidentally come from treating each other respectfully, and not, as some would have us believe, from the mere requirement for a center and some edges).
This year brought us to New Mexico, Pennsylvania, New York, Louisiana, Utah, Georgia , and now as we begin 2010, to Virginia again.  This past spring, we explored the raw beauty of an asparagus field in April in the historic Northern Neck, where re-oystering is showing we can do some things as a people.  And now we head towards Norfolk, which has some really big boats.  I mean big.  Ships.
Before we get to Norfolk though, there’s going to be a stop in Nashville and Oklahoma City and Albuquerque, and along this road we hope to reacquaint with czb’s wonderful friends.  It’s been a good tough year.  There’s so much work to do.
Charles Buki

Community and Neighborhood

2009 has brought czb to many places in America, and to some interesting conclusions.

Santa Fe reminded us about green chile posole and cold Dr Pepper at Cowgirl.  It took me into the raw beauty of Tesuque, a grace matched by a pervasive effete on the other side of the coin that still thinks community is shorthand for three part harmony.  (See Rodney King:  ”Can’t we all just get along?”).  Then again, it’s rather near impossible to ride the breeze down Bishop’s Lodge adrift in the pinon and lavender and not wonder if harmony is the point and that there’s nothing ephemeral whatsoever about the wonder one finds on the Pueblo.  Indeed the magic will shake you to your core.

You might not think the Rust Belt offers similar life conferring waters to the parched.  But I have found the struggling communities of Western Pennsylvania and Western and Upstate New York the very definition of courtesy.  These shrinking places – so glibly labeled as such by the no nothings in the community development field from New York City and Columbia, MD – may actually be on the cutting edge of Schumachering America forward out of their SUVs and into public libraries and high school gymnasiums to rediscover what we’ve known all along:  yesterday’s modernists were wrong when Corbu thought we could plaza people to consensus, and today’s Gropii are incorrect when they assert we can TND a subdivision into a community.

From the scented beauty of the Atalaya where one can see all things and that all things are possible, to the rusting Lake Effect where people know how to be genuinely thankful in a wonderful Midwestern sort of way, 2009 also brought us to the postdeluvian Louisiana Atchafalaya.  Another cold Dr. Pepper, some sweet potato fries and a po’boy so good it’ll make you cry.  From 10 degrees in January in Franklin Pennsylvania snow and ice to 95 and humid along the Causeway to Mandeville, people are hungry everywhere for authenticity.  Maybe not in the experience of place – maybe so.  But most certainly for real community.  Not facebook’s rolodex and not a pattern book, either.

2009 also reintroduced Ascension, where the white egrets and Live Oaks slow one down, and allow for people to have a nice conversation in Lamendola’s grocery and the best fried shrimp I’ve had in years at the Seafood Corner Exxon on Airline Highway.  There, the struggle is the same, and just as righteous:  how to keep our community together, hold onto what’s important.

This is the lesson Park Silly reinforced in re-electing a genuine communitarian to Mayor, affirming that our beliefs are what guide us, our “faith in a seed”, our own ecologies of commerce moreso than the transect.  We rediscovered the endless tension between our (good angel’s) hearts and the economic imperative to pay as we go, not kick the can any longer, and nowhere was this lesson reinforced more than in the impoverished SW Atlanta neighborhoods surrounding but not truly ever invited to be a part of downtown.  There we have confronted the truly ugly as captured in racially defined predatory lending by HSBC and Wells and Chase and Citi, and equally true beneficence in the effort to partner in these communities and help regain a measure of health and confidence (which, incidentally come from treating each other respectfully, and not, as some would have us believe, from the mere requirement for a center and some edges).

This year brought us to New Mexico, Pennsylvania, New York, Louisiana, Utah, Georgia , and now as we begin 2010, to Virginia again.  This past spring, we explored the raw beauty of an asparagus field in April in the historic Northern Neck, where re-oystering is showing we can do some things as a people.  And now we head towards Norfolk, which has some really big boats.  I mean big.  Ships.

Before we get to Norfolk though, there’s going to be a stop in Nashville and Oklahoma City and Albuquerque, and along this road we hope to reacquaint with czb’s wonderful friends.  It’s been a good tough year.  There’s so much work to do.

