Manuel Pastor / May 28 2009
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.
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Manuel Pastor, Jr. / Dec 04 2008
For Release Sunday, December 7, 2008
Citiwire.net
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. We have elected the first president in decades from urban America–and he seems to get the regionalist mantra. Running a campaign that tied together voters from cities and suburbs, he promoted a metropolitan prosperity agenda in place of the usual anti-poverty bromides. He coupled that with a commitment to social justice born from his early experience working for an interfaith group that was part of the Gamaliel Foundation, a network that has “regional equity” at the heart of its community organizing.
Yet, the incoming president also faces a tough economy and a propensity for some to say that smart planning for social inclusion is a luxury we can ill afford in a time of economic crisis. This is exactly wrong: we are only as strong as our weakest link. And there’s little doubt that the distributional excesses of the last decade are at least partly to blame for the mess we are in.
It is tempting to put inclusion to one side. Traditional economic theory has often posed a seemingly intractable trade-off between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting what’s good for one may be bad for another. In hard times like these, business and politicians argue, the constraint is especially tight: we need to celebrate the creation of any job. Read More »