Transcript
Sessions:
Introduction and Opening Remarks
Panel #1: Perspectives on Locally Based Community Development
Panel #2: Passing the Torch: The Next Generation of Urban Problem Solvers
Luncheon Discussion: A Conversation on Solving the Urban Crisis
Panel #3: Global Approaches to Fighting the Urban Crisis
J. Lander:
I would now like to introduce to you E.J. Dionne, who is a senior fellow here in the Brookings Institution. And E.J. describes himself at our Friday lunch as the Maitre d' of the lunch table. But, he is a columnist as well for the Washington Post, and syndicated. But more than that, he has a doctorate in sociology, and is a real scholar who has a very, very strong interest in civil society and in faith-based organizations. In fact, he had a wonderful conference last week on teen pregnancy prevention programs run by faith-based organizations. E.J. will preside over our discussion now.
E.J. Dionne: Thank you very much.
I always like it when someone says my degree is in sociology because I can tell the story of a friend of mine who was an economist who referred contemptuously to sociology as the dentistry of the social sciences. And he was very embarrassed when I looked at him and said, my dad was a dentist, which was true. He never said that again.
It's a great honor to be here because, as all of you know, Joyce Ladner not only knows about these problems that we're talking about better than anyone else, but cares more. And she's very gifted at fusing moral commitment and practical action, far-reaching goals and immediate results. She's very impatient about that, which is a very good thing.
I also think we should give a hand to Bob Margolis, who helped put this all together, and has been worrying all around the edges. And he's worried this conference to success.
I was watching some of this morning, and it was very, very moving. Some of the presentations were very moving, and also very heartening. My friend Tom Mann, who runs the Governmental Studies Program said that, you know, people always say, well, these problems are insoluble, and they use that as an excuse to walk away. And what Joyce has shown is, there are a lot of people out there who are actually solving these problems. So, if she gets that message out enough, people won't have the freedom to walk away anymore, and I think that would be a very good thing.
It's great honor to be here to moderate the session with these two guys. As everybody knows them, knows about their work, what they have in common is an innovative approach to urban problems, and great success in getting people to look at problems form a different angle.
Bob Woodson, as you know, is the founder and president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. It's a nonprofit group. And he has focused on strengthening neighborhood organizations, strengthening entrepreneurship in the inner city, and I think that's another thing that he and Bruce have in common, which they're both very interested in what's happening on the ground, and figuring out ways to strengthen neighborhoods.
Bruce has been, if Bob has gotten us to look at problems on the neighborhood level, Bruce has succeed, I think, in very substantially altering the national debate about metropolitan areas, and to have us look at inequalities within metropolitan areas, and how, in order to strengthen those local communities, we may have to go up a level to see what happens at the metropolitan level.
He is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. And the more I listen to him, the more I realize I am a Katzite on many of these questions, and I'm proud to be.
What I'm hoping, is that we will have a civil conversation. But I am also hoping for a real argument, not a crossfire argument, not pugilism, although that would make the event interesting, but a serious discussion about not only what you guys have in common, but also about how you're approaching these problems in a different way. And I'm hoping the audience will join in this discussion.
I'm going to ask Bruce to speak first, and Mr. Woodson, at his request, will go second. That way he can contradict everything that Bruce said, I think that's why he wants to go second.
It's a great honor to introduce Bruce Katz.
B. Katz: My grandfather was a dentist. So, this notion that sociology is the dentistry of the social sciences is greatly offensive to me. And I'm a lawyer by training, which is probably the plumbing of the social sciences, one rung below dentistry.
I'll talk sort of briefly and try to put into context, I think, some of the incredible work that the people in this room are doing in America's neighborhoods. I was chief of staff to Henry Cisneros, and left HUD about two-and-a-quarter years ago to start the Urban Center here, with its principal mission to focus on some of the larger demographic and market and government trends that are affecting cities and urban neighborhoods, and the metropolitan areas in which they're located.
And, I think after traveling around the country and talking with a whole bunch of different folks from different walks of life, I think at the end of two years, I come to sort of a sobering conclusion about where America's cities are at the end of '90s, which sort of is the end of an incredible period of economic prosperity.
But if you just look at the sort of structural indicators, and structural trends, I think you'd have to really come to the conclusion, despite all the popular media about cities are coming back, which usually are written about stadia here, or a convention center expansion there, that the decentralization of economic and residential life, the sprawling of metropolitan areas in the United States is really the dominant trend in this country, and really seems to have picked up speed and almost frenzy during the '90s.
