Housing Mobility Programs are an Important Piece of Equitable Community Development

Jenna Hampton, Graduate Student at Washington University in St. Louis & Practicum Student with the Social Policy Institute

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Despite its name, the Housing Choice Voucher (or Section 8) program does not always offer families much choice in where to live. Research from Opportunity Insights found that out of the 2.2 million households who receive vouchers, the majority live in high-poverty neighborhoods. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains that families with vouchers are often unable to access low-poverty, high-opportunity neighborhoods due to a number of barriers, including:

• Lack of support services from public housing agencies

• Shortage of information on available housing options for voucher-holders

• Landlords who are unfamiliar with the Housing Choice Voucher program

Outright discrimination is also a barrier. In St. Louis City, a “Source of Income” law prevents landlords from refusing to rent to someone due to their use of a housing voucher. Still, the Metro St. Louis Equal Housing Opportunity Council (EHOC) identified over 100 rental ads in St. Louis indicating that a landlord would not rent to anyone using a voucher. Last October, a local news story reported an instance in which a Central West End landlord turned down a woman named Phoenix after learning about her source of rental income. Phoenix reflected,

“It made me feel very belittled as well, like I wasn’t equal. There was no sense of equity in the situation at all.”

Housing mobility programs are gaining traction around the U.S. as a potential solution to these barriers. The 25 public housing agencies (PHAs) that currently manage housing mobility programs provide counseling, landlord outreach, and administrative support to help families access housing units in a broader range of neighborhoods.

This summer, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) opened an application for the Housing Choice Voucher Mobility Demonstration. Congress authorized $50 million to support new housing mobility programs around the country as part of the demonstration. PHAs that participate in the demonstration will test a variety of support services and outreach strategies to identify which elements of housing mobility programs are most effective.

Ascend STL Inc manages the only housing mobility program in St. Louis. In 2017, Ascend partnered with the St. Louis City and County housing authorities to create the Mobility Connection program*, which “provides families with opportunities and resources to connect with quality housing in communities of their choice.”

Ascend helps families with Housing Choice Vouchers move to high-opportunity areas (HOA) in the St. Louis region—defined as having a poverty rate and concentration of subsidized housing at or below 10%. The image below shows Ascend’s map of HOAs as of 2018.

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Source: Ascend STL, Inc. 2018 Annual Report

Last year, as part of an evaluation by the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, I surveyed 20 Mobility Connection participants about their experiences. Though one might think that economic concerns would be the primary motivation for moving to a HOA, our survey found that most participants were motivated to move by factors related to the safety and general well-being of their families. These included a desire for lower crime rates (95%), better housing (90%) and school quality (80%), and more amenities such as grocery stores and parks in their neighborhoods (75%). One parent explained her motivation for moving as:

“You want your children to feel safe, you want them to have a good education, you want them to be successful in life. One of my main reasons for wanting to relocate in a better neighborhood is my children more so than myself.”

While it is not practical to move every low-income family in St. Louis to HOAs, mobility programs offer families an opportunity to proactively choose their neighborhoods. Many families do not want to let their children’s futures hang in the balance as they wait for the promised “someday” of community improvements. Another parent from my survey explained her sense of urgency for moving out of her old neighborhood:

“My house was broken into and then my car was broken into… there was a shooting up the street from the house, so I just didn’t feel safe… I don’t feel safe with [my son] being home by himself in that neighborhood.”

Every family deserves to feel safe and happy in their neighborhood. Housing mobility programs like Mobility Connection help put the choice back into the Housing Choice Voucher program. Landlords and developers are a critical piece of that change. When community developers focus solely on place-based development, they miss an opportunity to promote equity through mobility-based strategies.

As the housing and community development field works together to create safe, high-opportunity neighborhoods throughout St. Louis, we should also expand the choices available to families who want the best for themselves and their children. Here are some actions we can take together to strengthen housing mobility in our region:

• Pass a Source of Income law for all of St. Louis County

• Develop better enforcement mechanisms to monitor Source of Income discrimination

• Encourage more landlords to participate in Mobility Connection and to accept Housing Choice Vouchers in general

• Re-evaluate zoning laws that prevent multi-family developments in HOAs (families with vouchers cannot access HOAs if there are not enough units in their price range)

• Make HOAs more welcoming for low-income families who move there by encouraging more service providers to open offices in the area, working with schools on anti-bias trainings, etc.

• Communicate with families who use Housing Choice Vouchers to learn more about their motivations, their hopes, their frustrations, and how we can help

* The original Mobility Connection program officially ended in March of this year. However, MDRC and Opportunity Insights will help Ascend re-launch the program as part of a broader study on housing mobility programs.

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Jenna Hampton is a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis. In December 2020, she will complete her Master of Social Work and Master of Social Policy degrees. In addition to classes, Jenna works part-time for the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials (NAHRO) and is a practicum student for the Social Policy Institute (SPI). While in St. Louis, Jenna has been an active member of CBN’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund Coalition (AHTFC). Originally from Oklahoma City, she became passionate about public and affordable housing policy when she worked as an intern for the Waco Housing Authority in Waco, Texas. Jenna hopes to continue working in the housing and community development field following her upcoming graduation. She believes that quality, affordable housing is a foundational need that should be guaranteed for all.

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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.

The Most We Can Do: A National Mandate for Housing Justice

Tony Pickett, Chief Executive Officer, Grounded Solutions Network

Robert Burns, Senior Vice President, Citi Community Investing & Development

This column was originally published in Shelterforce.

Tony Pickett

Americans are experiencing an unparalleled and historic series of crises, in many ways defying words to capture the magnitude of the damage.  Beyond the grave health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, our nation is tragically divided by a human rights crisis. Due to a long and painful history of institutional racism and the lack of responsive action by many elected leaders, Black Americans are disproportionately suffering once again. Police brutality, acts of inhumane cruelty, and widespread neglect are perpetrated daily in our streets.

Robert Burns

Serious policy reforms targeting the elimination of racism within law enforcement agencies and judicial systems are long overdue. However, there is also an urgent simultaneous need for the elimination of racial bias and barriers in our education, health, and housing policies. Anti-Black racism means Black American families are not only at higher risk for homelessness and eviction, making it difficult to shelter in place, they also often remain either excluded outright or acutely disadvantaged in fairly accessing, maintaining (especially during economic crises), and building wealth through homeownership.

Since COVID-19 is affecting Black Americans harder in terms of both health outcomes and employment outcomes, the housing stability of current Black homeowners and the ability of Black households to access homeownership after the pandemic should be top concerns. In 2016, the average net worth of a white family was already nearly 10 times greater than that of a Black family. Without sweeping and radical federal action on housing, this growing racial wealth gap will not only not be reduced, but it will also get substantially worse.

