A Ghostly Future

Today on Daily Kos, there was very haunting and sad post about Dayton, Ohio. Dayton, the home of the first flight and the first cash register is the empitome of what has happened to many small and mid-sized cities whose middle class was created through the promise of hard, but good paying work at factories.

Here is the link to the pictoral tour of modern Dayton.   Speechless.

Hooverville, Next Stop

Over the past weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting a lovely middle aged woman named Jane*, while helping some friends of mine fix-up the steal of a deal fixer upper they just purchased. Over the 24 hours of moving things, sanding cabinets, and scrapping off 40-year old contact paper and various and a sundry shelves, Jane shared her a good portion of her life story with me. The story was both heart-breaking and infuriating.

In short, 14 months ago, Jane lost her job at 55 years old. As the job market has continued to unravel, she has given up or lost her home, her car, many of her prized possessions, and to some extent her pride. She has been diligently searching for a job with each interview ending the same way, they either thought she was too old or too qualified and would leave if something better came along (I wish as an interviewee, one could ask the interviewer “how do I know if I say I’ll be here for 2 years, you will keep me for at least 2 years?”, but I digress.).  She is praying that what little she has left in a storage unit will not be auctioned off at the end of the month, and she has literally begged her cell phone company to give her one more month.

In the last few months, Jane has become almost entirely reliant on friends to keep a roof over her head. She is homeless–though not in the sense we almost always imagine in hearing the word. She is apart of the growing number of folk that have lost a job and a home. They are not sleeping on the street, or at a shelter or even in their car, but are shifting from couch to guest room as they try to stay economically afloat. No job. No home. She is dependent on the kindness (and/or tolerance) of friends and relatives.

Jane’s particular situation demonstrates the disconnect that exists between the haves and have nots as the economy continues to unravel around us. See Jane has some well-off friends, but none of them are willing to help her. One rich Beverly Hills friend who lives alone told her, that she is unemployed because of “bad choices”, and therefore she couldn’t let Jane stay with her. Another said she needed to be able to have “alone time” in her 4-floor house with a rarely used finished basement. (It is only because of a friend who is living much closer to paycheck to paycheck and is supporting someone else who also lost a job that Jane currently has a roof over head.)

Jane’s friends are just a localized version of the “disconnect” shown in all of its glory on the Hill and in the media as they gravitate between ‘let them eat cake’ in the form of tax cuts, and patting financial institutions with bailout funds on the back while they do nothing but hold on to the funds. I know at least 10 people who are currently out of work. They are trying to decide how much longer they can afford their rent, their mortgage, or their car. Folks need jobs. Not tax cuts. Nobody is going out to buy a big screen TV with it.

Some ideas that could help put people back to work, train the long-time unemployable, and increase the size of the middle class are largely absent from the stimulus. How about some RFP’s to address our crumbling infrastructure? That would connect private industry to job creation. How about some access to the training programs that are afforded to some TANF recipients in some states for those who have been unemployed for more than six months? How about encouraging cities to take back abandoned houses and create opportunities for entrepreneurial non-profit and for profit organizations with a way to reposition the properties like NYC has done with the Neighborhood Entrepreneur Program? How about supporting some funds for small business—the nation’s largest employer? All of these things are key to maintaining viable communities to live and work.

The same old tax cut, entitlement spending, and cuts to programs that encourage future growth (uh, education any one?) ain’t gonna do it. But as Kevin Costner once said, “In America, they’d rather give you a handout then give you a job.” I guess the latter is too much like right.

* Jane is not her real name, duh.

Loco for Local

Every weekend I’m home in Baltimore, I find out something new I love–and all of it has to do with the reverence to local commerce so many in Baltimore seem to embrace.

I live 5 blocks from a year-round outdoor farmers market and a 20 minute walk from a fancy indoor one.

I can get free books from a local guy who decided to start a free store after collecting so many books from patrons at the pub where he bartends.

I can drink cheap and dance till I can’t stand at a very local and very lively Melba’s.

And I can have what is supposedly the best Thai in town just 8 blocks away.

I can eat a great meal at a gazillion local restuarants that do not have that “this restaurant in Albequerque looks just like one in Cleveland” feel.

