REAGAN ERA COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
When last we left community development it was “hitting on all cylinders”; the approach had exploded, achieving almost near equal status with mainstream ED. Then along came the municipal fiscal crisis, property tax rebellions and Reagan! Federal pullback from sub-state ED hit CD hard. The reliance of local CD actors/EDOs on the federal government was more than HUD cutbacks; it was psychological abandonment from an ally viewed as more than a close friend—almost a betrayal. To maintain momentum community development and CDCs had to make new friends and develop new revenues. Riding on a train in late 1979, Ford Foundation executive Mitchell Sviridoff was challenged by a board member on how he would help local CDCs survive if he had $25 million available. A year later, he and former Bed-Stuyvesant CEO, then Ford Foundation president, formed a national CDO whose purpose was to assist CDCs. The new CDO was flush with $9.3 million in grants from Ford and six major corporations. Within four years the initial seed money had grown to $70 million from 250 corporations (Hoffman, 2012, p. 27). Today known as LISC, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation provides grants and technical assistance to CDCs. Foundations rushed into to fill the gap left by the Federal government.
In the eighties community organizers had to tone down mobilization. Citizen activism and volunteerism redirected itself from social justice, economic empowerment and political change, to confronting specific doable, local problems. Krumholz later observed:
what began in the early ‘70s as a group of grass-roots activist organizations, very strident in style and confrontational in expression, has been transformed into a set of enormously competent community development corporations that are now doing economic development, housing, and commercial development. (Fisher, 1994, p. 182)
Social change took a back seat to touchable change.
CD by the nineties exhibited a mixture of maturity, success and complexity—at the expense of exuberance and wild-eyed commitment. Sadly, it is beyond the capacity of this history to detail the literally hundreds of major initiatives conducted over the last two decades of the twentieth century—even very important ones such as the Harlem Children’s Initiative. A listing of the types of activities engaged—ranging from import substitution, welfare rights, development rights, housing and food cooperatives and tons more (Simon, 2001)—would strain the reader’s eyes and dull their sensitivity to the enormous effort and intensity of commitment to bring about change in distressed neighborhoods and their residents. But the tide of change, the critical mass, had not yet been achieved. The troubles of the Third Ghetto could not be meaningfully reversed.
The targets of neighborhood revitalization were constantly moving: new residents, new immigration—and the inability of American capitalism to provide work for low-income residents of color (Wilson, 1996). In some neighborhoods, the infamous “tipping point” had been crossed; in others affluent new residents appeared— precipitating gentrification and displacement. In other areas new inflows, mostly immigrant, invaded hitherto predominantly homogeneous black neighborhoods, with unsettling consequences. The majority of folk in Watts, for example, were Hispanic, no longer African-American. CDCs had to cope with “diversity” in addition to preaching it.
Two examples of influential Reagan Years projects testify to the innovation unleashed, and the change in the CDC movement’s direction: NYC’s Brownsville Nehemiah neighborhood renewal and Boston’s Dudley Street Neighborhood initiative. As the decade’s end drew near, frustration with conventional, housing-based, comprehensive CD’s pace and results suggested some further experimentation, a third new direction should be attempted. Perhaps, a community development “big push” might be answer. So a new CD initiative was tried: the Comprehensive Community Initiatives (CCI)—the Sandtown case study (see below).
Nehemiah and Dudley
Nehemiah
The Nehemiah project in East Brooklyn was as remarkable as it was controversial. Nehemiah was an offspring of an Alinsky Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF—founded by “himself” in 1940 Chicago). IAF evolved after his death in 1972 into a national network of neighborhood-level community organizing initiatives. By the Reagan Years IAF comprised 28 local initiatives, mostly in the Southwest, centered on colonias (suburbs populated by poor Mexican-Americans) and allied with local churches, congregations and existing neighborhood institutions. Unlike ACORN, IAF had to be invited in, and its message was often religious in tone—with IAF’s leadership asserting “the [Catholic] Church as the one institution in society with the potential to work positively for the empowerment of the people” (Fisher, 1994, pp. 192–6). East Brooklyn’s Congregations (EBC) spun off from IAF. Nehemiah, EBC’s experiment, was both an Alinsky community empowerment organizing initiative and what proved to be a significant faith-based initiative (Vidal, 2001, p. 9).