Focusing public and philanthropic resources on shared-equity homeownership models that include active stewardship is one way to advance racial equity in housing in the current moment.

Shared Equity and Stewardship

Shared-equity homeownership is a self-sustaining model that takes a one-time public investment to make a home affordable for a lower-income family and then restricts the home’s sale price each time it is sold to keep it affordable for subsequent low-income families who purchase the home. The model balances wealth-building for families who would otherwise be unable to afford to own a home with preserving the community’s investment.

One notable model of shared-equity homeownership is the community land trust (CLT), an enduring legacy of the civil rights movement, stemming from the struggle of Black leaders in Albany, Georgia, to combat anti-Black racism during the late 1960s. CLTs are nonprofit, community-based organizations created to safeguard collective community stewardship of land. CLT real estate development activities may include commercial and retail, but the model is most often used to ensure long-term housing affordability. A CLT typically acquires land and maintains ownership of it permanently. Homes on that land are sold to prospective homeowners, who all agree to a long-term, renewable lease for use of CLT land, dividing ownership of the home and land instead of a traditional sale. CLTs also sometimes develop rental housing. Because CLTs are community-led, CLT homeowners, tenants, and neighborhood residents have an active role in their governance and decision making. A well-functioning CLT that serves Black households can strengthen Black families, communities, and networks of partners by helping them attain housing justice and withstand the multiple major shocks of an increasingly uncertain world.

Affordable housing stewardship is a unique set of specialized practices that shared-equity programs use, designed to help households generate wealth while balancing long-term protection of local housing subsidy investments. Stewarded affordable homeownership programs work with buyers both before and after they purchase their homes to ensure that they are well-prepared for homeownership, financially responsible, and able to maintain the property. Stewarded programs also protect the subsidy investment by monitoring the physical asset, intervening to support homeowners experiencing financial distress and enforcing program requirements over the long term.

Shared-equity programs are increasingly intentionally serving communities of color, with new large-scale CLTs being inspired, created, and led  by leaders of color in locations such as Houston, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Grounded Solutions Network (GSN) is supporting a nationwide effort to accelerate the scale of shared-equity homeownership production.

Why Shared Equity, Why Now?

Stability—A 2011 study of CLT shared-equity homeownership performance during the Great Recession found that conventional homeowners were 10 times more likely to be in foreclosure proceedings than CLT homeowners at the end of 2010 (respectively 4.63 percent in the conventional market versus 0.46 percent in mortgages held by CLT homeowners). The results were based on 3,143 mortgage holders in 62 CLTs across 29 states. Over 200 GSN members today are committed to replicating that outcome by protecting their COVID-affected tenants from eviction; recording and tracking mortgage forbearance agreements; providing anti-eviction housing counseling efforts; proactively exploring the use of shared-equity mortgage refinance options to cure delinquencies for homeowners who have faced a financial or life crisis; and distributing targeted public financial support to keep families in homes using proactive stewardship.

Efficient use of investment—State and municipal governments are reeling from significant losses in revenue and increased spending, and the economic effects of the pandemic are likely to continue for a long time. This means we must choose affordable housing investments that will make the most of each dollar invested. Shared-equity models such as community land trusts and limited-equity co-ops do this. They retain and even grow the effect of the one-time initial public or philanthropic investment through resale price restriction and equity-sharing legal agreements that enable homes to retain their affordability in perpetuity. Shared-equity homes allow multiple families over many years to potentially become first-time homeowners, benefiting from ownership of the same perpetually affordable home without ongoing additional subsidy investments.

Wealth Creation Results—CLTs are highly effective in building wealth for families of color. The share of families of color living in a sample of over 4,000 shared-equity homes (73 percent of which were CLT homes) increased substantially from 13 percent during 1985-2000 to 43 percent during 2013-2018. Shared-equity homeownership performance data from a 2019 Lincoln Institute of Land Policy study, collected over that same period, shows that the majority of lower-income families who participated in shared-equity homeownership were able to use it as a stepping stone to purchasing traditional market-rate homes within a 5- to 7-year period. The data also shows that the median investment made to purchase a shared-equity home was $1,875 and that 6 out of 10 families accumulated at least $14,000 in earned equity upon the sale of their home. Notably, shared-equity sellers are accumulating wealth and experiencing smaller decreases in home values than market-rate sellers during housing market downturns, something that has historically caused large equity losses for Black households in particular.

Black Americans specifically are suffering daily from traumatic emotional, physical, and economic hardships stemming from arguably the most extensive series of crisis events experienced in our nation’s history. Like the admittedly flawed, but nonetheless powerful initiatives of the 1933-39 New Deal, which responded to the Great Depression, an equitable COVID-19 recovery urgently demands national public policies and major financial investments. But we need to make them using a racial equity lens. A new and targeted “Better Deal” must be launched, with a multifaceted federal policy relief initiative centered on the Black community, including a $2 billion to $3 billion investment to expand the availability of shared-equity housing with lasting affordability as a means to close the racial wealth gap. We estimate—using the methodology employed by the National Association of Home Builders—that creating 1 million new homes with lasting affordability over the next decade would generate over $45 billion in annual economic activity and would support 619,000 jobs. Only then will we be able to simultaneously strengthen our economic, health, and housing systems to intentionally benefit Black American families for the first time in history.

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Tony Pickett is the Chief Executive Officer of Grounded Solutions Network. Prior to serving as Chief Executive Officer for the Grounded Solutions Network, Tony was the Senior V.P. of Master Site Development for the Urban Land Conservancy, leading efforts to plan, finance and construct multiple equitable transit oriented development initiatives, complementing the $7.2B Denver FasTracks regional transit system. ULC’s Master Site Development work led by Tony has been described by collaborators as innovative; thinking about and achieving equitable outcomes in a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary manner.

Prior to joining ULC, Tony worked as the founding Executive Director of the Atlanta Land Trust Collaborative; a non-profit Community Land Trust entity focused on achieving equitable development outcomes as part of the Atlanta Beltline transit oriented development initiative. The Atlanta Beltline vision included the creation of 5,600 permanently affordable housing units over a 25 year period, in order to mitigate potential displacement and gentrification impacts in existing underserved communities along a 22 mile transit oriented development corridor. Prior to that Tony served as the Atlanta Housing Authority’s Director of Real Estate Strategy and Development; successfully creating multiple new mixed-income communities using innovative financing and public/private partnerships. Tony’s experience includes planning, creating and using local tax increment financing districts to leverage private investments in combination with additional federal and state funding sources to revitalize distressed communities.