I can buy every single one of my friends and family a gift for any holiday without ever stepping foot in a big box if I wanted.

I recently realized, even before deserting that great city of NY I have always had penchant for local stuff–sure you will have to go to a big box at some point to buy paper towels and other things, but local is lovely.  And local is paramount to helping communities remain stable and pushing transistioning neighborhoods toward continued good growth.

Research has shown that for every $100 spent in a chain only $13 on average stays in the local community.  That number goes up to $45 when you buy local.  That’s jobs, thats good bought and sold to other businesses. Thats community development.

And with the continued growth of social media and the maturing of the “Internets”, there is no excuse to not be able to buy some things local.  Some might argue that buying local costs more–and that might be true if you live in a community who’s only close by shopping options are the big boxes–but thing about all the charges that are added on to flying your apple from Washington when there is an apple orchard a county away.

Start with some of your groceries. Sites like Edible Communities have links to several cities and regions where listing of local grocers, producers, and even restaurants that only serve local food can be found.  At Sustainable Table you can find additional “buy local” resources and lots of great data on the benefits of doing even just a little bit.

Looks like I will be home in Baltimore this weekend. Lets see what else I can find!

We Keep Giving Fish Expecting Different Results

When I lived in DC, my friends and I called the neighboring suburbs in Prince George County, ‘Greater Southeast’ (a reference to Southeastern D.C). Southeast D.C., was for, generations ubiquitous with urban decay—high poverty, high crime, and high blight with few exceptions. Prince George, on the other hand, was known for having the largest population of upper middle class African American residents. The most obvious reason for the population shift was the rising cost of living associated with gentrification.

 

But it was while I was an evaluator for a D.C.HOPE VI project (a HUD program started under the Clinton administration to raze physically and socially obsolete housing projects and turn them into mixed income communities), the reason for the shifting crime pattern became even more evident.  It was not just gentrifications, but use of HOPE VI, as an urban renewal tool rather than a an inclusive “neighborhood revitalization” tool that was creating a storm of long term disaster.

 

Under the program, Housing Authorities are authorized to use Section 8 vouchers to help relocate tenants. While housing authorities are merely “required to provide eligible residents with relocation benefits and community and supportive services.”, there was little incentive to provide comprehensive support to residents looking to return or successfully integrate into new neighborhoods. The challenge of taking apart social networks and asking residents to move to places without them has been largely ignored. Instead, Housing authorities have shifted the pervasiveness of poverty out of the projects and scattered it about.

 

As it stands, less then 10% of former residents actually return to after construction is complete. Less than 20% of the new residents in most of these projects are even low to moderate income (less than 80% of area median income).  Instead, former residents move to new communities with no support network and no means of figuring out how to create a new one. Though the legislation requires such support, providing it with families scattered across counties and cities is nearly impossible, and many families become invisible again–except this time without a social network.

 

Since HOPE VI began, crime has been exploding in the relatively stable near-in suburbs of many mid-sized cities like Mecklenburg(Charlotte) and North Memphis(Memphis); Maywood(Chicago) while it is subsiding substantially in many inner-cities. A study recently conducted by husband and wife team, Richard Janikowski, a criminologist with the University of Memphis, and Phyllis Betts, a housing expert also at the University of Memphis, drives the speculation toward fact. Betts and Janikowski put together a map of crime patterns and a map of section 8 rentals, and voila—they almost perfectly matched.   

 

HOPE VI could be so much. But it is not. HUD should be incentivizing projects to figure out creative ways to re-integrate greater numbers of poor and moderate income residents into the new development (say at least 25%, for example) It should require housing authorities to design comprehensive, multi-tiered strategies to address joblessness, childcare, and eduation while also incentivizing the “step-up” from fully sibsidized housing to possible homeownership. Instead, it gives Section 8 vouchers and permission to housing authorities to simply say “go away.”

 

Don’t get me wrong, the goal of turning physically obsolescent, blighted public housing into modern, decent housing is of great importance, but the program should be more about creating economically and socially healthy communities and less about the beautification of real estate.

 

Its high time we time we stopped giving people fish and asking them to go away. Perhaps, its time we, at both the non-profit and public sector levels spend some more time teaching people how to fish instead.