http://www.shelterforce.org/ The journal of affordable housing and community building en Copyright 2013 2013-05-03T17:19:54+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3214/reconnecting_jobs_and_housing/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/reconnecting_jobs_and_housing/reconnecting_jobs_and_housing/#When:16:19:54Z The following are excerpts from a conversation with Shelterforce editor Miriam Axel-Lute and publisher Harold Simon at the semi-annual meeting of the The Shelterforce Community Development Leadership Editorial Advisory Council. Participants: Rachel Maleh, National Community Reinvestment Coalition; Chris Estes, National Housing Conference; Nancy Wilberg Ricks, National Council of La Raza; Ed Gramlich: National Low Income Housing Coalition; Leslie Strauss, Housing Assistance Council; Stephen Seidel, Habitat for Humanity; Frank Woodruff, National Alliance of Community and Economic Development Association; Patrick Maier, Innovative Housing Institute; Michael Bodaken, National Housing Trust; Marcea Berenger: NeighborWorks, Harold Simon, National Housing Insitute; Josh Ishimatsu, National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development Miriam Axel-Lute: How do jobs and economic development relate to housing and community development? Chris Estes: Typically, when you get into a discussion around housing, the first thing we all try to do is talk about how many jobs we create or our economic development impact. We really need to clarify what really creates jobs and for whom, because the national political landscape is in this job-centric focus. How do we differentiate economic and community development from job creation? We’ve gone down a job creation path, not an economic development or community development path, politically and philosophically. How do we really focus in on the issue of job preparedness and the educational implications of that? I sit on a board for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, and when you are in these discussions about unemployment, it’s really all about “Where are the people we want to hire?” not “Why is unemployment 23 percent in these certain census tracks?” People don’t really get their brains around what’s failed there and what should we be doing to make sure folks in those communities have access to jobs. And then, how [do we] re-assert that housing is an essential piece of the economic success of this country? The entire narrative, from the day Obama was elected to today, has never really been about housing. It’s always been about jobs. We’ve got to figure out how housing and investment in housing and the value that housing brings to successful community development, and equitable community economic development, gets reinserted into that narrative. Without it, we can’t ever compete on the job creation track with tax cuts for Exxon and other companies that could add 2,000 people in a fell swoop. I mean, our entire affordable housing industry’s just not going to stack up in that range. Nancy Wilberg Ricks: I think that that’s the exact angle we should go. Jobs is such a sexy topic, and housing is never connected to it. And we think it’s an obvious no-brainer that the economy can’t prop itself back up again without a healthy housing market. Ed Gramlich: Our primary focus is on getting housing built that is affordable to extremely low-income people, but part of the sell, too, for certain people is that this can create a lot of jobs. If you’re going to develop a bunch of affordable housing, there’s a lot of construction, and that can also then have spillover effects in neighborhoods where there’s a lot of deterioration and abandonment. The current administration came in right away and said, OK, we’re going to finally make Section 3 [local hiring requirements for public housing construction jobs] work, and they’re really the first ones that have said that since 1968. And I believe that they intended to do that, but here we are, almost four years later, and we still don’t have improved regulations, and I wouldn’t even say marginally improved performance. Leslie Strauss: I certainly agree with what’s been said about connecting housing and jobs. We haven’t done that in any concerted or organized way. When we talk about why the housing programs should be paid attention to, it’s usually in terms of people need better housing, not so much what the economic effect for the broader community is. Stephen Seidel: For those of you who might have a notion about Habitat, you probably are thinking about our work as heavily carried out by volunteers, which is true. But when you boil it down, we actually do spend money on people who get paid to do the work, some portions of the work on the house, whether it’s plumbing, heating, electrical, roofing, foundations, those kinds of things. For many years, we haven’t had many metrics that we collect from our affiliates in the field related to job generation, economic impact, and the like. But that is obviously changing in this environment. Our Dallas affiliate has generated within the last six months or a year or so a pretty detailed economic impact report on the work that that very large operation generates in the Dallas metropolitan area. That is increasingly common, and I think our larger affiliates are better positioned to respond. But I think one of the limitations that we have is just what are the right metrics to be collecting. What kind of systems do we need to set ourselves up to be able to help our local affiliates gather data that we haven’t been asking them really for in a concerted way. Related to that, Habitat worksites have often been, in many places, great sites for apprenticeship programs. So we do a lot of apprenticeshipping with the trades, whether it’s drywall or electrical or whatever, and that’s a great partnership. But we, again, haven’t tracked that and followed those apprentices into what’s happened with them employment-wise. And among many of our 1,500 affiliates we have this thing called Re-Stores, which are retail operations that sell donated or salvaged building materials to the general public. We have about 750 of them around the United States, and we’re looking at growing that unit of the organization both as an income-generating feature, but also as an employment venue, where we can bring people in as an employment setting for folks, again, in this very hyper-sensitive jobs environment that we’re operating in. Frank Woodruff: We’ve all seen trends where local organizations that have typically relied relatively heavily on developer fees for housing construction mostly are looking for other opportunities to gain financial independence. In the south, particularly in South Carolina, they’re looking at on-bill financing for home and commercial energy independence in construction and partnering with electric cooperatives in order to do that. And you notice how I framed that as an economic and energy issue and not as a housing issue, and that’s very intentional. Patrick Maier: In Maryland, under the last version of the DOT bill, you’re allowed to set aside up to a half of one percent of DOT money for job creation, training, and employment access by underserved people. In addition to having, the avenues to jobs, I think there needs to be a role for CDCs, NGOs to push for the access to them. Michael Bodaken: The tax credit program, according to most sources, creates somewhere between 140,000 and 150,000 good jobs per year. The Section 8 program, according to the administration, creates over 100,000 jobs per year and puts over $500 million in local economies. And the Trust where I work has preserved over 24,000 apartments, and we’ve helped put together about 30,000 jobs. But Chris is quite right that that is not enough. The Trust is part of what’s called the Opportunity Finance Network. Mark Pinsky, who heads up the Opportunity Finance Network, found out that [Starbucks CEO] Howard Schultz was upset with Obama for not creating enough jobs, and he said, “I’ll give your organization $5 million and we’ll raise another $5 million.” And we are part of that group, and we are keeping very close track of the jobs we’re creating with the loans and grants from this. I think they’ve raised about $13 million so far. And what’s interesting about this campaign is that there are stories that are associated with each one of the loans—short, two-minute videos. I’m not saying that’s the only answer, but I think it’s closer to where we need to be, because I know that our story is better than the other stories. Marcea Berenger: Housing construction and rehab does create jobs. We look at that every year when we’re telling the story of the 235 NeighborWorks affiliates, and I don’t think I heard anyone say this particular point, but we often make the point that those construction jobs and rehab jobs can’t be exported overseas, and that seems to resonate with people. In terms of how we get metrics for measuring those jobs we actually are moving to use a different system, which is called InPlan, and does a very complicated, locally-based analysis of the jobs that are created in different communities, and also looks at other kinds of economic impacts. We also have some members that are focusing on energy efficiency jobs. One of the NeighborWorks affiliates is Community Housing Partners Corporation, based in Christiansburg, Virginia. And they have something called the New River Center for Energy Research and Training, where they train people in how to do things like home performance testing and how to test for efficiency in heating and cooling systems. We also have other groups that are running similar training programs. Josh Ishimatsu: Our members are not universally housing developers, although we do have some, but we have lots of organizations who are just sort of social service providers and/or who do job development or small business counseling. We shouldn’t just limit the conversation or limit the issue areas to housing issues, because community development can also encompass micro-enterprise, small business development, job development, and job training. Miriam Axel-Lute: What’s the difference between job creation and economic development? When we think about economic development in our neighborhoods and job creation, what’s the range of things we’re looking at and what do we need to take into account? When we look at a neighborhood, should we be trying to think beyond it to things that connect it to a wider economy? Is something like a grocery store economic development, or do we need to be focusing on export-oriented industries that actually bring in new money to the community? Patrick Maier: If we use housing as a driver right now, I think we may be playing a zero sum game. If you’re building a strong city that people have access to new jobs in, you may have a better chance at building a place where people are able to sustain and where the housing stock is strong. Leslie Strauss: People want to live where they can get services and where the services are of a certain standard, education, grocery stores. You don’t want to drive far if you don’t have to. If you have the grocery store there and people stay in their community, they are contributing to an economy. And they may not work in that economy, but the grocery store is driving money, may even eventually, in the long-term, driving people to that neighborhood who don’t live in that neighborhood to invest more dollars there. Chris Estes: I think our strongest argument is that community stabilization and enhancement angle, and there’s a way that you can then talk about job creation inclusive of that, but it allows for a much more comprehensive conversation. Whether it’s rural areas or historically disadvantaged areas, it’s about investment that would not happen otherwise. If it’s about preservation or development in changing areas, it’s about preventing both the loss of previous investmentm but also preventing gentrification and displacement. There’s the access to jobs and schools, the balancing of deconcentrated poverty and the sort of macro example about why free market economies don’t work equitably, and so we have to intervene in them. And whether it’s Habitat producing homes that stabilize a neighborhood or a CDC, there’s this community benefit that has multiple ripple effects of that that allows for more investment. I think the philosophy of community empowerment and keeping things local is a useful lens. It may not be that we’re going to train a whole bunch of people to start their own business and start selling stuff, but if we got everybody in the neighborhood to really think differently about how they spent their money and where it goes and what that investment is, then you really are getting at this different framework of community economic development. The people who live in the wealthier parts of Baltimore have the same stake in Baltimore’s success that those that live in the abandoned row house areas, and we are all sort of in this together. And I think that framework is really where housing does its best work, because where we’re not just plopping down some homes and saying, look, we built some great stuff, and we put the financing together and then we walk away, we really are thinking about how does this all fit together. It’s almost more about philosophy than it is just the actual construction in some ways. It’s not just that we did something good. It’s how did we do it, and how did that fit into this other work? How does it fit into a conversation about school choice or energy efficiency, or transportation or access to jobs and employment and the public transit system? We need to talk about the jobs we produce, but we need to be framing it in these much more comprehensive ways. Miriam Axel-Lute: There’s an entire movement out there that you make me think of, the “buy local” movements. How connected are we, or how connected could we be to those movements? Chris Estes: We’re really trying to have a pretty comprehensive community benefit conversation, and too often, there are people focused on different segments, whether it’s jobs or transportation or education or public health, and they aren’t ever talking about housing. They’re talking about their piece. And there’s certainly a bridge needed for that conversation. But again, if we are doing our jobs well, we really are putting this larger community well-being framework out there that really ought to integrate well with what other folks are doing. I think the challenge of those kinds of networks is that they often get so locked into what counts [as local] and what doesn’t that it doesn’t allow them to have as much bridge as they want. And from my experience of having worked with many of those groups when I was at grad school and coming out of planning school and sort of getting into housing, it felt like there was this sort of disconnect where the conversation didn’t continue, because there was this framework of “That doesn’t qualify because you didn’t have a locally owned, minority-run CDC build this house and hire people who were formerly homeless to do it, with financing from the CDFI.” Frank Woodruff: Just a thought about bridging. I mean, we could try to create a nice little Washington, DC-based meeting once a month of all the housing, the transportation, education, and the Good Jobs First people. But there will be a lot of meetings. But maybe more practically, the first thing that really came to my mind was community organizers in the neighborhoods, because community organizers don’t just deal with housing. They don’t deal with just jobs. They take whatever the issue is of the moment, and they grab on to an opportunity. So if it’s a job opportunity, they’ll galvanize the community to work toward those jobs. There’s housing opportunity, great, or maybe we need a grocery store—we’re in a food desert. So maybe we ought to figure out how to get the community organizers talking to all the different larger interest groups that are at the national level. Michael Bodaken: I actually think it’s simple. Doesn’t make it easy. But I am reminded of those Fannie Mae ads for home ownership and they were very compelling. And I once went to Franklin Raines, and I said, “Why can’t we do that for rental housing?” And Frank was very honest about it. He says, “You know, we’ve tried and tried. We just can’t find people who want to be renters. Everybody wants to be a homeowner.” But I’ve thought a lot about that since that conversation, and that message about homeownership had really nothing to do with homes. The word mortgage wasn’t mentioned. The income wasn’t mentioned. You saw an African-American couple or a white couple or a Hispanic couple who were happy with their kids, and they mentioned homeownership about 15 times in 30 seconds. And I’ve often wondered if now what we really need to do is do a similar kind of thing about jobs with housing. If you take a look at the success stories that create jobs, it’s about one woman in New Orleans, about her life being transformed by getting this job through this—it’s all about her, right? The whole point of storytelling is we’re hardwired for success, and we want people to succeed. It’s not complicated. It’s expensive to put this together, and how we put it together is key, but I think there’s a lot of good two-minute videos out there that we could start with. And I think the question is how we could put it in front of policymakers and others. I think the real question is how do you show that housing creates jobs. Harold Simon: Maybe the question for this forum is how good are we at it? How good are we at creating sustainable work? How good are we at creating good jobs? Are they living wage jobs, are they sustainable, do they have mobility? How are your organizations able to have these conversations about job creation and job growth? Stephen Seidel: The beauty of housing is that it’s so versatile. It has so many different tentacles and so many different kind of sectors and industries and impacts and it’s such a fundamental need that, no matter what emerges as kind of the issue of the day, housing should be able to speak to it in some meaningful way. But that takes some kind of nimbleness and agility to be able to kind of shift our narrative and collect data that enable us to do that in a meaningful way. If jobs is going to be kind of the dominant theme for us to really delve into for the next five years then there’s some duty on our part to be able to speak to it more currently, with more current data. But there’s obstacles to that. I think there’s training. There’s tools. There’s capacity. But I do think that there is a story to tell. The jobs are, by and large, decent paying. They’re not exportable. But they do have a temporary [aspect] to many of them. I mean, it’s a job that doesn’t necessarily last for years and years and years. It’s project to project to project, and I think that might be an issue that we need to be able to speak to perhaps by saying we need a level of capacity and output in our sector that can be a viable, ongoing, steady job creator for lots of communities for the foreseeable set of years. Economic Development 2013-05-03T16:19:54+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3086/getting_beyond_growth_at_any_price/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/getting_beyond_growth_at_any_price/getting_beyond_growth_at_any_price/#When:12:00:54Z The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-State Economy, by Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty. New Society Publishers, 2012, 400 pp., $26.95. I must admit that until now resilience was not a word in my regular vocabulary. Given the challenges of pursuing community development with public and private sector partners, I usually use persistence and tenacity to describe our nonprofit sector attributes. However, resilience made #6 on The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Top 10 list of buzzwords for 2012 because it is quickly replacing sustainability. The Chronicle article notes that with all the changes affecting nonprofits in the world, focusing on adaptability and bouncing back is a good idea. In The Resilience Imperative, authors Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty offer a scientific definition of resilience as “the amount of change a system can undergo (its capacity to absorb disturbance) and essentially retain the same functions, structure and feedbacks.” Given the prevailing aftermath of our global economic crisis and the ignoring of climate change, the authors have convinced me it’s resilience that is essential for our future. Lewis and Conaty challenge each of us to use “Social, Ecological, Economic” lenses to “SEE” change and to fulfill the imperative of seeking strategic pathways by sharing what we are learning in order to secure the innovations that are getting results by scaling up and broadening their applications. They call for “cooperative transitions to a steady-state economy.” We can no longer afford growth at any price. The fundamental question that The Resilience Imperative poses is one that the authors credit to ecological economist, Hazel Henderson: Growth for whom and for what? This question has been asked consistently throughout the history of community development here in the United States. Lewis and Conaty advocate an economic strategy that “values diversity, is decentralized, additionally broadens, localizes and democratizes ownership in the economy and in turn widens the distribution of benefits, including the extension of democratic control over the commons of land, the corporation and finance.” Too often confirmed by daily news reports, increasing debt and carbon levels are, as the authors contend, “rendering communities, nations and the global economy and the biosphere more and more vulnerable to catastrophic events.” Yet, the cycle continues unquestioned as “economic growth is required more and more to pay back escalating levels of debt, which has sky rocketed over the last four decades. Growth continues to be dependent on fossil fuels. Thus, financial debt is a major contributor to our ecological crisis and socially, contributes significantly to increasing inequality and poverty.” Debt-based money creation and compound interest are targeted by the authors as key culprits contributing to the problem. We must remember that the origins of community reinvestment initiatives were also accompanied by financial services deregulation in the 1970s which removed the caps on interest and “marginalized usury laws that historically provided legally enforceable and transparent speed limits on creditors.” The book connects the dots between shelter, food, energy, and different forms of structuring property rights, ownership and finance with innovative strategies for a “Solidarity Economy” based on the shared “values of social justice, inclusiveness, ecological sustainability and deeper, democratic forms of participation.” It covers a breadth and depth of economic thought that merits the investment of time just for the history lessons alone. It addresses how little is understood about the hidden power of land, capital and ownership, with real and practical case studies of decommodifying land, moving financing from compound interest to fee charges, radically reducing energy waste, and creating a second source of income (besides wages) through forms of trusteeships. The authors bring these lessons home with a running tally of savings for an average Canadian family, the Hartwicks, as they deploy and integrate these strategies. In a concluding table, the Hartwicks can save over 25 years almost the full price of their $371,000 home through using