Tony is a graduate of the Cornell University School of Architecture, Art and Planning and a strong advocate for holistic and equitable neighborhood development efforts.

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Robert Burns is the Senior VP of Community Development with Citibank. Prior to this position, he was President and CEO of City First Homes, a DC-based nonprofit developer of committed affordable properties, specializing in locations and projects identified as areas needing community development in “hard to develop” census tracks. Robert has also served as Director of Local Government Solutions for IBTS, a leading service provider in the building environment to all levels of government, community and industry worldwide. Robert enjoyed a long career as Director of Field Operations for NeighborWorks America, a national nonprofit organization created by Congress to provide financial support, technical assistance, and training for community-based revitalization efforts. Robert also has served as City Manager and Assistant City Manager in Ferguson, Missouri. He also serves on the board of the National Community Land Trust Network. Robert is the AHDC Board Vice President; he joined the Board in 2004.

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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.

Federal Housing Assistance Falls Short of Meeting COVID-19 Needs

Charlene Crowell, Senior Fellow, Center for Responsible Lending

This column was originally published in The St. Louis American.

As the nation’s double dose of health and economic crises continue, many consumers believe that federal assistance to make ends meet has virtually disappeared.   

While the $600 weekly federal supplement to augment state unemployment benefits expired July 31. And the Paycheck Protection Program again stopped accepting applications on August 8.   

A recent policy analysis developed for the Brookings Institution suggests that the wages and earnings of economically vulnerable workers left little—if any—funds for regular household savings.   

“Unemployed respondents, on average, report a household income of $33,000 which is well below the U.S. median household income of $78,500 and less than 130% of the federal poverty line for a family of four,” wrote authors Jevay Grooms (Howard University), Alberto Ortega (Indiana University), and Joaquin Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).   

“While all unemployed Americans are facing significant economic challenges, these findings suggest that unemployed Black workers are less likely to receive unemployment benefits and are disproportionately experiencing delays in receiving critical benefits designed to mitigate economic hardship,” wrote the professors. “These findings indicate that our society has failed to address many of the socioeconomic inequities faced by racial and ethnic minorities that were brought to light during the Great Recession.”    

Additionally, a three-part consumer survey by Morning Consult, a DC-based global intelligence firm, determined that by the end of this August, 5.4 million consumers who lost $600 per week in unemployment insurance will also lose their ability to pay for daily living needs like housing, health care, food and clothing. By the end of September, the same survey found that an additional 9.2 million consumers will be in the same financial dilemma should Congress fail enact new or extended aid.    

Despite COVID-19’s ongoing disruption to the economic health of many Americans, our lawmakers have not taken steps to alleviate all the resulting strain, including housing.  

In late May, the U.S. House passed legislation to continue vital federal assistance as the pandemic continues. Entitled the HEROES Act, it would extend the CARES Act’s previous moratorium on evictions and foreclosures. But it would also provide new housing assistance including $100 billion in emergency rental assistance, $75 billion for homeowner assistance, $11.5 billion in homeless grants and expand Section 8 vouchers with a $1 billion revenue infusion.  Together, these measures could help shore up housing, a major pillar in the nation’s economy.   

In the ensuing three months, the Senate never considered this proposal and instead put forth a much smaller package this August that provided nearly nothing to assist homeowners and renters. This approach garnered little support and now the upper chamber is not expected to return to work until after the Labor Day holiday.  

Likely as a result of one of four recent executive orders, HUD extended the moratorium on evictions and foreclosures on homes with FHA-backed mortgages. As reported by Politico, an estimated 8.1 million single-family homeowners will now be protected until 2021. Omitted in this new development are mortgages that originated with other government-sponsored mortgages like VA and USDA, as well as those backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And no assistance in this action addresses the needs of many renters who do not live in FHA-backed housing. It is estimated that these renters already owe up to $25 billion in back rent, and could reach $70 billion by year’s end and no way to pay.     

By contrast, the CARES Act included limited forbearance, a postponement—not forgiveness—of monthly payments for financially-challenged homeowners with an FHA, VA, or USDA loans. These mortgage borrowers can request a suspension for up to 180 days plus an additional 180 days if needed. Thirty days before the end of forbearance, mortgage servicers should contact these homeowners to discuss available options.  Repayment options will also depend upon the type of loan held.   

Fannie Mae’s most recent annual housing survey shows that one-fifth of Americans are unaware that this assistance is available. Mortgage servicers should do more to notify borrowers of these options.   

Many homeowners sought to take advantage of lower mortgage interest rates, and filed applications to refinance their loans, in hopes of lowering their monthly payments.   

But beginning September 1, a new surcharge fee will be added to refinance applications with both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the other GSE with a large share of the mortgage market. A 0.5 percent fee on refinanced capital will be charged directly to lenders and then be passed on to consumers making applications. This new fee adds an upfront, estimated $1,400 to the mortgage cost, and as a result may eliminate any savings that might have been possible.   

In reaction, outraged housing stakeholders are demanding that the Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA), that oversees both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, reverse this new and harmful fee. Their stance is based on the facts that housing accounts for almost 20% of the nation’s overall economy, and further that the fee undercuts the Federal Reserve efforts to support an ailing economy.     

“It doesn’t make sense,” Bob Broeksmit, president and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association, told MarketWatch. “The implementation timeline is intentionally punitive and absurd.”  

"This is harming American families," says Mike Calhoun, president of the nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending. "It's absolutely the wrong thing to be doing now… We should be doing more to help people refinance," he says. "And this is going in the opposite direction."   

Most reasonable people would agree that now is the worst time to add home costs. And for Black America—already reeling from disproportionate unemployment, COVID-19 diagnoses, and far less wealth—any increase in costs will be harder to absorb.   

Some online resources provide additional information: 

• An online Look-Up Tool enables consumers to enter information and learn whether their home or landlord’s mortgage is held by Fannie Mae; 

• Fannie Mae renter assistance information is available online at: https://www.fanniemae.com/heretohelp/renters/; and 

• Access to live personalized assistance from HUD-approved housing counselors is available through its Mortgage Help Network or the Disaster Response Network.  

What lawmakers, regulators and corporate decision-makers must remember during these terrible times is that everyone deserves a future full of hope and genuine opportunity. It’s time our lawmakers got back to work. Every consumer should be afforded an equal opportunity to survive this pandemic and achieve financial prosperity. 

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In a career that spans posts in three state capitols and major markets in the Midwest and Southwest, Charlene is an articulate spokesperson and seasoned journalist. As a Smart Growth lobbyist, she has championed affordable housing, land use and transportation. As a communicator, she has served as press secretary to both a state attorney general and mayor, managing strategic and crisis communications over a broad range of public policy developments.

