Government grants are complicated and often beyond the capacity of small organizations to manage

This article, " ‘The EPA needs to humble itself’: why some US non-profits are turning down agency funds," in the Guardian makes a good point that government grants come with a variety of requirements that often exceed the capacity of nonprofits to manage and comply with.  

I joked on a grant I ran that was via the Federal Historic Preservation Fund, that if you don't do it right, you end up in Leavenworth.  DC Government grants were similarly problematic with lengthy reporting requirements, and allowed them to cancel grants with two weeks notice.  In Baltimore County, the county found it wasn't worth applying for Safe Routes to Schools money because of the reporting requirements.  They figured it was cheaper to just spend their own money on sidewalk and other improvements.  

This is true with a lot of government related grants to property owners for commercial district revitalization work, especially facades, or a program in SF to help business owners whose properties are damaged from vandalism but gives paltry amounts ("San Francisco restaurants grapple with vandalism," San Francisco Chronicle).  

Elements of a facade of a historic commercial building  

City of Creedmoor, North Carolina

The grants are relatively small, and the application and reporting procedures are onerous.  When I worked on a facade program in Takoma DC, the Main Street group actually did most of the applications and project management, making the program work for the businesses.

Earlier, in a facade program in Brookland, we screwed up, because some work was performed before the grants were awarded, and therefore, couldn't be reimbursed, abetted by the slowness of the grant process.

That's the kind of assistance that often needs to be provided.  But isn't.  Although, understandably with larger federal grants, there are a lot of provisions wrt accountability, bidding, etc., that the public demands.

From the article:

Local advocates wanted to monitor the air quality outside the school to help administrators figure out the safest times to let the kids play outside. “Most of these sites are completely unmonitored,” said Micah Parkin, the executive director of the non-profit 350 Colorado. 

She applied for an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant aimed at helping communities monitor their own air quality and was thrilled when her organization was selected to receive roughly $500,000. 

But Parkin and her colleagues quickly ran into hurdles. The EPA wanted her team to hold a competitive bidding process to find a local partner, even though 350 Colorado had already identified one: the air-quality monitoring firm Boulder Air. They also demanded financial information that Parkin said would require 350 Colorado to overhaul its accounting and reporting procedures. These processes required time and resources that 350 Colorado, with an annual budget of under $1m, simply didn’t have. 

In late 2023, after months of conference calls and untold amounts of paperwork, Parkin and her board made the difficult decision to turn down the money. “I kept saying: ‘Let’s just get this done – come on, people.’” she recalled. “But it became clear to me that there was no end in sight.”

...Near Denver, the community organization Cultivando also turned down a half-million dollar grant to monitor pollution in a largely Hispanic community near a petroleum refinery. The group had previously found high levels of radioactive particles and PM2.5, which is associated with increased incidence of respiratory problems, among other problems. 

Cultivando had planned to hire Boulder Air, the same air-quality consulting firm that Colorado 350 intended to work with. But like Colorado 350, Cultivando wasn’t equipped to carry out the competitive bidding process required before they sign on Boulder Air, executive director Olga Gonzalez said. 

“I was actually shocked that they didn’t know more” about how community-based organizations operate, she said. “The EPA needs to really humble itself and think about what it means to partner with community-led efforts.” 

Linda Lenz, founding editor of Catalyst Chicago, dies at 77 | Technical assistance for local schools advocates

This entry is in keeping with the two previous entries which are schools related, especially:

-- "School closure and consolidation planning needs to focus on integration planning at the outset as a separate process"  

Linda Lenz (obituary, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reporter obituary) who died in May, was the founder of Catalyst Chicago, which was a news reporting and technical assistance organization focused on Chicago schools issues.  From the article:

a state law decentraliz[ed] the Chicago school system and giving parents and educators the power to review school budgets and hire principals. The publication put a spotlight on schools where reform efforts were working, as well as those where reform efforts were running aground. Catalyst also published opinion columns, studied education experiments in other cities and surveyed students, teachers and principals on certain issues.

Lenz, had an extensive background in local news reporting, including on the education beat, realized that advocates needed focused information to better help them carry out their responsibilities wrt school management and oversight.

It was somewhat comparable, although independent of government, to how Minneapolis created the Neighborhood Revitalization Program to train residents and provide technical assistance and training to undergird their participation in significant neighborhood capital projects.  They realized, once they started the program, that most participants lacked the right skills and knowledge to carry out the project.

I've written about other kinds of systematic citizen support efforts that impress me here, "Framingham Massachusetts creates Citizen Participation Officer position."

Interestingly, Chicago had at least two other similar publications on local issues, the Chicago Reporter, and a publication by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which later became much more nationally focused, and those might have influenced the creation of Catalyst.  The same organization that publishes CR published Catalyst, which ceased operation in 2016, after publishing for 26 years.  For awhile, a sister publication also operated in Cleveland.

School reform and how can communities respond.  I bring this up because of the two related previous entries on schools issues, and the issue of "school reform."  I wrote many entries about it.  

-- "Schools #2: Successful school programs in low income communities and the failure of DC to respond similarly," 2017

-- "Missing the most fundamental point about urban educational reform," 2009

DC was a national example of the movement, centered around Michelle Rhee, a charter school proponent who became Chancellor of DC schools, and who mostly blamed "bad teachers" for the problems, not acknowledging that (1) "bad" teachers were produced by the system, and (2) charter schools usually had more resources, more time on task, and fewer school and legal requirements than "traditional schools."

Plus, because she couldn't take credit, basically she was against programs that were already successful before her arrival like language immersion and Montessori--when those kinds of programs are ways for traditional public schools to distinguish their programs.

Mostly the DC reform effort failed, but the Washington Post sure was all in.

