INNOVATION IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Men may find God in Nature, but when they look at cities, they are viewing themselves.
(Paul Ylvisaker, Life Magazine)
While JFK, Senator Douglas and Arthur Goldberg were trail-blazing a federal path in the direction of Keynesian-economics and people-focused CD, the Ford Foundation and “urban guerillas” innovated disruptive new programs that consciously intended to create an alternate community development path—a paradigm as potentially revolutionary as anything done previously. A “nexus of change” formed between the Policy World and Kennedy political appointees/bureaucrats. By November 1963 that group developed the nucleus/DNA of key concepts that later were encapsulated into the 1964 War on Poverty—the opening economic development salvo of the Great Society. That internal “policy nexus” begins with the Ford Foundation’s programmatic initiatives which we describe below.
Disruption would be guaranteed by convincing the powerful federal government to not only fund the new programs but also to apply its political muscle to lure/compel sub-state actors to follow them into this brave new world. Left behind would be the CD housers and neighborhood physical developers who were then engaged in slum clearance and neighborhood redevelopment around housing. A new dawn in the Age of Community Development was on its “threshold of a dream.”
Community development’s core concept is that it is people, not business focused. The new set of Ford Foundation/federal government CD initiatives proved to be extremely disruptive to old-style housing/neighborhood CD, but even more so to the Privatist-, state- and local-oriented mainstream ED. Crossing over several fault lines, they fostered heavy-duty politicization within our policy area—more than northern hegemony and southern “piracy” were doing. The new CD’s linkage with the federal government was the key to its dramatic entry into our policy area—and the chief ingredient that led to inevitable politicization. The involvement of the federal government in state and sub-state policy spheres, without the legitimizing threat/reality of war or depression, into a policy area heretofore locally dominant, was guaranteed to stir someone’s juices. That it was done with good intentions will only compound the schism.
People-based community development is intended for meaningful economic opportunity for all who live within its jurisdictional boundaries. But not all need help equally, and CD’s focus has always been on those who most need help the most. In these years (1950s and 1960s), despite the overwhelming exuberance of the American economy, culture, military and political power, difficult economic realities—race, unemployment, automation and poverty—will be perceived as structural barriers that inhibit or preclude the disadvantaged from seizing economic, political and social opportunity. Breaking through these structural barriers was a role for the federal government—and that has remained a mainstay relationship for a redefined community development.
Woodlawn, Gray Areas and Mobilization for Youth (MFY)
From the mid-1950s the Ford Foundation started a series of experimental programs in urban areas across the nation. One of these was the Gray Areas Program, designed and advocated in 1955 by 33-year-old urban planner and educator Paul Ylvisaker. Much has been written about the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas.5 Gray Areas and Mobilization for Youth are directly linked to the War on Poverty and much of the Great Society—“community action” evolved from both.
Ylvisaker, a Harvard PhD, advisor to Philadelphia Mayor Joseph Clark turned Ivy League faculty, was recruited to the Foundation in 1955 and subsequently developed experimental programs centered on physical urban reforms, such as housing and urban renewal, as counters to the metropolitan crisis of the era. By 1960 Ylvisaker, perceiving disruption caused by physical urban redevelopment/housing/slum clearance, had “drifted” into “people problems,” away from bricks and mortar and urban governance. Integration of human services and a concern with racial change and race relations were central programmatic concepts (O’Connor, 1966, pp. 600–606).
Shortly before Gray Areas, and completely independent of it, was a shadow movement in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago. Woodlawn was a reaction against the soon to be old-style housing/slum removal neighborhood CD. Using tactics and a community-organizing CD strategy developed by Saul Alinsky, it would serve as model for other neighborhoods and social activists, and a metaphor for us. Drawing from its own roots, no small part of which was resistance to slum removal to create public housing, another CD alternative path was becoming cohesive. That path would insert itself into the political and administrative chaos/vacuum created by the intrusion of the Great Society into local and Big City policy systems. Woodlawn-style community organizing was not an intended feature of Great Society community action, but the two became fused (or confused) for a period of time—and that was all it took. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. First the basics.