Honored by the Texas Publishers Association and twice by the National Newspaper Publishers Association for her feature and editorial writing, she currently writes twice-monthly commentary on consumer finance as a standing assignment with the Center for Responsible Lending.

The Charlene M. Crowell Collection, housed at the Calumet Regional Archives at Indiana University Northwest, makes available to scholars and researchers many of her noteworthy government and journalism papers.

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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.

Property tax assistance funds are an easy gap for philanthropy to fill

Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for Legal Services of Eastern Missouri’s Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative (NVI)

This column was originally published in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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In the first of five annual sales, St. Louis City last month auctioned more than 400 properties for delinquent taxes. These included a significant number of vacant “investment” properties, but public records also show that more than 100 of the properties may very well be owner-occupied. Another auction is scheduled for Aug. 18, followed by a St. Louis County auction on Aug. 24. Last week, Jackson County, which includes Kansas City, postponed its sale citing public health concerns and the economic hardships facing taxpayers. Our region must also respond.

However, rather than postpone these auctions, we should consider a long-term approach by partnering with philanthropy to create a charitable property tax assistance fund. For a few hundred thousand dollars a year, the property tax burden of more than 100 struggling homeowners could be met. Charitable property tax relief programs are common across the country and serve a dual purpose of both benefiting vulnerable homeowners and our shared tax base.

The pandemic has created a housing crisis, the scale of which we are only beginning to grasp. Renters cannot pay rent. Homeowners and landlords cannot pay mortgages. Governments — federal, state and local — have responded with rental, utility and mortgage assistance programs. Those resources are critical, and we applaud the community leaders who acted early and decisively to prioritize that relief.

However, another critical gap remains. Like lenders and landlords, local governments are also facing the economic fallout. Tax foreclosure can be seen as one way to make-up for the lost revenue that local governments haven’t been collecting through the loss of local sales taxes. Unfortunately, without safeguards in place to protect vulnerable homeowners, tax foreclosure could exacerbate the economic and housing crises.

After the Great Recession, the number of parcels auctioned for delinquent taxes ballooned across Missouri. Tax delinquent property flooded metropolitan housing markets, driving down property values and leaving communities vulnerable to cash-rich coastal land speculators who gobbled up notoriously “affordable” properties at the expense of local developers. In St. Louis city, the under-resourced Land Reutilization Authority received a massive influx of tax-foreclosed properties, much of which the authority is still struggling to repurpose today.

Outside of Missouri, in places like Texas and Michigan, cities and counties partnered with local charities to make property tax assistance funds available for homeowners experiencing economic hardship. Many of those programs are still going strong today.

When homeowners lose their property to tax foreclosure, they lose equity that some have worked for generations to build. This transfer of wealth worsens disparities between Black and white St. Louisans. Nationally, the Black-white homeownership gap is now 30.1%, the widest it has been in 50 years. With Black Americans suffering disproportionately greater health and economic effects of the pandemic, we can expect the current recession to broaden this gap even more.

Startlingly, a new study also shows that property taxes weigh disproportionately higher on Black homeowners. As a result of higher assessed values, Black homeowners in Missouri pay 25% higher property taxes relative to the market value of their home than whites. Simply put, without relief funds available for homeowners, tax foreclosures hit Black communities harder.

For St. Louis, a charitable property tax assistance fund is easily within our reach. Compared to the millions of dollars being directed to landlords and banks through rent and mortgage relief, the amount needed locally is relatively small. Property tax assistance would leverage philanthropic dollars to produce a return on investment that would benefit the entire community. Tax assistance programs help fill local budgets, prevent an increase in vacant property, stabilize neighborhoods, and protect homeowners facing economic hardships — now and into the future. They are an investment in our shared, long-term prosperity.

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Peter Hoffman is the Managing Attorney for Legal Services of Eastern Missouri’s Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative (NVI). Peter created NVI in April of 2018 to provide free legal assistance to nonprofit neighborhood and community organizations to help prevent vacancy and propel the grassroots rehabilitation of abandoned properties. Peter previously worked in Kansas City on similar efforts with Legal Aid of Western Missouri starting in 2010. In 2015, Peter helped create that organization’s “Adopt-a-Neighborhood Project”, a Legal Services Corporation “Pro Bono Innovation Fund” recipient bringing together urban neighborhoods with local volunteer law firms. He served as that Project’s Director until relocating to his hometown of St. Louis in 2018. 

Peter received his JD/MPA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City with an emphasis in Urban, Land Use, and Environmental Law. Peter’s articles, “Bringing Self-Empowered Revitalization to Distressed Neighborhoods” published in the Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law, and “Legal Services and Pro Bono Lawyers Help Neighborhoods Tackle Vacancy” published in the St. Louis Bar Journal, both spotlight the role pro bono lawyers can play in community revitalization.

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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.

Unexpected Heroes for Democracy

Paul Woodruff, Executive Director with Prosperity Connection

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More than ever, remote voting is both necessary and responsible. COVID-19 has opened our collective eyes to the fragility of systems and tradition that not only govern our way of life, but facilitate public engagement in decision-making at the local, state, and national levels. The election on November 3, 2020 will test society’s will and ability to adapt as individuals weigh the risks of being cloistered in tightly filled polling places against the imperative to participate in our democracy at this critical historic juncture. This paints an especially grim picture for residents living in historically disinvested neighborhoods, where the risk of contracting COVID-19 and dying from it is many times higher. Because without full access to voting, neighborhood networks and local grassroots initiatives cannot build the social capital they need to address issues facing their community.

No one should have to trade their personal health for the right to vote, nor fear the act of voting. However, COVID-19 presents an invisible and real threat to all people fearful of becoming ill, but especially many individuals who have existing health issues—and in St. Louis, most especially our Black neighbors and communities north of Delmar. Now is the time to act in order to ensure that voters are both confident and safeguarded regardless of Missouri’s imperfect 2020 mail-in ballot legislation for the general election.

Cue the notary community…

Per the new legislation, “Voters casting a mail-in ballot are required to execute and submit a notarized statement under penalty of perjury with the ballot.” The solution is simple; we need to give notaries a platform to easily and safely serve the public so that the voice of the people can be heard in November.

Here are a few easy steps that can be taken:

• Financial service industry—this is your moment to shine by mobilizing to provide free notary services inside your facilities and through partnerships with community stakeholders who will welcome your staff to their sites for ballot certification.

• Libraries, social service agencies, and other public locations—get your staff certified as notaries and deploy them to notarize ballots.

• Corporate and philanthropic entities—fund notary certification, postage for mail-in ballots, personal protective equipment (PPE), physical barriers to protect notaries, and other expenses related remote voting.

