Notes on Social and Organizational Capital on Virginia's Northern Neck 

czb LLC
March 30, 2009

With benefit of the analysis, many of our clients ask us what we think should happen next, after the data has been collected, scrubbed, crunched, and analyzed. 

In general, our experience is that the end of analysis marks the beginning of the work. 

For the analysis merely describes the status quo and takes a stab at what an unintervened in future might look like; how the market might plausibly unfold without any specific intervention.

In our experience the work has two basic elements.

1. The first is mobilizing the community to decide what about the probably course weʼre on needs to change.
2. The second is mobilizing the community to actually undertake the work. We typically refer to these phases as the “what” and the “how”. What we want or aim to do. How we are going to get it done.

Communities of all types struggle with this, but some more than others. Often, those that move quickly from analysis to some form of implementation already have what we call “capacity”, that is at the outset the ability to mobilize the community to take analytical work and generate a direction to go in. From there, these communities are poised to organize themselves, form partnerships, set priorities, and mobilize resources.

All of this constitutes the “real work”. 

There are other communities that move less quickly. Such communities tend to lack execution capacity; for these communities its difficult to organize, not least because there isnʼt a consensus about either the nature of the problem to solve, or an imperative to solve it. Our experience is that communities that have yet to locate the adaptive problem (what must change) are not ready to tackle the ʻhowʼ work. Indeed we often see these communities jumping right into “how” work when they arenʼt yet sure where theyʼre going. Partly this is work avoidance.

Dr. King from the duPont Fund made what I believe to be a seminal remark during the 3-28 session in Northumberland County. In the course of his comments he made reference to “those reports that gather dust and sit on the shelf.” Unfortunately this is all too frequently the reality in many circumstances. In my view, this occurs when a community has not yet done the hard work of ripening the issues that a study merely shines a light on. How is that relevant to the Northern Neck and in particular to the work of taking the report and doing something about it?

Often what we see is a community that has not yet churned through the issues, as a community, to locate with specificity both the basis for a status quo some piece of which is not acceptable, and what kind of an alternative future would be supportable in the community. In my experience communities that have not yet done this work are prone to either do nothing or do the wrong thing, which is to say start doing something prematurely (in this case developing housing for low-income families). I believe this is the case on the Northern Neck.

 

For this reason it may be useful to explore why this may be true, and what may be done about it. I believe there are three.

• From my vantage point, the Northern Neck is, first and foremost, not a community. It is rather a collection of many small cliques; not uncommon in a rural area spread over, in this case, four large counties. Lacking a critical mass of people with a common destiny and compact geography, the Northern Neck consists of enclaves of second home owners whose chief focus is making sure the conditions that make a weekend appealing remain so. It consists of farmers and their suppliers and customers. It consists of small groups of merchants in a few locations who cross paths. It consists of church congregations. It consists of a handful of civic organizations and benevolent societies. But these groups have yet to be mobilized, yet to be woven into a large infrastructure with a clearly articulate common purpose, common trajectory, or shared risks. This is not to say such commonalities do not exist - I think the evidence is that they do. Instead it is to suggest that whatever residents of different parts of the Northern Neck do have in common, it is yet to be articulated and in a way that brings people together in a critical mass with a shared aim and a sense of who is to do what.
  
  There are many fissures in the region that partly explain this lack of cohesion. And of course these appear across the United States in all kinds of places. But based on the qualitative research we did for this project, the ones that most require attention are the racial divide, the class divide, and the local versus non-local divide.
  
  Black residents of the Northern Neck have not proportionately shared in the upside of the regionʼs growth, and arenʼt poised to. This has to be addressed. Not necessarily as an outcome to be remedied but certainly through opportunity. And there is preciously little public acknowledgment of this in local discourse.
  
  There is a widening gap between rich and poor on the Northern Neck. Sometimes race is a proxy for this divide, but not always. Sometimes local roots are a proxy, but again, not always. Not all African Americans on the Neck are poor and not all newcomers (black or white) are rich. But the divide is wide and getting wider. Such division is both reflective of the work to be done, and an indication of where to start.
  
  My recommendation is to invest less in housing development now - though landbanking makes sense given market conditions - and more in organizing the community to develop a shared agenda meaningful to parties on either side of such divides for what must be done.
  
  There is a large gap between “come hereʼs” and “been hereʼs”. It separates newcomers from community life, and deprives long time residents of the valuable inputs that outsiders can offer. It is manifest in the informal planning edict one finds where “we avoid infrastructure to keep from having development that would attract outsiders.” It is present in the churches. In conversation.
• Second, the Northern Neck has too little intellectual and experiential capital to address the complex issues it faces without help. This is a common reality all rural jurisdictions face at one time or another. Rural areas export talent for want of superior opportunities elsewhere. Such communities tend to face one of two futures, depending on the marketability of their strengths. Those with superior assets (such as highly prized land, views, other resources) can offset the talent bleed by reeling back into the community other sources of capability. Those with inferior stocks lose talent and fall further behind. Eventually, talent attracts talent, or the absence of it confirms that it should go elsewhere. In either case the effect is self fulfilling. 
  
