Citiwire.net

For Release Sunday, May 2, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

WASHINGTON — What’s happening to America’s low-income neighborhoods in the face of the Great Recession? What can be done to protect them?

Late in April many of the big guns of the nation’s community development movement met in Washington to hear about a brand new institute designed to stimulate thinking and action on full panoplies of services for troubled neighborhoods.

The challenges, right now, are immense. Lost jobs, stunning declines in family incomes, evictions and business failures have hit poor areas nationwide. Troubled families churn in and out of the hard-hit neighborhoods. Street gangs, plus a proliferation of firearms, strike terror in many inner-city neighborhoods.

But the misery isn’t focusing in inner cities alone. It’s “gone metro” in a big way, as poverty afflicts more and more suburbs. Between 2000 and 2008, reported Amy Liu of the Brookings Institution, suburbs of America’s largest 100 metro regions saw their populations living under the poverty line grow five times faster than the rise in center city neighborhoods. Overall, joblessness in this recession is up equally in cities and suburbs.

That suggests that smart solutions have to be region-wide, and that the Obama administration is right in framing its “urban” policy initiatives to cover entire metro areas, not just their center cities.

But solutions get real at the neighborhood level. So what’s the new role for the community development corporations (CDCs) and allied community-based groups that first appeared during the social turmoil of the 1960s and have since led neighborhood stabilization efforts through their affordable housing programs?

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation has been a leading financier of the CDCs’ housing efforts — to the tune of billions of dollars — through its contacts with foundations and corporations.

But now it’s time, LISC president Michael Rubinger told the Washington gathering, to think and act well beyond the issue of shelter.

“No amount of new affordable housing,”he said, “will suffice for a family whose parents can’t find work, or send their kids to a quality school, or walk safely down their streets without encountering gangs and drugs, or find any hint of a grocery store, health care provider or decent recreational space.”

The answer, Rubinger argued, is a concept called “comprehensive community development.” The essence is full-bore attention to all of a challenged neighborhood’s problems. It’s an approach pioneered in the South Bronx by super-CDC-leader Anita Miller, with key support from the Surdna Foundation, in the early 1990s. More recently, it’s been expanded by LISC and supported significantly by the MacArthur Foundation, first in Chicago neighborhoods and more recently in 20 other cities across the country.

The expanded agenda means attention to jobs, schools, and public safety by working with local government, faith-based groups, foundations and other grassroots groups. It includes deliberate steps to recruit full-service supermarkets into neglected areas, overcoming the “food desert” phenomenon while providing jobs and access to fresh foods. It means, as the South Bronx experience suggested, attracting doctors’ offices for primary care, promoting parenting groups and child care, security patrols, physical planning, recreation space, employment training for youth, and organizing firms for a business improvement district.

Comprehensive community development, in the words of Julia Stasch, vice president of the MacArthur Foundation, has “put the nail in the coffin of addressing one issue at a time, or ignoring context.”

But, she added, can it connect realistically to the newfound focus on entire metro regions as the nexus of the country’s competitiveness? And can it link up in a meaningful way with the both the mission of the White House Office of Urban Affairs and the widely heralded new effort of several federal departments to coordinate their grassroots operations for sustainability and livability?

Those are some of the issues the new “Institute for Comprehensive Community Development” (great idea, tough title!) is designed to tackle. It will study and evaluate community development initiatives, propose new ones, provide on-site support for comprehensive efforts across the U.S., train community development practitioners, and support integrating government with neighborhood development initiatives. And on top of all that, it’s intended to spread the word of the best practices it sees in the field.

Andrew Mooney, the LISC officer who’ll head the new institute, wants it “to be provocative” — a table at which field operatives and theorists and funders can better grasp “what works, what doesn’t, and why.”

The very idea of an “institute” dealing with community development — however activist — seems worlds away from the hardscrabble, street-level efforts to upgrade neighborhoods I began covering in the 1970s. But maybe it’s the indispensable next step in the thrashing out of ideas, learning of necessity, taking on odds, that have been hallmarks of the community development effort from its start.

And the time for that has never been riper.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.