• Voting public—exercise your legal right under Missouri law to avoid polling places and cast your ballot safely by mail.

Amid this global pandemic, the rise of the unsung, and unexpected, hero has been both surprising and very welcome. To grocery store clerks, hospital staff, U.S. Postal workers, and so many more: THANK YOU. As we venture forward and adjust to new “norms”, I anticipate yet another hero to rise. In the coming months, please take time to thank your local notary.

Our democracy depends upon an engaged electorate. Engage and protect yourself from the COVID-19 virus by voting remotely and supporting efforts to facilitate mail-in ballots. Our collective future depends on you, the voting public, the U.S. Postal Service, and most especially, notaries.

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Paul Woodruff serves as the Executive Director of Prosperity Connection and Vice President of Community Development for St. Louis Community Credit Union (SLCCU). In these capacities, he is responsible for managing strategic initiatives which fund, support, and advance interventions designed to decrease racial and economic inequity throughout the St. Louis region. During his tenure, he has built a robust, data-informed financial coaching program, launched RedDough Money Center as a lower-cost payday loan alternative, and established numerous strategic alliances with public, private, and non-profit entities to fund and support key initiatives led by both the credit union and Prosperity Connection.

He began his career in 2009 as a teller at SLCCU and has subsequently worked as a business development specialist and manager of community development. In 2013, he moved into his dual role as the head of Prosperity Connection and VP of Community Development for SLCCU. Prior to joining the credit union, he received his Master’s in Public Administration from St. Louis University, where his research focused on credit union alternatives to payday loans.

As an active member of the community development sector, Paul serves in a variety of advisory roles, some of which include on the Board of Directors for the Inclusiv Credit Union Network and US Bank’s National Community Advisory Committee. Outside of work, Paul loves to read, cook, entertain, and enjoy the cultural offerings of his beloved hometown, St. Louis, Missouri.

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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.

Radical Collaboration is Hard. If We Want a Better World After COVID-19, We Need to Figure it Out

Jenny Connelly-Bowen, MPPA, Executive Director with the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis

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Jenny and Josephine

In January, before COVID-19 took over the world, my husband Adam and I adopted three backyard chickens, an urban gardening-adjacent adventure we’d been planning for years. Josephine, Florence, and Dragonette came to us through local nonprofit Second Hen’d, which works with industrial egg producers to give spent hens a second life after their egg-laying careers are over. They were in rough shape when they arrived (photo evidence below): missing feathers, missing tails, oversized hormone-fed combs, weak neck muscles. So we’ve both been pretty stunned by how quickly they’ve gotten their strength and their plumage back. They even started laying eggs again in March, which was by no means guaranteed.

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January 2020

As I’ve been watching our flock recover, I’ve been reflecting often on a study I learned about a few years ago. To examine productivity in chickens, Purdue biologist William Muir compared two flocks: one full of hens with average egg-laying ability, and one full of high-producer “superchickens.” Both groups were left alone for six generations, then compared at the end of the study.

How do you think these two flocks fared? Conventional American wisdom might point to the “superchicken” flock as a dream team bound to send egg production through the roof. But at the end of the study, the flock with average production was the one that thrived: they were plump and healthy with increased productivity over the first generation. Meanwhile, most of the “superchickens” had pecked each other to death, with just three of the original flock remaining. The superstar hens had secured their positions by suppressing—more bluntly, murdering—others in the flock and had destroyed the entire group’s capacity to thrive in the process.

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May 2020

Why does this matter as the world struggles under the enormous weight of COVID-19? As an allegory for how we humans relate to each other and our work, it matters a lot. A Medium article about this study summarized:

This study proved that “Pecking Order” is unsuccessful. When you have a group of super chickens, they compete, fight and damage each other in their drive for success and power. Regular chickens thrive off of each other and are content to co-exist in an environment that they can improve together. They work as a TEAM to progress and build.

St. Louis has every type of human flock you can imagine along this continuum between teamwork and rivalry. We have plenty of amazing organizations and sectors working as teams to progress, build, and improve our environment together. We also have many that are competing, fighting, and damaging each other in their drive for success and power. Like other chronic, systemic issues, our fragmented ecosystem feels more real and more pressing in the face of COVID-19 than it ever has before.

This is far from an original thought. I know many of us have embraced the idea of “radical collaboration,” especially in the years since the Ferguson uprising. But transforming radical collaboration from an idea into action is a lot harder. It has real costs, and it’s almost always messy. As Forward Through Ferguson’s Karishma Furtado has put it:

Moving forward, we need to figure out how we operationalize radical collaboration. We all understand that Racial Equity is in some ways this emergent property. It doesn’t live in just one system or place. It can only arise out of all systems behaving in a racially equitable way, which means that those of us working in education can’t be isolated from those working in housing and can’t be isolated from those working in banking. And it’s hard to do. We can all say it, and write it down, and be all about it on paper, but we still haven’t figured out how to actually do it in our work.

COVID-19 is a clarion call. Now more than ever, our solutions and our advocacy need to be intersectional and multisector. They need all of us.

I will acknowledge my own bias: clearly I’ve drunk the collaboration Kool-Aid. CBN was created in 2011 as a strategic response to the fragmentation that plagues us in St. Louis. Our member organizations believed then, and do now, that together, we are smarter, stronger, and more resilient. In recent years, as we’ve grown into a convener for fellow community members who also want to come together to change our region, we’ve had a front-row seat to what can happen when collaboration works.

We have plenty of growing left to do in this arena, but we will always believe that any proposal or process can be improved when we tackle it from many different angles and ensure folks with a variety of perspectives are driving the conversation and the action. As the proverb goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”

Proverbs are proverbs for a reason. When we collaborate—really collaborate—we can avoid unintended consequences, tap more effective solutions, and get a whole lot closer to the futures we want to see. True collaboration means we get to see in real time how one sector’s decisions have ripple effects in all the other sectors they touch.

We also get to see how many of our decisions are colored by choices made upstream and have consequences for others downstream—even when we think we’re just acting in the best interest of our own organizations, or that of our partners. Even when we don’t think we have real “choices” to make. Because systemic racism and inequality and all its ugly fingerprints are the water we’re swimming in, and they cannot be undone by one organization, sector, or silo alone.

It’s a rare thing for the entire world to be focused on one problem at the same time. And that makes COVID-19 an opportunity. It’s widely accepted that social determinants of health (which are as intersectional as they come) are real and important, so how can we act on those connections collaboratively to fight for the health and well-being of our communities?

One example: we know that a safe home is a critical defense against contracting COVID-19; what can we do together to ensure those with homes can keep them, and those without homes can secure one?

