Looking at Community Development as an Exchange of Good(s)

NeighborWorks America

Mid-Atlantic District Leaders Retreat

Tuesday, May 9, 2006

Good noontime and thanks for allowing me to spend a few moments with you.   I am honored to be invited by my ole pal, Emily Thayer, and seconded by Lucy Cook and the committee to be your keynoter this lunchtime. As noted, my remarks to you today are entitled, “Looking at Community Development as an Exchange of Good(s)”.   

By that title…I’m reminded of a story of a young Baptist minister, who having gained fame and fortune in the North, was asked to come home, South, to deliver a sermon. Well, he could hardly refuse.  So he decided to take his young son along with him, to teach him something about his history, his culture.  Well, he went down there and he delivered the sermon of his life, he had the congregation rolling from one emotion to the next. When he was finished, his old pastor came up to him and said, “ John, that was a mighty fine sermon, the finest sermon I’ve heard in a very long time.  I wish we could give you something, but we’re just a small congregation.”  John waved off the old pastor and said it was payment enough just being home.  As he’s leaving the church, John notices there’s a poor box in the back.  He reaches into his wallet, pulls out a fresh new, crisp $10 bill and puts it in the collection box. 

Halfway across the parking lot with his son, he hears a voice, “John!… John!”  (it’s the voice of his old pastor).  “Now, John, as I said, we wish we could really give you a proper gift but we just don’t have it.  But we’d like to give you a small “token” of our appreciation.”  And with those words, he hands John the crisp new $10 bill that John recognizes as the one he put in the poor box. 

Traveling home, he decides to test his son.  He says to his little brown eyed five year old,  “Son, there’s a lesson here.”  And the innocent faced boy looks up at him and says, “I know.”   “Well, what is it, son?”  And the little boy says, “If you had given more, you would have gotten more!”

When I was in college, one of the seminal books I read was called “Games People Play” by Eric Berne.  In that book, Berne advances the idea that interactions are an exchange.  That is, to over-simplify, in relationships you give to get and get to give: relationships are made up of give and take.

So it is that that’s probably a useful way to look at community development (as an exchange), what comes out of it, as Memphis blues musician, W.C. Handy, once said about his trumpet, depends on what you put into it. 

There is no question that many city neighborhoods in America are much in need of development: not enough affordable housing, lots of joblessness, failing schools, mediocre mass transportation, consumers victimized by the energy crises, a lack of diversity in leadership, inadequate recreation and limited involvement in the civic or political process, among other issues.  If other communities are anything like Baltimore, there is much to do, but we have to talk about it first… it’s what you don’t talk about that can get you… In fact, from the “It’s what’s not said that can kill you” file…. I’m reminded of the story of a man and his wife who were having some problems and giving each other the silent treatment.  The man realized that he’d need his wife to wake him the next morning at 5:00 AM for an early flight to Chicago. Not wanting to be the first to break the silence, he wrote on a piece of paper and left it for her, “Please wake me at 5:00 AM.”

The next morning, the man woke up only to discover it was 9:00 AM and that he had missed his flight. Furious, he was about to go and see why his wife hadn’t woken him when he noticed a piece of paper left for him by the bed.  The paper said, “It is 5:00 AM. Wake up.”

It is time for us to wake up and get to work.  I’d like to talk about a few things we can do in community development that if taken up will make a large impact on communities:

For example, with the upcoming July 1st deadline announced by our Baltimore Gas & Electric Company, let’s get right into it.  In the face of their impending 72% increase in the cost of gas and electric to household users, it’s time to call once again for public ownership of local utility companies!  How in the devil can anyone ask for a 72% price increase for anything, with a straight face?  It’s time to get both utility companies’ and oil companies’ hands out of our pockets. 

We should do as some folks in the Twin Cities of Minnesota are doing and pool resources to buy fuel en-masse to offer it cheaper to customers and we should do as the nation of Brazil has done and convert to sugar generated ethanol (not the more expensive, poorer performing but better lobbyist-represented corn industry) to quickly and almost completely replace petroleum based fuel. 

And in terms of household power:  According to an admitted  five year old article in the San Francisco Chronicle, California, for example, has 31 local power entities that distribute their own electricity to residential and commercial customers, a fellow named Jerry Jordan, then (if not now) executive director of the California Municipal Utility District Association said. They serve between 25 and 30 percent of the state's population. They include 23 city utility companies, two municipal utility districts, four irrigation districts and two largely rural public utility districts.