a land trust, a fee-based loan and energy conservation. The authors cite research that the exponential impact of compound interest embedded in the economy may make up close to 35 percent of a hidden cost structure that benefits the financial industry rather than our local economy and families’ fiscal health. The analysis offered by Lewis and Conaty is so distinctive because rarely are land reform, corporate reform, and capital/monetary reform discussed outside of their separate silos. They challenge the reader to “SEE” the sum of these reforms as a transition that is imperative for our collective future. Particular case studies that drew my interest include: Interest-Free Lending as managed by Sweden’s JAK Cooperative Bank (an acronym for Jord Arbete Kapital or Land Labor Capital); Community Land Trusts as established by Vermont’s Champlain Housing Trust; Eliminating “Fuel Poverty” (spending more than 10 percent of household income to keep your home adequately warm) as demonstrated by the UK’s Kirklees Energy Services, a not-for-profit social enterprise; and Community Economic Development as implemented by Montreal’s Regroupement Economique et social du Sud-Ouest (RESO) and Maine’s Coastal Enterprises Inc. (CEI). Cooperative Land Banks are proposed to transform property rights in order to capture for community benefit the uplift in land values created by public investment in infrastructure. Another benefit cited is making it more difficult for speculators to sit on properties, an especially pertinent strategy to combat vulture investors now swarming over communities plagued with foreclosures by predatory lenders. Honest self-reflection would admit that our efforts for banking reform are still falling short and we have yet to adequately address or even consider the land reform and corporate reform necessary for a just economy. Chapter 8’s title — Convivial Banking — may seem to be a relic from the past or a current oxymoron. But the authors share as seeds for transition how the UK is developing new initiatives for community banking partnerships to address the multiple needs of low-income households and patient equity investments for social enterprises through “withdrawable share capital.” As the authors implore us, community development lenders should revisit and seek to replicate successful interest-free and fee-based lending practices outlined in The Resilience Imperative that either charge low rates of interest or replace interest entirely with fees for service and risk cost premiums. Ecological economics holds the answer, they assert, since the single most powerful lever available is price. They insist, “We must price the social damage we are causing ourselves and the ecological damage we are inflicting on the planet.” They implore us to: Expand our investment in green infrastructure; Radically reduce the costs of compound interest; Implement broad land reform; Reclaim our lives from the moneylenders and speculative developers; and Ensure shared ownership under a diversity of trusteeship companies and Community Land Banks. As the authors stress, we all face the formidable challenge of: “combining the community and social banking parts into more visible and powerful consortiums that can be federated to shape public discourse, social investment policy, and priorities…. What is missing is leadership to bring diverse networks together, forge intensive cooperative links, mobilize a social/ecological justice vision, and develop creative ways to deliver knowledge capital through dynamic services that make money our servant and no longer our master.” These may be particularly difficult times to achieve national policy support here in the United States for the reforms that Lewis and Conaty advocate. But in the meantime, we can certainly pursue local innovations and cooperative alliances to demonstrate what real change can accomplish. Sustainability, Reviews 2013-04-09T12:00:54+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3084/learning_from_san_franciscos_housing_movement/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/learning_from_san_franciscos_housing_movement/learning_from_san_franciscos_housing_movement/#When:21:32:00Z From Urban Renewal and Displacement to Economic Inclusion: San Francisco Affordable Housing Policy 1978-2012, by Marcia Rosen and Wendy Sullivan. National Housing Law Project and Poverty and Race Research Action Council. 2012, 62 pp. “History is important. If you don’t know history it’s as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.” Howard Zinn Marcia Rosen and Wendy Sullivan from the National Housing Law Project have given us a history to learn from. From Urban Renewal and Displacement to Economic Inclusion: San Francisco Affordable Housing Policy 1978-2012 is a unique and comprehensive analysis into the history of affordable housing policy in San Francisco. It is also the story of the maturation of the community of that city’s housing groups from a grassroots, single-issue movement into a major force in shaping affordable housing policy there. The study teaches us that sustained community organizing has the ability to change the face of city government from one controlled by business interests into one responsive to neighborhoods and residents. It is particularly relevant now, since San Francisco is in the middle of its second technology boom. Salesforce, Google, Twitter, and many smaller technology companies have added thousands of jobs, resulting in additional stress on housing costs, with rents increasing rapidly and now averaging more than $1,800 per month for a one-bedroom apartment. One section of the study traces the history of San Francisco housing policy starting in the urban renewal movement of the 1970s and ending in the present day, when the mayor is a former housing activist and the city has just created a new permanent source of funding for affordable housing and is committed to a bold initiative to rebuild public housing in an initiative called HOPE SF. The study tells the story of a number of epic and historic battles over housing issues in San Francisco: major evictions, urban renewal, and gentrification. What makes San Francisco different from much of the rest of the country is that the battles resulted in significant local financing for affordable housing, high capacity nonprofit developers, strong inclusionary housing regulation, and rent control. Rosen and Sullivan’s study provides the roadmap can make San Francisco a significant model for other cities. The study also provides a comprehensive look at the financing of affordable housing in San Francisco, pointing out the myriad of funding sources necessary to create permanent affordable housing for populations ranging from dual-diagnosis special needs supportive housing to family units. San Francisco has used TIF bonds, a local Affordable Housing Fund, Hotel Tax funding, money from the general fund, and many other sources to fill the large gaps between market rate and affordable. The study includes a timeline that makes a clear connection between organizing and policy changes and many charts to summarize the research and trends. With all the struggle and victories, and the strong commitment by city government and housing advocates, it is still clear that the housing needs of low- and moderate-income people in San Francisco have not been met adequately, showing the limits of regulation and nonprofit development in the case of a “strong market city” like San Francisco. Affordable Housing, Reviews 2013-04-01T21:32:00+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3085/born_to_score/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/born_to_score/born_to_score/#When:21:40:57Z Born on Third Base: What the Forbes 400 Really Says About Economic Equality and Opportunity in America, United for a Fair Economy. 2012, 12 pp. The release of United for a Fair Economy (UFE) report Born on Third Base: What the Forbes 400 Really Says About Economic Equality and Opportunity in America, coincided with the release of the Forbes 400, an annual list of the U.S.’s wealthiest individuals. What is striking, if not surprising, is that most of the members in this elite club are not self-made billionaires but, as the title denotes, started out “on third base,” to use a baseball analogy. They come from wealthy families with access to opportunities and advice, are mostly white, and are part of the good ol’ boy network. Based on family, inheritance, tax laws, and other federal policies, it is almost impossible for them not to succeed and grow increasingly wealthy. Little more needs to be said about this point. What does this mean for the rest of us? “The truth is that Americans have never had an equal opportunity to become wealthy,” notes the report. “Rather than concocting fables about our ‘opportunity society,’ the editors of Forbes should be examining the birthright privileges enjoyed by many of those on the list.” The report highlights the inequalities of wealth in this country, discusses how wealth is made in America and acknowledges the structure of the system we currently live in. It also highlights and suggests policies, products, and tools that can increase the opportunity for low- and moderate-income families to move up the ladder and make inequality less pronounced. In the concluding section of the report, UFE suggests ways of “leveling up” policies to really create wealth opportunities for all Americans. Practitioners in the asset-building field would agree that jobs with a living wage, access to post-secondary education without lifelong indebtedness, and promoting asset accumulation through savings, homeownership, and retirement security are good ideas. Beyond those policies, specific tools and products to expand opportunity for low- and moderate-income families could include children’s savings accounts at birth with some initial “seed” deposit to expand post-secondary enrollment and completion; expanded employer-based savings for emergencies, large asset purchases, and for retirement; and a suite of financial mainstream products to allow families to utilize market-rate lending with responsible fees, rather than predatory products. While we can demonstrate that many of the Forbes 400 start on third base, these are some of the steps that can help low-income families at least get to first base. Equality, Reviews 2013-03-22T21:40:57+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3087/the_next_move_is_always_ours/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/the_next_move_is_always_ours/the_next_move_is_always_ours/#When:21:49:45Z In the name of full disclosure, I worked for Gale Cincotta for more than ten years, starting as a graduate student volunteer in 1973 through staffing her negotiation team in 1984 for the landmark neighborhood lending agreement with then–First National Bank of Chicago (now Chase). I had a great education, but to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, I learned more from Cincotta than I ever learned in school. Gale Force by Michael Westgate with Ann Vick-Westgate is a superb biography of a true American hero and an exceptional oral history of the 1970s and the growth of the neighborhood movement as a direct descendant of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In these troubled economic and political times, this book is extremely relevant today. The Westgates chose to tell this story from the perspective of those who lived these times and through articles from the national newsletter, DISCLOSURE, that I founded for Cincotta to chronicle how communities across the country were being victimized by the government. “We have found the enemy, and it’s not us,” Gale was noted for saying. The book details many of Cincotta’s legacies, including two national laws that continue to serve America’s communities today: The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) of 1975 and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. Chicagoans still benefit from Gale’s leadership in establishing the Chicago Neighborhood Housing Services, which Michael Westgate worked with her on in 1973. But inherent within all the stories is perhaps Cincotta’s greatest legacy and what first attracted me to her and continues to inspire and shape my professional and personal life – her ability to work with all who were seeking real solutions to community issues. It was not common in the early ‘70s for a church hall to be filled with white ethnics and people of color joined together in demanding redress from their government officials for allowing their homes and blocks to become “cities destroyed for cash,” as the title of Brian Boyer’s 1973 expose of the FHA scandals described them, but Cincotta was able to bring these communities together. I still cringe today when DC policy wonks tell us FHA is the solution for American homeownership. “We want the private economy to come in our neighborhood,” Cincotta said. As the Westgates capture, Gale was not a political person in the conventional party sense. She didn’t care if you were Democratic President Jimmy Carter or Republican HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, she expected a responsive government. Certainly a point lost on Capitol Hill today. There are chapters that provide the reader with the Chicago history of Realtors’ block-busting, and for the many who may not have known, the chapter on the Catholic Church details the key role of Father Roger Coughlin and Catholic Charities’ support for organizers at the parish level. For those who knew both Cincotta and Shel Trapp, the book describes the yin and yang of surely the most unique but productive “professional marriage.” Unfortunately, while their voices are captured here for all to read, both Coughlin and Trapp left us last year before Gale Force was published. Their legacies are also part of this story. I found Chapter 10, “You Gotta Have an Outcome,” to be revealing in its citing of Ford Foundation program officers’ reports. I couldn’t help but acknowledge that their observations were not only true but also explain much about my own managerial style. One of my contributing stories to the book was Cincotta’s response to another funder’s question of how she could accomplish so much with so small an operation. Without any hesitation, Cincotta replied, “We work miracles here, it’s part of the program.” One of my colleagues put those words on the front of her desk and it became lore for staff motivation. One correction I have already provided the Westgates for a future edition is a misrepresentation (obviously spread by the American Bankers Association) regarding the 1980 Reclaim America action on the ABA’s annual convention in Chicago. A U.S. Senate staffer, in recounting Cincotta’s assault on McCormick Place by boat on Columbus Day, states that the boat was in danger of capsizing and had to be rescued by the Coast Guard. In fact, then–Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne was welcoming the ABA convention and had ordered Chicago Police boats to be deployed to stop Cincotta’s “Santa Maria II” from landing and reclaiming America from the bankers. Such “lake” or street theater has always been in the DNA of National People’s Action and remains today. Gale Force includes other such stories, from the 1979 Battle of New Orleans to the 1980 NBC Land Shark appearance at the Federal Reserve Board. But throughout this history, the Westgates remind the reader that Cincotta’s intention was always to win. “This isn’t about civil disobedience. This is about getting a meeting and moving business along. You can’t move business along if you get arrested.” Gale Force begs the question What if Cincotta had still been with us these past few years? When she died on August 15, 2001, Cincotta’s last words were reported to be: “Get the Crooks.” Unfortunately, 10 years later, after our government stood by and watched our economy be destroyed by greed, “too big to jail” seems to be the current refrain. This book captures Cincotta well — a most ordinary working class woman without a formal education who managed to do extraordinary things with other everyday people from different races, cultures, and communities. Gale Force tells the story, which we must to continue to spread, of how one person can make a difference. As Cincotta would remind us, the next move is always ours. Organizing, Reviews 2013-02-18T21:49:45+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3081/the_answer_171/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/the_answer_171/the_answer_171/#When:03:46:47Z A: In an appreciating or expensive neighborhood, the value of creating permanently affordable housing through shared-equity homeownership* is easy to grasp: it preserves ongoing access to opportunity for those of modest means. But why would such programs make sense in disinvested neighborhoods or weak markets where housing costs aren’t soaring? The Answer 2013-02-12T03:46:47+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3063/an_island_where_there_is_a_standard/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/an_island_where_there_is_a_standard/an_island_where_there_is_a_standard/#When:14:00:54Z Deryl McCray was about 12 years old when he realized he didn’t like the way his uncle cut his hair. So he did something about it. “I figured if he let me use clippers I’d probably do a better job than he did,” he says. His uncle let him give it a try, and McCray promptly put his uncle out of the family hair-cutting business. “I did a good job,” he says. “My brothers saw it and they wanted my uncle to stop cutting their hair, and eventually my uncles saw it and they let me cut their hair, and then it became a venture from that day, where I became like the little community barber.” After finishing high school in Washington state, McCray enlisted in the Army, became a paratrooper, and served in the Gulf War. After he’d served four years, it was a woman who lured him to Albany, N.Y. His wife had ties to the area, so McCray made the move. But the job opportunities he looked into didn’t pan out. “That’s when I remembered one of the things my mother always told me as a kid: ‘Whatever you choose to do in life, make sure you love it, because if you love it you will stick to it and do your best at it.’” So, in 1999, McCray opened Brick’s barbershop on Central Avenue, the city’s largest commercial corridor, which also serves as one border of some of the city’s most troubled neighborhoods. The business currently has three partners: McCray, Jason Ellis, and Daiwan Perry, as well as seven barbers. “I wanted a name that is symbolic of structure, and Brick’s just came to mind,” says the stocky McCray, who sports a wide smile as he sits with Ellis in the back room of his barbershop. The walls of the room are covered with autographs from celebrities, musicians, and athletes who frequent the shop. Senate Senator and Democratic Conference leader John Sampson is said to be a regular, as is Ellis’s cousin, Corey Ellis, a former Albany city council member and mayoral candidate. Brick’s has relocated twice since 1999 and has expanded its ranks of barbers. Out front, NFL games play on flat-screen TVs that hang over the barber chairs. “Every barber represents a brick,” says McCray. “Every customer represents a brick; we put them together and we build.” What exactly McCray has built with his two other partners and seven barbers is a safe haven—a reliable community cornerstone in a neighborhood notorious for its lack of stability. Outside on an early December Sunday, the crisp winter air pushes bundled-up pedestrians on Albany’s lower Central Avenue toward their destinations faster than usual. This isn’t the safest neighborhood—and they know that—but frostbite is the main concern for most, except for a man in a baggy jogging suit who stands out in the open urinating on the side of the fried-chicken joint across the street. Two apparently homeless men stand outside a corner store barking at each other over some debt while beer sloshes from the paper bagÐwrapped bottles they hold. Inside Brick’s, there is a different atmosphere than the one that typically pervades this stretch of Central Avenue. First of all, it is warm inside—not only the temperature, but the social atmosphere. People inside greet you personally with a firm handshake. No one is asked to stop loitering; people sit in the big black couches and relax while taking in the games. The only major requirement seems to be the one stated on the sign on the outside of the building, which says, “Please No Cursing.” At Brick’s, people of every age walk in the door smiling. They pull back their hoods, unwrap their scarves, and hang up their coats to settle in for a while. “We’re a family shop,” says McCray. “We see kids born and see them off to college and then come back to the community. We’re hood psychologists, we’re counselors, we’re educators.” The shop has run health fairs, reached out to the Albany Police Department and partnered with agencies to mentor troubled teens. Even so, these men’s jobs require more community interaction than most would think. McCray and Ellis say they have intervened to stop gun violence. “We’ve got kids come in that wanna know what to do, man,” says McCray. “We’ve stopped gun violence. You’ve got a kid with a lot of pressure living in the inner city coming in here and he’s got in a squabble out on the streets, and by street standards the next thing for him to do is retaliate in violence. Man, we’ve gotten in the middle, squashed beefs, stopped things. Kids know that Brick’s is safe—not only kids but men, grown men! They know, ‘I can come in here, get a haircut, and I can close my eyes.’” Jason Ellis knows how powerful the barbershop can be, as he himself was pulled from a dark place in his life by the influence of his barber. After college, Ellis’s father passed away, and he was unsure what to do with himself. “You go through a mental breakdown a little bit, a fear of life—what do I do? What do I do to survive? I’ve got training here and there but I don’t want to do those things. So I started getting haircuts from Deryl [McCray] and John at [nearby barbershop] True Images, and I talked to them about it, and they were joking, laughing, saying ‘Man, you can’t cut no hair,’ and I was like, ‘Hook me up!’” So they gave him a chance. “They were like, ‘Want a spot man? Come here with a client or one of your boys and show me a demo cut.’ I showed them a demo cut; it was terrible!” Ellis laughs. “But by the grace of god these guys gave me an opportunity.” Ellis says he took full advantage of McCray’s tutoring, and soon his vision of the business went from one of pure monetary concern to something bigger. “After a while you gain relationships with people; you realize business is bigger than that,” says Ellis. “You can influence someone and be a solid pillar in their life, ‘cause they don’t have that, and they see this person is constantly there, constantly a friend, constantly has good energy—and I loved that.” For McCray, Ellis’s story epitomizes what Brick’s is about, what it does for the community. “He was affected by the barbershop. He knew, ‘I can come here, get strength and support.’ When I met Jason he was a young man and full of fire, but he hit a wall in his life when he lost his father. He needed something, and he reached out to us and we embraced him.” But it isn’t just the lost who come to Brick’s looking for advice. Politicians and businessmen come to Brick’s looking to relax and bounce their ideas off the barbers. Corey Ellis says he goes to Brick’s to continue the tradition he started in his youth by getting his hair cut at Herman Cockfield’s Three Star Barber Shop on South Pearl Street. “Herman’s place was where everyone would go,” says Ellis. “It gave young men in the community great opportunities. If you were gonna run for office you went to Herman’s. If you were a visiting African-American politician you went to Herman’s. It was the anchor on that corner for so many years.” Ellis says when he goes to Brick’s now, customers take the time to talk to him about “what is really going on” in the news. He says that in some ways the community barbershop is the exclusive news provider for some residents of the inner city. “The barber shop isn’t just a business; it is a place of refuge, it’s a place of opportunity for the African-American community.” The guys at Brick’s are doing their best to keep that tradition going. “A guy told me,” says McCray, ”’I could cut my son’s hair. I could cut my own hair. But I bring him here for him to see what I see. You’ve got 10 black men working together harmoniously, and that is something.’” McCray says that “people see standards in Brick’s in a community that lacks standards, and that’s what we want to do—raise the standard in the community, be a standard to where we are saying, ‘Look, you don’t have to sell drugs. You don’t have to commit crimes just because of where you are and what you see. We happen to be a little island right in the middle of Baghdad, for a lack of a better term. We’re a little island where there is a standard.” Jason Ellis cranes his head to view the action out on the barbershop floor. The sound of the door chimes echoes into the back room, and the room erupts with cheers or shouts about one of the football games. “When you walk in the door you sit down, lay back, relax and take your mind off a couple things; it’s almost like a country club for the community.” As comfortable as things are at Brick’s, the barbers there still have their work cut out for them when it comes to educating the kids who come through the door, because the realities of the street do not simply disappear after the hair is dusted off their shoulders. “People at Brick’s tell me they see a lot of kids who don’t trust the police, they don’t trust authority, but we have to lead by example,” says Corey Ellis. The problem with that is despite the effort they have put into educating kids and telling them they need to work with the police—not be scared to report a crime or call them when they need them—the barbershop itself has had unpleasant interactions with the police. In January 2008, an incident with the police took place in front of 16 Bars, a shop just a few storefronts down from Brick’s. Officer Mike Geraci was involved in an altercation with a man who double-parked his car in the street to unload product into his business. The situation escalated, and barbers and patrons of Brick’s went outside to watch what was happening. When an officer shoved the man’s wife, people began voicing their displeasure and started filming the incident. This reporter was present as the entire situation played out. “Put that fucking camera down!” shouted an officer. “Get off the fucking sidewalk,” Geraci yelled at the guys from Brick’s. “I know my rights. This is my business. I can be on the sidewalk in front of my business,” McCray told Geraci. “I don’t care what you know!” Geraci shouted back. Then McCray demanded Geraci’s badge number. Geraci gave it to him but said, “You sure you can spell? You don’t look like you can spell.” Geraci returned after the local alt-weekly newspaper, Metroland, ran an article about the incident and apologized to McCray. But McCray doesn’t feel that the apology was exactly sincere. He thinks Geraci was motivated to apologize because he found out that Brick’s is an established and respected anchor in the community. So how does McCray communicate to kids who come to his shop that it is important to work with the police when he himself has had bad experiences with them? “What we tell them is that, ‘Listen, there’s good people and bad people, there’s good cops and bad cops. You want to connect with good people.’ We put ourselves out to be a conduit to the police department to bring about understanding. The police have a tough job. It’s not easy being a police officer. A lot of people make their jobs difficult, and then you’ve got some bad officers who make it difficult on the community.” But McCray says he plans to keep working on things and reaching out to the police department. “It’s unfortunate that we are in a community that needs a whole lot of development. We hope someday soon some things can transpire so it becomes a whole lot more peaceful—not just for us as businessmen who see what’s going on and stress over it, but for the people who live here just as I do.” My conversation winds down as more customers pour into the shop out of the biting cold wind. The football games are coming to their conclusion, but I’m not done here yet. I head to the ATM and return. McCray is waiting. “You ready?” he asks. I nod and sit down in the sturdy black barber’s chair. He asks me what I want. “Just make it less messy, please,” I say. He drapes the smock over me, wraps the paper around my neck, and turns on the clippers. Then he goes to work cleaning up my unkempt trim. He takes out an array of tools, gets the hair at the bottom of my neck. “So, what is your story, Dave?” he asks. “Where you grow up?” I relax and spill my guts: my parents’ divorce, my troubled childhood split between an exclusive private school and school for emotionally troubled youth. “I don’t deserve this luxury,” I think to myself. Only a few days ago I moved out of an apartment in the building adjacent to Brick’s, where I lived for five years, to new digs in Center Square, a much more upscale area. I feel guilty. But for the first time I feel safe in this neighborhood. I feel completely at home. This article first ran in Metroland, Albany’s alt-weekly newspaper. Reprinted with permission. 2013-02-11T14:00:54+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3058/get_out_of_the_way/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/get_out_of_the_way/get_out_of_the_way/#When:13:50:25Z You are never finished. That is one of our 11 principles for creating great community places at the Project for Public Spaces. For anyone working to create a great “third place” in their neighborhood, it is critical to remember that there will never be a time when the work is done. Real-world communities are incredibly dynamic, ever-changing things. A public space cannot be finished any more than the city in which it resides can be. At their best, public spaces are the most tangible reflections of cities and neighborhoods and the people who make them special. They are stages for public life, and should reflect the people who live, work, and play nearby. “Ninety percent of success in public spaces is about management,” says Fred Kent, PPS’s founder and president. “Lots of cities create spaces but don’t manage them.” The key to successful management is understanding and being responsive to the people a space currently serves. Since people come and go, great places must be understood as sites that are in constant flux. Placemaking, the process that PPS uses in our work with communities around the world, is designed to involve people directly in deciding how their public spaces will look, feel, and operate. Normal citizens are the best experts that you can ask for when planning how a place should be designed or used—but they often question or ignore their own intuitive knowledge. For far too long, the shaping of public spaces has been left to architects and urban planners, who plan from the top down. This has left many people feeling disconnected from the places that are supposed to serve their needs. Parks and plazas go unused because they don’t feature activities that excite local residents; waterfronts languish because they remain disconnected from their cities even after renovations; streets are seen as conduits for traffic instead of places for bumping into neighbors on the way home from work. Ask many citizens why they don’t go to a given place and they’ll probably have a few good reasons; ask them how they’d go about changing it, and they’ll shrug their shoulders. “That’s for the planners to decide.” Placemaking teaches people how to evaluate places based on sociability, accessibility, uses, and comfort, and helps them to articulate and build confidence in the value of their own observations about how a place is working—or not working, as is often the case. In this way, placemaking is a fundamental part of any attempt to create a local third place, since it simultaneously ensures that changes to a space will reflect the needs of the existing community and builds that community’s sense of ownership in a project. Privately-owned third places like neighborhood cafés or pubs are forced to be responsive to the local community; if they aren’t providing programming and services that their neighbors want, they will most likely go out of business. Public spaces, by the very nature of being publicly owned and operated, can shirk responsibility if the community does not feel either empowered to make them their own or hold local leaders accountable. The placemaking process encourages people to connect in public spaces, creating the kinds of engaging and memorable third places that anchor strong communities. Opening and Programming Pittsburgh’s “Golden Triangle” is a central business district located at the convergence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers. At its heart sits Market Square, roughly one and a half acres surrounded by historic warehouses and glassy skyscrapers, historically one of the primary marketplaces for the region. Sadly, the solid old Diamond Market building that filled the site was demolished in 1961, when the Steel City went through one of the most dramatic urban renewal programs in the slum-clearance-crazed country. Huge chunks of the bustling downtown waterfront were cleared for a new park and sterile office complex, while several of the city’s most densely-populated central neighborhoods, including Old Allegheny Center and The Hill, were completely leveled, scattering many of the market’s core customers to suburbs and public housing complexes on the edges of the city. When PPS got involved in the planning process for Market Square in 2006, the site had been through numerous re-workings, none of which had managed to restore it to its former status as a gathering place for the greater Pittsburgh region. Working with the city’s Downtown Partnership, PPS facilitated a public placemaking workshop with neighborhood groups and individuals to generate ideas for uses and activities that would inform the future design and management of the square. The process led to an opening up of the square, including the eventual closure of several streets that ran through its center, to create a more welcoming space. This created one continuous piazza-style square instead of four quadrants, putting the activity at the heart of the space rather than pushing it to the corners to make way for automobile traffic. Participants also said Market Square needed a more robust and dynamic slate of public programming. Physical changes combined with features like a farmer’s market and lunchtime concert series have helped to turn the square into an extremely popular spot for downtown office workers to gather on lunch breaks and for drinks after work. Programming, from a Carnegie Library–run reading room to the annual Zombie Fest, which celebrates the city’s status as the setting for director George Romero’s Living Dead series, has made Market Square a destination for residents across the metropolitan area as well. By focusing on programming rather than a dramatic redesign, Market Square has once again become a major gathering space for Pittsburghers. On a recent Saturday afternoon, even without any events in progress, the square was packed with people sitting, talking, playing, and enjoying each other’s company, illustrating the spillover effect of great public space management: once people have reasons to visit a space and experience its unique sense of place, they’ll keep finding their own reasons to come back. Getting People There The Perth Cultural Centre (PCC) is a cluster of institutions located at the hinge point between the central business district of Western Australia’s largest city and one of its burgeoning nightlife districts, Northbridge. It features a mix of historic buildings from the 1800s and Brutalist structures built in the 1960s and ‘70s, and includes art museums, theaters, a history museum, a major library, and a compact college campus. When it came time to revamp the PCC in 2008, the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority (MRA) decided that they would work to connect the 23 institutions within the precinct to each other by improving the public spaces that surrounded them, and to extend the precinct past its formal edges, with cultural activity reaching out into the surrounding area like an octopus. But these myriad spaces were no-go zones for many residents due to poor visibility, lack of activity, and public perception of the PCC as a high-crime area after dark, so the MRA reached out to PPS in 2009 to lead a placemaking process to determine how the staid grounds could be turned into a series of lively public gathering places. The MRA’s understanding of the importance of careful management and cohesive vision proved to be key to changing the public’s perception of the space in a very short period of time. “One of the big things for us was to take the focus off of the buildings and put it on the things that happen in the spaces between them,” MRA’s executive director of place management Veronica Jeffery explains. “That’s why what we call the ‘quick wins’ strategy was so important: it basically went from planning straight to implementation, and was really powerful. It didn’t leave time for contemplation, which meant that people could see their ideas transform into action.” This “lighter, quicker, cheaper” approach focused on creating more flexible space through the addition of seating, improvement of lighting after dark, and ample programming to draw people into the PCC precinct. PPS encouraged the institutions clustered in the area to bring their programming out into the public realm and take better advantage of their co-location with other major cultural and educational organizations. Fast-paced collaboration led to a burst of activity that drew people to the site and encouraged them, in turn, to mix and mingle with each other. This created the sense that the PCC was not a walled-off precinct that “belonged” to the MRA or the institutions within, but a great third place that Perth residents were welcome to claim and use as their own “back yard.” “Ultimately, the centre is a public space,” says Jeffery. “We want everybody to feel comfortable here.” The MRA’s willingness to try new things and actively work with a variety of organizations and local constituencies has made the PCC into the kind of place where locals feel that comfort and sense of attachment—because it directly represents their needs and interests. Tapping Local Wisdom Currently, PPS is working with UN-Habitat to adapt the placemaking process for use in developing world cities and towns. One of the first projects that we are undertaking through this partnership is a slew of placemaking workshops in Nairobi, Kenya, where the mayor has promised to create 60 new public spaces around the city in the next five years. This is no small feat in any city, much less one where a full half of the population lives in informal settlements and slums, on just 5 percent of the land area. The spaces created will undoubtedly be filled with people due to the density of human life here, but a truly successful place is not just a busy space, it is a great destination. Especially in cities like Nairobi, the need for great destinations is acute. Says PPS vice president Cynthia Nikitin, who is leading our efforts in the Kenyan capital: “In Kibera [the massive slum where PPS is working on a project to upgrade an athletic field], the streets are truly the public spaces, and people are out all day, every day: selling, socializing, trading. People make their living—they live their lives—right out in the streets. Having safe and adequate places for that activity is as vital in these areas as water or electricity.” Creating destinations that people choose to go to, rather than just spaces where people go out of necessity, is an ideal way to improve the quality of life for people living in slum settlements. Public spaces in these areas can serve many necessary functions: as marketplaces, as places for getting water, as hubs for social services like healthcare and education. But the concerns in these areas are often very different from those that might be found in more established cities in developed countries. Safety, especially for women, is a major factor. And as always, the people who understand the problems that need to be addressed are the people who are already using the spaces. Silanga Field is a wonderful example of how this valuable knowledge is being tapped. One of PPS’s local partners, the Kilimanjaro Initiative, had been working on making improvements to a soccer pitch over the course of several years. “KI enlists the help of the community throughout each phase,” their web page explains, “to give its members a sense of ownership and pride in the field.” During the first placemaking workshop Nikitin led with local residents in the spring of 2012, Silanga residents were encouraged to participate in creating a long-term plan for the site. They voiced a strong interest in improving safety in their community, which led to a plan that incorporates environmental improvements and a slate of programming for children and families that are specifically geared toward making the field a place where everyone can feel safe. The process illustrated the true value of a great third place in any community: a sense of community ownership and control of one’s place in the world, which can be expressed in the way that people engage in discussion and collaboration around a site plan, long before permanent changes to that site are implemented. It Doesn’t Have to Be Big In developed and disenfranchised communities alike, the assumption around great destinations is that they cost a lot of money to create and have to take the form of new parks or flashy waterfront promenades. “When talking about expanding public space within Nairobi,” Nikitin says, “I kept bumping up against this assumption from city staff that this meant they had to buy big chunks of land and even clear people out of existing neighborhoods to make room for new parks. The idea that schools and sidewalks, streets, plazas, and fire stations could be meaningful places within the city’s public realm was new to them. There’s a division there between ‘public spaces’ and spaces that merely happen to be public.” In fact, the kinds of great community third places that build social capital and encourage people to take an active role in the daily life of their neighborhood are often smaller, more manageable spaces like community gardens, street corners, and schoolyards. These hubs provide places for people to gather and organize, and are vital to building constituencies for broader efforts to create more equitable cities. This is not necessarily an expensive or labor-intensive process; it merely requires the people who are currently “in charge” of a given space to step out of the way and let the people who use it play an active role in how it is shaped. 2013-02-11T13:50:25+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3061/saving_the_village_pub/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/saving_the_village_pub/saving_the_village_pub/#When:13:40:40Z The village of Crosby Ravensworth, with a population of 250ish, lies in the most sparsely populated district of England on the edge of the Lake District National Park. Although the village lies only six miles from the country’s main North-South highway, rail services are limited and the nearest shops, bank, and emergency room are 5, 7, and 30 miles away respectively. With the rural location and the seemingly quiet, idyllic lifestyle come exceptionally high house prices; prices approach 12 times the average family income. Against this background, a group of residents decided in 2009 to form a community land trust to develop some affordable housing. For nine months the group beavered away on the project, developing a support network and getting to grips with the various government agencies, housing policies, and site investigations, all while maintaining a regular dialogue with the community. Everything was going well until one fateful night when, while we were sipping on our pints in our only pub, the Butchers Arms, the landlord dropped bad news into the conversation: he was closing the pub in two weeks. Suddenly there was a groundswell of noise from the community. Our friends and neighbors started asking the housing group to intervene with comments like “The housing is going well, could you not do something about the pub?” Community Buys In We decided that we needed to investigate options and test the resolve of the community. We visited a co-operative pub in another community, sucking up every bit of information we could, as well as sampling their hospitality, then progressed to a community meeting. We were working on the basis that if there was no commitment we could drop the idea and press on with our housing scheme. Well, over 100 people turned up at the meeting to hear our co-operative proposal and we came away with 50 people pledging £1,500 (about $2,400) each. The scheme seemed to be a potential runner so we spent the summer of 2010 chasing further pledges. We reached over £240,000 before our plans took a real backward step. We were visited by a cabinet minister from London, very supportive, but the press release that went out from London stated that the minister had visited a pub already owned by the community. Thereafter, every time we tried to revitalize the story with the media this press release reared its ugly head. It was time to regroup and take a more formal approach. We managed to get some grant funding, which allowed us to get the premises valued and surveyed, develop some preliminary revised layouts for the building, carry out a community survey to measure support, and capture views on the building’s future use. We employed the chair from another community group to draw up a business plan and prospectus. This was a godsend as at this stage we had secured grant funding for our housing, but had only five months to buy the site, get planning permission for housing, go out to bid, award the building contract, and secure the additional £1.4 million required. We managed to hit the March 15, 2011, deadline for the housing and went on just two weeks later to officially launch our Pub Prospectus. By the launch we had secured purchase of the pub, subject to raising the £255,000 required within three months. Without doubt our secret weapon was Christine Smith, known to all as Kitty. One of the founding directors of the co-operative we formed, the Lyvennet Community Pub Ltd., Smith is a local hairdresser and pretty well had most of the community in her chair every six or so weeks. That took care of the locals! We used every avenue to promote our issue of cooperative shares, from local papers and radio to eBay, the Web, Twitter, national press, and national radio and television shows. Our aim was to have the pub story in the media every week. The story was also picked up by