Woodlawn
Up until 1948, Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood was white, middle-class, ethnic, originally populated by workers from the 1993 Chicago Exposition. Home to many University of Chicago professors, the neighborhood of nearly 73,000 residents underwent dramatic racial change during the 195’s. Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun tells the story of the neighborhood’s first black family. Fearing blight’s impact from the nearby Hyde Park neighborhood (Hirsch’s Second Ghetto then in the process of slum removal and neighborhood transition), the University of Chicago urged preemptive housing/slum removal in Woodlawn that triggered its own intense racial transition—and widespread arson. An alliance of black pastors (Arthur Brazier) operating within Alinsky’s umbrella Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), led by his successor Nicolas von Hoffman (Alexander, cited in this history, is his son), formed their own group, The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), to resist urban renewal and integrate African-Americans into the Woodlawn neighborhood. In 1960, adopting Alinsky’s community organizing principles, TWO worked with von Hoffman in developing a semi-political/economic development strategy that fell clearly into the community mobilization wing of community development.
TWO organized actions against local businesses that gauged consumers, attacked overcrowding in neighborhood schools, organized rent strikes and aggressively fought the University of Chicago’s urban renewal plan—TWO insisted that low-income housing be first built on vacant land before any active units were torn down. TWO eventually gained a seat on the planning board and stopped further slum removal. While it may have aggressively contested the development of the Second Ghetto, TWO was unable to stop racial transition. Counter-intuitively perhaps, during the 1960s Woodlawn lost over one-third of its resident population (this is a characteristic of the Second Ghetto). Older neighborhood institutions moved, many to the suburbs. The neighborhood became solidly black.
Gray Areas
Borrowing from Raymond Vernon’s “gray belt,” Ylvisaker defined these as potential slums pressured by structural shifts in the economy and residential markets—areas that Ylvisaker believed concentrated the disruption induced by physical redevelopment and racial change. Gray areas were neighborhoods where programs should be introduced to “citify our in-migrant populations.” Recognizing pathologies of what Hirsch later called the Second Ghetto, Ylvisaker asserted that 1960 gray area neighborhoods could no longer perform the socializing function they had for previous generations of immigrants. For him, gray areas were:
a wretched form that has lost the saving grace of a noble function [assimilation] … their escape into better jobs and neighborhoods is slowed by the depressed conditions they live in or by the color they were born with … The challenge to the cities was to revitalize the gray areas and “perfect the process” of assimilating and making “first class citizens” of the in-migrants … in one generation. (O’Connor, 1966, p. 606)
Developing several programs, first in housing and then a “Great Cities School Improvement Program,” the Ford Foundation made grants to several Big Cities to establish “citifying” pilot programs focused on culturally deprived/disadvantaged in-migrants. These programs attempted to positively impact families and home life, and to coordinate any social services these individuals might require. Each grant was constantly evaluated, training workshops were provided and distinguished experts brought in to assess findings and effectiveness of the grants. After a year or so, Ylvisaker came to the conclusion that if these people-changing programs were to have any effect, social services, schools and government agencies had to be linked in a common effort that overcame their “guild-ism” (siloization).
Ylvisaker injected this new theme into Gray Areas—not to focus exclusively on one policy area, say juvenile delinquency, but to simultaneously involve a slew of policy areas that collectively prevented individual mobility/change; not to “target one institution, but the whole tangled network of agencies responsible for housing, social services, and employment for the poor” (O’Connor, 1999b, p. 175). Thus, enlarged Gray Areas offered a diversified, but managed, package of services sufficient to the task of personal, family and social change. That is what community developers call “comprehensiveness.” It has evolved into a defining characteristic of the foundation approach to community development.
To receive follow-up grants cities, their mayors and bureaucracies had not only to provide a match; they also had to plan a coordinating process that could innovate as well as implement focused programming. Five cities were involved: Boston (headed by Ed Logue, a former Ylvisaker staff member), Oakland, New Haven, Philadelphia and DC. Each of these cities devised its own programmatic approach to Gray Area targets. In each demonstration project, Gray Areas established a community organization to coordinate the programs and link community institutions. In that Gray Area programs contemplated a systematic “revamping of neighborhood—a reshaping of the entire social and human system”—it is not surprising many agencies and institutions resisted. The “quality and effectiveness of local leadership was also a limitation” (Mossberger, 2010, pp. 63–5). In any case, the cycle of poverty could be broken through coordination of neighborhood bureaucratic initiatives.