In almost every case, their residential rates are lower than the three major investor-owned utilities in the state, Jordan said. And their rates in general, including commercial and industrial, parallel the national average, which is about 18 percent lower for public power, he said.   More money in the pockets of consumers, less money up in smoke or out of exhaust pipes and more available to beautify neighborhoods and homes.  Let the investors in utility companies invest in something else (like low income housing, for instance?).  But it’s time for public ownership of utilities… we need to start getting organized to make that happen.

For poor people, there is a growing housing crisis in this country.  A couple of months ago, Eric Siegel of the Baltimore Sun  wrote about the national critical need for affordable housing.  He quoted a Harvard University study that said “about 200,000 low rent units are being lost each year nationwide through demolition or conversion to market rate rentals or condominiums.  That’s about twice the number of new affordable units that are being created through a federal tax credit program and minimal expansion of housing vouchers. … Most of the lost units were built before 1960, 90% had tenants in them and three quarters of the units were in decent shape.”

The biggest issue related to low income housing is affordability.  Folks simply don’t earn enough to be able to afford even the more modest of rents.  According to another study done last fall at Johns Hopkins University, here in Baltimore , Low End Rental Housing, only a third of the nation’s poor households receive rent subsidy assistance, while two out of five tenants pay more than the affordability threshold of 30% of their income for housing. 

But it is back to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies to hit the nail on the head (and I quote)…”Without increased resolve to bolster the earning capacity of low-income renters and to expand the supply of lower-cost rental housing, the affordability crunch will only worsen in the years ahead.”

So, one of the things we can do as a community development measure and to ease the housing crisis, short of getting more and more inclusionary zoning laws passed, is to support state of the art living wage laws in our respective jurisdictions.   Get behind those laws, folks.  Get them researched and passed at the local or state level.  God bless the dwellers who’ve got their own… incomes.

And speaking of personal income, it’s time for a full employment campaign in our cities, suburbs and rural areas.  We need to put people to work for example building and operating ethanol plants and repairing infrastructure in our population centers: streets, bridges, sidewalks, etc. 

200,000 people in the city of Baltimore are unemployed (according to an article in the March 24, 2004 edition of the Sunday Sun).  That amazing figure represents almost a third of the city’s population… And I’ll bet there are likewise sized and equally invisible human scrap heaps in other jurisdictions in the country.   Think about it, 200,000 people who do not pay taxes, 200,000 who have limited or no spending power, which is 200,000 who cannot buy or rent their own place to live, go the ballpark, eat at a modest priced restaurant or take their family to a movie. 

The best thing we could do for this city and others is to put the jobless persons to work.  There’s work to be done and there are folks who need to be employed, we should bring them together.  That’s the exchange I’m talking about: we need to change the non-productive, invisible folks into proud tax paying citizens.   The much need work gets done and the many marginalized folks enter the mainstream with tax, rent and utility payments.  Fewer would go to jail, jails are limited in their ability to rehabilitate and expensive to operate and more folks would be able to afford decent housing.

For those in our communities with criminal records, we should do massive workshops and trainings to teach micro-enterprising.  We should circumvent the records problem that keeps folks from becoming employed and have them use skills and the hustle they might have within themselves to sell or distribute legal goods or services instead of drugs… We should teach people who are ready to get out of the drug life how to get into the legitimate life… yes it’s hard work and yes, they’ll be some failure along they way, but we cannot abide with having so many unproductive human beings in our midst. 

And while we’re fixing things, we have to get our schools in shape.  It’s good to see the Baltimore City Public School System just announced a new $21,000,000 initiative to fix middle schools—6th, 7th and 8th grades.  For many years, middle schools have been the weak link in the city school system chain.  I advocate shutting the schools down to fix them!  Schools are too important to the health of a community to be lousy.  They are the potential way out of poverty still for most of our children.  So shut them down…

One grade at a time, starting with the Eighth Grade, close the schools and use the money you’d spend on those kids (the per pupil expenditure) to pay their tuition at parochial and private schools or for transportation to surrounding county schools.  But shut the schools down, bring in national, regional and local experts and design better schools. 