The Guardian newspaper around our “buy a share in a pub for father’s day” promotion. Not only did we raise the money in two and a half months, but we managed to raise a total of £300,000 to allow refurbishment. In addition, we secured further grant funding from local government and charities. Just over 50 percent of our investors are local, with the remainder mostly from every corner of the United Kingdom. We also have international investors from Alaska, Vermont, California, Singapore, Australia, Spain, and France. Our Alaskan investors emailed to say that they were coming to walk the Coast to Coast path and that visiting their own pub would be a real hoot. From Owning to Opening By June 7, the pub was ours. Over the first weekend we had 35 volunteers from ages 5 to 70 helping gut the downstairs. Not everything went well though. When we turned the water on we discovered we had leaks everywhere, as everything from taps to radiators, pipe joints, and the boiler had been blown by frost damage during the previous winter. The electrical systems were not much better, with electric showers linked to cooker sockets and a Jacuzzi bath that was not even grounded. Our community is resilient, however, and over the next nine weeks the pub was taken back to bare walls; room divisions were removed; new plumbing, heating and electrical components were installed throughout; the walls were replastered; a catering kitchen and new bar were installed; and the building was painted inside and out. We had a blackboard where tasks were listed; people came when they could to complete a job and “scored it out” (marked it off) when they were done. Each day we arranged materials and listed the next jobs, and so it progressed. Over the nine weeks we had volunteers who never missed a weekday night or weekend day (in total over 4,000 hours of volunteer time). Everyone recounts stories of this period: the gallon of white masonry paint that fell from an upstairs windowsill onto the road in front of the pub; knocking down internal walls and finding buried live electric cables; one of our shareholders spending a week’s holiday cleaning the catering cooker to bring it back to show room condition. Our local councillor visited every weekend with her barbecue to make bacon and cheese sandwiches for the troops. That’s how, on a rainy day, we found out that the fire alarm system, like everything else, did not work. We managed to secure and appoint two excellent tenants to run the pub, Keith Taylor and Bev Percy, both talented chefs with a brilliant track record in catering and the hostelry trade. They were dubious at first that a small rural pub had a future and that the community could deliver the project, but as we progressed through raising the money to refurbishment they became inspired by the dedication and support. Open for Business Our member of parliament, Rory Stewart, was very supportive, and brought a stream of government officials and cabinet ministers to visit, until I joked with him that he needed to stop bringing the monkeys and bring the organ grinder! We received a message on a Monday afternoon, less than two weeks from opening, that MP Stewart was bringing a VIP. He could not tell us who, as any leakage of the visit would mean cancellation. On August 18, the visitor, Prime Minister David Cameron, duly arrived for lunch with the directors. We were pestered to allow him to open the pub, which we refused, saying it was a community project and the community would open it, but we offered him the option of pulling the first pint or the last bit of painting, before conceding and allowing him to open the bar (but not the pub). Our grand opening was on August 27, and boy did we have a party. Our Australian investor, John Stubbs, flew in to officiate, which was really fitting. He grew up in the pub, as his mother had owned the premises from 1958 to 1978. He had emigrated over 40 years earlier and this was his first return visit. Over 200 people attended and we even had our own ballad produced by John’s family: the Ballad of the Butcher Arms, though Keith said “not in his pub” to one of the chorus lines—“and we will drink to the break of day.” We are now over a year on. The business is thriving, employing two full-time and nine part-time staff, and providing good food in a warm and pleasant environment. The tenants have created the right balance between attracting diners, drinkers, and individuals simply coming in for company, activities and to catch up on the latest gossip. The pub has built a reputation for good food, fine ales (always three real, mostly Cumbrian ales on tap), and wines. And the pub has become again a vibrant community hub. There are regular social gatherings, quizzes, domino tournaments, drinks evenings, parties, gatherings to sing hunting songs, live music, Wednesday evening walking group during the summer months, and pub pool teams. At our first annual general meeting, we reported income over 125 percent higher than the previous owner’s last full year. We are currently fund-raising to convert two of the upstairs rooms into an additional dining/meeting room. One of our shareholders, a community resident, summed up the pub buy-out: “For years we have seen a steady decline in local services in our community. We had a shop, a post office, bus service, and another pub when I was young. We were about to lose the last pub. We did not have a choice. It was a case of find a solution, do something about it for ourselves, or lose it forever. Now I can continue to meet up with my friends whilst enjoying a good ‘crack’ [catching up on the latest stories and gossip] over a pint. The group and shareholders have given us back a much-needed community building.” 2013-02-11T13:40:40+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3065/flowers_follow/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/flowers_follow/flowers_follow/#When:13:30:51Z When I first exited the train in Cityline, East New York, on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, I was struck by the smell of Asia. Bangladesh, to be precise. The spices. It looked like the outer boroughs of New York City, with buses going by and streets too wide and a bodega with a yellow awning, but it smelled like somewhere absolutely exotic. I had been asked to come out to Cityline by a local community organizer, Misba Abib. My organization, 596 Acres, helps neighbors transform vacant public land into community resources by publicizing the status of that land and connecting neighbors who want to use it with each other and with the correct decision-makers. Abib was dealing with a vacant lot situation that no one seemed able to resolve. In the heart of his neighborhood is the place where the A and the C train come up from underground. If you’re on the train to Rockaway Beach, this is the spot where you suddenly encounter sunshine after miles of dark subway tunnel walls and your cell phone starts working. At that exact point in the journey from the rest of the city to the sea, I found Abib, standing outside a triangular vacant lot situated above the last few feet of subway tunnel. The lot had a diagonal wall painted green, with a six-foot red MTA emblem in the middle of it. It also had a rusty chain-link fence and a small forest of weeds so thick that it took me a few minutes to see the wall as a whole and understand that this piece of aging municipal pride had been re-painted to resemble the Bengali flag. Abib told me he remembered a garden here, with containers for vegetables and elderly Italian ladies taking care of them. That was in the late 1970s when he was a child who had just arrived in the United States from Bangladesh. Through his teen years, the neighborhood changed. The Italian ladies disappeared—in fact a lot of people disappeared. No one cared for the containers or the plants. Trash accumulated. And then, one day in the mid-1980s, a fence went up, though it didn’t stop the trash. In fact, it seemed to increase its flow. Three years ago, Abib started talking with the Community Board about this piece of neglected space in his neighborhood’s heart. He had trouble getting answers. So did the community board. The only concrete advice Abib got was that, if the mess in the lot was bothering him so much, he should jump the fence and clean it up. If only it were so easy. Abib and his community are Muslim. There is a mosque right next door to the fence, perched just on top of the train tracks. The second time we met, he told me a story about a 17-year-old neighbor who had gone home to Afghanistan during summer vacation and had been detained on his way back to New York City. “We’re too scared to go in there,” Abib explained. “It’s too close to the subway. Have you heard of stop and frisk?” Through 596 Acres’ information sharing platform, I was able to put Abib into direct contact with the MTA official who is responsible for their landholding and, after years of trying in vain to talk to someone about this space, Abib was finally able to have a direct conversation with someone whose interests aligned with his—to make all MTA property a resource. MTA agreed that the lot should be “beautified,” but wasn’t sure of the next step. When, a few weeks later, a clumsy driver knocked down one of the poles holding up the chain link, Abib and I made a plan to clean up the fence. I brought a few college students with me for the afternoon, and Abib rallied some community members. Teenagers stopped by and pitched in. The leaders from the mosque came outside and laughed and carried clumps of weeds. “You make me brave,” said Abib. “You make all the people here brave.” Standing on the street corner, watching the weeds pile up at the curb and the fence be cut down and stacked for the scrappers to come pick up, I talked to two other residents of the neighborhood, one from Ghana and one from Trinidad. Both had lived in Cityline for as long as Abib had and both told me, in confidence, that they had never spoken to the “Bangladeshi people” before. Cityline has a Bangladeshi population of somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000. Abib put it best later in the afternoon when the group of us sat down to share a meal: “If we have no reason, we won’t talk to each other. This lot, this place, it gives us a reason.” An Accidental Start 596 Acres is the most optimistic thing I have ever done. In April 2011, I accidentally started this project when I got my hands on a spreadsheet and a map that showed all the vacant public land in Brooklyn, according to the NYC Department of City Planning. “Vacant” land is land for which the NYC Department of City Planning has no use code on file; this is land that is literally, from the perspective of the department, not being used for anything. Public land is any land that is being held by a city, state, or federal agency. Adding up the rows in the spreadsheet, I came up with the number 596 acres for vacant public land in Brooklyn alone—an astounding total area of land slightly bigger than Prospect Park, the borough’s celebrated oasis. I thought people needed to know; and so “596 Acres” was born. We started as an experiment in getting information about land ownership into the hands of people who really were ready to make change. The first incarnations didn’t work. Sending spreadsheets of GIS coordinates for vacant public lots in each City Council district by email to people I knew who lived and worked in those districts produced absolutely nothing. Crickets. So I got together with a visual artist friend, Julia Samuels, and we made posters that advertised Brooklyn’s municipal vacancies. People snatched them up. In one weekend of block parties and festivals, 200 posters were gone. So we printed 1,000 and took them out to the neighborhoods, glued to foam rescued from the trash. We began physically labeling the vacant and available lots themselves, with signs that explained, in specific, painfully bureaucratic detail, what was going on behind each particular fence. In June 2012, I threw some zinnia seeds embedded in a clay ball over a fence into a lot owned by the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, a lot that had been the frustrated target of decades-long community organizing efforts for a new community green space. By September, I was able to pick a few of those flowers with the daughter of a neighbor, and by October I found myself sitting in a peaceful circle of self-appointed land stewards, flowers as backdrop, inside the new “Myrtle Village Green,” discussing community composting, health fairs, and a greenhouse for growing a last fall crop of radishes. There were fourteen neighbors in the circle. I had lived in the North Bed Stuy neighborhood for a decade, but I had only ever spoken to two of them. Vacant Land and Unsorting Public life is life that happens in between privacies. It is no accident that Occupy Wall Street began in a place that was neither work nor home nor shopping, creating in Liberty Plaza in the fall of 2011 a momentary community living room. The city on a map shows us areas where resources are pooled and vast steppes where resources are scarce. Deleterious conditions concentrated in certain New York City neighborhoods are not accidental, but rather a systemic deprivation enabled through urban geographies. Power congeals in pools of inequality that carry with them their own gravitational pull. The map of vacant public land in NYC is a map that shows both the present day reality of a city sorted on racial and economic lines and the history of disinvestment and subsequent bulldozing that affected some neighborhoods and not others. The differences between neighborhoods are even more stark when one looks at where foreclosures are concentrated, where vast numbers of people live who pay more than 50 percent of their income in rent, where renters most often find themselves in housing court. These places overlap to a shocking degree. These are also the areas from which jail and prison populations are drawn and to which they return, bringing the trauma and violence of their experiences back home, as well as the neighborhoods to which you have to take a bus because the subway does not reach them, the neighborhoods where few hospitals ever opened and those that did are closing, the neighborhoods with few grocery stores and fewer farmers’ markets, the places without parks but with trash incinerators. These are also, by the numbers, the places where one is most likely to be stopped and frisked. The most burdened neighborhoods are also the neighborhoods where the majority of New York City’s people of color live. 596 Acres’ maps make patterns of neglect visible by showing the distribution of unused, misused, or otherwise untapped resources. These maps make concrete what would otherwise be invisible or, at best, anecdotal. In the face of neighborhood-level disparities, 596 Acres engages communities in a set of tactics with the goal of unsorting the city through neighborhood-level change. The residents of neglected areas do not lack the imagination or will to create a more ideal neighborhood. The missing piece is a path to follow and the contextual information that people need to organize their communities. Sometimes all that is missing is the phone number for a specific person in municipal government who has the power to move an idea toward reality or the ability of a resident to speak the same language as the city official who answers the phone. Our signs, hung on the fences that disconnect them from the usable landscape, activate the dreamers around them. They speak directly to those residents of the neighborhoods who walk by them daily and wonder where the decisions are being made that will someday lead to the removal of the fences and the arrival of new people and institutions that are not “from the block”; they speak equally to those people who walk by and simply refuse to see them, being so accustomed to living in a landscape of scars and rust and inaccessibility. Opportunities are born on our sidewalks in the simplest conversations. Start taking down a fence on a corner that has served no purpose but to house weeds and bags of human waste and other untouchable elements, and people really stop to talk. People who have never had a cause to speak to one another, who sometimes struggle to find a common language, suddenly have a question in common: “What should we build here?” (Or sometimes, the much simpler “Which way should the benches face?”). Connecting Neighbors Shatia Jackson, co-founder of the 462 Halsey Community Garden and now a member of our advisory committee, was one of the first people to see one of our signs and plug in. “The brownstone that my family owns has been there since 1899,” says Jackson. “My great-grandmother bought it and we’re five generations in. We all grew up there. My great-grandmother had her life there; my grandmother grew up there; my dad; me, my sisters; and my son. And since that lot is on that block and since it has been the backdrop of a lot of wonderful memories of my childhood, its very important to me to transform it and make it something beautiful and something that the community can utilize.” Shatia saw the sign in July 2011. By November of that year, she and a small group of local residents had successfully navigated the murky municipal process that led them to keys to the rusty locks and a signed agreement with GreenThumb and Housing Preservation and Development to turn the space into a “garden” (defined loosely) within six months. As of October 2012, 462 Halsey has over 80 members, an active children’s corner (with the only sand box for miles around), an affordable produce program run by GrowNYC, a collaboration with a local school’s science program, an active community composting program, and open hours every day. “Providing a community hub is one of the goals that we have, a place where people can come together,” Jackson explains. “And the first step in doing that was the fact that my co-founder, Kristen Binardi Rapp, is not a native Bed-Stuy resident. She just moved her with her family. The fact that we have linked up, that you have someone who has been in the neighborhood for a long time and has been through its ups and downs, and someone who is brand new but is willing to learn about the history and really make this their home . . . hopefully this will set the model for other residents to feel like they can do that.” Rapp, a 596 Acres volunteer, met Jackson through the 596 Acres platform—Rapp did a search for lots near her new address, and they were introduced by email after Jackson sent a note in response to the sign on “her” vacant lot. Organizing geographically around “third spaces” and the disparate distribution of vacant land in poor communities allows for the congealing of power in unexpected places. While the NYC budgeting process inherently gives more life chances to projects and people living in places where capital is pooled, the areas left underfunded are no less likely to house people who want to live in a city and neighborhood they are proud of. Letting those people find each other using spatially organized social networking tools allows their voices to be heard. For years, I taught adult speakers of other languages to speak English. One of the most common struggles I encountered was elucidating the difference between the word “neighbor” and the word “neighborhood.” My students consistently pointed at pictures of people (or at actual people in the classroom) and said, “This is my neighborhood.” Again and again, I painstakingly worked with them to “correct” this mistake: to somehow get them to internalize that a ‘hood is a place, and neighbor is a person. I think there is a really obvious reason that it was always so hard. Neighborhoods are people. I am thrilled to be engaged in a tactic aimed at making it possible for them to create and re-create themselves. 2013-02-11T13:30:51+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3068/hanging_on_to_the_land/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/hanging_on_to_the_land/hanging_on_to_the_land/#When:13:20:35Z The fortunes of many community gardens follow a boom and bust cycle, sprouting up from debris-filled abandoned lots in times of economic distress only to eventually wither away under the pressure of rising land prices. While the urban agriculture movement has gained much momentum in recent years, it needs coherent, long-term strategies to insulate urban agricultural land against the speculative forces of the market. At stake is more than mere horticulture, but food security, public health, and essential community gathering spaces. Warning from New York City The continuing land insecurity of many community gardens in the United States was illustrated all too well by the 1999 showdown between former mayor Rudy Giuliani and New York City community gardeners over the future of urban growing on city-owned land. Giuliani proposed to auction off 114 of the nearly 850 community gardens across New York City as the first phase of a larger disposition strategy to build low-income and market-rate housing on former city-owned land. The proposal effectively pitted affordable housing proponents against community garden advocates in a zero-sum contest. According to one representative of New York City’s Housing and Preservation Department—the organization charged with developing city-owned land—“Gardens are great, but not at the expense of new housing.” The community gardens were a feel-good story of neighborhood improvement through self-help and sweat equity, but were not viewed as a legitimate long-term land use. Giuliani made his famous pronouncement “Welcome to the era after communism,” in response to widespread protests over the proposed auction of these community-managed spaces. In the end, two nonprofits—the Trust for Public Land and the New York Restoration Project—stepped in to broker an 11th hour deal to avoid displacement of all 114 gardens. Over 400 other community garden sites were transferred to the GreenThumb program under the City’s Parks and Recreation Department. However, 67 gardens were eventually destroyed during the Giuliani administration, serving as a bitter reminder that government ownership of land does not necessarily ensure permanent protection. Community Gardens as Third Places Research has linked community gardens to diverse benefits including improved nutrition, public health, educational opportunities, increased property values and brownfield remediation. But community gardens can also play the vital social role of “third places” in neighborhood settings. In his classic 1989 study The Great Good Place, sociologist Ray Oldenberg defines the third place as any public location that hosts regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of people. While the majority of our time is spent in the first place of the home and the second place of work, it is the underappreciated third place that serves as the core setting for informal public life. The third places of lower income neighborhoods do not always get a lot of press, but serve important community functions such as establishing a sense of place, fostering broad and inclusive social interactions, and supporting civic engagement. They can take a variety of forms, such as bars, religious institutions, community centers, barbershops, and even simple building stoops. But few of these informal hangouts can activate a space and create an engaged constituency quite like the community garden. There is something unique about a garden that crosses every conceivable barrier of race, class, and religion. “Food has always been a center of family, friends, and celebration,” says Essence, the