-- Fawning coverage of DC school "reform" doesn't push better practice forward," 2017

Advocates need a solid narrative.  I was on an e-list on DC schools issues, and my complaint to the advocates and "opponents" to the reform program was that they failed to develop a counter narrative to Rhee.  They were inchoate.  Without a narrative you lose by default.

And so like my belief in civic engagement training for people participating in planning issues, I believe the same is true for schools.  There aren't a lot of available resources.

Sure there are PTAs and PTOs, and theoretically the two main teachers unions, but none of these organizations have provided the kinds of resources I think people need to have to be better informed and able to articulate alternatives.

Printed resources.  For publications there is the newsweekly Education Week, which I think all main branches of public libraries should get.  For alternative publications, I can only think of Radical Teacher and Rethinking Schools.  I guess there are others, like K12 Digest, and blogs.  

That's why Catalyst Chicago was so innovative.

For years I've recommended that main branch libraries create collections comparable to the Urban Information Library at the Dallas Public Library, along with programming which I don't think they do, but I never suggested adding schools-related publications to the mix.

There are probably others.  Plus decent academic journals, of which there are many.  At the same time there need to be trained professionals available to help advocates, because they can't be expected to assimilate all the information and apply it.

While speed bumps do suck, what's being proposed are raised crosswalks, and the way they are implemented in Salt Lake they don't "hinder" traffic, but they do provide visual, aural and physical cues to not drive as fast.

Safe routes to school is a good example. (See the end of this entry on walk and bike to school).  It ought to be noncontroversial.  

But even in my neighborhood, some residents are fighting a proposal to add raised crosswalks to an arterial serving two schools that have a high percentage of students walking to school.  

There should be resources and technical assistance aimed at helping bring people together.  

Especially since walking improvements for students also improve neighborhoods for everyone.  Interestingly, though our greater neighborhood is T4 in the New Urban transect it's pretty walkable, except when people do walk--other than to school--it's mostly recreational.

Conclusion.  Then again, we could provide all the civic engagement and technical assistance in the world and maybe the outcomes would be the same.  However, I do know that doing things the way we are doing them--even if by omission--isn't working, so it's obvious that alternatives are in order.

Volunteer Expo, Asheville, North Carolina

With the decline in public media--newspapers and alternative weeklies especially, it's increasingly difficult for organizations to get the word out about volunteer opportunities.  

In Asheville ("Volunteer expo seeks to recruit help for over 65 local nonprofit organizations," WLOS-TV) the Junior League of Asheville just sponsored the fifth edition of its Annual Volunteer Expo.

The Hill Center on Capitol Hill in DC sponsors something similar, focused on the Capitol Hill neighborhood, but the room they hold it in is too small.  I suggested they move it to Eastern Market's North Hall, but they evinced zero interest.

In "Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda" (2015), I suggested each city political district should sponsor a volunteer expo, based on the Hill Center effort, but of course, a city-wide event can be just as good.

More opportunities need to be provided to seed community involvement.

Youngstown, Ohio: "The Place That Makes Us" | Documentary: America Reframed

America: ReFramed is a documentary series that runs on the PBS World Channel.  Last week they repeated a previously shown program, "The Place That Makes Us," on redevelopment efforts in Youngstown, Ohio.

Downtown Youngstown.  Photo: Ohio Stock Photography.

With the decline of the steel industry, Youngstown, about 75 miles southeast of Cleveland--has lost about 2/3 of its population. 

Once a thriving city of great wealth, it still has a remarkable downtown core with many tall buildings.  

But with that level of population decline, many of the neighborhoods are dotted with abandoned buildings or empty lots where once extant houses have been demolished ("Non-profit looks to demolish nearly 800 abandoned houses in Youngstown," WKBN-TV).

Youngstown is noteworthy in planning circles for the Youngstown 2010 initiative, which focused on planned shrinkage, recognizing that the city would not be able to re-attain the heights reached when it was a thriving industrial town in the 1960s ("As Its Population Declines, Youngstown Thinks Small," Wall Street Journal, 2007; "WDWVW?/WDWVN? | What do West Virginians want and need and Senator Joe Manchin," 2021).

The documentary focuses on four people, the director and housing programs manager of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, a community development  organization focused on rehabilitating houses to stabilize otherwise shrinking neighborhoods, as well as maintaining commercial buildings like the Foster Art Theatre ("YNDC buys Foster Art Theatre, Will Shut it Down," Youngstown Vindicator), Julius T. Oliver, a city councilmember interested in restoring the vacant South Field House complex (once part of South High School) as a thriving community center, and the woman who gets to buy one of the houses fixed by the YNDC, a beautiful historic house, for only $55,000!

This house on Pineview Avenue was restored by the  Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation.

The documentary is grim.  

It shows people working on improving their community despite significant handicaps of population, business activity, and money.  But at the same time, they're doing great work.

It's definitely worth watching.

Follow up: Washington Post op-ed on affordable housing, the priming role of foundations and Washington's weak philanthropic community | Enterprise Community Partners could be a leader

Bradley Fennell of W.C. Smith talks with David Bowers of Enterprise Community Partners, Inc. at a development on 21st Street in Northeast Washington. (Jeffrey MacMillan/The Washington Post)

After writing, "Op-Ed in Washington Post about preserving affordable housing in the Purple Line corridor," which discusses the need for a bi-county community development corporation where as part of its mission it would buy, hold, maintain, operate, fund and/or build affordable housing in the catchment area of the forthcoming Purple Line light rail line in Montgomery and Prince George's Counties in Maryland, as well as how I've been making that point for 13 years, it occurred to me that I neglected to make a key point: what about Enterprise Community Partners?