And the cities, particularly in the Northeast and the Midwest, continue to lose population, particularly middle class population, as their metropolitan areas grow. People talk about Baltimore as a renaissance city. Baltimore has lost more people this decade than they lost last decade as places like Anne Arundel and Howard and Harford become really the population growth centers of Maryland. Philadelphia has lost more people this decade than last decade. St. Louis is the same. Washington, D.C., has lost about 70,000 people this decade, while we look at Loudoun becoming really the sort of Fairfax of the future, with the high-tech growth sector being based out there. As population goes, so does jobs.
This city had about a third of the region's jobs in 1990, just eight-nine years ago. And the outer beltway suburbs had about 38 percent of the jobs in this region. You fast-forward eight years, and the outer beltway suburbs have 50 percent of the jobs, and the District of Columbia has 24 percent of the jobs in the region, two to one. And I think the nature of jobs is changing. I think more and more the outer suburban areas are the place here the high benefit, high wage, new economy jobs are being located, and the cities, you know, with so much focus on entertainment and culture, are becoming places where the job mix is changing.
Poverty is concentrating back in the central city as middle class households leave, as jobs, particularly good jobs decentralize. Poverty is concentrating, that is a racial phenomenon. If you're white and you're poor, you tend to live disbursed throughout metropolitan areas. The only pockets of white pockets we tend to find are in rural America. But if you're African American and you're poor, you're as likely as not to live in a neighborhood of high poverty, where the poverty rate is 40 percent or more, and you can correlate any kind of indicator you want to correlate, whether it's school performance, or crime, or family fragmentation, or substance abuse, you can correlate that pretty directly with these neighborhoods of hyper-poverty.
And it's not any surprise that welfare reform, the one place where welfare reform really has not seemed to be succeeding, if caseload reduction is our sort of measure of success, which has its own problems, but the cities are lagging behind, particularly in the Northeast and the Midwest, in terms of moving people off of welfare to work. Baltimore has 13 percent of Maryland's population, and it has 56 percent of the welfare caseloads. Philly is 12 percent of Pennsylvania's population, it has 48 percent of the welfare caseloads. Welfare reform is going to succeed or fail in the cities of America. And yet, we haven't really had that kind of focus, either nationally or at the state.
Now, what I see happening with these trends, and you could have stood here 10 years ago, and the story would have been a little different, but it still would have been a story of some real sense of urban distress and crisis. I think the difference in the '90s is, for the first time in a long time, we're beginning to understand that the suburbs are not monolithic, and that many suburban jurisdictions, particularly inner suburban jurisdictions, are beginning to look more and more like central cities, with growing school poverty, and declining fiscal capacity, and decentralizing jobs, and loss of population.
And then many of the outer suburbs, you think of a Prince William, you know, 35 minutes out from here, many of the outer suburbs in the United States, even though we think of them as, that's the place where the growth is so centered, are growing really without a strong commercial and industrial base, and without the fiscal capacity necessary to support the new infrastructure, and particularly schools for the growing number of children.
I think one thing we need to focus on going forward in terms of urban policy in this country is lifting it out of what David Rusk calls the inside gate. You know, all these kind of interventions, whether they're systemic, whether they're micro, that really take the borders of a city as a given, and basically stop at the borders and say, well, we're going to intervene on the corpus within these parameters. I think we need to think particularly as the suburbs become the dominant power in state legislatures, and within the Congress, we need to think about cross-jurisdictional and cross-disciplinary coalitions between cities and inner suburbs, between cities and older suburbs, around not only a new metropolitan agenda, but around a new urban agenda.
And I think that agenda really has a number of key points. One is the change fundamentally, the rules of the development game. I mean, these growth patterns in the United States, where the cities continue, where the poor continues to decline, as the hyper-growth is at the urban fringe, these growth patterns are not inevitable. They're not just the market restructuring. They have not just consumer preference, everyone looking for the bigger house with the bigger lot. They very much are a product of a series of federal and state policies, whether it's spending policies like transportation, or tax expenditures, like the home mortgage deduction, or regulatory policies, like environmental policies at the federal level, or land use, or the absence of land use at the state level. These policies facilitate the out migration of people, jobs and wealth. They make your job much more difficult to do, because they basically are allowing the rules of the development game to dictate that going forward we will build new, we will build out, we will abandon the older cores, and we will abandon the places with the built environment.
So, I think one of the key components going forward for an urban policy is to strike a new sense of coalitions between central cities and the suburban. Those jurisdictions in the suburbs that share common ground with the cities on some fundamental issues about how metropolitan areas can grow. You know, I think this region, and I see Hattie Dorsey from Atlanta, I think this region, like Atlanta, like many others, are growing in fundamentally polarized ways. They're stratified by class. They're stratified by race. They're stratified by ethnicity. You could draw a line right down 16th Street in Washington, D.C. You can draw it up into Montgomery County, you can draw it down into Arlington into Fairfax. If you go to the east, that's where you'll find African American, not just the poor, but the middle class. If you go to the west, that's where you're going to find the wealth. That's where you're going to find the new economy. That's where you're going to find the high tech. In Atlanta, it's the northern suburbs versus the southern suburbs. In Chicago, it's the northeast suburbs versus the southern suburbs.