At this point (1963), Gray Areas/the Ford Foundation became more complicated and complex. Municipal grantees intermingled Gray Areas’ implementation with grants from the DOL’s Office of Manpower and Training. The overlap was most pronounced with juvenile delinquency grants, one of which being New York City’s Mobilization for Youth (MFY). That offered an opportunity to Ylvisaker and the Ford Foundation to join efforts with the Kennedy administration—in this case with the administration’s evolving, embryonic, anti-poverty community-action approach being forged in task forces within the DOL. There was, however, a shift in approach that Ylvisaker was uncertain of—Gray Areas focused on urban bureaucracies and the DOL’s approach focused on people rehabilitation. In the DOL’s approach, urban service bureaucracies were to be “coordinated,” not by Ylvisaker’s coordinating agency but through something called “community action.” Accordingly, it is now helpful to switch to the MFY program so as to ground the reader in that approach.
Mobilization for Youth
Unlike Gray Areas, MFY was a bottoms-up policy process. It resulted from a grant application developed within NYC’s Henry Street Settlement House (Helen Hall its director), the coordinator for six other neighborhood settlement houses, submitted to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The proposal advocated a program to counter juvenile delinquency in these neighborhoods, and was returned to Henry Street for further study and refinement. Two Columbia University professors, Lloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward, developed a revised application based on their newly articulated model of the causes of juvenile delinquency (Cloward and Ohlin, 1960). They asserted that a “lack of conventional opportunity alienated inner-city youth from societal norms and pushed them to adopt the norms [often illegal, sometimes violent] of the street and the gang”—“frustrations caused by unequal opportunity structures [found] in poor communities” (Halpern, 1995, p. 102). At root was gang members’ exclusion from legitimate upward assimilative paths such as education, part-time jobs and school extra-curricular activities. Henry Street’s original proposal was recast into the model, resubmitted and eventually approved. The $12 million program commenced in 1961 (Halpern, 1995, pp. 101–2). Most of MFY’s funds and programs went into conventional services, pre-/after-school programs, youth employment and some training.
More sophisticated than Ylvisaker’s formulations, MFY was compatible with the Gray Area human service framework, but it ventured into new ground. Instead of coordinating various social and government bureaucracies through a “neighborhood coordinating entity,” as did Gray Areas, MFY adopted a more bottoms-up approach that meaningfully involved residents and clients in problem identification and resolution. Adults and parents, for example, were part of the process to address issues with schools. These adults in turn were expected to be more involved with their children, potential candidates for juvenile delinquency (Brager and Purcell, 1967). Bureaucracies, being bureaucracies filled with experts, often had a hard time with this involvement, as did the residents. During program implementation, relationships “went south”; MFY staff got caught in the middle, and tended to support the residents (Halpern, 1995, pp. 102–4). Obliquely, the clash of bureaucratic and resident cultures meshed poorly with the Gray Areas approach—even though by this point the Ford Foundation was involved with MFY.
It is at this point (1963) that MFY and Gray Areas “hooked up”—but the arena was not the Ford Foundation, but rather the President’s Commission on Juvenile Delinquency, the Department of Labor, the Bureau of the Budget and a presidential task force. What had happened is that, from separate departments, two key Ford Foundation program directors lobbied federal officials to carry their ideas, and the programs, further. The review and decision was one function of the task force. This is the critical juncture that took these pioneering yet rudimentary initiatives and recast them into community action and, eventually, the War on Poverty. This policy formulation approach—vastly different from that followed by a more open, legislatively focused and decentralized public housing, slum clearance and urban renewal policy process— hints that foundation-led community development may have alternative policy formulation processes that set it apart from both mainstream economic development and other wings of community development. That it did in 1963 is evident in the next section.