Another: we know that systemic racism means Black St. Louisans are more likely to get sick with COVID-19 and more likely to die from it; what can we do together to ensure pandemic support flows to Black communities first?

And, most importantly: how can we guarantee that we’re not asking ourselves these questions again the next time a crisis hits? How can we turn the spotlight that COVID-19 has cast on our broken systems into an opportunity to tear down what’s no longer working—and what never did—and start over?

I don’t have brilliant answers to these questions. But I do know we’re going to have to work together to find them. The best thing our organizations and our sectors at-large can do for St. Louis right now is to step outside ourselves and put our dreams about being superchickens to rest. Let’s start planning and preparing today for the recession and recovery ahead, and let’s do it as a team.

Nothing has made me believe in healing more than to see how far our backyard flock has come since January. And yes, healing our world is going to be a lot more challenging and complex than healing three chickens. But imagine: what if there’s a reality on the other side of COVID-19 where race and zip code no longer predict life outcomes? What if this is the push we need to step out of our silos and up to our shared tables?

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Florence in January 2020

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Florence in April 2020

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Jenny Connelly-Bowen currently serves as Executive Director for the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis (CBN). She has a master's degree in Public Policy Administration with certificates in Nonprofit Management & Leadership and Policy & Program Evaluation from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a B.A. in English from Beloit College. Prior to entering the community development field, she spent over five years working in distribution, buying, and pricing at Save-A-Lot Food Stores, where her first role as a warehouse supervisor challenged her to rethink what it means to be a responsive, responsible community member and servant-leader. Jenny pivoted careers in 2015 to pursue work that would allow her to connect more deeply with others and to engage more deeply with the fight for change in St. Louis. She’s been an active volunteer in the community since moving into the city in 2013 and believes wholeheartedly that change will only be possible for our region if we all pull together strategically and keep racial equity, social justice, community leadership, and community voice at the center of everything we do.

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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.

Why North St. Louis City needs a COVID-19 testing site – now

Our national, state and local mitigation efforts need a racial equity lens

Will Ross, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine, Division of Nephrology & Principal Officer for Community Partnerships, Washington University School of Medicine

This column was originally published in The St. Louis American.

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, which started in Wuhan, China in December 2019, has marched across the globe and wreaked a path of death and debility that may soon eclipse the great Influenza Pandemic of 1918. COVID-19 is now present in every continent except for Antarctica and is indiscriminately striking at every demographic group. 

As of March 26, there were 495,086 cases globally and a total of 22,295 deaths. Within the U.S., on that date there were 69,197 total cases and 1,046 deaths. The highly contagious and deadly virus, having wreaked havoc in Seattle, California, New York and New Orleans, is now slashing through the heartland. 

Within the U.S., there is no sign that the pandemic is abating. What should frighten anyone with common sense and a conscience is the graph of world-wide mortality from COVID-19. The graph shows death by country (on a log scale) as a function of time, with the U.S. deaths in red. What is apparent is that our death rate and the rapid rate of rise precisely mirrors that of Spain and Italy, which have both overtaken China’s death counts.

The difference is that our death rate lags about two weeks behind Spain and Italy. By all accounts, given that our deaths are doubling every three days, when the COVID-19 pandemic peaks in the US within 2-3 weeks we will likely have the highest deaths in the world. These data argue for longer and even more comprehensive Stay at Home or Shelter in Place orders than we currently have in place.

So, who exactly is dying from COVID-19? And who is at risk of dying? 

Based on the epidemiological studies in China, we know that over 80 percent of deaths in China occurred in adults over 60 years of age. However, according to the Morbidity and Mortality report by the Centers for Disease Controls and Prevention (CDC) for the week ending March 27, among patients who need hospitalization due to COVID-19 infections, 20 percent were ages 20-44 years; and among those who died, 20 percent were between the ages of 20-64. 

However, the CDC data does not identify cases by race, and that may contribute to a false sense of security that African Americans are somehow less susceptible to the infection. That belief could not be further from the truth.  

As African Americans, we suffer from higher rates of conditions like asthma, obesity, diabetes and kidney disease; these problems could predispose us to COVID-19 and make us more vulnerable to its complications. African Americans are also more likely to be uninsured or underinsured. According to Dr. Lisa Cooper, an esteemed epidemiologist with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "this is because as a group, African Americans in the U.S. have higher rates of poverty, housing and food insecurity, unemployment or underemployment, and chronic medical conditions, and disabilities."

Although there is a scarcity of data on how COVID-19 affects the African-American community, as well as LatinX and Native American communities, a series of case reports are indicating that no group has been spared by the spread of the virus.

Case in point is Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As of March 26, there were 207 cases in the City of Milwaukee, and the majority of the cases were on the north side of town, primarily among African Americans.  In a report by City of Milwaukee Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik, the northern half of Milwaukee has seen most of the city’s outbreak of COVID-19 cases. The three-recorded deaths in Milwaukee County as of March 26 were all middle-aged African-American men.

There is no reason this is an isolated phenomenon. While actor Idris Elba and basketball star Kevin Durant quickly became the public face of COVID-19 among African Americans, the gripping photos of Judy Wilson-Griffin, the first person to die of COVID-19 in St. Louis County, and Jazmond Dixon, the first person to die in St. Louis City – both African-American – should have been a wake-up call for all of us.

The problem is that many have not fully embraced the risk of COVID-19 because we are not aware of the number of cases of COVID-19 in the African-American and other underresourced communities. This is primarily due to the unconscionable delay in testing for COVID-19, the lack of testing facilities in the African-American community, and the need for a targeted communication campaign to increase awareness of COVID-19. Any further delays in action will have a devastating effect on the health and economic vitality of African Americans. 

While all this information is sobering, there is hope we can contain this threat. It starts by placing a racial equity lens on our national, state and local efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

We must ensure that all symptomatic individuals can get rapid access to COVID-19 testing and results without accruing a cost. Currently the Cortex corridor has the only testing site in St. Louis city, and that is available to those who are referred by providers in the BJC hospital network. Amid the unprecedented collaboration between St. Louis city and county health departments and area hospitals to develop a regional response to COVID-19, there is ongoing discussion on how to urgently stand up a COVID-19 testing facility in North St. Louis.

This effort must include community leaders, as well as respected institutions such as the St. Louis Regional Health Commission and the Integrated Health Network, and the Missouri Foundation for Health. Likewise, there is an active effort by the regional response team to develop and execute a targeted communication campaign to increase awareness of COVID-19, particularly in the African-American community.

There is no room for delay; so many lives are as stake. Based on all available data, we need to act within two weeks to flatten the curve – that is, slow the spread of the disease. That means slowing the rate of infection to ensure that healthcare systems and hospital bed capacities are not overwhelmed, so that ultimately lives are saved.