And I think we are growing in ways that are fundamentally unsustainable from a fiscal perspective, from an environment perspective, and particularly from a social perspective. And I was very interested in hearing these conversations about the world "disconnect," because I think America is growing in ways where we are fundamentally disconnected from each other. Cities are disconnected from suburbs, different classes disconnected from each other, and so forth.
So, one thing I am beginning to advocate for, I guess I shouldn't use the word "advocate" because we're at Brookings. We are disseminating information to really focus on a sort of more robust and muscular urban policy, which of course has to include some of the elements of fixing the basics, fixing our schools, dealing with crime, rebuilding our local urban economies, building on competitive assets, extending neighborhood networks. But I think also needs to focus on fundamentally changing the rules of the development game, and fundamentally altering the politics of how cities interact with suburbs, both within the regions, within their states, and ultimately at the national level.
I think we are way past time where we can have sort of neighborhood only policies, or city only policies, and see the success. The types of statistics and the types of indicators, the types of structural trends that we're talking about, I think, are too deep, and too embedded. And, I think, undermine and eviscerate the work of so much of the community based movement that I think for folks in this room as well as many other central city constituencies, I think we need to lift the urban conversation way beyond the neighborhood to the metropolitan scale, and really focus on new politics and new policies.
Thank you.
[Applause]
E.J. Dionne: Thank you, Bruce.
I'm glad to call on our next information disseminator, Robert Woodson. I just want to note that one thing I didn't mention among his many achievements is, he's got a master's in social work from the University of Pennsylvania. So, those of you who say that the term conservative social worker is an oxymoron have never met Bob Woodson.
It's a great honor to have you.
R. Woodson: I'm a reconstructed social worker.
There's an expression that says, if you want to go some place you haven't been, you've got to do something you haven't done. And so, I consider myself a radical pragmatist. Someone said that you praise Allah, but first tie your camel to a post.
So, my presentation will be of that nature. That is practical. And I believe that for years we've believed that social injustice, racism and economic disparity explained the social explosion and spiral decline of our nation's inner cities. And on that assumption, we have targeted program to these issues. We've spent over $5 trillion programs to aid the poor. We have black and Hispanic people running many of the major cities and the institutions.
Washington, D.C., is a laboratory for failure of social policy. When this city leads the nation in 21 separate indicators of poverty programs, we lead the nation. And yet, we cannot confront this nagging question, why in the face of these huge expenditures, where we've had had black political control, where the black community here has the highest median income of anyplace in the nation. That it also coexists with the fact that a black child born in this city has a lower life expectancy than any child born anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, second only to Haiti.
If our conventional approaches were effective, then why do we have these phenomena coexisting in this city? One of the reasons that I believe it exists is because we're working on an incorrect paradigm. Urban renewal, and many of the Great Society programs have done more to devastate these communities than the Klan or the Night Riders of the KKK could possibly accomplish, not only in Washington throughout this nation.
For example, in the Southwest section here along Maine Street, that used to be occupied by lower and moderate income black folks, there was a massive movement of people from this community, where we replaced it with upper and middle income housing. The city gave generous tax exemptions to those businesses that occupy Maine Avenue. We took public money, built the parking lots, built the boat marina. Said to those businesses, in the course of a 30 year, a lease was signed in 1965 to all those businesses along the waterfront, that allowed them to lease that property at a cost less than $100,000 per year. And a clause in the lease enabled the city to sell the owners of the property the land at the 1965 price, which just took place in 1995.
The same took place in the Ninth Street corridor when we built—and what did we do with all those poor black folks? We shoved them up on Alabama Avenue with public housing, or they went out, they were better off, went to P.G. County, no services, no commercial development, nothing. The same is true with Durham, North Carolina. That was the black Wall Street of America. And throughout the 10 years of the Depression, not a single one of the 100 businesses in that city went under. But, yet in the under two years of urban renewal, 100 business were bulldozed, 600 residential properties, and 75 acres or property was flattened, with the promise that we would rebuild. Only 25 percent, or 25 acres has been rebuild. That's the same with Overtown in Atlanta, where it used house the Harvard and the Calvert Hotel, a rich legacy of black entrepreneurship was sacrificed on the alter of urban renewal in the name of poverty programs.