Looking Backward Through the Looking Glass: Experts and Bureaucratic Bowels
The task force deliberations overlapped with a changing ED policy environment reacting against municipal-led urban renewal, public housing, interstate highway construction and slum removal/housing demolition, from multiple projects. Felt disproportionately in neighborhoods and ghettos, resulting in destruction of local business, loss of housing units, accelerated neighborhood transition and succession, protests, sit-ins, rent strikes, conflict, even violence, often within schools, were normal events after the early 1950s. Crime and juvenile delinquency were high-visibility policy areas. Active resistance at public meetings against specific urban renewal/highway projects, while not especially impactful, was also commonplace. Jane Jacobs had published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. The so-called melting pot was boiling over and the Second Ghetto in steroidal development while the policy initiatives below were being formulated.
Early in 1961, Ford Foundation officials, including Ylvisaker and MFY’s director David Hunter,6 approached the new Kennedy administration via David Hackett, a boyhood friend of RFK, campaign official and newly assigned special assistant to the Attorney General. After being briefed, principally it seems on the Gray Areas approach, in May 1961 JFK established the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime (PCJD), chaired by the Attorney General and composed of the secretaries of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), Labor and, indirectly, the Budget Bureau’s Kermit Gordon. Hackett was staff head and he recruited Lloyd Ohlin, Sanford Kravitz (a prominent social worker and soon to be Chief of Research and Program Development of the Office of Economic Opportunity/OEO’s Community Action Program) and Richard Boone from the Ford Foundation. The staff, referring to themselves as urban guerillas (Vietnam was in vogue), formulated programs, cobbled together funds and, working with the Ford Foundation (and others), set up programs in selected communities to test further the ideas developing in Gray Areas and MFY (Moynihan, 1969, pp. 63–7).
The delinquency programme operated, then through an unstable alliance of Robert Kennedy’s personal authority with internal department rivalries, and the mutual understanding of a small group of idealistic innovators within the bureaucracy … [it] stressed a new coalition of community leadership … intellectual coherence … a proven theory of social rehabilitation. (Marris and Rein, 1967, p. 135)
If Moynihan (a participant) is correct, the PCJD proved to be the “blast furnace” that forged community action and the War on Poverty. Over the next two years, the PCJD experimented with pilot programs, joined in closely with Ford Foundation MFY and Gray Areas and eventually came to several conclusions, including that:
+ The federal government with local governments and private foundations should start programs to attack the problems of youth.
+ Bureaucratic siloization and uncoordinated services required new methods and structures if these problems were to be successfully countered and a critical mass of initiatives assembled sufficient to provide individual and neighborhood change.
+ The root cause of these problems was “poverty,” and success required “concentrated resources on attacks on poverty” on a wide variety of policy areas.
Municipalities, schools and local nonprofit bureaucracies required having their feet held to the fire of consistent, client-centered program administration—and that was best accomplished by embracing citizens and residents themselves in the process of change: “They wished the poor to be involved in the program, but in the interests of therapy as much as anything else … they wanted those who had the power to do something about the suffering and the poverty” (Moynihan, 1969, p. 70). It was as simple and decent as that. This was called “community action.” Gray Areas “comprehensiveness” was incorporated into this approach as necessary to provide the scale and power to break the cycle of poverty. Poverty being the root cause of delinquency, any attack on its symptoms ought to also attack poverty itself.
At this critical juncture, the civil rights movement “turned north”: the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (“I have a dream”)—economic demands were prominent elements in its agenda. Later active in Chicago and other northern cities, organizations such as the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Urban League (NUL) intensified pressure on northern integration efforts, and urged the hiring of minorities by private companies. The Civil Rights Movement expanded into economic development. In this environment, the policy approach drafted within the PCJD appeared in a Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) staff report, Program for a Concerted Assault on Poverty, on October 29, 1963. The next day CEA’s chair, Walter Heller, wrote the cabinet to submit their proposals so they “might be woven into a basic attack on poverty and waste of human resources as part of the 1964 legislative program” (Moynihan, 1969, p. 79).
A month later Hackett’s PCJD proposal was accepted by the Bureau of the Budget—but by then President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.
Ron W. Coan 