Enterprise Community Partners, a CDC and foundation prominent in Maryland and the Mid-Atlantic (founded by James Rouse),  and the organization that David Bowers, author of the op-ed, works for, could have stepped up years ago to put forward the concept in the first place, that they are one of the only Maryland organizations with the kind of heft that is required to get such a concept off the table from vision to implementation ("With project near H Street, Enterprise Community Partners offers vision for affordable housing," Washington Post, 2012).  From the article:

Renovation of Fairway Park, the 33-building cluster of apartments named for views of Langston Golf Course, aims to preserve 396 apartments at rental rates affordable to families making well below the area’s average. But for David Bowers, head of the local office of the nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners, the project is also another chance to demonstrate an evolving vision of what the term “affordable housing” means.

Now in its 30th year, Columbia-based Enterprise operates in dozens of communities nationwide and has grown its focus from just creating and preserving low-income housing to addressing transportation and energy costs for poor and working class residents. ... 

With housing prices on the rise again in the region, Enterprise has been aggressively locking up similar deals. In 2011, it provided $51 million in financing for the preservation of 1,200 units, and Bowers said he expects to close on $95 million in financing this year toward 1,400 units. He is developing new housing in partnership with churches in some of the poorest parts of Southeast D.C., including Matthews Memorial Baptist Church and Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal. 

Bowers said the deals are a start, but that if the District wants to remain a place where low-income residents can remain, broader changes are needed. “When it comes to our city leaders, there really needs to be a sense of urgency for funding changes, policy changes and more coordination when it comes to preserving affordability,” he said.

DC area philanthropy is weak.  A problem in the DC area is that its philanthropic community is relatively weak.  That's what sets apart affordable housing initiatives in concert with transit in cities like Minneapolis, Denver, and Phoenix.

Philanthropy is weak here because in past generations, there wasn't a lot of wealth in the area--instead the major business was (and is) government.  So you don't have legacy foundations in DC the way that you do even in Baltimore, where they have the Abell and Weinberg Foundations, and later foundations like the Casey Foundation, investing a lot in the local community.

Or not oriented to serving low income communities.  And today's wealth (the Rales brothers, Bezos, Reynolds' and others) isn't into what we might call social justice initiatives, they are more self-interested and/or focused on high profile donations to national institutions: Jeff Bezos in robotics; Mitchell Rales has his semi-private museum ("Glenstone, a Private Art Xanadu, Invests $200 Million in a Public Vision," New York Times); the Reynolds' wanted to dictate their gifts in narrow ways ("Catherine Reynolds, The Giver Who Gave Up," Washington Post); David Rubinstein's incredible donation streak, but to national organizations ("Rubenstein Discusses Philanthropy, Failure at Business School," Harvard Crimson); etc.

For awhile you had the Fannie Mae Foundation, which did locally-serving projects but while it had some high profile projects ("Howard U. in Washington Looks to Its Neighbors," New York Times), in terms of substantive structural change, it didn't accomplish much.  Now the FMF no longer exists because of its takeover by the federal government after the 2008 crash.

ECP, with a national footprint but home in Maryland is in a unique position to shape the environment for affordable housing preservation in Maryland.  In short, in the Washington area, there likely is no better organization than Enterprise Community Partners to start a CDC to preserve affordable housing in the Purple Line corridor, to create an organization, provide start up funding, and lay the groundwork to create a large scale bi-county tax increment financing district to do just that.

From the Baltimore Sun article "Enterprise Community Development plans $5 million investment to form partnerships with minority developers":

Enterprise Community Development, the nation’s sixth-largest nonprofit affordable housing developer and among the largest African American-led affordable housing developers, seeks partners who are proposing affordable housing of 60 units or more as well as mixed-use developments, retail, multifamily communities or senior communities. Projects can be proposed anywhere in Enterprise’s footprint from Pennsylvania to Virginia.

In some respects, too much time has passed.  It's probably "too late" to have the kind of impact that such an initiative could have had 8 years ago, but at least with the Purple Line now being delayed until 2026 ("Purple Line will open 4½ years late and cost $1.4 billion more to complete, state says," Washington Post), and the lagging housing market in Prince George's County, there are still opportunities, if this course of action were to be pursued.

There are best practice affordable housing initiatives in the area, but not at the scale needed for the Purple Line corridor.  Note that there are a number of groups active in the area that could participate in such an initiative including Montgomery Housing Partnership ("A call to action on affordable housing," Post), Arlington Housing Partners ("Arlington nonprofit expands to Montgomery as region responds to affordable housing crunch," Post), the Community Preservation and Development Corporation, Manna CDC, Jubilee Housing of DC--they are focused on DC, were the model for Jubilee Housing of Baltimore ("Jubilee: A Partnership in Housing The Poor Can Afford," Washington Post, 1987), for profits like WC Smith Company ("At Villages at Parklands, A Community Reborn," Post) and Jonathan Rose Companies ("$43M DC Affordable Community to Open Next Spring," Multi Housing News), etc.

(The Prince George's County Housing Authority has about 400 units of housing!!!!!!)

But these groups need a leader.  To move forward, the affordable housing, community development, and revitalization community in Suburban Maryland need a convenor, seed funding, and strong advocacy for the creation of a "Transportation Renewal District" TIF program, which is a natural role for ECP.

======

Also see:

-- "Building stronger community support for public/social housing," 2012
-- "East County, Montgomery County, Maryland: Council redistricting spurs ideas for revitalization | Part 1 -- Overview," 2021
-- "Affordable housing: it's not just one element, it's many elements," 2013

From the 2013 blog entry, listing an agenda for preserving existing housing:

A balanced policy for producing and maintaining affordable housing involves at least seven policies: 

1. portfolio investment in existing multiunit buildings
2. support for community land trusts and cooperatives to extract land from the market to maintain affordability
3. putting easements on apartment buildings so that a certain proportion of the units remain affordable
4. providing density bonuses and other incentives for the production of affordable housing as part of new developments
5. allowing accessory dwelling units and accessory apartment units in single family houses and lots
6. monitoring privately owned multiunit buildings and stepping in when necessary to ensure that properties are maintained and that housing doesn't become decrepit or vacant
7. stepping in and taking properties over through receivership, when they are mismanaged.