East Brooklyn was one of the most devastated of NYC’s predominantly minority neighborhoods. After over 100 “kitchen-table” house and public meetings that drew thousands, EBC incorporated in 1981 around a plan to demolish over 300 houses—the first of its controversial decisions was to reject rehabilitation and press ahead for large-scale demolition. Named after the biblical prophet sent by Cyrus the Great to rebuild destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, the Catholic bishop, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island joined the initiative. When additional land became available and Mayor Koch agreed to provide city resources for infrastructure and write-downs, the Nehemiah initiative expanded. It hired I.D. Robbins as its general manager, and his revamped plan produced two more controversies: Robbins (1) embraced the Levittown model of mass-housing construction; and (2) its scale of housing demolition matched UR projects. Shades of slum clearance!
The idea was to construct affordable houses for existing residents. That didn’t work out; it took at least working-class incomes to purchase a new home—not affordable for all displaced residents. The scale and housing style, many thought, created “suburbs in the city.” The first phase (1100 units) started in 1983, the second (1100 units) in 1987, the third (700 units) in 1996; and a recent (2009) bi-phased initiative for 1500 units completed the construction thus far (4500 units). The townhouses (modest, architecturally detestable and low-priced) have always enjoyed waiting lists—and stable ownership. The New York Times reported that fewer than a dozen original homeowners went into Great Recession foreclosure.19
Nehemiah inspired many imitators nationally, including Sandtown in Baltimore, and later a HUD Nehemiah Opportunity down-payment assistance program between 1987 and 1991. While much maligned, Nehemiah proved that community development could make slum clearance, Levittown and reasonably affordable housing construction work on a scale that moved the needle. Another lesson from Nehemiah is that in these tough times, housing proved itself to be a sustainable focus for a CDC, causing awkwardness from some CD advocates who prefer social change/justice and personal empowerment. Nevertheless, housing remains to this day as the most common activity of CDCs.
Dudley Street
Located on the borders of Boston’s Dorchester and Roxbury neighborhoods, the 1.5-mile block Dudley Street initiative provides insight into the complexities of neighborhood revitalization. Dudley’s diverse population (40 percent African-American, 30 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Cape Verdean and 10 percent white) lived in a neighborhood that included 4 million square feet of vacant, weed-filled lots and lacked the elements of a viable residential area: no supermarkets, commercial storefronts boarded up, lots of abandoned cars and its three closed landfills the proud recipients of continued illegal dumping. Almost 1500 residents were on a substance abuse program waiting list.
In 1984 the Riley Foundation “pulled together” 30 community agencies to formulate a neighborhood plan (Halpern, 1995, p. 203). The “Plan” was introduced to neighborhood residents at a public meeting—and promptly rejected, mostly because residents were not involved in its development. In response, a CDC, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), was devised with membership and governance composed of residents, agency leadership, businesses and neighborhood institutions and churches (during this period about 1800 resident members). Between 1984 and 1987, DSNI successfully tackled a number of problems that built confidence, capacity and credibility. Vacant lots were cleaned up, abandoned cars towed, a public landfill closed, and new street signs and lights and an MBTA rail stop to downtown installed. The rationale was to build resident confidence so more complex issues could be tackled.
A second planning campaign in 1987 produced a five-year plan that included land use modifications, housing, jobs, youth/community service programs, public safety and environmental cleanup. The plan coined the now-famous “urban village” metaphor. The overall goal was to revitalize all the elements necessary for a successful neighborhood (i.e. comprehensiveness). New and rehabilitated housing were anchors. To secure land for housing, DSNI board and staff decided piecemeal land acquisition simply would not work. The land was owned by over 130 individuals and entities. City agency eminent domain seemed the answer, but DSNI and residents alike feared that, once condemned, they would lose control over the property to the city agency. The solution was for DSNI itself to be empowered to exercise eminent domain. It took a while, but in 1992 DSNI acquired authority to condemn 30 acres of land (Dudley Triangle). The Ford Foundation provided funds, and construction of low-rise owner-occupied homes followed. DSNI, which still prospers, afterward evolved into a full-fledged, multiservice CDC conducting numerous programs congruent with the traditional CD “comprehensiveness.”
Issues in Neighborhood Community Development
By 2005, the number of CDCs was estimated at around 4600.20 As CDCs evolved, they engaged in more complex activities involving greater planning and sophisticated execution. Tension between resident control, involvement in governance and CDC accountability to the neighborhood became evident—it remains so today. Given the goals and gestalt associated with community development, this concern cannot be dismissed as a mere Michel’s iron law of oligarchy—it presents an almost existential concern. In order to get things done, too much may have to be sacrificed. Dudley Street initiatives, plans, innovative activities and housing construction made apparent a persistent concern about “who” made decisions. Ideally, of course, a CDC should be governed by neighborhood residents, businesses and institutions; but residents do not always have the interest and, frankly, the capacity to be effective decision-makers.
