DC as a case study in the debate over investments in place over investments in people and the recent mass shooting

This piece is sparked by the recent mass shooting in Southeast DC a couple days ago, where as many as four people shot into a large crowd of people at a community barbecue, shooting at least 20 people and killing one ("Shootings in District surge as officials confront mass shooting that killed 1, wounded 21 at block party" and "After a mass shooting at a block party, community leaders are left reeling, seething and pleading," Washington Post).

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In Muriel Bowser's first campaign for Mayor, in the Fall of 2013 I had a long talk with one of her campaign staff about what I called "creating a Marshall Plan for East of the River," a social urbanism program for the city's two poorest wards (but should also be extended to parts of Wards 1 and 5).

I proposed that a new Deputy Mayor for East of the River be created to oversee such a program.

I never heard from them again, but later I read an article in the New York Times about her proposal for a "Deputy Mayor for Greater Economic Opportunity," which was her transmogrification of my concept.

The difference between my idea and what she implemented is investments in place versus investments in people ("human capital")--the Deputy Mayor for Greater Economic Opportunity position mostly focused on worker training and readiness programming.

While at the time I hadn't developed the concept in detail, these writings capture the thinking behind it:

-- "An outline for integrated equity planning: concepts and programs," 2017
-- "Social urbanism and Baltimore," 2019
-- "Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda," 2015
-- proposal for an Ivy City Village Community Development Corporation, 2005
-- ",Lessons from Culture-based revitalization efforts in the European Union" Europe in Baltimore blog, 2014
-- "In lower income neighborhoods, are businesses supposed to be "community organizations" first?," 2012

What I was proposing was wide ranging investments and innovation and transformation in civic assets and programs in those communities, with the intent that the programs and facilities--what Klinenberg in Palaces for the People calls "social infrastructure"--would improve people's lives and their communities, including:

• schools ("Schools #2: Successful school programs in low income communities and the failure of DC to respond similarly")
• libraries ("Neighborhood libraries as nodes in a neighborhood and city-wide network of cultural assets")
• parks and recreation ("The layering effect: how the building blocks of an integrated public realm set the stage for community building," "Sounds familiar to me: recommendations from a guy who visited every park in Boston)
• addressing crime ("Crime time re-revisited: a set of programs focused on reducing crime," "The state of "broken windows" versus "problem oriented policing" strategies in 2016: Part 1, theory and practice," and "The state of "broken windows" versus "problem oriented policing" strategies in 2016: Part 2, what to do")
• transforming the health care system ("More communities need to integrate health care and public health programming")
• housing ("Revisiting the need for 'Tower Renewal' programs")
• transit ("Will buses ever be cool? Boston versus the Raleigh-Durham's GoTransit Model")
• sustainable mobility ("Revisiting assistance programs to get people biking: 18 programs") 
• workforce development ("One potential solution to the problem of "finding work" for homeless adults," cooperative high school, Tower Hamlets Idea Stores linking libraries and workforce development training, a community college branch in Southeast, social enterprise development, etc.)
• economic development ("Creating a graduate health and biotechnology research initiative on the St. Elizabeths campus," "Wanted: A comprehensive plan for the "Anacostia River East" corridor," "DC has a big "Garden Festival" opportunity in the Anacostia River")
• entrepreneurship and retail business development
• etc.

This is a big debate in urban economics.  Do you invest in people or places. Cities are fixed, they can't go anywhere. People are mobile.

-- City Success: Theories of Urban Prosperity, CEOs for Cities

So it's in the interest of cities to invest in place, to increase retention of residents and businesses, to spark and attract new businesses and residents, to increase property values, and property and sales taxes, to pay for the programs and quality of life that people want.

If you invest in people that supports the knowledge economy, which is what post-industrial capitalism is all about.  But people can leave.  (E.g., one of the downsides about a "nationally-focused" state university like the University of Michigan or the University of California-Berkeley is that many of the students do not stay in the state, and the state's investment in the university is wasted on those students who leave).


A lease sign on a vacant business property on Martin Luther King Avenue in Anacostia (2007), 

But if your "place" is severely deficient--wracked by crime, poor schools, poor health outcomes, deteriorated living conditions, poor mobility and access, etc.--do investments in people matter?

This is an especial issue of equity, as major center cities have proven that they can succeed as bifurcated places of both wealth and poverty ("'Two cities' collide as Chicago's social time bomb explodes," Guardian).

But success for some comes at the failure for others, and is costly socially, politically, economically, and morally.

Sure you're spending money on education, but a lot of K-12 reform efforts, especially DC's ("Fawning coverage of DC school "reform" doesn't push better practice forward") tend to be flawed and don't have great outcomes.

I've applied the Herzberg Motivation-Hygiene Theory to this, at least conceptually. Herzberg argued that in the workplace there are different factors concerning job satisfaction and dissatisfaction. That it isn't a continuum from dissatisfaction to satisfaction.

My take for cities is that you need to have great places to set the stage to best realize investments in human capital.

Like how what fuels dissatisfaction is separate from what fuels satisfaction, focusing investments on human capital while blowing off place conditions mean that your investments go for nought.

I think that's likely when it comes to the "Deputy Mayor for Greater Economic Opportunity."

When I had my Marshall Plan idea, it was engendered by my grand jury duty experience, and being aware of various poverty interdiction efforts in cities like Charlotte-Mecklenberg, Dallas ("Grow South"), Richmond, Virginia, and Toronto, social urbanism programs in Bogota but especially Medellin, and various innovative program delivery models in North America and Europe, the kind of stuff I've been writing about in the blog since the beginning.

Mayor Bowser's focus was jobs, jobs, jobs.  She always talked about jobs as "the gateway to the middle class," figuring that if people are employed that goes a long way towards addressing other problems. While that is true in many cases, when you're dealing with multi-generational poverty, usually it's not that simple.

Conclusion.  It's not that DC hasn't been or recently committed spending billions of dollars on civic assets like new or refurbished schools, libraries, and hospitals.  But for the most part the spending isn't particularly organized, integrated, coordinated, inspired and visionary, or transformational.

Granted, things are tough.  Addressing multi-generational poverty is difficult even in the best of times and takes a lot of money and time.

But I'd say the focus on worker training and "greater economic opportunity" hasn't moved the needle much in terms of community and human capital improvements in DC's most impoverished areas.

And these areas and households aren't particularly economically resilient when economic conditions change significantly, as they have as a result of the pandemic.  Hence, in pandemic times, we are seeing more shootings, more murders, continued poverty.

Place investments and not just "any old investment" but the right kind of investments are key.

Oklahoma City as a contrast.  Note that this is the fundamental lesson in Oklahoma City, which led to their capital investment program called "Metropolitan Area Projects," which former Mayor Mick Cornett (A Republican!) wrote about in his book The Next American City.

That to invest in (and attract) people a/k/a "human capital" you had to invest in place.

OKC kept trying to recruit big businesses to the city, offering great incentives packages, but they kept getting rejected. 

After many months of badgering one of the companies that turned them down told them why.  They said that the Downtown had no liveliness, no activity, the schools were bad, etc., that their executives couldn't imagine wanting to live there.

It took 6 years from that point to develop the program that became MAPS, and more than 10 years before the first projects started to come to fruition, but through four phases, they've made incredible investments in the community, from streetcars, an arena, improved canal, Canal District, and riverfront, a water sports complex, rebuilding of every school in the main inner city school district, etc.

They're making Oklahoma City a place that businesses want to locate and people want to live.

(OKC's Metropolitan Area Projects capital improvement program is an example of what I call Transformational Projects Action Planning.)