  Usually the trade is for older experienced people that can afford the assets (second or retirement homes for example) whose arrival brings valuable abilities. This is happening across the Northern Neck sparingly, most acutely in Northumberland County, but it needs to happen more. Navigating financial and land use and other challenges as a community will become more possible with the arrival of such talent. But this is only part of the challenge, for the new talent that does arrive tends to be diffuse, unexploited systemically, and, quite frankly, shunned. In few regions of America is there so deeply entrenched a good ole boy network as there is on the Northern Neck, comprised of old timers and a handful of new arrivals who tend to look on outsiders more with suspicion than open arms. This is a problem for the Northern Neck. Less in Northumberland County and Westmoreland County. But it is an issue that requires attention. Itʼs probably valuable to build a formal set of mechanisms that help new arrivals and long time residents come together. The church is one place where this can work, but this will not bridge racial divides. Schools are an opportunity but new arrivals tend to be retirees or older so there is not much ground to be covered here. More fruitful will be the creation of an organization that has a role for all kinds of people. Not all things to all people, but surely something shared.
• Third, there isnʼt a coherent sense of the Northern Neck - either as historical artifact or present and future day place. It is a place only insofar as it is rural when the rest of the adjoining areas are not, it has lots of waterfront access when the rest of the adjoining areas do not, it birthed its share of American history, and it is impenetrable (physically and socially, by intent and accident) to a sufficient extent that things tend to remain the same. The upside of things remaining the same is the potential for natural and cultural resources to be preserved, and thus be valuable, and in being valuable, being marketable and having the capacity to generate value that can be used for common purpose. The downside of being impenetrable is that potential infusions of capital get squandered and go unleveraged, leaving a talent-weak community anemic. When this happens, the irony is the very assets that should have been preserved - water quality, viability of farming, wetlands protection, historic preservation, open space buffers, small town charm, cultural heritage - are imperiled. Left unprotected, they become vulnerable to extraction and abuse and ultimately are at risk of loss. The most powerful example of this on the Northern Neck is the swapping of soybean fields for golf courses and open space for large lot housing development and strip retail. In short the future of the Northern Neck looks a lot more like the desecrated hallowed ground of the Battlefields of Manassas in physical form than most locals would probably be pleased to admit. Itʼs probably a good idea to focus the community on developing a vision of itself that it can support. Is the Northern Neck to be a collection of occasional outlet malls between small towns as to be found outside Gettysburg? Is it to become one giant golf course like Hilton Head? Will undeveloped areas remain undeveloped? Will housing be affordable? Will jobs pay good wages?

In my view these fissures and the questions that require attentionrepresent not obstacles but opportunities. A series of chances to address important issues: racial equity, land conservation, a sustainable economy, environmental restoration.

But because these are complex issues that are distinct yet related, a great deal of organizing and community education must come first. Before new housing is built some attention should go to addressing where, in what quantity, at what density, and what cost, to help which income groups?

Unless anti-poverty work is distinguished from affordable housing development, unless job development is likewise understood as different from labor quality development, and unless land values are understood to be a derivative of limited supply, the work of creating a common Northern Neck wide interest will remain elusive. It will be difficult to know whether the “work” is the construction of an apartment complex or the right apartment complex at the right price point in the right location.

For these reasons, I recommend that the Northern Neck Housing Study Group work with the duPont Fund and Visions to develop a Northern Neck Development and Preservation Organization, and thereafter launch an intense Northern Neck-wide visioning process to establish an agenda for the four counties that is shared, difficult to achieve but achievable, and relevant to the many kinds of residents and stakeholders in the region. Our professional expectation of such an effort is that several interconnected issues merit attention and once raised and validated as issues, would constitute the outlines of the mission of such a development and preservation organization.

• Regional land use agreements with emphasis on
  • Reducing development of single family residential property with du/a b/w .5-20
  • Preservation of family-owned farms
  • Incenting environmentally sustainable farming practices
  • Crop diversification
  • Reduced chemical use
  • Inclusionary zoning or other mechanisms to deconcentrate poverty
• Small town preservation
  • Ordinances
  • Incentives
• Ladder of housing and economic development opportunities
  • Workforce housing emphasis connected to employers
  • Scattered site, moderate density, high quality affordable rental
  • Incenting mixed-income development
  • Workforce development

Numerous examples of such an approach have been successfully deployed in the US.

One of (if not) the most notable and relevant is the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT) in California. Other similar entities exist in upstate NY, the Shenandoah Valley, northern New Mexico, Vermont, western Massachusetts, and elsewhere. I urge the NNHSG to reach again to the DuPont Fund, using its valuable capable as a group of focused capable individuals committed to the NN, and attempt to initialize the creation of such an organization. I recommend the work begin immediately while the study czb-Va Tech did is fresh, and that a steering committee of stakeholders capable of mobilizing the community to address the above issues be brought together as a first step towards establishing a public-private entity as Iʼve described. I believe the duPont Fund would be amendable to receiving a well crafted proposal to capitalize such an organization and get it started. This, I believe, is the right way to go. And this approach, I believe, would well position any actual housing development that would and should be developed, to get built properly and in accordance with a community consensus that is badly needed.