Applied to the Purple Line, you'd need additional policies:

-- funding the construction of new affordable housing projects and related social infrastructure  

-- adding affordable housing to existing properties

-- land use intensification

-- adding an SRO housing element as part of the mix ("One of the "solutions" to the crisis of homelessness is a lot more SRO housing")

With regard to the checkered track record of CDCs in Washington, see:

--"Falling up -- Accountability and DC Community Development Corporations," 2005
-- "(Some) Community Development Corporations still screwing up," 2011
-- "The community development approach and the revitalization of DC's H Street corridor: congruent or oppositional approaches?<" 2013

which is why it's important to have strong accountability measures:

--"Why can't the "Bilbao Effect" be reproduced? | Bilbao as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning," 2017

BTMFBA: arts uses in Greater Boston/Somerville, Massachusetts

There is an article in the Boston Globe, "‘Tension is everywhere’: In Somerville, a tech cluster emerges with hope and worry: Around Boston, tech grows at the expense of artists and small businesses," about the displacement of arts uses in Somerville, a suburb of Boston, as tech uses especially biotechnology continue to expand.  Somerville is also complicated by a rise in demand due to improvements in transit service.  From the article:

When it came time to renew the Asylum’s lease on 42,000 square feet of warehouse space it rented in an envelope plant off Somerville Avenue, Hasselblad Torres wanted a long-term deal. He said he offered to pay roughly $900,000 a year — a roughly 50 percent hike — but the building’s new owner, Boston-based developer Rafi Properties, didn’t show “much enthusiasm” for the offer. Later, a Rafi spokeperson said, the landlord offered a two-year extension at the Asylum’s existing, lower, rent, but said the Asylum was “not able to provide a guarantor” and could not move forward in negotiations.

Either way, talks fizzled. Artisan’s Asylum found a new home in Allston. And in December, The Engine, an MIT-backed venture capital fund with far deeper pockets, moved in to its old space. ... 

It’s a question that has played out in neighborhood after neighborhood across Greater Boston in recent years as historic levels of investment have flooded the city’s tech scene, promising good jobs and more customers to small businesses but often pricing out some of the institutions that make a place thrive. 

From Fort Point to Jamaica Plain to once-forlorn pockets of Cambridge, enclaves of artists and low-cost creative endeavors have been transformed by soaring rents for both housing and commercial space. Now Somerville is in the throes of it. “Tension is everywhere,” said Jessica Eshleman, executive director of Somerville’s Union Square Main Streets, in an interview. “The excitement and the optimism and the concerns and the worry — it’s all at the same time. It exists in the same moment, and in the same breath.”

A letter to the editor ("Artists can’t expect perpetually cheap real estate") in response says, well if you want to maintain uses, buy the properties, don't expect it to be given to you.  He's right, stating:

Now is the time for artists to go to Holyoke, North Adams, Lawrence, and other places where real estate is more reasonable than hot Somerville. They could form co-ops, condo associations, or partnerships, and buy old mill spaces, old shopping centers, or even an old mall in Lanesborough, and divvy it up and use it for their needs.

If you want to control your future, you buy your space. Most other tenants understand this. Artists create things that inspire or challenge us or bring beauty into our lives. But to demand that private property owners be legally obligated to rent to them at a loss is not part of the deal.

but misses the point some, in that an average groups of artists and creatives usually lack the means to be able to raise such funds.  They need help to do so.

That's why I argue for the creation of arts-use focused community development corporations operating at the scale of a city or a county, to take on such projects, to buy, hold and operate arts facilities including housing, to maintain their uses in the face of property price appreciation and displacement.

In a more cryptic way, I refer to this as "Buy The M***** F****** Building Already."

-- "BTMFBA: the best way to ward off artist or retail displacement is to buy the building," 2016
-- "BTMFBA: Baltimore and the Area 405 Studio," 2021
-- "When BTMFBA isn't enough: keeping civic assets public through cy pres review," 2016
-- "BMFBTA revisited: nonprofits and facilities planning and acquisition," 2016
-- "BTMFBA: artists and Los Angeles," 2017
-- "BTMFBA Chronicles: Seattle coffee shop raises money to buy its building," 2018
-- "Dateline Los Angeles: BTMFBA & Transformational Projects Action Planning & arts-related community development corporation as an implementation mechanism to own property," 2018
-- "Seattle preservation: Pike Place Market, Neptune Theater, and the Cinerama," 2021
-- "A wrinkle on BTMFBA: let the city/county own the cultural facility, while you operate it (San Francisco and the Fillmore Heritage Center)," 2021

The BTMFBA argument extends writings about how artists, arts disciplines, and organizations need to "make their own plans" to represent their own interests.  

The initial piece in 2009 didn't mention in a direct way the need to have community development corporations, although I'd written about such groups in Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

-- "Arts, culture districts and revitalization," 2009

-- "The Howard and Lincoln Theatres: run them like the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust/Playhouse Square Cleveland model," 2012

I updated the piece in 2018 to include that point.

-- "Revisiting stories: cultural planning and the need for arts-based community development corporations as real estate operators"

WDWVW?/WDWVN? | What do West Virginians want and need and Senator Joe Manchin

People protesting outside of Senator Joe Manchin's houseboat, which is his DC domicile.  Photo: © Sarah Silbiger / Greenpeace

The Washington Post's Paul Waldman has a column, "Joe Manchin has all the power — and a catastrophic lack of imagination," about how the Senator from West Virginia, in a closely divided Senate, has all the power to scuttle President Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda and legislation, but that he isn't interested much in particular benefits, he only expresses what he doesn't like--climate protections, child care benefits, increased taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

Waldman argues (not using the word) that Manchin is pretty much a nihilist, not concerned at all about the needs of his constituents.  The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch has a number of great articles about Manchin's wealth as derived from investments in the coal industry, which shapes his "policy" preferences and agenda ("Joe Manchin beats his chest for D.C. elites while struggling W. Va. waits for help," "Joe Manchin’s ‘blind trust’ is an utter farce").