president of Clayton Williams Community Garden (CWCG) in the West Harlem neighborhood of New York City. CWCG is one of the 114 gardens that was slated for auction and eviction in May 1999 but was instead purchased by the Trust for Public Land and eventually transferred to the newly created Manhattan Land Trust. The CWCG is a classic example of a community garden serving as a third place, an informal public meeting place for gardeners, neighbors, and the wider public. “There’s not a lot of places here for people to gather outside of buildings and have a good time in a contained space,” says George B., long-time Harlem resident and gardener. Harlem, like many lower-income communities, suffers from lower rates of parks and green infrastructure than other neighborhoods with similar population densities. According to a 2009 study by New Yorkers for Parks, Harlem ranks in the bottom half of New York neighborhoods in terms of parkland and playgrounds per capita. Further, some residents have been reluctant to use local parkland due to lingering concerns over the quality and safety of such spaces. “A lot of people hang around outside, but it’s not always organized, and unfortunately, it sometimes disrupts life,” notes George. “We need spaces in a large city, spaces where people can gather together socially and with civility.” There is also a strong collective memory of the CWCG serving as a green respite in this once devastated neighborhood. “A lot of the people come by on a day-to-day basis,” says Essence, “just because they have grown up with the garden being here, and they have grown up with Miss Loretta [one of the founding gardeners] being here, and they’ve seen the garden grow from nothing into something.” The garden is particularly successful as a third space for elderly residents to congregate and maintain social contacts. “It’s good for the community and it’s good for your dignity,” adds George, a retired superintendent. “The older folks can come in and relax. Instead of sitting in their house all day, they come and sit down under the gazebo and talk about what’s going on in the neighborhood.” This third space function is particularly crucial in an area with relatively few options for seniors to commune, and where many neighborhood churches have scaled back senior citizen programming due to revenue shortfalls. The social impact of community gardens as third spaces extends beyond their physical boundaries. The process of developing a community garden—everything from neighborhood discussions about the location and identity of the garden to tackling land use and zoning codes with planning agencies and local politicians—can serve as a community organizing catalyst. “If you can pull off a community garden, you can pull off a lot of things,” says Ben Helphand, executive director of NeighborSpace, an open space land trust in Chicago, Illinois. Prospective gardeners must learn to connect with a wide range of stakeholders, opening up new lines of communication and opportunities for civic engagement. When it comes to community gardens, it is the community that comes first, Helphand explains. “The gardening is just a wonderful, beautiful, delicious excuse for the community to come together, explore its own becoming, and put its ideas into practice, but in a more immediate way than can typically be done in modern cities.” NeighborSpace encourages gardeners to locally organize, says Helphand, and “within a basic set of rules, each garden can define its own self-determination. It’s democracy writ large.” Given the vital social roles community gardens play, we need robust, long-term strategies to protect and support them. Long-Term Land Security Land security—having the right to access and use a piece of land year after year—is often considered the greatest challenge facing community gardeners. According to a 1998 American Community Gardening Association survey of over 6,000 sites, 99.9 percent of gardens viewed site permanency as an issue. High-profile conflicts have not been limited to those in New York; there was also the heartwrenching 2006 eviction of the South Central Farm in Los Angeles. Despite their current popularity, hundreds of community gardens still get displaced every year, and these integral neighborhood institutions are not easily replaced. “You can’t just pick up a garden and drop it somewhere else,” explains Sharon DiLorenzo, a project manager at Capital District Community Gardens, a nonprofit organization in Troy, New York, responsible for creating and preserving dozens of community gardens throughout New York’s Capital Region. “Often you’re starting [a garden site] with almost no soil, so you have to bring in thousands of dollars of soil amendments, compost, fencing—that’s a huge investment. You put in all that effort and in two years or five years, someone comes along and says, ‘Sorry but we’re taking this land back.’ It’s a big investment to lose, and people get very invested in these sites.” This issue has an additional dimension in Rust Belt cities with shrinking populations, such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, where the widespread availability of land has enabled a flourishing community gardens movement, but without a commensurate focus on secure tenure arrangements. In failing to develop long-term tenure strategies, these community gardens are dependent on a perpetual supply of cheap and plentiful land, which can only happen in the context of a permanently depressed local economy. When these communities eventually rebound, development pressures will push land prices upwards, and land insecure community gardens will be at risk of displacement. By securing land today, community organizations can purchase land at favorable pricing, protect the long-term security of community gardens, and send a positive message that reinforces their belief in a bright future for their community. At the same time, there is nothing inherently wrong with short-term community garden initiatives, as long as the land security is well matched to the program goals. For example, gardens can serve an interim use on sites that are being land banked for future development. Trouble occurs when community gardens (and gardeners) expect to be around for a long time, but don’t have tenure arrangements that allow that. The roots of community garden land insecurity can be found in this simple fact: the unrestricted market value of urban land, which reflects conventional notions of “highest and best use,” is almost always far more expensive than income from agricultural use can support over time. However, our notions of the “highest and best” use of land rarely reflect the full range of community benefits which can be embedded in these spaces. If we are to protect community gardens from the speculative forces of the market, we will need to adopt more sustainable models of secure land tenure for community gardens. One of the most promising approaches is the land trust model. Land Trusts A land trust is a legally recognized, mission-driven, nonprofit organization that sustains access to land by holding property rights and providing long-term stewardship support. Land trusts protect land by either purchasing it outright, restricting use through attachment of conservation easements, or negotiating long-term leases and management agreements with other landowners. They are also guided by a democratic board structure, where gardeners and other local stakeholders have a voice in the governance of the organization. NeighborSpace is a Chicago-based land trust that supports urban growers by holding title or long-term leases to land and providing stewardship to 81 community gardens throughout the city. This support eases the burden of site acquisition, ownership, and liability insurance, while devolving day-to-day management responsibilities to local garden groups. The land trust was established in 1996 as a result of a city-led planning process on the future of neighborhood-based green spaces in Chicago, and is supported by a 20-year intergovernmental agreement between the City of Chicago, the Chicago Parks District, and the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. “Chicago was making the claim when they established NeighborSpace that community-established and -maintained gardens are a permanent part of Chicago open space, different from but alongside the parks and forest district,” says Helphand. “Historically, gardens were thought of as temporary uses, but when it comes to land trusts, nothing is temporary.” In Athens, Georgia, the Athens Land Trust (ALT) has developed 31 community and school gardens since 2009. The ALT is a dual-mission land trust dedicated to preserving natural areas and creating affordable housing, a model that stands in stark contrast to the divisive “housing versus gardens” framing of the Giuliani-era New York City conflict. “You can touch so many more people—and do it quickly—through community gardens than through housing,” says Heather Benham, director of operations at the ALT. ALT’s community gardens work supports its affordable housing work because it strengthens the group’s outreach to diverse local communities and positions ALT as a trusted neighborhood resource. Such was their experience when a new pastor arrived at Hill Chapel Baptist Church in Athens. The new pastor was very concerned about health issues affecting the African-American community—hypertension, diabetes, obesity—and interested in advocacy for more nutritious food opportunities and a healthier food culture. The ALT worked with the church to design a community garden, test and till the soil, provide plants, organize volunteer workdays, and teach gardening workshops. In developing the garden, the ALT strengthened ties with the church community and its African-American membership. “They call us now if they have issues, and see us as more of a community resource than they did before,” says Benham. Unlike many land trusts, the ALT does not address long-term land security through outright ownership or conservation easements. Georgia property tax policies make it prohibitively expensive for the ALT to hold title to urban garden land, because it is uniformly assessed at unrestricted market value, so the organization has taken on the role of garden supporter and advocate. An actively gardened site with an engaged constituency backstopped by the watchful presence of a community-based organization can provide at least a degree of political protection. The Best Time Is Now We are in the middle of a unique window of time, when land values in many cities are at their lowest values in decades, while interest in urban agriculture is at historically high levels. For many community gardens, the idea of owning their own garden has until now seemed like a fantasy, but this is the time to buy and protect land—there will be no better opportunity moving forward. The key is identifying acquisition funding. Now is the time to create a national pool of funds to acquire and permanently protect land for community gardens and other forms of urban agriculture. Similar strategies have been successfully employed for decades for rural land conservation by organizations like the Trust for Public Land and the Nature Conservancy. The philanthropic community is very interested in the issue of food security, and could very well support a well-conceived proposal for a national urban agriculture land protection initiative. Let’s work together to make this happen. 2013-02-11T13:20:35+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3062/claiming_space/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/claiming_space/claiming_space/#When:13:10:56Z Philadelphia has more public art than any other American city, so it’s no surprise that art is among the city’s most potent community development tools. Groups across the city are increasingly using art to create and animate neighborhood spaces that reflect shared community values, aspirations, and identity. And, in many cases, art can be a lasting community organizing tool. Philly has a robust public art landscape for variety of reasons. The city is perhaps best known for its venerable Mural Arts Program, which since 1984 has developed thousands of murals in partnership with communities across the city. Philadelphia is also home to the nation’s first private, nonprofit public art association, the Association for Public Art, still active at 140 years old. In 1959 the city also established the first Percent for Art program in the country, requiring that any city-funded construction project allocate at least 1 percent of its total budget to the creation of site-specific artwork. A Reason to Come Here In Southwest Philadelphia, neighbors have used themes of shared heritage and community identity to reclaim a neighborhood park and add a significant new piece of public art to its landscape. That artwork has become the anchor of the park as a gathering place. When the restoration effort got started, “Elmwood Park was a wasteland,” says lifelong neighborhood resident Cathy Brady. But you wouldn’t know it looking at the park today. In this gritty corner of the city, Elmwood Park is a seven-acre oasis with a huge variety of trees, bordered by neat single-family rowhouses. At the park’s center, seven bronze tables arranged in a circle form The Labor Monument, a public artwork that was more than a decade in the making. The tables are designed to look like the brass buttons found on denim work clothing (think overalls), and each one depicts a transformative movement in American labor history, in the heart of a neighborhood itself shaped by industrial forces. Elmwood was built up in the early 20th century, to provide housing for the area’s growing industrial workforce, and it became a stronghold of working-class, mostly white, union families. But in recent decades the area has seen a lot of change. Though many residents still belong to unions and there is still some industry left, most of the manufacturing jobs—building ships at Hog Island, turbines at General Electric, or trolley cars at Brill; making soap at Fels or ice cream at Breyers—are gone. Elmwood Park itself was built in the early 20th century. But by the mid-1990s it was a derelict mess and residents like Cathy Brady were fed up. The park was overgrown and trash-strewn, baggies and needles were commonplace, paths were badly broken, and there was nowhere to sit even if you wanted to. At night the park was dark and attracted illicit activity. Neighbors formed the Friends of Elmwood Park and started a campaign to restore the park, petitioning politicians for capital improvements and working with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Philly Green program. The project gelled when Elmwood Park was selected as one of few groups to participate in the competitive New•Land•Marks program, which paired community groups with artists to create new works of public art in neighborhoods. Often public art projects focus on the here and now, but the New•Land•Marks program explicitly asked community groups to think about their neighborhood’s defining characteristics and what kind of place they wanted to leave behind for future generations to enjoy. “It’s not just what kind of a space do we want now but for the future,” explains Penny Balkin-Bach, executive director of the Association for Public Art (formerly the Fairmount Park Art Association), which runs New¥Land¥Marks. Her organization was established in 1872, and its takes a particularly long view on the permanence of public art. Through these future-oriented conversations, Balkin-Bach says, “art can be a powerful community organizing tool.” For the Friends of Elmwood Park the New•Land•Marks program provided an incredible opportunity to improve the center of the park. In turn, the art project enabled them to attract public resources for the park’s overall improvement, and got neighbors thinking about their hopes for the park’s rebirth. At a community meeting about the art project, neighbors discussed ideas for different themes for the artwork. Cathy Brady said she floated the winning idea of labor: “I said, ‘What about a tribute to the working class? [The Art Association wants] something to define this neighborhood … who in this room is not a blue-collar worker?’” Brady, like many of her neighbors and friends, grew up in a union household. She was an industrial union member and now organizes for SEIU. Despite the demographic shifts in her neighborhood, the idea of a labor tribute resonated. As the project artist, John Kindness, started design work, Friends of Elmwood Park worked on improving the park’s physical appearance to make it a fitting setting for the new public art. They convinced the city to install new paths and lighting to enhance the park’s appearance and safety. And over the last 10 years Friends of Elmwood Park has planted 163 trees, each chosen because they either flower in spring or burst with colorful foliage in autumn. Fundraising to create The Labor Monument took years. Ultimately, a different progressive union underwrote each of the seven bronze tables, and it was dedicated in October 2010. “This is a monument to the people, recognizing the achievements of the common person. The lady in the shirtwaist factory. The farmer. The folksinger. Sanitation workers,” Brady says, looking at the bronzes. “Obviously I’m pretty proud of it.” The stories depicted on each table are deliberately diverse, emphasizing minorities in the workplace, with the hope of broad appeal. They are not the most obvious labor events or movements, but each is pivotally important and meant to provoke the curiosity of passers-by. One button features Joe Hill’s famous last words: “Don’t waste time mourning, organize.” One depicting child labor says, “The worst thief is he who steals the playtime of children.” On another, a farm worker draws an eagle in the field with the words Si, se puede. Two others are portraits: one of socialist leader and union organizer Eugene V. Debs and another of whistleblower and nuclear safety activist Karen Gay Silkwood. One table shows the faces of Memphis’s striking sanitation workers in 1968, bearing signs with the unforgettable phrase: “I am a man.” Brady’s favorite features female textile workers of Lawrence, Mass., arms linked, with a banner reading “We want bread & roses too.” While these work buttons are beautiful artworks telling very human stories about work, they’re also functional. The tables are arranged in a circle and surrounded by curving benches facing inward, creating space for conversation and interaction—something the park long lacked. As Balkin-Bach explains, The Labor Monument has high aspirations and a rich message, but ultimately they wanted it to be relatable and useful to the community. That meant the form had to be functional. Since its completion, The Labor Monument has become a space that’s actively used by the neighborhood, and is beginning to serve as a gathering point for labor rallies on May Day as well. Elmwood Park is now a very well-kept community asset where kids romp and neighbors exercise and keep after litter. “It’s really nice to see because it’s what we envisioned, actually happening,” says Brady. “We have couples sitting on the bench, old people sitting on the bench, a ton of kids, families visiting, which they never did. Before, there was no reason for anyone to come up to this park.” As we sat down to talk at the Bread & Roses button, a young Southeast Asian woman interested in our conversation about the tables approached us. She wanted to know if we could help her find work or volunteer opportunities. (We tried.) As the young lady walked away with her mother, Brady exclaimed: “See, community happens here!” About work, no less. Watering Cultural Roots The neighborhood of El Centro de Oro, in the city’s Fairhill section, is the commercial and cultural heart of Latino Philadelphia. Here, where Puerto Rican and Latino businesses and cultural institutions line blocks of North 5th Street, metal palm trees rise above a sidewalk inlaid with a yellow ribbon of concrete. And the Latino-centric arts organization Taller Puertorriqueño (“Puerto Rican Workshop/Studio”) is right in the thick of it. In recent decades Fairhill has been marred by the forces of disinvestment, crime, poverty, and drug activity. But Taller, a 38-year-old arts group dedicated to preserving and sharing expressions of Latino and Puerto Rican culture, is part of an energetic movement to build positive community capital for Latinos in Philadelphia and strengthen this corner of the city. Taller’s two buildings on North 5th Street are covered with colorful murals and mosaics depicting icons of Latino culture and heritage. Inside its education building, neighborhood youths take art classes and learn about Latino, Puerto Rican, and Caribbean culture, while its building up the street houses a book and craft store, art gallery, and the organization’s offices. Here, Taller provides space for Latino-centric artistic creations and conversation that help bond the community. “Taller preserves culture and makes space for those expressions to remain and persist,” says Taller Puertorriqueño’s executive director Dr. Carmen Febo-San Miguel. “We think that maintaining a connection to your heritage maintains a stronger sense of self.” Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Social Impact of the Arts Project have found that communities with stronger cultural organizations tend to fare better socially and economically than those without. And in her 26 years working with Taller (12 as executive director) Febo-San Miguel has seen the positive ripple effects of Taller’s work in the Latino community, particularly among young people, that comes from building a strong cultural foundation. “The dropout rate among Latinos is close to 50 percent in this community. That doesn’t happen in Puerto Rico,” Febo-San Miguel told me. “You wonder if it’s because those kids don’t see themselves represented anywhere in the curriculum of the schools. Nothing really speaks to them.” But she notices that when kids are involved in Taller’s programs—even if only for a semester—they start doing a bit better. “We see improvements academically. When they are with us they don’t miss school as much and their literacy rates start going up a little bit. They take more pride in speaking up in class, being less shy and feeling less marginalized,” Febo-San Miguel said. “We had a kid who was flunking English and he won a spelling bee contest after a couple of semesters here. We cannot claim all of the success, but the stories are there.” Taller Puertorriqueño’s art gallery is a formal venue where emerging and established Latino artists—including former students—exhibit work curated around carefully selected social themes. Here Taller shares art that neighbors might not see anywhere else. Through spring 2013, the gallery is showing two exhibits organized around the theme of Latinos “claiming space,” both as individuals and as a community in Philadelphia. Taller also helps organize more casual, neighborhood arts events. For 28 years running, with partner community organizations, it has hosted Ferria del Barrio, a hugely popular street festival along North 5th Street, celebrating Latino art, music, dance, and food. This year Taller also hosted “Café Under the Stars,” a monthly performing arts series that transformed a humble surface parking lot into a pop-up arts venue, thanks to a Knight Foundation Arts Challenge grant. Each month the well-attended series showcased different cultural expressions, from traditional Venezuelan song and dance to a cross-cultural classical music performance featuring members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and local students. Art to Climb On While community groups like the Friends of Elmwood Park and Taller Puertorriqueño employ art to reclaim neglected public spaces, or curate events and nonprofit gathering spaces, others have the rare opportunity to use art in shaping a new public space from scratch. In Hawthorne, a once-tough pocket east of Broad Street just south of Center City, a quartet of notorious public housing towers were demolished in the late 1990s. Over the last decade, a HOPE VI townhouse development and market-rate houses were built in the towers’ stead. Plans for the new development originally included refurbishing the Hawthorne Community Center at 13th and Fitzwater and the construction of a small park at 12th and Catharine streets. But the old community center was demolished in favor of additional housing, and the Hawthorne Empowerment Coalition had to fight the Philadelphia Housing Authority tooth and nail to prevent the same fate for the promised park, eventually petitioning the Department of Housing and Urban Development to save it. During all of that time, Hawthorne residents thought about what they wanted in a park, working in partnership with Industrial Design students from University of the Arts. Patricia Bullard, a leader of the Hawthorne Empowerment Coalition who fought to see the park realized, recalled that some neighbors wanted a space for play and sports but she and others wanted a quieter place. She said she hoped it would be a space where people could “sit and read a book, let the little ones run around on the grass, maybe sit and play a little chess.” After a long stalemate over the park idea, and years of community planning and civic engagement, Hawthorne Park opened in July 2012, built for about $2.1 million from public and foundation sources. Because Hawthorne Park was a city construction project, a public art piece was created for the park through Philadelphia’s Percent for Art program. The artwork, a contemporary stainless steel lectern called Object for Expression, interprets one of Hawthorne’s points of pride: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech outside the Hawthorne Community Center in 1965 on his Freedom Now tour. Object for Expression plays off of the historical event, and “creates a place for people to continue that tradition,” explains Margot Berg, the city’s public art director. Object for Expression sits on an elevated plaza, facing the site where King spoke, which overlooks a lush lawn. This stage-like area feels tailor-made for performances and gatherings. Bullard says the Friends of Hawthorne Park hope to host a jazz concert series and family-oriented movie evenings next summer. The park was dedicated in July and so far, Bullard said, a lot of people have expressed interest in using the park for different events, including an operatic performance and a church fair. In this recently reengineered, increasingly desirable, mixed-income neighborhood, residents are hopeful Hawthorne Park can become a place where new and old residents can come together, in part through arts programming. Monica and Jared Ayers are among the newer residents. They live with their young family in an old rowhouse across the street from the park. They’re thrilled with the park, though they agree that neighbors are still figuring out how to use the space. For now, students hang out there for a bit after school—some even do homework—young families like the Ayerses play, folks read, dogs enjoy a sniff around the lawn. The artist, Warren Holzman, hoped the lectern would invite spontaneous orations about social justice or the occasional operatic aria. Bullard says she can envision Object for Expression being used for youth readings or a speech contest. For now, kids enjoy climbing onto it to survey the park from a slightly higher perch. Like the story of the park, Object for Expression’s story is still unwritten. But in this artistic nod to the neighborhood’s history is an invitation to help craft a new narrative for Hawthorne. 2013-02-11T13:10:56+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3055/stories_of_community/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/stories_of_community/stories_of_community/#When:13:00:41Z Several years ago, the family-owned florist two buildings down from my house closed. There was great consternation in the neighborhood about what would happen to the building, which turned out to have some structural damage from years of water seeping into the floor. The small red and white cottage sits on a decently sized corner lot, and rumors flew for a while that it was being looked at by drive-through restaurant chains like Sizzlers, which struck fear in the hearts of my neighbors. We were incredibly relieved when it became instead a locally-owned branch of the gourmet ice cream shop Emack and Bolio’s. At first this was mostly the feeling of dodging a bullet. But after they opened, we began to realize what a treasure we had. It wasn’t that access to expensive ice cream was so miraculous. It was the yard. The property has a large picket-fenced yard, right in the heart of our walkable commercial strip. It has stairs to the side door of the neighboring restaurant on one side, a door in the back to the shop that the Emack owners rent to a mosaic artist, and a simple stage for live music on all summer weekend nights. Full of tables near the front fence, with a lawn behind, it is an absolutely perfect place to gather for children’s birthday parties, after story time at the library a block away, after the last soccer game of the season, or to meet a friend for lunch. My children and their neighborhood friends feel like they own it (which can be good or bad; we spend a lot of time getting them to put the gravel back where they found it), and most times we show up we can be guaranteed to find someone else we know there, or at least walking by on the street, to say hi to. In that yard, I have conducted interviews, signed political petitions, been part of planning for neighborhood events, and met new people. We are lucky to have such a place—and others like it, from cafés to the green space around our new library branch to our weekly farmers’ market. And I was surprised to find that I couldn’t have told you just how important such places were to my feeling of community and my daily life until I had them. I would have to go back to college to remember living in a place where I could so readily head out my door and find a social place to be. One of the things that strikes me about this issue of Shelterforce, which focuses on what planners call “third places”—those spots that are neither home nor work, where a community gathers—is how full of rich stories of place it is. Partly we went looking for that, but partly we couldn’t have held it back if we’d wanted to. Though many topics we cover tend to fall quickly into numbers and policy details, while we gently prod for more examples and anecdotes, it seems that third places are their stories. Stories are their common thread, what makes them a third place rather than merely a store or an institution. Not every place the public is allowed to go becomes a third place. And yet the ones that do are otherwise so diverse—a private restaurant or barbershop, a library, a park or playground or school yard, a community garden or farm, a stoop or stretch of sidewalk where kids are allowed to congregate, a recurring event like a market or a fair. Our relationships to them vary as well. Some are publicly owned and we advocate for them, clean them up, try to protect or enhance them. Some we create, as groups of residents or as community developers, on empty public land or as part of another development project. Some are privately owned, and so, as the participants in our roundtable discuss, roles for community support may look different, from financing to institutional patronage to partnering on events or art projects. Talking about third places in low-income and disinvested areas raises many questions: How do you balance spontaneity and nurturance? Safety and inclusivity? Creative placemaking that attracts new people with preventing displacement of current neighbors? In this issue we start to take a look at these questions, but there is a lot more to be said, and we will keep returning to this topic in the months ahead. Please send us your stories about third places in the neighborhoods where you work, and we’ll pick some to feature on our blog in connection with this issue. Editor's Note 2013-02-11T13:00:41+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3072/not_just_for_school_kids/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/not_just_for_school_kids/not_just_for_school_kids/#When:13:00:36Z All across our communities are wonderful parks, fields, and playgrounds … behind locked fences, or marked with big warning signs that they are only for use by supervised school children during school hours. The twin forces of liability lawyers and helicopter parenting have contributed to a phenomenon where one kind of public space—school grounds—is prevented from serving as open or recreational space in its off hours, often in the neighborhoods that need it most. But with the help of the public health field, which sees recreational space as a key piece in the fight against childhood obesity, and legal arrangements called joint use agreements to calm the nerves of school districts’ lawyers, many neighborhoods are turning the tide. In 2008, Seattle set out to coordinate a comprehensive joint use and scheduling arrangement between its schools and its parks department. Last year, New York City’s Schoolyard to Playground Initiative opened its 200th playground to the public for afterschool and weekend hours. Now 71 percent of New Yorkers live within a 10-minute walk of a park or playground. The Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust (a conservation group), the University Muslim Medical Association, and the Los Angeles Unified School District have partnered to create a wellness center and community garden on the grounds of John C. Fremont High School in South Los Angeles, a historically low-performing school located in a neighborhood with a dearth of green space. The project, which opened December 2012, involved the broader community in its design, and the gardens will be open to community members. Though their publicity is focused on public health benefits such as “learning about growing healthy food,” our articles in this issue on the many important roles of community gathering spaces make us think the benefits of creating such a space could be quite a bit broader. Read more Health/neighborhood connection Seattle New York Fremont project Round up on shared use of school facilities Joint use agreement checklist and model documents Shelter Shorts 2013-02-11T13:00:36+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3064/new_territory/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/new_territory/new_territory/#When:13:00:35Z Beyond Housing and Community HousingWorks may both be community organizations with the word “housing” in their names, but they view their charge as community development corporations through a very wide lens. And that’s how they both ended up taking on school reform. In 2008, at a meeting about the foreclosure crisis, Beyond Housing’s Chris Krehmeyer got to talking with public officials about what was really needed to stabilize the inner-ring suburbs of St. Louis where his group had been developing affordable housing for over 30 years. Beyond Housing’s staff and board had talked about the need to improve public education in the communities they served before, but that meeting and the arrival of a new school district superintendent that same year turned that talk into action. “That meeting with the city was the pivot point,” according to Krehmeyer. Four years and 52 community meetings later, Beyond Housing is the lead agency in a comprehensive effort to transform the Normandy School District, which covers 24 municipalities, and stabilize its families. The school district superintendent sits on the Beyond Housing board of directors, and the 24:1 Initiative has engaged over 400 residents and other stakeholders in creating a comprehensive agenda for change. “We have a historical culture of doing new and different things if we think it can make a difference to the families we serve,” explains Krehmeyer. For Community HousingWorks of San Diego County, California, engagement in public school reform started with traditional community organizing. In 2006, residents of Crown Heights, a neighborhood in the city of Oceanside, in the north of the county, raised the lack of school transportation as one of their biggest grievances. School budgets had been cut, drastically limiting transportation services for students. Parents were paying $25 to $30 per week to have neighbors transport their children to school, and were desperate to find a more affordable alternative. They were tired of facing a weekly choice between buying groceries and sending their children to school safely. In classic community organizing fashion, CHW organizers followed the residents’ lead in identifying priorities and pressed them to not just identify the problem, but step up and take action. While they each entered the world of public education through different doors, the two organizations agree that they cannot meet their missions of strengthening communities without somehow addressing academic improvement for the children living in those communities. Making the Leap Beyond Housing, working closely with the Normandy School District, has spent the last several years facilitating the creation of a community vision and plan, starting with community engagement and really asking people what they needed and believed possible. They used as a model some comprehensive community transformation work they had done in a single community, Pagedale, which helped them see the potential for transformation at the larger scale of a 24-town school district. In Pagedale, Beyond Housing had worked with residents to identify priorities. The organization was instrumental in bringing a sorely needed grocery store into the community. They opened a Family Center, and coordinated other development projects that, taken together, have turned the community around. While this work did not include school reform, it demonstrated how a comprehensive, resident-driven approach to development could have more of an effect than housing development alone. According to Krehmeyer, the new superintendent was very supportive of the idea of linking community support to district turnaround, which was absolutely critical. “Once he saw everything Beyond Housing had done in Pagedale, and heard us say we were interested in expanding this work to the Normandy School District, he bit on the idea of what we were trying to do. We also had a 30-year track record, not just an idea. The superintendent is an integral part of our thinking and work in this space. The person at the top has to have complete buy-in. Without that, you will struggle to be successful.” In 2011, the 24:1 Initiative began the shift from planning to implementation. The plan includes three key focus areas: strong communities, with a focus on community health, residential stability, and jobs; engaged families, including leadership training and financial literacy; and successful children. The initiative has half a dozen working committees, which include residents and service providers and are staffed by Beyond Housing. Beyond Housing staff and committee members connect the school district to community resources, encourage increased parent involvement, and promote practices such as youth afterschool enrichment activities that work across the district. The focus is largely on systems alignment with the vision and goals. As convener and facilitator, Beyond Housing brings together all of the organizations that work in each area of focus. According to Krehmeyer, “We literally have a long table where we bring everybody together. We look at collective impact. We assume that all individual programs have great outcomes and impacts, but collectively they are not reaching larger community goals. How can we get together to work towards shared goals and track progress? In early childhood, for example, the goal is school readiness. How do we get to a place where every child arrives at school prepared? That’s when we will know we have succeeded. Everybody gets the big idea that we have to all work together. Working individually is not getting the job done.” For example, prenatal service providers in the community felt they were competing with each other for clients. Beyond Housing was able to gather data on who was served by each program, then facilitate a conversation to help these agencies see that their qualifications for clients were very different, and that there was plenty of need for all of their programs. The idea of the big table is what has attracted the funding to sustain this effort. In 2009, a local foundation made a $3 million commitment over five years. This funding has been critical to Beyond Housing’s ability to staff the work and keep it moving with a high level of ongoing community engagement. Krehmeyer is clear that “to lead such an effort takes resources. The reality is to do the work we’re talking about takes a tremendous amount of time.” More recently, a large corporate civic group invited the 24:1 Initiative to present to its board of directors. This group represents the leaders of regional industry, a group that many nonprofits only dream of having access to. It was drawn to the 24:1 Initiative precisely because of the Initiative’s big picture thinking. Starting Small Community HousingWorks’ initial efforts around improving public schools did not start with a big vision, or the blessings of the local school board or superintendent. When CHW spurred Oceanside residents to organize around school transportation problems, the residents were wary. There had been school budget cuts in previous years and their protests at that time had fallen on deaf ears. CHW staff had to convince residents that a less confrontational approach might bring better results. It took a while, but organizing staff convinced parents to consider meeting school officials halfway, offering to contribute toward a sustainable solution. CHW’s school transportation campaign with Oceanside residents was launched in August 2006. CHW worked with parents to create a proposal that allowed parents to donate a small weekly amount to CHW that was then offered as a match to the school department. The city was concerned that any special arrangements with these parents would trigger requests from parents in other neighborhoods and set a precedent that the school district could not afford to replicate. But CHW’s credibility allowed it to move forward. Eventually, the school board agreed to share the cost of transportation. In fact, they took it a step further and agreed to work with any neighborhood group that was organized and willing to match resources in the same way. CHW’s activities are funded through a variety of revenue streams. The neighborhood-based organizing is supported through Community Development Block Grant funding provided by the city of Oceanside along with private grants. Other municipalities pay CHW a fee to deliver its eight-week leadership training program. The costs of its Learning Center academic enrichment and afterschool operations are covered through a combination of property revenue, grants, individual donations, and local partners that vary from site to site. Some of the Learning Centers are sponsored by financial institutions. Making a Difference Beyond Housing’s 24:1 Initiative is just moving into implementation. The structure continues to evolve to ensure broad and ongoing input, oversight, and feedback loops. 24:1 Initiative partners are being asked to execute memos of understanding saying they will share the data they collect. It is too early to see hard data as far as academic gains, but leaders are hoping to see it in the next testing cycle. Krehmeyer understands that they may never be able to show a direct line between this massive effort and student achievement. But he is confident that because the Initiative works at a district-wide scale, incremental gains will, over time, lead to significant, measurable impact across the entire district. “We think we have the context of an opportunity to be successful,” says Krehmeyer. “Our geography is not very large. The school district is not very large. We have core competencies around key pieces. We know how to bring people together.” Looking ahead, the biggest challenges Krehmeyer sees are ensuring that they get high quality, high impact partners to the table, and bringing the work to scale. He states boldly, “If we don’t get to scale in everything we touch, it will fail.” By example, Krehmeyer explains that there are currently 115 students out of 4,700 participating in their matched savings program for college. “If that’s all we can reach, it begs the ‘so what’ question. We think about 100 percent of kids being ready for kindergarten. We need to know that we are touching every kid. Can we get there, and to all the different points along the continuum in the plan?” CHW’s impact can be seen in a number of ways in the communities in which it works. Oceanside residents who engaged in the transportation organizing campaign remain active and have successfully worked on other community improvement efforts. The Oceanside School District is now a key partner in CHW’s work with residents of that city. CHW has also successfully engaged low-income residents in a wealthier community, Poway, on school issues. Building relationships between these residents and the Poway School District took time, but they now have the ear of the superintendent and school board members. CHW staff, parents, and the school district are currently working together to allow CHW to access student grade data to enable staff to better support the students in CHW’s afterschool programs. Carmen Amigon, vice president of classes and coaching at Community HousingWorks, is optimistic that this relationship will now encourage even higher levels of parent engagement. CHW would like to improve its tracking of impact. According to Amigon, “We have names of all the children [in Oceanside] who use the transportation we helped organize. It would be great to analyze data to see if this has made a difference to their academic performance. ...If we can demonstrate how the reliable and affordable transportation has made a difference, it might allow for others to replicate the model. ... There are so many other school districts in San Diego that have cut transportation budgets. Our model could be a win-win.” Lessons for Other CDCs “Community developers have to get engaged in school improvement if they are serious about their communities becoming strong and healthy,” says Krehmeyer. “In most places, there is something occurring around improving public education. I would just urge [community groups] to seek out existing efforts that are underway and begin conversations. Seek out coalitions that are working toward collective action. The majority will say, ‘We’re so glad you’re here, because we know there is also a need for affordable housing.’” Krehmeyer advises that organizations need to understand what they bring to the table that can add value. They need to understand the whole picture and how they fit in to it. “All CDCs don’t need to serve in a lead role,” he says, “but somebody needs to lead.” Lastly, Krehmeyer cautions that this work is not easy due to the bureaucracies in school systems. “But, at the end of the day, this is where we need to be and not be frightened about it because it’s going to be complicated and hard.” Amigon of Community HousingWorks would like to remind other CDCs that “as parents, we want all of our kids to be successful. I don’t think any parent is dreaming at night that they want their son to be a dropout.” Given that, she says, “a large part of organizing is working with parents and youth to understand the school system and that it is going to take a little more than prayers to successfully send our kids to college.” That’s why CHW does financial literacy workshops that go over college requirements—to give parents “the information, the tools, and the support to help their kids be successful. If we understand how the system works, and begin to save money early enough, it’s not ‘if,’ it’s ‘when.’” While Beyond Housing and Community HousingWorks engage in very different types of efforts in very different communities, their approaches to improved educational outcomes have much in common. Both work closely with residents, asking probing questions that encourage residents to analyze issues and go deeper than the problems that are first presented. Both organizations have credibility in the eyes of the communities they serve, and actively support residents to take on leadership roles. Both are honest about their core competencies, and know how to strategically broker partnerships. Perhaps most importantly, both organizations are absolutely committed to comprehensive approaches to community development that go beyond provision of affordable housing, start with vision, focus on impact, and have absolute faith in the possibility for change. 