And we wonder why we're in this sad state of affairs, where there's a huge bifurcation in the black community today, with black families with incomes between $35,000 and $50,000 doubled in 20 years, black families with incomes of in excess of $75,000 went up 300 percent, while black families with incomes below $15,000 expanded 150 percent. Same social forces operating. Why is it that one group prospers where the other group suffers? There is something wrong with this picture.
I believe that while policymakers focus on technical and economic issues, the fact remains that urban decline or restoration is also an event in the autobiography of urban residents. That we must take some of the same principles that operate and drive our market economy, and apply them to the social economy. We know that 80 percent of the jobs are created by small businesses, not the Fortune 500. And that it is the commercial entrepreneur that drives our economy, someone with a good idea comes together with capital and management, and then takes that idea to scale, and eventually we have a corporation that is formed that hires thousands of people, that helps to pay taxes.
If you look around the nation at the various ethnic groups and their economic profile, a healthy community generates about 2.5 businesses per thousand people per year. The black community generates about 3 businesses per 100,000 per year, and the Hispanic community a little more. So for us to continue to emphasize in our social policy social justice, and race policies is missing the boat. Yes, racial discrimination—let me do my compulsories now, so we can dismiss this criticism. As a veteran of the civil rights movement, having gone to jail, racial discrimination is a problem and will continue to be, and we must address it. It is not the most crucial problem. On the very day that the brother was blown apart by these police officers, we lost six young kids in Washington, D.C., on that same weekend. But, yet it did not generate the kind of outpouring or protest. Evil has to have a black face—a white face in order for us to get all animated about it. If it has a black face, we're silent about it, which we are making therefore a heavy statement about what we think and believe about black life.
And if we are to develop a change, this has to change. We have to focus on the problems in terms of this whole magnitude that exists. Okay. What should we do? First of all, the restoration of a community has to be based upon the establishment of civic health, and a prerequisite for civic health is the establishment of social order. Social order cannot be done by having a regional plan. It has—it is a retail endeavor. You've got to begin neighborhood by neighborhood.
So that's why in our work at the National center, what we do is we go around the country and try to look for the social entrepreneurs. We look in low income neighborhoods, and try to find the people who are not dropping out of school, in jail, in drugs, and ask ourselves, how these experts are able to thrive in the presence of despair, and what is it that explains their success? How can we as venture capitalists insinuate into these communities capital, but also management, and insinuate them in such a way that it doesn't smother the entrepreneurial event, nor does it starve the entrepreneurial event. That's a policy challenge. How do we insinuate money, technical support to these neighborhood organizations that have demonstrated that they can change the values of young people who are gang banging, who are drugging, women who are prostitutes, men who are prostitutes?
The way that the neighborhood organizations who are not only salvaging their own families, but are able through faith, it is faith in God, not faith in the chair, not faith in the leaf. Most of the groups that we have found that are effective in transforming some of the most desperate pathogenic people in our society do so because many of them have walked those same paths. Their lives have been transformed. It is not therapeutic intervention that works. I can tell you that. Therapeutic intervention has nothing to say to somebody who is a drug addict, or selling their child to a pedophile to buy crack. No psychologist or analyst can solve that problem. That is a morally spiritual crisis, because you've got to understand that a rational problem has to have a rational remedy.
That's why we're getting ready to spent $100 million on drug education, as if drug addiction is a rational phenomena. If it were rational we wouldn't have Ph.D.s from Harvard, pharmacologists or chemist drug addicts. Theirs is not a lack of information. We wouldn't have people like River Phoenix, Paul Newman's son, all these other folks who are rich and famous drug addicts. We would not have kids in the suburban schools, Fairfax and others, blowing their brains on drugs. This is not a crisis of families, this is not a crisis of economic or race, or political injustice, this is a morally spiritual crisis.
And therefore, America is in a morally spiritual free fall that takes expression by the kind of violence that we witnessed in Colorado, but it also takes expression by drive-bys in the inner city. They are different pages of the same book. And therefore, what must we do to solve the problem? A, we've got to understand, as I said, that if a problem is irrational, which that is, the solution has to be irrational. And belief in God is irrational. It doesn't make any sense. But, it works. And therefore, it seems to me that: a) we've got to reach out to these neighborhoods as we have done in Benning Terrace in Southeast Washington by engaging people that already have the trust and confidence of the kids, people that have already made an investment in there. You don't have to create trust, you have to find people who already have established trust. Provide the money for them to quit their jobs washing cars. Capture them when they've come out of prison. Employ them as providers of service to the young people. And then provide jobs, as David Gilmore, the housing receiver did. We have 178 young people who were gang banging and selling drugs, employed now, and now they are buying homes, they are also—we've exported that model to Park Morton. It's being exported to Dallas with the same results. There are thousands of people that have the confidence and trust of the people who are tearing these neighborhoods up. What they lack are the money, the technical skills, and the resou