Photo: Destination Signs.

Note that this article ("Manchin takes aim at Build Back Better, but his real focus is on West Virginia," Conversation) argues that Manchin cares about the needs of West Virginians, although making no case for it.  If his focus is on West Virginia, it's on corporations.  Also see "West Virginians Ask Joe Manchin: Which Side Are You On?," New Yorker.

West Virginia is pretty much a basket case. According to US News and World Report, the state ranks 47th in the nation, on the various criteria it ranks. It's a great example of the so-called "resource curse" experienced by nation-states in the Third World, where resource extraction has limited economic benefits within the nation of extraction ("Families of those killed in mine disaster criticize Blankenship," CBS News).

It has the worst rate of drug overdose deaths in the United States--deaths are 8x higher than the number of murders.  We know about how it was ground zero for opioid addiction ("Gazette-Mail wins Pulitzer for investigative reporting," Charleston Gazette-Mail).  

The state's coal industry continues to contract, while leaving environmental degradation in its wake ("Environmentalists allege pollution from West Virginia mine," AP), and the state only adds to the degradation by having a limited approach to environmental regulation ("'All the water's bad': In McDowell County, you have to get creative to find safe drinking water," NBC News).  The state's poverty rate is 16% and the child poverty rate is almost 20%.

Why don't federal legislators work to develop "community plans" focused on helping their constituents?  Sure they work on various stuff, federal grants for development and transportation, on military bases, VA hospitals, national parks ("Park designation delivers on promised increase in visitors at New River Gorge," WV MetroNews), and getting federal agencies if they can, but there isn't an overarching plan.  

And they do constituent services (hopefully) -- casework -- helping individual constituents break through bureaucratic logjams.

But for the most part, legislators work for the interests of corporations (Who Rules America? website by Professor G. William Domhoff).  And Manchin is a prime exhibit of this fact ("Corporate donors gave to Manchin before announcement he wouldn't support Build Back Better: report," The Hill).  Although they are not alone ("The Fracking Shill Local Newspapers Love to Publish," New Republic).

What if Senators and Representatives were to develop community plans, having a public process that wasn't a bag job, where people could have substantive input, with a planning website and metrics measuring accomplishments wrt the plan's precepts?

A State House district plan for Utah Representative Jennifer Dailey-Prevost.  This reminds me of my surprise when attending The Avenues Street Fair and seeing how Utah State Representative Jennifer Dailey-Prevost (official website, campaign website) had a whiteboard in her booth about developing a five year "community plan" for her district.

I haven't followed up with her on the progress, but I thought it was very interesting.  

How many elected officials have a "plan" for their district, let alone work to develop such a plan with constituents?

Proposed Ward 4 focused planning framework in DC. It also reminded me of when I was thinking of running for City Council in DC, how I came up with what I thought was a much more Ward-specific platform for running ("Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda," 2015), although in talking with people about mounting a campaign, I was reminded that while I like talking to people especially door to door in a campaign, I don't like the kind of people who tend to be into running campaigns.

Past entries on national and West Virginia/state economic development 

Marshall Plan/New New Deal.  In November 2020, I wrote a piece, "What should a domestic Marshall Plan/21st Century New Deal look like?," in response to an op-ed in the Washington Post by eight Rust Belt mayors, arguing for a "Marshall Plan" for their region, in response to a decline in the use of fossil fuels produced there, and the impact on their communities and economies, with the idea it is better to be proactive than reactive.

My basic point was that we need a "Marshall Plan" for the nation, not just the Ohio River Valley Basin.

Economic planning in response to the contraction of the coal industry.  In March, I wrote another piece, in response to the United Mine Workers calling for a retraining and economic revitalization program because of the continuing contraction of the coal industry ("United Mineworkers Union calls for a revitalization/economic development/mitigation program in response to the decline of the coal industry").

I was remiss in not responding to a couple comments on this piece, which made the point that these industries are contracting and that rebuilding many of those micro-economies is a long shot, so out-migration should be part of the equation.

This is not unlike how Hurricane Katrina led many New Orleanians to leave the city, and they found better economic opportunities as a result ("Starting Over Many Katrina victims left New Orleans for good. What can we learn from them?," New Yorker).  From the article:

Kirk is a sociologist at the University of Oxford. He trained at the University of Chicago under Robert Sampson, and, for Sampson and the small army of his former graduate students who now populate sociology departments around the world, neighborhoods are the great obsession: What effect does where you live have on how you turn out? It’s a difficult question to answer because the characteristics of place and the characteristics of the people who happen to live in that place are hard to untangle. As Kirk drove around the Lower Ninth, however, he realized that post-Katrina New Orleans provided one of those rare occasions when fate had neatly separated the two variables. In the course of bringing immeasurable suffering to the people of New Orleans, Katrina created what social scientists call a “natural experiment”: one day, people were in the neighborhoods where they had lived, sometimes for generations. The next day, they were gone—sometimes hundreds of miles away. “They had to move,” Kirk said. What, he wondered, were the implications of that?

This billboard is famous in urban planning circles.  It was put up in Seattle, when Boeing laid off 60,000 employees, 60% of its workforce (HistoryLink).  Photo: Seattle Times.