All too frequently, agency and foundation officials were the drivers behind DSNI and its initiatives. The gap between resident involvement and bureaucratic (staff) leadership of activities was troublesome and initiatives were frequently:
staff driven when [they] began, and it took skill and willpower by staff and the directors to make even moderate levels of participation feasible and to carry programs through. The balance of resident versus professional control … remains in question, and it is not clear what should have been expected … resident control tends to diminish as more professional staff are hired and the organization becomes dependent on external funders. (Ferguson and Stoutland, 1999, pp. 51–2)
At one point a “leadership academy” was established to teach residents the necessary skills (Halpern, 1995, p. 204). The problem was not specific to DSNI, but common to some degree to CDCs (Hopkins and Ferris, 2015, pp. 15–19).
Comprehensive Community-Building Initiatives Movement
After a decade of Reagan/Bush, foundations believed the time had come to develop an approach that combined private financing with Policy World professional/policy expertise to fill gaps that prevented neighborhood CDCs from achieving comprehensive neighborhood revitalization. In the first half of the 1990s several initiatives experimented by supporting projects. Today these projects are collectively referred to as Comprehensive Community Initiatives (CCI). CCI formally developed into a coherent approach in the early 1990s and continue to this day.
Four core CCI goals tie this approach to a CD tradition that started with the nineteenth-century settlement house:
- change in neighborhoods (place) and residents (people);
- comprehensiveness or change in a number of program policy areas (housing, education, health care, social services, jobs and, in recent years, environmental sustainability) to achieve critical mass;
- a rational, plan-driven process devised and implemented by a network/alliances/ partnerships of “experts” and research; and
- resident/community empowerment, self-government, capacity-building and achievement accomplished through involvement and direction provided to outside experts, professionals and change agents.
Two additional characteristics are especially relevant to the “foundation approach”: (1) funding is based on philanthropy and corporate donations: (2) each individual project is both an experiment and a knowledge-base for formulation of future (and better) initiatives. A practical consequence of CCIs is a network of alliances and partnerships with foundations, service providers, NGOs and think tanks (both local and national) that were involved in CCI initiatives. In later years the Living CitiesNational Community Development Initiative (backed by 20 foundations and financial institutions) in 23 cities was a prominent example of a CCI approach. Indeed, Hope VI and Clinton’s approach to EZ community-based implementation tied into early CCI mentality. Over the last two plus decades it is estimated that $1 billion in philanthropic dollars were invested in its initiatives, an investment that leveraged $10 billion in federal government and local financing (Kubisch et al., 2010, p. 8).
LISC (outlined above) provided the model and inspiration for CCIs and the various sub-initiatives. A powerful catalyst for CCIs was the founding by James Rouse and his wife of the Enterprise Foundation (EF) in 1982. EF intended to serve as a national platform for community economic development initiatives. Its core competence was low-mod affordable housing, but comprehensiveness was also a key goal in Rouse’s approach. EF set up its own neighborhood-based CDO—Community-Building in Partnerships (CBP)—to act as its organizational change agent. Rouse, long associated with Baltimore’s ED, would be the force behind the below Sandtown case study—he died during its implementation.
Sandtown in the next section is a case study of one of CCI’s very first experiments. It failed—badly in my opinion. The spring 2015 Baltimore riots resulting from the death of Freddie Gray, a Sandtown/Gilmore Project resident, were not, of course, caused by the 1990 decade-long CBP/CCI revitalization initiative; but they demonstrate how little that first experiment altered the neighborhood’s path. Sandtown was chosen as a case study not to suggest CCI cannot work—much evaluation and learning has followed from it and other projects. CCI today is not in the same place as it was in the 1990s. Rather, Sandtown illustrates what have proven to be chronic issues which CCI has struggled to overcome. If history can teach lessons, then Sandtown must be a teachable case study.
Sandtown
Sandtown is a 72-block neighborhood with 10,000 residents in West Baltimore, a neighborhood associated with HBO’s The Wire. For several generations Sandtown had been among the most deteriorated and troubled of Baltimore’s neighborhoods. Just plug in terrible statistics stereotypical of distressed areas. Half its residents were unemployed, it suffered four times the nation’s infant mortality rate and, in 1987 (and today) high drug addiction rates—and crime. Earlier it had been a working-class black neighborhood that produced success stores like Cab Calloway, Billie Holliday and Thurgood Marshall.