2013-02-11T13:00:35+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3075/ballin_at_the_graveyard/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/ballin_at_the_graveyard/ballin_at_the_graveyard/#When:13:00:28Z The documentary Ballin’ at the Graveyard looks at the hardball culture and strong supportive ties between players that have brought two generations of men out to the same Albany, N.Y., court for pickup basketball every weekend for decades. Starting with an action-packed exploration of this particular game and its history, norms, and rituals, Ballin’ then examines the life stories of some of the key players and the community they have formed. Ballin’ is a moving and poignant yet respectful and unassuming portrait of the role of one “third place,” an informal yet longstanding gathering, in the lives of those who gather there. Shelter Shorts 2013-02-11T13:00:28+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3066/the_case_of_nychas_disappearing_open_space/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/the_case_of_nychas_disappearing_open_space/the_case_of_nychas_disappearing_open_space/#When:13:00:00Z Two new charter schools are sprouting in Upper Manhattan on the grassy campuses of some of New York City’s classic public housing developments. And they are not likely to be the last developments moving in on these formerly open spaces. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), which is in charge of the largest stock of the city’s publicly-owned land, has initiated a plan to sell the development rights to what it calls “unused,” “underutilized,” or “vacant” land situated within its housing superblocks. NYCHA argues that the revenues from these sales outweigh the quality of life concerns that have been raised by residents and advocacy organizations. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer proposed this strategy in Land Rich, Pocket Poor: Making the Most of New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) Unused Development Rights, a 2008 paper in which he advises NYCHA to develop a long-term plan for its “property surplus” by redeveloping it as rental housing, for-sale housing, retail, schools, or offices. Stringer says the revenue could be funneled into the upkeep of existing public housing. The report suggests that these projects be pursued as “as-of-right developments,” which would prevent them from being subject to the city’s standard land use review process. NYCHA would still be required to “consult” with tenant associations, but the document brushes off the idea that these real estate developments would have an effect on them: “While the sale of unused development rights is of understandable and legitimate interest to NYCHA residents, it is important to note that selling unused development rights would not affect the public nature or affordability requirements of existing housing … [it] would not impact the status of current residents in any way.” The language of this passage is very specific: this piecemeal selling of land would not affect residents’ status. There is no reference to how it would affect the livability of their surroundings. In a presentation to the National Housing & Rehabilitation Association in February 2011, NYCHA Chair John Rhea admitted there are challenges with development rights transfers. He said maximizing the development potential of sites may produce buildings significantly out of scale with the surrounding neighborhood. In some cases, he added, the development would result in displacement of open space, including passive and active recreation used by NYCHA residents and their neighbors. Rhea said these considerations are balanced by the fact that the “monies obtained for this property will be reinvested to preserve existing housing” and that “new development can provide triple bottom line benefits: revenue to NYCHA, community benefits and sustainable development.” However, whether these developments should actually be considered “sustainable” is a matter of considerable controversy. Under Construction The two charter schools under construction on public housing grounds are both located in upper Manhattan: a branch of Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academies within Central Harlem’s St. Nicholas Houses and the youth development organization Harlem RBI’s DREAM Charter School within East Harlem’s President George Washington Houses. Supporters point out the benefits of the schools’ ambitious educational programming, the formation of “public housing neighborhoods,” and job creation. At the groundbreaking for the DREAM Charter School building, which also contains spaces for Harlem RBI’s offices and affordable housing units, Rhea commented, “We are here today because we are focused on students, NYCHA residents, and their families and to show our continued involvement in building the neighborhoods that will serve East Harlem families’ needs in the 21st century.” But opponents have argued that the park, gardens, playgrounds, and benches that are being torn down to make space for these new amenities are also essential to the community’s wellness—they provide much needed ventilation, recreation, and gathering spaces. They have also voiced concerns that the schools present new safety, overcrowding, and traffic concerns. In both cases, residents have said they were not sufficiently consulted in the planning and implementation processes. Patricia Jackson, 58, who lives across the street from the St. Nicholas Houses, does not remember any public consultation process before the construction of the Promise Academy, which is nearing completion. “No one told us,” she says. “There was no meeting to ask the community what we thought.” NYCHA’s press releases indicate that there was in fact community outreach at St. Nick’s in the form of dozens of meetings with the tenant association, community board, and local elected officials, but there is nonetheless a feeling of exasperation on the ground. Another resident, who did not wish to be identified, says, “If there had been more community involvement in the decision-making process, they might have decided that it’s OK. I have nothing against the building of a school. But I’m not sure that this location is an ideal location. And a lot of people share the same sentiments.” In the book Restorative Commons: Creating Health and Well-Being Through Urban Landscapes, published in 2009 (pre-dating the construction of the charter school), there is a short article on NYCHA’s “Garden and Greening Program” that singles out programs slated to take root at the St. Nicholas Houses as examples of the program’s success. It cites the creation of a one-mile walking path around the grounds and additional gardens and trees around the perimeter, providing residents with “exercise, activity, and a source of relaxation and pride. For those who simply see the gardens or walk by them, [gardens] provide visual interest, and reduce the amount of garbage dumped: even less mobile residents can benefit from looking out their windows.” The unified campus, the benefits of which were touted by the article, has now been bisected by the new Promise Academy. At the Washington Houses, the most pressing issue that emerged after the plans for the school were revealed was the elimination of a popular communal space to accommodate the relocation of six trash compactors. The gathering space had been used for summer barbecues and picnics, birthday parties, and informal get-togethers for families and seniors. Along with the loss of communal space, concerns about rodents and air quality in a high-asthma area mobilized Washington Houses residents to action. They contacted the advocacy group Community Voices Heard (CVH), which held multiple press conferences and rallies over the issue. Kflu Kflu, public housing field coordinator for CVH explains: “We initially supported the school being built. We need more affordable housing and we need more schools. What made this issue problematic was that the decision was made top-down. When [NYCHA Board member] Margarita López came to speak to us, she, in a condescending and patronizing way, told the residents what was happening and what was best for them. And then it was kind of ‘hush hush.’ It was a done deal and then all of a sudden there was a start and end date. Mind you, they are taking someone’s public space—what little space they have—and putting in garbage compactors.” A coalition of community members at the Washington Houses met with NYCHA in May 2012 to negotiate the issue of the trash compactors. At the meeting, they were promised a comprehensive rodent management plan for the area, a reduction from six to three compactors and an extra wall of protection around them, a new barbecue/picnic station in another location, and fast-tracked repairs for the complex. Kflu considers being at the table to be progress at the minimum: “We didn’t completely win, but we were able to get them moving on some things and we got people motivated and organized.” Two of the tenant organizations opposing NYCHA on these buildings, Citizens for the Preservation of St. Nicholas Houses and East Harlem Preservation (Washington Houses), say they are fighting not only for the preservation of physical space, but also for the quality of life, character of place, and culture of these sites. Another group, a coalition of public housing advocacy organizations called the NYC Alliance to Preserve Public Housing, has expressed deep concerns about the “privatization” of public housing resources through projects like this. NYCHA, Harlem Children’s Zone, and Harlem RBI declined to comment for this article. Parks But Not Quite The Washington Houses and St. Nicholas Houses are both located in areas that are underserved in terms of open space, according to the NYC Office of Environmental Coordination, falling well below New York City’s already low average of 2.5 acres of open space per 1,000 residents. (Also, much of the open space that is counted in New York City is concentrated in areas like Central Park that are underutilized by low-income residents and communities of color.) NYCHA is in charge of 26,000 acres of open space, a precious resource in such an environment. In 2011 a group of tenants filed a lawsuit against NYCHA, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Harlem Children’s Zone claiming, among other things, that they should have sought permission from the city council and state legislature before taking away open space for the Promise Academy. The suits rely on New York state laws on the “alienation and conversion of municipal parkland.” But there are fuzzier protections for public housing campuses than there are for formal parks that fall under the jurisdiction of the New York City Parks Department. This is true despite the fact that many were created in concert with one another, and for the same reasons, in a time of great public investment in the 1930s and 1940s. Nicholas Dagen Bloom, in his book Public Housing That Worked, explains why: Robert Moses, parks commissioner at the time, chose to not define open spaces in public housing as parks to protect his budget and authority. He described NYCHA grounds as “landscaping,” not parks, because he felt they were “no substitute for properly operated independent playgrounds under the Parks Department.” Urban thinker Jane Jacobs argued that these spaces were barren, unfriendly zones in contrast to her preferred low-rise urban villages. But in Restorative Commons, Rob Bennaton, head of NYCHA’s “Garden and Greening Program,” says that use of that open space for gardening and greening can help with “anything from drug rehabilitation to relief from stress,” slow and steady exercise for seniors, fresh foods and snacks, opportunities to build cultural connections, and a “nonconfrontational way to reclaim the land for productive and positive use.” Historic preservation might be a possible tactic to protect these open spaces. NYCHA relies on federal funding, and any potentially historically significant properties would be subject to review under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, with NYCHA publicly accountable for adverse actions to them, including to key features of the “landscaping.” NYCHA has begun working with the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation (SHPO) to create an inventory of gardens, buildings, and facilities on public housing properties that are more than 50 years old and could have the potential for landmarking. Kathy Howe, a historic preservation specialist with the SHPO, says that open space is crucial to the integrity of public housing campuses, and that “landscape plays a huge role in what would make them significant and help them to become eligible [for the National Register of Historic Places].” Two public housing developments that she mentioned, the Amsterdam Houses on the Upper West Side and Eastchester Gardens in the Bronx, are considered eligible for the register based on having the same qualities of modern urban design as many other public housing campuses in the city: central axis plans, semi-circular play spaces, curved walkways, and harmonious building siting. With the two school developments, NYCHA is starting down a path of promoting these open spaces as being more valuable as commodities than as environmental and cultural assets. Given what residents and other stakeholders are saying about how they value their gathering spaces, a holistic approach to the creation of “public housing neighborhoods” should be required to take into account the benefits of open space as well. 2013-02-11T13:00:00+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3057/where_community_is_at_work_making_itself/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/where_community_is_at_work_making_itself/where_community_is_at_work_making_itself/#When:12:59:49Z A “third place” is what planners call somewhere that is neither home nor work, a place where a range of people gather and interact. Much of the importance of third places is the opportunity they create for conversation. And so we decided a conversation about their roles and how community-based organizations and others could strengthen them would be an appropriate way to launch our package of articles on third places. Taking part in this discussion with Shelterforce editor Miriam Axel-Lute and NHI executive director Harold Simon were May Louie, director of leadership and capacity building at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative; Neeraj Mehta, director of community-based research at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota and a Bush Foundation Leadership Fellow; Ken Reardon, director of the Graduate Program in City and Regional Planning at the University of Memphis; and Chuck Wolfe, a land use attorney in Seattle who is working on a book called Urbanism Without Effort. Miriam Axel-Lute: In a lower income or disinvested community, are there different kinds of third places? Are they operating differently, and why or why not? Ken Reardon: I think they’ve taken on a whole new level of importance because of the long-term public and private disinvestment in some of the poorest neighborhoods. There are fewer community facilities, there are school closings, a lot of the neighborhood-oriented retail spaces are much less vibrant. So these remaining community spaces, whether they’re barbershops or a low-cost breakfast restaurant, are among the few gathering spaces that remain. And given the difficulties that these neighborhoods face, having civic conversation about critical policy issues becomes more important. So I think they’ve become more vital in many ways. Chuck Wolfe: In some of our more culturally diverse neighborhoods, you’re apt to see more spontaneity, where people might take on a space such as Ken has described, or a street or something, and create the spaces themselves without intervention from government or a [nonprofit] or a community organization. I was in a meeting where someone spoke [about] a festival that neighbors just did on their own, without it being part of the city’s Office of Neighborhoods programmatic sort of street fairs. I remember thinking as a lawyer, “Well, gee, they probably needed some street use permits for that, and they didn’t bother.” And that’s just fine. The other piece of this is I think that sometimes these types of populations will tend to rely on the commercial third places, like a bookstore or a coffee shop. And when those places close, it can have an impact because they might not have anywhere else to go. When Borders shut down, I actually wrote an article about [how] no matter what you think of “big books,” so to speak, versus small bookstores, when a space like that that’s really used by the community for convening shuts down, [people] might not have anywhere else to go. Maybe [cities] ought to have “no net loss” policies for third spaces, kind of like [they do for] wetlands. If there happens to be a large commercial space that is used that way, it can be all the more sensitive when that operation shuts down, because there’s not necessarily a naturally occurring local business that will step in. Our Borders in downtown Seattle is still empty a year and a half later. May Louie: People are looking for the places that support their coming together and interacting and meeting other people. I think public markets are a great place: you’re going there to buy something, but you’re [really] going there to see the neighbors and start a casual conversation over “I’ve never seen yellow carrots before.” Third spaces are where community is at work making itself. What you want is not for government or a consultant, an outside expert, to say, “Well, you know what you need there is this kind of space.” It has to come from the cultures and what’s appropriate in that place, and what people would use. How do you know what people would use? Well, you create the settings in which people can express that themselves and be the co-creators of what the space might look like. Very early on in DSNI’s work, there was a very large public park in the neighborhood, and it was the site of a lot of drug dealing. The neighbors around the park, they called the police, nothing happens. Drug dealers leave, they come back. And out of utter frustration, the idea that the neighbors came up with is, “Let’s build a giant fence around the entire park so that nobody can get in and out, and they can’t sell drugs there.” So, OK, take away this resource from the community because it’s being used negatively? What we proposed was that we fill the park with positive activities so that the drug dealing wouldn’t have a place. And that’s what we did. We worked with community partners. We brought in children’s programs. And over time, as the community was using it more, the police backed us in this attempt to move the drug dealing out. They had a cruiser there any time that they knew we were organizing children’s activities. Over time, the city refurbished the entire park. There’s a Little League field. There’s new play equipment. There’s a small basketball court. When the space itself looks like somebody cares about it, then more people care about it, right? It was a signal about this being for the children of the neighborhood. And we’re going to keep it clean. We’re going to care about it, and people use it. Miriam Axel-Lute: Do you have examples of assumptions by outsiders about what sorts of third spaces would work for a community and why that wasn’t the case? May Louie: I will tell you a case where we, in our planning process, had done something that didn’t work. In a portion of the neighborhood half of the land was vacant because of arson fires, [and] people dumped garbage on top of the rubble from the burnt houses. So we did a land use process for this particular area, which became our community land trust. There were two large pieces of land that we designated for small community centers in the middle of the new housing. And after the housing was built, the new families that lived in the houses, they said, “You’re going to put a community center there? That doesn’t belong.” And of course, they were right. And so, we had the land re-designated for open space, because these are interior residential streets, and you don’t want the basketball game letting out at 11:00 at night with families that are trying to put their kids to bed. Ken Reardon: I think the planning and design professions have to proceed with great humility and care in their efforts to support changes in the physical environment to preserve and advance these kinds of things. We have [in South Memphis] the most successful neighborhood-based farmer’s market at the site of an old fish fry restaurant that’s been closed for years. It’s on the corner of two very busy streets. Residents understood that if they made lots of improvements, the cost to the merchants would be high, [and] they wouldn’t be able to survive. So they did something very minimalistic, with just a beautiful children’s mural wrapped around this building, which over 100 kids executed. They waited in line a half-hour to put their name on the side of the building. People told us that we were crazy, that the building would be tagged in a nanosecond. There has never been a mark put on this building. And nine outside vendors came in, several community garden groups came in. [It’s a] vibrant, exciting space, 400 people every Thursday afternoon, a mix of local residents, poor and working class, and then health professionals from area hospitals. And there was this lovely interaction between folks who know a little bit about nutrition and health interacting with the local experts and exchanging recipes. As a result, a foundation comes forward with $300,000. And all of a sudden the church leaders used to doing brick-and-mortar projects come up with a design that now they need another half a million dollars to do. Meanwhile, all