Place versus People strategies.  This is tough for local economic development authorities, whose jobs are place-focused and who would be fired for advocating for contraction, the way Youngstown, Ohio did with the Youngstown 2010 project ("Study calls Youngstown 2010 plan a ‘cautionary tale’," Youngstown Vindicator), or in the European Shrinking Cities initiative from the 2010s.  The city was once an economic powerhouse of steel production.  Now all those plants are closed.  

ED officials saying that people are better off leaving for jobs elsewhere is a big no no.

The Vindicator story discusses a study of the Youngstown 2010 project, offering caution based on an academic study of the initiative ("Plan Implementation Challenges in a Shrinking City," Journal of the American Planning Association, 2019, also see this).  The authors do focus on the barriers to change.

At the same time, I think the authors miss key points.  The first, being that ten years is hardly enough time to seriously evaluate a plan under these conditions.  (For example, it took 25 years to see substantive benefits from the DC area Metrorail system, and even longer to see impacts outside the core of the center city.)

Second, the kind of economic devastation faced by Youngstown (or Flint or Detroit Michigan, etc.) is comparable to a natural disaster, and it takes decades to recover from such, even infavorable circumstances.  Third, in this situation, the difficulties such communities face in lack of access to capital as well as customers and needs for the capital also take decades to rectify.  Revitalization in such situations takes 30-50 years.

-- The Future of Shrinking Cities:Problems, Patterns and Strategies of Urban Transformation in a Global Context, UCB Institute for Urban and Regional Development
-- "Why can't the "Bilbao Effect" be reproduced? | Bilbao as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning," 2017
-- "Lessons from CNN story on Allentown, Pennsylvania," 2020

As an example of the issue of capital, This Christian Science Monitor article ("One neighborhood reaches for resilience: A letter from Chicago") discusses the revitalization program in the Pullman neighborhood of South Chicago, which has landed $450 million in inward investment, and the program is still in early phases with limited visible improvements.  It's a good example of how much capital is needed to counter long term disinvestment.

Photo from the Toronto Star article, "‘These good old boys done stole our damn boots’: In his home state, protesters want Joe Manchin to get with the Biden program."

Conclusion.  Activists should come up with a social and economic revitalization plan for West Virginia, and challenge Senator Joe Manchin to support it, and to outline his objections in a substantive way.

A wrinkle on BTMFBA: let the city/county own the cultural facility, while you operate it (San Francisco and the Fillmore Heritage Center)

There's an interesting article in The Grio, "Black residents demand San Francisco give center as reparations after destroying Fillmore neighborhood," about how residents and community organizations in the Fillmore district of San Francisco are advocating for the city to give residents the Fillmore Heritage Center, to own and operate. 

The FHC is a ground floor space, 50,000 s.f., with an adjacent 112 space parking lot, that is connected to a separate 12-story condominium building.

FHC has languished for many years, after its main and opening tenant, Yoshi's jazz club, went through bankruptcy in 2012 and shut down for good in 2014, which in turn led to the closure of the adjacent restaurant, 1300 on Fillmore, a couple years later.   

Two nonprofits were given control of the space, which is the ground floor of a building with housing above, and programmed it aggressively, but a shooting and the pandemic have combined to leave the facility empty.

Fillmore Heritage Center is seen on the corner of Fillmore and Eddy Streets on Thursday, November 2, 2017 in San Francisco. Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle 2017.

The nonprofits estimate it will cost about $420,000 per year to operate ("Will new plan for S.F.’s Fillmore Heritage Center revive long-shuttered jazz club and community hub?," San Francisco Chronicle).

Reparations argument.  The advocates are calling on the city to give them the facility as a form of reparations for planning and policy decisions over the decades that have harmed the predominately black neighborhood.

Reparations is a misguided argument: they need plans and implementation mechanisms.  I think the reparations argument is misguided, or at least, aren't well-focused.  

Graphic/map of the Chicago Loop from a Wall Street Journal travel article illustrates the concept of "cultural mapping" at the neighborhood scale.  Illustration by John S. Dykes.

The issues are two-fold: (1) creating viable revitalization/equity ("Social urbanism and equity planning as a way to address crime, violence, and persistent poverty")  and cultural plans for the neighborhood; and (2) creating a viable operating plan and implementation mechanism for the Fillmore Heritage Center. 

Why did Yoshi's and the restaurant fail/Arts as consumption.  Another question that doesn't seem to be asked is what happened? ("1300 on Fillmore Closed," Eater SF, "The Addition, Formerly Yoshi's in San Francisco, to Abruptly Close," KQED/PBS, "How the Yoshi's Deal Went Down," New Fillmore).

I think the problem is the "heritage center" was really a concert facility and restaurant, focused on "arts as consumption" (""Arts district planning" in Arlington County | Many communities don't know the difference between arts as production and arts as consumption").

The large facility--28,000 s.f.--needed a lot of people to fill it up, multiple days a week, and the market for jazz is small compared to other genres.  

Plus, the firm took out many millions of dollars of loans to pay for outfitting the facility and revenues weren't strong enough to both operate the business and pay down debt.   

The adjoining but separately owned restaurant was dependent on concert attendees for a significant amount of its business, and when the facility shut down, they lost almost 40% of their business.

This project, while laudatory, was probably inadequately considered in terms of overall demand and the cultural offer within the Fillmore neighborhood, and when costs to develop it ballooned, it was set up to fail.

Buying/Controlling buildings.  My BTMFBA--Buy the M.F. Building Already-- writings focus on how cultural organizations and disciplines to have more control over their future and economic sustainability, need to own (or at least control for the long term) their own buildings.  

The primary recommendation is to do this through culture/arts-based community development corporations, acting at the scale of a city or county, to buy, hold, build, and operate such facilities.