There are proven ways to accomplish this: enforce even stricter social distancing guidelines and, above all else, stay at home. And let us remember a Hausa proverb: “However long the night, the dawn will break.”

*Note: It was announced on March 31 that Affinia Healthcare will open a COVID-19 testing site in North St. Louis City on April 2.

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Dr. Will Ross is associate dean for diversity at Washington University School of Medicine and professor of medicine in the Nephrology Division. Over the past two decades he has recruited and developed a diverse workforce of medical students, residents and faculty while promoting health equity locally, nationally and globally through collaborations with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and public health officials in Ethiopia, Haiti, and South Africa.  He is currently assisting the development of an undergraduate program in public health in northern Haiti. As a public health and health policy expert, Dr. Ross focuses on systems integration and conceptual frameworks to reduce health-care disparities.  He is a co-founder of the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Center for Diversity and Cultural Competence and served on the task force that created the Washington University Institute for Public Health, while serving as co-director of the new MD/MPH program.  He is vice chair of the Washington University Commission on Diversity and Inclusion.  He has been instrumental in redesigning local access to health care for the underserved as the founder of the Saturday Neighborhood Health Clinic and co-founder of Casa de Salud Latino Health Center.  Dr. Ross is also a founding member of the Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience, a magnet health professions high school in St. Louis.

Dr. Ross previously served as the chief medical officer and director of ambulatory clinics for the St. Louis Regional Medical Center, the last public hospital in St. Louis.  In 1997 he was appointed a charter and founding member of the St. Louis Regional Health Commission, which has leveraged over $400 million dollars to St. Louis to maintain an integrated network of safety net primary care clinics and public health services.  He served as Chairman of the board of directors of the Missouri Foundation for Health, where he directed the Foundation’s creation of the nonprofit center, Health Literacy Missouri.  He served on the Institute of Medicine’s Health Literacy Roundtable, where he evaluated health literacy efforts at the international level. He is currently Chairman of the board of directors of the Mid-America Transplant Services Foundation, Chairman of the St. Louis City Board of Health, and a member of the CDC’s Health Disparities Committee, where he promotes diversity in the public health workforce. He is a founding associate editor of the new public health journal, Frontiers in Public Health Education and Promotion. He was recently elected to the Group on Diversity and Inclusion Steering Committee for the AAMC, where he focuses on strategic planning to advance faculty diversity and inclusion.

Dr. Ross is a principal investigator of the Epharmix E-Interventions for Medical Care Study and co-investigator of the APO 1-1 GUAARD Replication Study.  Dr. Ross has received numerous honors and awards, including the 2005 State of Missouri Martin Luther King Distinguished Service in Medicine Award, the 2009 Washington University Medical Center Alumni Faculty Achievement Award, the 2011 Health Literacy Missouri Trailblazer Award, the 2013 Samuel Goldstein Leadership in Medical Education Award, and he is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha.  A graduate of Yale University, he completed medical school at Washington University School of Medicine, an Internal Medicine residency at Vanderbilt University, and a Renal Fellowship at Washington University. He completed a Master’s of Science in Epidemiology at the Saint Louis University School of Public Health.

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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.

Affirmatively Dismantling Fair Housing

Gregory D. Squires, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy & Public Administration, George Washington University

This column was originally published in Shelterforce.

“Racism is a structure, not an event.” So argues Robin DiAngelo in her powerful book White Fragility. While racist acts do occur, she acknowledges, the real challenge is to dismantle “a complex, interconnected system” from which white Americans benefit no matter their individual attitudes or behavior. There is no stronger bulwark of racism than the segregated housing system that has long persisted in virtually every metropolitan area in the U.S. Consistent with other housing policy presented by the Trump administration, HUD is planning to further entrench policy in the past. HUD has proposed a new “affirmatively furthering fair housing” rule that would make it far more difficult for the agency or any other fair housing group to combat persisting patterns of discrimination and segregation in the nation’s housing markets.

The Fair Housing Act passed in 1968 requires recipients of federal housing and community development funds to take action that will identify the causes and consequences of discrimination and segregation in the nation’s housing markets and create the “truly balanced and integrated living patterns” that Walter Mondale, co-sponsor of the 1968 act, called for on the Senate floor. In other words, they are to affirmatively further fair housing.

But this obligation was virtually ignored before the Obama administration issued a rule in 2015 that provided clarity and muscle for compliance and enforcement. Key provisions included requiring recipients of federal funds to conduct a fair housing assessment to identify policies and practices that led to discriminatory and segregated outcomes, and then to implement programs that would not duplicate, but eradicate those outcomes. Local participation in the formulation and implementation of those plans was a key component of the 2015 rule.

In January 2018 HUD suspended this rule. In January of 2020 the agency issued a proposed rule that eliminates the affirmative planning and local participation requirements along with several other regulations in an effort to provide “clearer guidance to states and local governments to help them improve affordable housing choices in their community.”

“Housing choice” is the new mantra, and the reversal in policy is aptly captured by the change HUD proposes for its definition of AFFH. HUD currently defines AFFH as “taking meaningful actions that, taken together, address significant disparities in housing needs and in access to opportunity replacing segregated living patterns with truly integrated and balanced living patterns, transforming racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity, and fostering and maintaining compliance with civil rights and fair housing laws.” HUD now proposes a very simple definition of “advancing fair housing choice within the program participant’s control or influence.”

The proposed rule makes repeated reference to three primary goals, which are to increase the supply of affordable housing, enhance access to that housing, and improve housing conditions.

But affordable housing does not automatically translate into fair housing. Segregation results from a variety of practices and not just income differences across different groups. Steering by real estate agents, redlining by mortgage lenders and home insurance companies, discriminatory appraisals, and refusing to rent to families with housing vouchers are just some of the practices that perpetuate segregation. These practices can be identified by the fair housing assessments required under the previous rule. Increasing the supply of affordable housing will not make them go away.

The proposed rule calls for collection of data on a variety of housing characteristics including median home value and rent, cost burden, share of units lacking plumbing and kitchen facilities, vacancy rates, frequency of lead-based paints and poisoning, availability of housing accepting housing choice vouchers, and availability of housing accessible to persons with disabilities. However, no data collection with regard to racial or ethnic disparities will be required for these factors or in terms of treatment by real estate agents or mortgage lenders, proximity to good schools, or access to any other neighborhood amenities.