Charles Buki

Posted in Community and Attitudes, Planning and Design Critique | 2 Comments »

Starbucks: The Achievable Good en Route to a More Perfect

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

25 years ago (gulp) when I was a student in Chapel Hill, you could go to the Carolina Coffee Shop and get a fairly bad cup of coffee. By 1986 could you get a really first rate cup of coffee only if you went to Broad Street Roasters in Carrboro.


Even the Ninth Street Bakery, with its tremendous Bear Claws could not give you a decent brew. Magnolia Grill (where I would work) had not yet opened and Lex Alexander had not yet bought the old grocery across the way and turn it into the Wellspring (eventually to be Whole Foods).


After college while living in Washington, DC it was the same story. No decent coffee. So I arranged for Broad Street to send me three pounds of beans a month. A pound of Guatemalan Coffee. A pound of French Roast. And a pound of Sumatra, which I would blend.

Each month the box came to my apartment on Lincoln Park, smelling wonderful.


I traveled in 1990 to Portland and had a great cup of coffee at Starbucks, and not long afterwards, Broad Street told me they would not be able to keep shipping me coffee. I called Starbucks and they happily filled my orders and every month my shipments came. About two years later Starbucks too ceased to deliver beans to my house, but by then they had begun to open retail outlets in the DC area – and elsewhere – and I could get beans that way. Their influence began to widen, of course, and it became possible to obtain coffee from Peets and other retailers.

In 1995 I and others started a farmers market in my new community – Del Ray, a neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia. But the retail strip we ventured onto was merely storefront churches, beauty salons, decrepid redneck bars, and vacant lots. No coffee.

We found a street vendor who occupied a spot across from the Library of Congress and she agreed to come each saturday to our new and young and tiny farmer’s market. Between her arrival and those of a few farmers, neighbors could get heirloom tomatoes and apples before they became vogue and also get a great cup of coffee.

A local developer watched and saw an opportunity and put in a local coffee shop – St Elmos – on Mount Vernon Avenue, so now we had a farmer’s market on one side of the street and good coffee on the other. The demographics had been shifting over the years so such an enterprise could work.

Del Ray had become less blue collar, more professional. The trucks yielded to the Volvos. The petunias gave way to lavender beds. Sub-zeros were delivered to homes undergoing rehab. Fancy baby strollers appeared. But for me, having a good cup of coffee so close was what mattered.

Of course demand for the coffee at the local shop was not always there. There didn’t magically appear pent up demand and knowledge. It was grown, and in my view not by the coffee fairy but by Starbucks. Much the same way Wellspring and Fresh Fields grew demand for organic produce beyond the hippie dippy set.

This presented no difficulty whatsoever to me. However hostile towards Wal-Mart and Borders Books and McDonald’s I may be, I loved – and still retain some love – for Starbucks, for what they did was expose people accustomed to drinking water that had had a brown crayon dipped in it and was masquerading as coffee to what a decent cup of real coffee could be. It’s not a latte that you would find on Le Boulevard Haussman, but it was not meant to be. It’s a strong cup of three dimensional coffee for a reasonable price now available almost (but still not) anywhere. As Americans migrated from fake bread to the real thing, so too did we leave behind Maxwells and Folgers for something better. A-fukcing men.

Amid this some very interesting class warfare issues took root and hold to this day.

Starbucks became associated with McDonalds and with everything we think about when we think about sprawl and corporate farming and the Earl Butzing of corporate Iowa corn. Why? Ubiquity has much to do with it. But so too does upper class ignorance.

Peets is no less present in some markets, but the Berkeley crowd fitted Peets with a badge of authenticity.

Which brings me to something else that happened 20 some years ago. I was in a poor South Carolina community working on housing issues when the mayor said, beaming with pride, in a slow southern drawl, “we got us a Piggly Wiggly!” A store no wealthy community would want he had recruited and was glad to have.

His pride was instructive, for it illustrated that we all look at retail as something of a proxy for how far we have come, the extent to which we’ve arrived, or how far we have yet to travel. Which it surely is.

Middle income communities want a Nordstrom instead of a Macy’s. Working class communities want to be a step up from Sears. In Mill Valley California when I was polling people there in 2002, they did not want a Starbucks, for that was seen as beneath them. At the same time, residents in derascinated Richmond couldn’t get a 7-Eleven. Santa Cruz could afford to fight a Borders (which is valiantly tried to fend off), while less affluent and less educated places like Fresno were thrilled to have a Barnes & Noble.