-- "BTMFBA: the best way to ward off artist or retail displacement is to buy the building," 2016
-- "BTMFBA: Baltimore and the Area 405 Studio," 2021
-- "Revisiting stories: cultural planning and the need for arts-based community development corporations as real estate operators," 2018
-- "When BTMFBA isn't enough: keeping civic assets public through cy pres review," 2016
-- "BMFBTA revisited: nonprofits and facilities planning and acquisition," 2016
-- "BTMFBA: artists and Los Angeles," 2017
-- "BTMFBA Chronicles: Seattle coffee shop raises money to buy its building," 2018
-- "Dateline Los Angeles: BTMFBA & Transformational Projects Action Planning & arts-related community development corporation as an implementation mechanism to own property," 2018

Now, it doesn't have to be a CDC specifically, sometimes smaller scale efforts work just fine.

Colleges might do this, for example Emerson College in Boston owns and operates significant theater buildings, as do other colleges, Seattle has a couple of different nonprofits running multiple performing arts/theater facilities, ("Seattle preservation: Pike Place Market, Neptune Theater, and the Cinerama"), while in Greater Philadelphia, there is a theater management company, Renew Theaters, that operates community theaters which are each owned individually. 

My writing on cultural planning has been sparked in part by the financial failure of cultural facilities and institutions "going it alone" ("Cultural resources planning in DC: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king," 2007; "Cultural organizations in financial exigency," 2020).

And even though I recommend CDCs with more heft as the primary actors, like the Playhouse Square CDC in Cleveland, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, the Brooklyn Academy of Music CDC, and Takoma Arts in Washington State, there are plenty of one-off nonprofits successfully running cultural facilities.

I wonder if the Fillmore Heritage Center "idea" is a bit misguided in that the community likely lacks the financial capacity to own, maintain, operate and program the facility. 

If they had that capacity, they would have picked up the management contract for the facility by now, and would be operating the FHC already. 

Although it's possible that the FHC Equity Partners initiative has the capacity, as it includes a couple of community development organizations with the experience and track record of developing, owning and operating a significant property portfolio.

But the group of people and organizations agitating for ownership of the Fillmore Heritage Center ought to think long and hard about what they want and how best to accomplish it.

1.  Why not let the city continue to own and maintain the facility?, thereby off-loading the expense, which will only get bigger as the building ages.

2.  How about focusing on creating a robust nonprofit with the mission and capacity to operate it?

3.  And the demonstration of the ability to deliver a great and successful program of events and activities.

Miami's Liberty City and Overtown districts as models.  There are many models, including some interesting organizations in Miami, in the Liberty City district ("Social infrastructure in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami") and Overtown.  From the blog entry:

• African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, is part of the county culture agency, has programs in visual and performing arts for children and youth, presents various arts events including black theater, and has residency and apprenticeship programs for artists ("African Heritage Cultural Arts Center Shapes the Next Generation of Miami's Black Creatives," Miami New Times).

The original theater has been expanded into a cultural complex with the addition of a new building immediately adjacent.  

In Overtown, another historically black Miami neighborhood, one remarkable civic asset is the Black Archives, History & Research Foundation of South Florida.  

In addition to its ever expanding archives on the Black experience in South Florida, the organization also operates the Historic Lyric Theater, the city's first theater building dedicated specifically to the Black community when it opened in 1915.

Leimert Park, Los Angeles.  Another example is the Leimert Park Village district in Los Angeles, which is seen as the cultural heart of the city's black community ("Los Angeles's Black Pride Taking In the Retro Vibe of Leimert Park," Washington Post, Slideshow, Los Angeles Times).  

The Vision Theatre building is a fabulous example of art deco architecture ("Leimert Theater: Envisioning a Neighborhood Landmark," KCET/PBS).  Photo: Luis Simco, Los Angeles Times.

Historically it has been a great scene for music, from blues to hip-hop.

The city is restoring the Vision Theatre and repositioning it as a community arts and performance facility, which will reopen next year (Vision Theatre / Manchester Junior Arts Center, LA Department of Cultural Affairs).  

Note that the Vision Theatre will be operated the way I suggest for the Fillmore Heritage Center.  The city will own the building, and a third party community-focused organization will operate it ("LA seeks proposals to operate Vision Theatre in Leimert Park," Hey SoCal).

-- RFP webpage and document 

Other cultural elements include the annual

Leimert Park Village Book Fair, featuring more than 200 authors, the open air Destination Crenshaw cultural interpretation walk ("Destination Crenshaw art project aims to reclaim the neighborhood for black L.A.," Los Angeles Times, Destination Crenshaw webpage, Perkins+Will), and the annual Juneteenth street festival.

Concept for Destination Crenshaw, Perkins+Will

Social infrastructure in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami

There is an article in the Miami Herald about "climate gentrification" ("Another study finds climate gentrification in Miami, this time in the rental market") but it's behind a paywall so that you have to access it through a library articles database.  

Doing the search on that site, there were links to other articles on the topic within the paper, including "Liberty City is rapidly transforming. Residents are split on who will benefit." 

Artist Kyle Holbrook of Moving Lives of Kids created the nine-story ‘Liberty City Mural’ for the Liberty City Pinnacle Art in Public Places program. Photo: EILEEN ESCARDA.  "Mural depicts leaders, positive changes in Liberty City," Miami Herald.

Liberty City is a historically black neighborhood of about 28,000 residents.  Its black population is dropping, its Hispanic population is increasing, and in part because of its location, but also its relatively high elevation in the face of climate change and the expected rise in sea levels that will devastate most South Florida neighborhoods, it's experiencing new development and an influx of higher income residents.

I've discussed "social infrastructure" in the context of equity planning ("An outline for integrated equity planning: concepts and programs," 2017) and even within managing  and programming public spaces as a network ("The layering effect: how the building blocks of an integrated public realm set the stage for community building and Silver Spring, Maryland as an example," 2012) although I didn't refer to the concept of anchor programming as a kind of "social infrastructure."  I should have.

