Amanda Colón-Smith, Executive Director, Dutchtown South Community Corporation
For community development practitioners, 2020 was a year of unveiling, re-witnessing, and digesting disparities in health, policing, and other facets of community life that we work to undo daily. The visibility of acute pain in contrast to chronic issues should be embraced as a reflection and inflection point for our field. It is a call to action to move from sympathetic sentiment to bold and intentional redesign of systems and structures that uphold inequity.
In the realm of real estate development, there is abundant opportunity for redesign work that could result in the dismantling of the racial wealth gap. A new decade of strategic efforts is upon us. While frameworks such as Opportunity Mapping are being enhanced with the power of data, an old adage stands firm in how we implement tactics: “Nothing About Us, Without Us, Is For Us”.
In South St. Louis City, Dutchtown South Community Corporation is on a mission to advance neighborhood vitality through community empowerment, housing stabilization, and real estate development. In a recent comprehensive neighborhood planning effort, the Gravois Jefferson Historic Neighborhoods Plan was adopted by the City of St. Louis Planning Commission in May 2018. DSCC has recently formed a 13-seat Development Review Committee for the plan area, with nine seats for residents/stakeholders and four for local CIDs and neighborhood associations. Almost every resident who applied participated in a previous leadership training session or were active and known in this community. Each applicant had an interview with staff from the DSCC team and a guest reviewer from the local community development field. Guest reviewers included: Cristina Garmendia, Jenny Connelly-Bowen, Gary Newcomer, Catherine Hammacher, Jonathan Roper, Claire Ripple, Dwayne James, Jessica Payne, and Jay Watson.
Processes and tools for the committee were modeled on structure from other development committees in the St. Louis region. We also looked outside of St. Louis to develop a new tool to use in the development review process; the Neighborhood Plan Scorecard was modeled from a coalition in Twin Cities, MN. The scorecard outlines the most relevant and priority recommendations from the Gravois Jefferson Plan and will be used to measure alignment of projects to the overall community vision. With the plan document itself over 300 pages, this tool will make it easier for developers to understand plan priorities in a snapshot that’s just under 20 pages. We hope this tool can be the basis for development of concentrated geographies done differently—an approach of relationship-based development, where shared interests are explored and cultivated.
The development context of communities like those of the Gravois Jefferson Plan includes histories of extraction and exploitation. For example, our plan area has a 29% vacancy rate for residential units, a standout statistic, alongside being a community that is over 74% people of color with 39% of households living in poverty. For comprehensive neighborhood planning to be effective, it requires careful implementation, especially in terms of guiding the pace and quality of private real estate development. This work has an inherent racial equity overlap: disinvestment was not accomplished through race-neutral policy, and reinvestment cannot happen in a color-blind manner either. Resident review of proposed projects will allow for a focused analysis of who will preferentially benefit or be negatively impacted.
The equitable future we want, the one in 2039, not so far off from the untimely death of Michael Brown, will require intentional steps. As we build toward closing the racial wealth gap, the processes of private reinvestment into neglected communities must be refashioned. Processes that center the voices and decisions of residents most impacted must be central to creating this future. The next several years will bring pivotal moments, from a mayoral race to ward reduction in the City of St. Louis and redistricting based on Census outcomes. While these larger systems shift, we must ensure that housing and development systems also take up the responsibility to change how business is done.
A question worth asking ourselves: If you could change the ground rules of development, what would you change? It is time to transform the real estate development systems that do not serve us and build new ones that do. Communities not only deserve a seat at the table, they deserve to build those tables and set the agenda.
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Amanda Colón-Smith is the Executive Director of Dutchtown South Community Corporation in South St. Louis City. She works with residents, partners and stakeholders in the Dutchtown, Gravois Park, Marine Villa and Mt. Pleasant neighborhoods. The organization focuses on Housing Development and Stabilization as well as Community Empowerment. Through activities such as comprehensive planning, improving parks, and tenant rights education, the organization seeks to advance neighborhood vitality through resident-led activities. She is a graduate of the Regional Arts Commission’s Community Arts Training program and holds a certificate from NeighborWorks as a Certified Housing Asset Manager. She holds a BA from Cornell University in Africana Studies, a MS in Special Education from City College, CUNY and is currently completing an MS in Geography at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.
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Articles in “From the Field” represent the opinions of the author only and do not represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis or the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
We invite readers to contribute to the civic conversation about community development in St. Louis by writing an op-ed for the Community Builders Exchange. Op-eds should be short (400-700 words) and provocative. If you have an idea for an op-ed, contact Jenny Connelly-Bowen at jenny@communitybuildersstl.org.
