For Release Sunday, May 31, 2009
Citiwire.net
It’s always great to complete a new book. And my new co-authored volume — This Could be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity are Reshaping Metropolitan America — is surely no exception.
But this book feels particularly satisfying because — oddly enough — it’s not the book we meant to write.
I’d set out out three years ago to catalog “best practices” in the field of regional equity — the various attempts by non-profits, government agencies, and some business leaders to insure that all communities get to share in successful regional economies. Joining in the research adventure were two long-time colleagues — Chris Benner, previously the research director at Working Partnerships, a labor-affiliated think tank in the Silicon Valley, and Martha Matsuoka, now a professor but once an environmental justice organizer for Urban Habitat in the San Francisco Bay Area.
All three of us had been early proponents of regional equity. Chris helped to push for living wage laws in San Jose. Martha worked for regional tax-sharing in the Bay Area. And I collaborated with L.A.-based groups to place inner city youth in jobs in the entertainment industry. Along with such groups as PolicyLink in Oakland, we had been boosters of mutually supportive regional connections. And we were all starting to feel a bit guilty.
What, after all, had people done with all our advice to “go regional”? We knew that it was harder than it looked: making regionalism real to struggling communities was a challenge, and collaborating at the regional level required a new set of skills. Plus, low-income advocates were always afraid that their voice would be diluted in regional discussions.
It’s hard out there for a regionalist, we thought, and so we sheepishly set up to survey the progress — or perhaps the damage we and others had inadvertently caused in response to our suggestion of a whole new approach to community development.
What we did find was as surprising to us as it may be to others. There was no shortage of best practices in terms of real estate development, job training, and regional planning. But — that wasn’t what practitioners were focused on or wanted to talk about.
Leaders of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, architects of the nation’s first Community Benefits Agreement, might be expected to dwell on the arcane but critical details of zoning and entitlements they’d mastered — even becoming as expert in as the lawyers negotiating on the other side. But they had a broader interest now — how “community benefits” reframes the nature and purpose of development, and leads to quite new coalitions.
When we talked with the organizers of MOSES, an interfaith group in Detroit, and out came an erudite exposition of why one needs to reform voting power in the regional transit authority, along with an emphasis on”fix it first” priorities in infrastructure spending (you’d think you were talking to Brookings experts!). But stick around long enough and the talk turns to how the group’s broader goal is to repair the divide between rich and poor, black and white, city and suburb.
What we’d stumbled on was not simply a field of new practices to gain fairer treatment. It was a social movement in the making.
What struck us most were the social movement regionalists who focused on organizing communities, building power, and changing the narrative of disconnection that has allowed poverty to flourish in so many different locations in our metropolitan landscapes. They are not seeking a new housing project, a new jobs program, or a new way of taxing: they are actively trying to reshape America.
And they are winning. When others were decrying a rightward turn in the country, they were demonstrating a different path with the passage of living wages and community benefits agreements. When others were pessimistic that Washington would ever address climate change, they were forging agreements to curtail sprawl and support public transit. When others were dismayed by the growing polarization in the country, they were working effectively with business leaders to forge new job training programs to rescue both workers and regions.
We realize this is a bold view. When we first presented it to one crowd in early 2007, we faced a sharp push back. We quickly asked the group to name the most exciting politician in America. The answer came back: Barack Obama, with the explanation that he could connect us to each other and to our higher selves. We pushed back ourselves: why do you think he can connect like that? To which we were reminded that he was a community organizer with the Gamaliel network in Chicago, just as they were starting to experiment with regional equity as a strategy to connect suburbanites and rural residents with city dwellers.
This is not the book we meant to write — it’s the one we discovered in the writing. And it suggests a future — of inclusive and sensible politics and policies — a future we hope will continue to bubble up from our regions to our nation in the years ahead.
Manuel Pastor’s e-mail address is mpastor@college.usc.edu. He is Professor of Geography and American Studies and Ethnicity and Director of the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at the University of Southern California. The Cornell University Press is publisher of his Pastor’s coauthored book — This Could be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity are Reshaping Metropolitan America.
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