In my community in Alexandria, some of the older blue collar types get their coffee today at the 7-Eleven, and have personally told me they do not feel welcomed at the local shop – St. Elmo’s. This is sad and instructive.

In the strangest places you find a Starbucks – off highway 99 north of Madera, California in the middle of grape orchards. Some locals there will still gather at the Fruit Basket and drink light brown water claiming to be coffee, but others have seen Starbucks-induced customer knowledge and subsequent demand as opportunities for local entreprenurialism.

I saw this last week in upstate NY in the weak market city of Jamestown. Jamestown is too weak to induce Starbucks perhaps, but the community has for ten years now been exposed in other markets to what coffee can be and so even in small Jamestown there are two places where you can get local brew that’s quite tasty if not perfect. There, people are employed selling a product for which there was no demand just a few years ago.

Along this journey, two interesting storylines are not often acknowledged.

First is that thousands of coffee shops are flourishing in America only because Starbucks educated a pallid whitebread American palette. Second, they did so while providing health insurance and a great working environment and a growing environmental ethic.

What troubles me about the gripes you hear about Starbucks – and I myself have plenty starting with the proliferation of silly sugar bombs ten inches tall that have nothing to do with food and coffee and everything to do with tasteless kitch – is that Starbucks’ everpresence somehow is aesthetically unappealing and beneath us. That’s the worst kind of elitism and I say this occupying shaky ground on that front.

And worse, other coffee outlets like Peets – which I like fine – are somehow okay, and that the 3,000 small shops across the country that are locally owned would somehow have materialized on their own and become successful.

In elite communities like Santa Fe, NM you hear at the Aztec or in other places the refrain to “buy local”, which is crucial.

I started a Farmer’s Market that had as its original proviso a buy local requirement, and did this 15 years ago.

But the gripes about Starbucks are the same as those hollow ones about Whole Foods, for neither see that Starbucks and Whole Foods made possible the financial success of local coffee shops and local small farms by educating a rather ignorant America on one hand, and aggregating buying power on the other but in responsible if imperfect ways. And both are exemplars of responsible business stewardship.

Across America poor communities (which is where I work) pray for retail of the sort that Starbucks and Whole Foods bring. A stamp of arrival. Responsible stewardship of business relationships. Ethical employment opportunity. Tax base. They pray for grocery stores that might bring fresh produce and quality products. Jobs – imagine that!

On the other sides of those same towns, snotty buy local efforts miss the forest they want to save for the trees they themselves are milling, by looking down their noses at a Whole Foods or a Starbucks as insufficiently perfect.

Fifteen years ago two tiny farms came to my farmer’s market: an apple grower from Pennsylvania and a vegetable grower from Maryland. Neither could really make much money. They had only a few markets as outlets. No big buyers. They were eeking out a living as organic farmers and neither Safeway nor Giant had any interest in them.

Last year my Whole Foods in Alexandria had a display of local tomatoes and other produce featuring both those farms, which are now flourishing. My local farms can finance their organic aspirations because an admittedly imperfect buyer arrived to make it possible and now educated consumers demand such things. This is the same with Starbucks.

Welcome to the real world.

An astonishing challenge I face everyday in poor communities is that the good my work can often usher in is challenged not by them, but by their putative advocates who allow an achievable good to be killed in want of a distant perfect. They do this in housing circles when they resist making distressed neighborhood better for fear of gentrification and they do this when it comes to retail that is not perfect.

Is Whole Foods perfect? Far from it.

But I was there in Chapel Hill and Durham when Lex Alexander made Wellspring a beautiful contribution to our palettes and community and I welcome Whole Foods today.

Is Starbucks perfect? Far from it. But you can be sure the person making your coffee – even if they are making some stupid cream swirl thing for someone else – has health insurance and a good wage. These are not to be trifled. This is what community development is all about.

Our work in strong economies is to soften the harsh edges of a healthy market to create opportunities for people otherwise left behind, and do it in ways that don’t weaken market incentives.

Our work in already weak places is to make them strong.

The kinds of businesses we have in our communities – or don’t have – says much about the capital those communities bring to the table: social and financial.

Our work should not be about keeping an imperfect Starbucks or Whole Foods out on the basis of an ephemeral definition of authenticity, but how to move entire markets get quality products in sustainable ways to people in all kinds of circumstances, and do so in a manner cognizant of the world as it is. The achievable good is the necessary step towards anything better.

Posted in Community and Attitudes | No Comments »

« Older Entries