Community, social, and civic organizations are part of the civic asset network in communities, which is discussed in Eric Klinenberg's book about social infrastructure, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.  His study of death and the Chicago heat wave, found thatwhen comparing equally impoverished neighborhoods, those neighborhoods with a greater array of community organizations and civic and retail amenities had fewer deaths.

The organizations listed in the Herald article that I found particularly interesting are:

• Roots Collective Black House, which has a print shop, event space, offers creative services and an internship program for youths, including access to seminars on topics such as gentrification ("Roots Collective Black House Aims to Enrich Black and Brown Communities," Miami New Times)
• Collective 62, an artists cooperative, gallery and work space
• MEYGA, the Multi-Ethnic Youth Group Association, started as an after school program for children, expanded to offer some family programming, and has since opened a private school serving K-8 grades
• African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, is part of the county culture agency, has programs in visual and performing arts for children and youth, presents various arts events including black theater, and has residency and apprenticeship programs for artists ("African Heritage Cultural Arts Center Shapes the Next Generation of Miami's Black Creatives," Miami New Times).

The original theater has been expanded into a cultural complex with the addition of a new building immediately adjacent.  

In Overtown, another historically black Miami neighborhood, one remarkable civic asset is the Black Archives, History & Research Foundation of South Florida.  

In addition to its ever expanding archives on the Black experience in South Florida, the organization also operates the Historic Lyric Theater, the city's first theater building dedicated specifically to the Black community when it opened in 1915.

Belated seasons greetings and churchgoing in the time of covid

I haven't been writing much because changes to the Blogger posting function make writing much more laborious, and because I am still depressed by the election, and how Democrats were pretty much trounced, except for the presidency, not to mention what Trump's continued existence says for democracy ("What We Get Wrong About America's Crisis of Democracy," New Yorker; "Americans’ acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy," Guardian; "Republicans closely resemble autocratic parties in Hungary and Turkey – study," Guardian; "Is Trump's 'coup' a dress rehearsal?," New York Magazine).

I'm not religious.  I'm intellectually Jewish but have grown up in a Christian culture.  It happens that I am a fan of religious architecture, even though I am agnostic at best--some things sometimes you can't shake even if intellectually you know faith is pretty much a loser.

I guess in Christianity the tension between the Old Testament (vengeful and cruel) and New Testament (social justice, loving, forgiving) is reproduced in society more generally such as the difference in outlook between Republicans (vengeful, blaming, individualistic) and Democrats (more focused on the collective and mutual aid).

St Margaret’s church in south London is being used as a food bank distribution centre, supported by the Trussell Trust. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.

An article in the Guardian, "If the Church of England worships online, how can its historic buildings survive?," about the impact of pandemic related meeting restrictions on churches, and how some churches are responding in creative and innovative ways, which increases rather than diminishes their relevance, is relevant to my earlier writings on churches and urbanism, codified here, "Churches, community, religion and change," last in 2015 (although I do "update" it from time to time in the comments section as I come across relevant articles and findings).

Photo: St. Bridget's church in Glasgow, Scotland (ANSA).  Fixed pews make churches inflexible spaces.

A photograph in the article of the St. Margaret's Church in South London, showing the worship hall used for a food bank, reminded me of my experience going to the Liverpool Cathedral when I visited the UK in 2018.  About churches as flexible spaces.  (I've written about church social halls as flexible spaces here, "Ground up (guerrilla) art #2: community halls and music (among other things).")

I went there because there was an art exhibit, using the cavernous hall to show the "Museum of the Moon" (more) which had been written up in my local newspaper before I left.  

The Cathedral, the largest in Britain, also has a Tracey Emin neon sculpture ("Award for Cathedral's Emin Work," BBC) which was placed as part of Liverpool's European Capital of Culture program in 2008.

I was intrigued because the church doesn't have fixed pews, which means that the space can be flexibly used.  

My understanding is that it was designed that way deliberately (although I never got around to confirming it), so that the church space could be multipurpose.

And later that weekend, the same space was used for what the church called the "Summer Arts Market," basically an art fair, within the church.  They also do this in the winter.

Years ago I wrote some pieces related to the point Washington Wizards team owner Ted Leonsis made about the arena or stadium being a platform ("Stadiums and arenas as the enabling infrastructure for "money-making" platforms").

Simon Jenkins points out in the Guardian article that some churches are more than doubling their pre-pandemic attendance with the addition of Zoom-based services.  

He wonders what that means for church buildings, although he argues it's an opportunity for renewal as well.   

In my piece, I made a similar point but in a different way.  I wrote that churches, especially megachurches, are organized at the scale of a metropolitan area.  It means that they get much greater attendance and membership, but it comes at the loss of connection to a particular community or neighborhood.   

Although this has happened anyway, because only a few religions maintain a tight geographical bound between the community and the place of worship, because of how religion is practiced.  This is especially the case for Islam--which requires daily practice ("Can This Muslim Community Create a Model for Rebuilding Detroit?," The Nation); and Orthodox Judaism, which forbids the use of mechanical devices on the Sabbath, so people live within walking distance of their synagogue.

Dream of Detroit is an Islamic initiative focused on revitalizing the neighborhood around their church building.  And in nearby Oak Park, in the late 1980s, the State highway department built a deck across a local freeway to facilitate a community's ability to walk to and from synagogue ("Who knew? There's been a freeway deck in Oak Park, Michigan over I-696 for almost 30 years").

Interestingly, in Utah, especially Salt Lake City, the Mormon Church historically built churches around the idea of people living close and walking to church ("A Brief Introduction To Mormon Urbanism").  

Although I believe that the practice of walking to church has waned, as most churches have big parking lots, and even before the pandemic it was rare to see people walking to or from church.