of the grassroots activity tapered off as people expected the grand new building to take the market to the next level. So there’s an example of very earnest and well-intentioned designers and foundation folks wanting to make something already special even more so, but coming up with a design that now loads onto that community a monthly expense that is way in excess of what the immigrant merchants can afford to pay, and may end up killing it. There’s the notion of introducing principles of good practice from elsewhere, but I prefer looking at what’s already working, and see[ing] how we can modestly build upon that, preserving those very special principles that allowed a very unlikely and dramatic success to have happened in the first place. Chuck Wolfe: I think there’s an incredible irony when I see clients and policymakers trying to embrace and champion this organic vision, but in order to do that and implement it, they end up reshaping it in an out-of-context way that really inhibits its success. Miriam Axel-Lute: I was really struck by how many of the examples you have given are private retail spaces rather than technically public spaces. Is it more challenging for a community group to support a third space that’s within a private business, or how does it differ? Chuck Wolfe: There are well-meaning private businesses or developers who want to be inclusive in allowing for third spaces or a much more diverse fusion business that might have been possible in the past. But you have to have the right mixture of person and community working together, and it doesn’t always come off. May Louie: We have a small, locally owned market where the owners let us paint a mural on both of their outside walls. The owners are immigrants. They are bilingual. [It] wasn’t that anybody thought “This would be a good community place,” but people were attracted to the store because it’s an immigrant-ethnic store. They are probably one of the few places in the community that will give you credit. People are going there to have their letters translated, to get help with their taxes. Kids will go there to show their report card to the owners. One of the owners runs a local Cape Verdean radio station, which provides one of the few sources of news and information for that population. She noticed that there were a lot of women in the neighborhood who were really good cooks, [but] have no jobs. She opened up a little eatery [to sell their food]. The community finds the places where they’re welcome, where people care about the quality of life in the community and will be available to them. I think there are a lot of places like that in all of our communities. Ken Reardon: I teach at a university that does participatory planning with neighborhoods. We were invited into a South Memphis neighborhood, and my graduate assistants kept telling me about this great soul food restaurant, and so I went. And all over the walls were every significant civil rights and African-American arts figure of the last 50 years photographed at this restaurant. The owner had bought it at auction. It was about ready to close, and he had gone around as the neighborhood lost institutions and picked up the artifacts and brought them in. It’s more than a restaurant. It’s a repository of the extraordinary culture that has kept this neighborhood together. Most people outside of a very small footprint didn’t know very much about this incredible place and its story. We’re now bringing in lots of students to do work on dozens of projects, and it becomes part of the orientation to that community, because it’s like a civic museum. It has the whole story of a people’s emancipatory struggle on the walls, and also told by this remarkable 70-year-old vendor. And we bring business. We have community meetings there now. [Lots of groups at] the university now regularly use [the restaurant as a] caterer. [The owner] had this big piece of pretty hideous-looking rustic machinery in the front of his business, and I offered to help him take it away. And he laughed. He said, “You’re not familiar with shoe-making, are you?” and I said no. He said, “This was a shoemaker’s space before I turned it into this restaurant. When we first came from the South, 11 of us, no shoes, my mother went to the shoemaker and asked him if she could rent some shoes until she got some money and could perhaps pay for a pair.” “And the guy made 11 pairs of shoes on the promise that all the kids would go to school. And it was on this machine. The reason it’s here is that, in my estimation, small businesses are like the stitchers of the community. They’re the ones who can pull together the various threads of people and sense of pride and place and possibilities. We need to remind people on this commercial corridor that that’s part of their role. So the machine stays.” May Louie: Food is community. Our executive director, John Barros, was part of a group that opened the first local Cape Verdean restaurant. And people hung out there, and still do, and they do music on the weekends; whatever you’re celebrating, you can do it there. When they started the restaurant, I don’t think anybody’s main goal was to make money, because they didn’t, but it was to create that kind of place in the community. It is a commercial enterprise. It is a business. But it plays this whole other role of sharing the culture and creating a gathering place. Ken Reardon: Here’s another example: A fellow had a candy store in Memphis where all the kids [in the neighborhood] after school would come, and if they did well in school, would show him their report cards, and they would maybe get a little extra treat. Sadly, local rival youth gangs had a conflict over turf near his store, and two young men were shot and killed. And from both sides of this conflict, young men would come into his store, because they had done so as young boys, and lament the situation. And this fellow took it upon himself to reach out to the university and see if there might be some folks who, within the African-American community, would be in touch with powerful healing traditions. And a result of this was a series of Friday night meetings for young men and women who had lost folks close to them, facilitated by African-American social workers and local religious leaders. I think these places have, on multiple levels, important roles to play. We often just don’t see it, [as] outsiders coming in. Miriam Axel-Lute: Making great spaces can play into gentrification. How do we balance making a great third place, but making it inclusive and preserving equity in the neighborhood? Neeraj Mehta: The people most equipped to solve our community’s toughest challenges are too often left on the sidelines. They’re not included in deliberation and decision-making and problem solving, and instead we use this sort of paternalistic, “We have the right answer for you, let us import it in.” I’m really concerned about how the gifts and the strengths and the talents and the wisdom of existing community residents play a part in articulating and shaping revitalization. How do you acknowledge and lift up the culture of a place? We have a third space in our neighborhood that an organization called The Redeemer Center runs. It’s called the Community Living Room, and it’s literally a living room, with couches, built into a storefront, because that’s what the residents of that community said they wanted, and they program it and they use it. It really represents the ethos and the culture of that place. And they use it to achieve all sorts of things. It’s great to have a space in which people can come together and dialogue and build relationships. We’re always thinking about how do you build communities, too often we say we want to build community without investing in building community. Third spaces can be an opportunity for people, maybe across culture or differences, to get together to build social capital. Then how do you convert that social capital into the type of efficacy and power that can help bring strength to a community? May Louie: Recently we were partnered with a couple of other groups to do something called Public Kitchen. This was a set of eight or nine days of intentional events to have food and cooking and eating be this community-building public activity. The resident artist for that period was a chef, and she’s at the town commons during the farmer’s market, cooking. They cooked on the sidewalk and shared food. They had events at the Dudley greenhouse, including an Extreme Chef cook-off. It was gathering and non-gathering. Some of the events were groups of people who were there for the events, and other ones were people walking by the farmer’s market, grabbing a taste of food, moving on, but talking to each other over food. Miriam Axel-Lute: In affordable housing, we talk about creating permanently affordable housing so that people don’t get displaced. I wonder if people are starting to think about that for third places. May Louie: The Food Project farms 2.5 acres of land in the Dudley neighborhood. The land is city-owned. Both we and the Food Project have asked the city to convey the land to the community land trust so that it’s not subject to real estate pressures, or a different city administration [that] decides to balance the budget by selling off all the land to the highest bidder. We want to stabilize the use of that land for urban agriculture as long as that is the will of this community. And the way we can do it is the same way we preserve affordability in housing, through the use of a community land trust. Neeraj Mehta: We have a Starbucks in our community where the Somali community gathers. Every time you go there, it’s 90 percent Somali community members. In St. Paul, there’s a historically African-American coffee shop gathering place where the issues of the day are being communicated. There’s all sorts of research that shows as our cities become more diverse, we kind of hunker down into communities of sameness. Diversity has all sorts of power to it, yet it’s hard to capture and it’s hard to bring people together across differences. How do we bring the strengths and the gifts and the different experiences and interpretations and ideas of diverse groups of people together? I think using third spaces is a great way to do that, something that feels not-mine, not-yours, but ours. May Louie: [Third places should be] integrated intentionally, proactively, into a whole community planning process. Ken Reardon: Encourage people within their local community to identify places that already function this way. I wonder if third spaces for children need to be different than [those for] adults. I can imagine having some privacy and some protection from the meddling of adults wouldn’t be a bad thing if you were a child. We say we’re very concerned about kids, but we also have accepted so many stereotypes, particularly of young kids of color, that we are really frightened of this segment of our population. And in many ways [we are] eliminating all kinds of spaces for these kids to gather. Where does that leave them? Harold Simon: So what are some of the ingredients that need to be in place to allow places like this to sprout? Neeraj Mehta: If I’m a community-based organization, the entire ethos of my work [should be] sprinkled with being in relationship with people in our community; they have a say in a structural way. How do we look for and acknowledge the naturally occurring ways in which people are gathering, if that’s in a public space or a private place, and wonder with them, “If that is exactly what you need, how do we preserve it? Or is there a next iteration? And how do we support that next iteration? What can we do ourselves and what can we do with a little bit of help, and what can we do with a lot of help?” But really starting with this idea that there are bright spots in our community. We shouldn’t start with what’s broken and how do we fix it, but what’s working and how do we do more of it. And then, elevate the value of these kinds of spaces so that they’re seen as intimately and explicitly important to what a healthy and vibrant community is and has. No community should be without these kinds of spaces. Therefore, when we think about planning or revitalization efforts or development, we’re saying, “Where are they?”, because it’s that important. May Louie: The creation of these spaces needs [to be] locally owned. People are part of figuring it out. People are part of making it real, and it’s theirs. That’s probably the best ingredient for sustainability, because what’s created belongs there because people want it. Ken Reardon: These are important resources in communities, and I think we could do a better job lifting them up and talking about why they matter. They’re sort of the public houses of our century, and they’ve never been more important. At a time where we’re all electronically hooked up but maybe less and less actually connected, these spaces are really precious. Also give some recognition to a group of people who’ve probably had to work hard at creating and maintaining them—washing them down in the morning and getting new cushions for the lawn chairs, or whatever they have to do to keep the space inviting to people to use it. Neeraj Mehta: It’s easy to see physical development. We can count units. We can see a shiny building go up. But if part of what happens in third spaces is building community and building social capital, how do you paint pictures for people so that they can see? I love the idea of awards and lifting it up so that people can really see what it looks like and feels like. 2013-02-11T12:59:49+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3070/after_the_election/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/after_the_election/after_the_election/#When:13:10:06Z Americans have just wrapped up another ugly presidential election. Even with the outcome, as Gar Alperovitz reminds us in America Beyond Capitalism, the progressive achievements of the 20th century and progressive aspirations in the 21st face rocky times ahead. The continued shrinking of labor will give the wealthiest Americans, individually and through their corporate personhoods, a growing opportunity to chip away the remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society. We should prepare to work longer hours, for less pay and more limited benefits, and to retire in abject poverty. Our hours to participate in small-d democracy will become more scarce, and democracy itself will increasingly be like this year’s political conventions—theatrical performances orchestrated by those with money. Meanwhile, any remaining sense of happiness and stability will be upended by environmental crises like climate change, social crises triggered by widening inequality, and political crises deepened by all the local power we’ve surrendered over the years to global free-trade regimes. Yet it’s the very severity of these crises and their intractability, Alperovitz argues, that might just move Americans to consider more radical options. After we have exhausted tinkering with private health insurance through half-baked reforms like Obamacare, we finally might be willing to entertain a coherent single payer system. Once we recognize that we cannot possibly pay for Social Security and Medicare, we might decide that rather than cut our benefits we’ll impose more serious taxes on the wealthy. Alperovitz finds hope beneath the political surface. Across the country, progressives—often with the support of principled conservatives—are reinventing business, government, and civic life, through what he calls the Pluralistic Commonwealth. Cutting-edge cooperatives, small businesses, worker-owned firms, social enterprises, community development corporations, and municipally owned entities are providing competitive alternatives to the Fortune 500 economy. These new community-based businesses not only are raising the bar on labor and environmental standards but also democratizing the ownership of capital and experimenting with shorter work weeks. Meanwhile creative states are stepping into the voids left by federal inaction, whether it’s California leading auto mileage standards, Vermont moving ahead with single payer health care, or North Dakota running its own public bank. And as U.S. demographics shift away from the white males who long dominated our political culture, space will open up for new leaders, new strategies, and a new politics. Three features of America Beyond Capitalism make it an especially valuable book for classes and study groups. First, Alperovitz is a remarkably thorough scholar. Some 75 dense pages of notes underscore how many years he and his colleagues spent culling books, articles, and the Internet for literally hundreds of creative proposals. It’s hard to think of another book that provides such a thorough overview of the literature of economic alternatives. Second, Alperovitz is not just an abstract theorist. He worked his early professional years on Capitol Hill. He later helped Youngstown, Ohio, consider the possibility of buying a recently closed steel mill in 1977. Thirty years later, he worked with community activists in Cleveland to design and deploy an American version of the Mondragon Cooperatives, anchored in the Evergreen Laundry. These real world experiences, all of which had important successes and shortcomings, give the analysis a welcome tone of humility and cautiousness. Third, while a self-avowed Wisconsin-bred progressive, Alperovitz is remarkably non-ideological, and urges us to reject the worst elements of both capitalism and socialism. Clintonian New Democrats, Wellstone liberals, Ron Paul populists, and even Reagan small-government conservatives will find proposals here that are exciting and thought-provoking. It’s hard to imagine another contemporary scholar who, on a two-page spread, could so credibly weave together the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Herbert Marcuse, and John Adams! Every reader will surely also find lots to quibble with. Personally, I find Alperovitz’s critique of centralization persuasive, but not his arguments that regional governance (which barely exists in the United States) is more promising than local government (which is thriving). I agree that unless we change the demands of work and family, Americans will be unlikely to participate in day-to-day democracy; but I worry that many citizens today, in the absence of greater education and mobilization, would use a shorter work week to become couch potatoes rather than activists. I find his proposals for redistributing corporate stock obsolete (not to mention politically farfetched) now that recent crowdfunding reforms make it easier for small local businesses to create new stock. I prefer to abandon Wall Street, not redistribute it. Nor is the top-down character of these proposals consistent with Alperovitz’s (or my) faith in decentralization. At the end of the day, any redistributionist policies may well have to be led by the states, communities, and even cooperatives. These are the kinds of friendly debates Alperovitz and I have been having for more than 20 years, since we worked shoulder-to-shoulder at the Institute for Policy Studies in the early 1990s. The genius of Alperovitz, and this book, is that no reader exposed to so many ideas can possibly come away without rethinking where he or she stands or without pondering some new ideas he or she might embrace. Above all, Alperovitz is one of the nation’s most skillful teachers. The book was mostly written before 2005, though several new chapters for this edition resituate the arguments for today. The first edition was remarkably prescient. Alperovitz foresaw that sooner or later the 99 percent would find political legs in increasing taxes on the top 1 percent. If the book’s thesis is right, Occupy Wall Street is just the beginning of a new chapter in American history where wealth is distributed more fairly as a prerequisite for a decent society and real democracy. Alperovitz counsels us to look past short-term wins and losses in elections—and many of both lie ahead—and encourages readers to focus on the slow, patient work of rebuilding America, one family, one business, and one community at a time. Reviews 2013-02-09T13:10:06+00:00 http://www.shelterforce.org/article/3073/update_atlanta_beltline/ http://www.shelterforce.org/article/update_atlanta_beltline/update_atlanta_beltline/#When:13:00:58Z In our Winter 2010 issue, we published a series of articles about the Atlanta Beltline, a rail loop surrounded by multiuse trails that is the country’s largest public transit infrastructure project. We examined the commitments being made to developing affordable housing around the Beltline, and the work to create community land trusts to make sure at least some of that housing is permanently affordable. Two years later, construction has begun on a few portions of the trails, and an implementation plan for the whole project is expected by Spring 2013. Although Beltline advocates were disappointed that a statewide referendum on transit funding that would have accelerated the project did not pass earlier this year, that funding wasn’t part of the original Beltline plan, and work is proceeding according to the original 25-year completion time frame. The Atlanta Beltline Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which gets 15 percent of the revenue raised through a special Beltline tax allocation district, stands at $8.8 million, and has helped create 120 affordable housing units along the Beltline so far. In one project, the Lofts at Reynoldstown Crossing, the Beltline Partnership was itself the developer, rehabbing a building that had been intended for high-end condos and then abandoned in the housing crash. It became 28 units of affordable owner-occupied housing, three of which were sold as permanently affordable units with deed restrictions. The Atlanta Land Trust Collaborative is stewarding those units as part of its portfolio. The Atlanta Land Trust Collaborative is pioneering a “central server” model that provides back end support for neighborhood-based community land trusts while also acting to support shared-equity homeownership directly in areas without a local group taking the lead. It is up and running, supporting the community land trust (CLT) efforts of two neighborhood-based community development corporations and one resident volunteer coalition of four adjacent neighborhoods. All six of these neighborhoods are located along the Atlanta Beltline. The Pittsburgh neighborhood-based CDC is preparing to market its first newly renovated CLT homes before the end of 2012 and the Reynoldstown neighborhood-based CDC is preparing to initiate site development for six new LEED-certified CLT homes around the beginning of 2013. Tony Pickett, ALTC’s director, says that during 2013, ALTC and the Fulton County/Atlanta Land Bank Authority, along with a variety of other local and national partners, plan to explore the creation of an Atlanta Transit Oriented Development (TOD) Land Acquisition Fund to facilitate the production of shared-equity housing, both rental and for sale, at scale. “Our work is based on successful national best practice models operating in Denver and San Francisco with the added innovation of utilizing a land bank/CLT partnership as a central element in the fund structure,” says Pickett. “Control of TOD land for shared-equity housing can accomplish the critical linkage of low-cost public transit access and affordable high-quality housing opportunities for low- and moderate-income families with urban job centers.” Shelter Shorts 2013-02-09T13:00:58+00:00