Our Sandtown-Winchester story begins with Kurt Schmoke: present-day president of the University of Baltimore, Rhodes Scholar, Harvard and Yale grad, former Howard University Dean of Law and Baltimore’s first African-American mayor (1987–99) (Stoker et al., 2015). Schmoke forged an alliance with BUILD, a Westside church-based coalition affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation (see above). BUILD advocated a program to push Nehemiah-style homeownership: “Sandtown-Winchester 600” (600 abandoned brick row houses). By 1989 BUILD and Schmoke amassed over $20 million in federal, state, city, foundation and church funds to implement Sandtown-Winchester 600. The initial phase, the Gilmor Project (227 row houses), was identified. BUILD needed a developer, however, and formally in 1990 James Rouse and his Enterprise Fund stepped into the Sandtown story.
Rouse’s EF, joined with BUILD/Schmoke to establish the Sandtown-Winchester Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI). NTI attacked a comprehensive set of neighborhood problems—i.e. “broken systems” such as schools, health care, jobs, safety and housing. EF set up NTI to organize and lead residential and institutional participation because it believed no local CDO or anchor institution could be used—although longstanding Sandtown CDOs existed. I note the absence of the private sector.
EF also forged alliances with other foundations such as Rockefeller, Kellogg and Anne E. Casey. Professional staff was assembled, residential board and staff participation recruited and studies of various types conducted. Several other organizations and local alliances were formed to flesh out the “comprehensiveness.” Between 1994 and 1998 at least eight corporations and five “consortiums” were formed—one of which, the Transformation Consortium, included 18 organizations. In addition seven other organizations (for example, AmeriCorps operated the jobs component) either ran programs within the EF/CPB network or were in some way connected to programs. This does not include local entities such as the city, BUILD, Baltimore School System, the Urban League, universities or HUD (Halpern, 1995, pp. 208–13). Evidently, comprehensiveness invited large doses of bureaucracy.
Comprehensiveness was always a problem. Educational initiatives, faithful to the Boston Compact, required close working relationships with a non-involved private sector, and an exceedingly troubled Baltimore school system. Other program areas, lead paint for example, operated at the margins of neighborhood priorities. Anti-drug efforts got off to a late start and were mostly limited to referrals—which makes for easy statistics but little impact. Anti-crime and Police Department-related programs were virtually non-existent. Initiatives leveraged public funds, and private foundation involvement, however. The Anne E. Casey Evaluation (2000) states that $70 million of “new funds were committed … by federal programs such as Healthy Start and Empowerment Zone. Foundations such as Aspen, Kellogg, the Habitat for Humanity, Anne E. Casey, Abner, Annenberg, Rockefeller, Walter Jones, Urban Institute and NY Community Trust were involved in activities/initiatives.
Where in all this was the BUILD Nehemiah housing project? After Phase 1 of the Nehemiah Project was completed, BUILD separated itself from EF and NTI, remaining involved in the Empowerment Zone but dropping its name from CBP literature. EF moved into large-scale “Sandtown-Winchester” scattered site; substantial rehab housing was intended for owner-occupiers but eventually, because of the high cost, became mostly rental. Little momentum was generated behind the housing. Nevertheless, between Nehemiah and the other housing initiatives approximately 1000 new units were constructed and another 2000 rehabbed—out of about 4300 units in the two neighborhoods.
Local political leaders, activists and media interviews observed NTI leadership was perceived as both political (loyal to the mayor) and not especially attuned to residents—the age-old perception was NTI was more adept with bankers and bureaucrats than with its client population. At the beginning, the mayor appointed a task force to lead the CBP planning process. Local comment asserts that two successive CEOs were the mayor’s picks, the last and a mayoral appointee whose performance at CBP was not favorably received by residents. The mayor brought in all sorts of other goodies, including a Federal Empowerment Zone (2000) to Sandtown, followed by a later New Markets Tax Credit project.
When the mayor left office in 1999, NTI lost its thrust. The new mayor, Martin O’Malley, had other priorities, and embraced mainstream economic development strategies (business assistance, attraction and tourism). Police, crime and anti-drug programs were his signature neighborhood initiatives. They are today blamed for the Freddie Gray riots. NTI closed up shop. No critical mass was ever achieved, and the neighborhood downward spiral was not stopped. Said and done, over the existence of CBP lots of public and private funding went into Sandtown—$60 million from Rouse alone. Lacking a comprehensive audit, it is impossible to determine how much actually was spent. Over the course of EF/CBP’s NTI project, the various participating entities likely spent several hundred million (pre-2000) dollars.
Ron W. Coan 