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently released a study on high school dropouts.  They asked kids why they drop out of school and the answer that came back was that they were bored.  Remember what Paul Simon sang in his song Kodacrome?  “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all!”…

Well, before you can even get there one thing keeps kids out of high school: middle school!  School should be seen by students as a way to the future… the way to adulthood and independence… the way to the world of work.  For too of our children, the connections are not clear: teaching is mediocre, books are in short supply, buildings are falling down around them and there is little to no order there.  If we fix the schools, as if our futures depended on it… and they do, we’re sure to get faster more effective results. 

We need educated and informed, positive thinking young people to make and keep our communities strong.  We need folks who can get jobs and pay social security so that they can support our monthly social security payments when we become elderly.  I mean, it should be enough motivation to improve schools for their own sake, that is, for the sake of the children in them.  But that hasn’t been enough.  To me, race has been a factor:  the urban schools are populated principally by children of color (I know Baltimore City’s are) but if there were mostly white children forced to attend them because they couldn’t afford to go elsewhere, we’d have fixed them completely a long time ago…  But that aside, it’s time to fix them now!  As long as the schools are unstable, the community will be weak by that much… you can’t really develop communities successfully without having strong schools. 

Finally, we’ve got to look the issue of race relations square in the face.  I’ll bet it’s the same in many of your communities out there as it is here in Baltimore: most of the client bases for most of the non-profit organizations in town are persons of color.  But most of the leadership of the organizations is white.  We need to develop short term and long term diversity plans to ensure that our communities are being developed and represented more and more by persons who look like the folks who live in them.  This should start with leadership develop programs in our schools and definite, concrete diversity plans with timelines in our organizations.

The foundation community has to become more committed to diversity than it is to maintaining the status quo.  Non-profits need to find or develop more leadership of color and white folks need to vote for Black folks more than they do and do business with African Americans and others of color more…  imagine what would happen if churches, schools and other places where persons of color were in the majority or in some substantial presence would conduct their business with many more merchants of color.  It is amazing how Black dollars flow to white folks without anybody thinking much about it.  That is considered the natural order of things but it’s not.  We could even up the playing field a lot if everyone attempted to buy Black and Hispanic more. 

We’ve got to develop greater faith in persons of color in our communities.  We are the folks who battled for America’s soul in the fifties and sixties and who brought you significant social change movements in civil rights, that lead to women’s rights, rights for gays and lesbians, the environmental movement and the consumer rights movement… Persons of color think differently and operate differently. It’s clear to me we need to try something different in developing our communities.  The poet, William Robinson said it best, William Bill “Smokey” Robinson that is, said , “If that don’t do, then I’ll try something new.”

It’s time for us to think big, think new and think courageously.  It’s time for us to get everyday people involved again… to give them permission to take their country and its communities back.  Greed, power grabbing, crimes breeding crime, warmongering, lies and unfairness (what seem to be the order of the day) can only be combated with honest, people centered, diverse and fair effort at the grass roots level. The question is, are we ready to save ourselves and move to the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King and others died for?

It’s time for a real change; it’ll be good for us all!  Thank you.

Ralph E. Moore, Jr.  05/09/06

And speaking of  believe it… A lady named Mrs. Jenkins comes to visit her son, Anthony, for dinner… who lives with a female roommate, Vikki… During the course of the meal, his mother couldn’t help but notice how pretty Anthony’s roommate was.  She had long been suspicious of a relationship between the two and this had only made her more curious.  Over the course of the evening, while watching the two interact, she started to wonder if there was more between Anthony and his roommate than met the eye.  Reading his mom’s thoughts, Anthony volunteered, “I know what you must be thinking, Mama. But I assure you, Vikki and I are just roommates.”

About a week later, Vikki came to Anthony saying, “Ever since your mother came to dinner, I’ve been unable to find the silver sugar bowl. You don’t suppose she took it, do you?”  “Well, I doubt it”, he said,  “but I’ll e-mail her, just to be sure.”  So he sat down and wrote:

Dear Mama,

I’m not saying that you ‘did’ take the sugar bowl from my house, I’m not saying that you ‘did not’ take it.  But the fact remains that it has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.

Love,

Anthony

Several days later, Anthony received a  response e-mail from his Mama, which read:

Dear Son,

I’m not saying that you ‘do’ sleep with Vikki, and I’m not saying that you ‘do not’ sleep with her.  But the fact remains, that if she were sleeping in her OWN bed, she would have found the bowl by now.

Love,

Mama