And yet, a wide range of disparity persists in today’s housing markets. Paired testing by a variety of public and private organizations has consistently demonstrated that when equally qualified white and non-white home seekers (families with similar incomes and wealth as well as housing preferences) visit real estate or rental agents they are often treated differently. The most recent national housing discrimination study conducted by the Urban Institute for HUD in 2012 found that in one out of every eight visits white home seekers were told about and shown more homes than were non-whites. In November 2019, Newsday reported on its three-year investigation revealing that almost half of all African American, 39 percent of Latino, and 19 percent of Asian home seekers encountered a range of discriminatory practices in their efforts to find housing on Long Island. A 2015 investigation by Rutgers University public policy professor Paul Jargowsky for The Century Foundation concluded that poor Black Americans were three times more likely to live in a poor neighborhood than poor white Americans. Yet as Solomon Greene of the Urban Institute and Shamus Roller of the National Law Project noted, HUD’s proposed new rule does not even mention racial segregation or racially concentrated areas of poverty—which the Fair Housing Act was designed to address.

HUD should unsuspend the 2015 rule, which, as the Poverty & Race Research Action Council concluded, “provided clarity and real teeth to the mandate and established a new robust framework for fair housing planning (the Assessment of Fair Housing) that yielded promising results from its early rollout.”

As for the proposed rule, HUD should simply drop it. That would advance the agency’s efforts to fulfill its mandate to dismantle the structure of housing discrimination, make fair housing a reality, and lead to the balanced living patterns envisioned when the Fair Housing Act was passed.

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Gregory D. Squires is a Professor of Sociology, and Public Policy & Public Administration at George Washington University. Currently he is a member of the Advisory Board of the John Marshall Law School Fair Housing Legal Support Center in Chicago, Illinois, the Fair Housing Task Force of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the Social Science Advisory Board of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, D.C. He has served as a consultant for civil rights organizations around the country and as a member of the Federal Reserve Board’s Consumer Advisory Council. He has written for several academic journals and general interest publications including Housing Policy Debate, Urban Studies, Social Science Quarterly, Social Problems, New York Times, and Washington Post. His recent books include Meltdown: The Financial Crisis, Consumer Protection, and the Road Forward (with Larry Kirsch – Praeger, 2017) and his edited book The Fight for Fair Housing Causes, Consequences and Future Implications of the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act (Routledge, 2018).

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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.

Perspectives on Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Reform

An HOLC security map of Philadelphia showing redlining of minority neighborhoods. HOLC maps are part of the Records of the FHLBB (RG195) at the National Archives II. Image attributed to the United States Federal Government [Public domain].

This month, we're sharing perspectives on Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) reform and what it could mean for our communities.

In December, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) & the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) proposed significant changes to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), originally enacted in 1977 to combat the legacy of redlining and hold financial institutions accountable to serving the credit and banking needs of low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

As the banking industry has evolved over past decades, community members and professionals have spoken out about a need for revisions to CRA regulation that account for new realities, including the world of online banking. Many are also concerned, however, that the OCC and FDIC's proposed changes could weaken requirements for banks to invest in local neighborhoods. This list of articles includes perspectives from a variety of different voices exploring the issue of CRA reform and the latest proposed changes. Comments on the proposed ruling are being accepted through April 8.

Perspectives on Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Reform

A Tale of Two Community Reinvestment Act Proposals
Oscar Perry Abello, Next City

Fed Has to Pitch In on CRA Makeover
Faith Bautista and Steven Sugarman, National Diversity Coalition

Strengthening the Community Reinvestment Act by Staying True to Its Core Purpose
Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard

Inviting a Return to Discrimination
Charlene Crowell, Center for Responsible Lending

By Staying on Sidelines, the Fed is Protecting CRA
Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, California Reinvestment Coalition

Statement - Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Community Reinvestment Act Regulations
Martin J. Gruenberg, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)

Initial NCRC Analysis Of The FDIC And OCC Notice Of Proposed Rulemaking Concerning The Community Reinvestment Act
National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC)

A Community Reinvestment Act That Works for Everyone
Comptroller Joseph Otting, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

The Fight Over CRA Reform Just Got More Complicated
Karen Petrou, Federal Financial Analytics

New Penn Institute CRA Research Compendium Suggests Incremental Change Is Best Path For CRA Reform
Josh Silver, National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC)

Editorial: Proposed Banking Changes Could Starve Investment Where it's Needed Most
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board

Don’t Overhaul CRA Just For the Sake Of It
and Give CRA Reform Credit Where It's Due
Kenneth H. Thomas, Community Development Fund Advisors

Protecting the Community Reinvestment Act Is an Investment in Economic Justice
Jaime Weisberg, Association of Neighborhood & Housing Development (ANHD)

Redlining Would Be Relegalized by CRA Reform Proposal
Frank Woodruff, National Alliance of Community Economic Development Associations (NACEDA)

Jimmy Carter signs the Housing and Community Development Act. From the National Archives and Records Administration. Image attributed to the United States Federal Government [Public domain].

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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.

The Opposite of Deficit-Based Language Isn’t Asset-Based Language. It’s Truth-Telling.

Miriam Axel-Lute, Editor, Shelterforce and Associate Director, National Housing Institute

This column was originally published in Shelterforce.

How do you describe the people you work for and with, or the neighborhoods you work in? Do you use primarily “deficit-based” language like “distressed,” “at-risk,” “vulnerable,” “blighted,” “high crime,” “concentrated poverty”? If so, you’re in good company—terms like this are ubiquitous throughout the field (including in Shelterforce).

It was more than 20 years ago that John Kretzman and John McKnight introduced the idea of asset-based community development, which encouraged community developers to try to counteract these kinds of narratives by identifying the strengths of the places they are working—social networks, history, small businesses, the talents of the people living there—as the starting place for shaping programs. The idea, and tools it spawned, like asset mapping, have definitely become an important approach throughout the field. But deficit-based language, especially in communications and calls to action, remains.

This can be a problem for multiple reasons, as panelists discussed in some detail in the conversation, “Asset-Based Language: How to Avoid the Rescue Syndrome in Our Communications” at the 2019 Opportunity Finance Network conference in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 21. Emphasizing only negative statistics and disparities tends to “other” the people and places involved—it defines them by their worst characteristics, which no one wants to do, as moderator Katie Coleman from IFF pointed out humorously by asking everyone in the room to introduce themselves to their neighbors using their worst trait.

Deficit-based language also risks reinforcing some of the same negative stereotypes and perceptions that the organizations using the language are actually fighting against, said Mackenzie Price from Frameworks Institute. It can communicate the idea that these are inherent characteristics and not the result of circumstances. It can also contribute to a dynamic where people and places are treated less as partners in a given program or campaign and more like objects of charity. “We end up seeing ourselves as helpers, not partners,” said Jennifer Oldham of The Healing Trust.

These are all very solid arguments, and very legitimate critiques of a nonprofit culture that really does struggle with operating from a position of solidarity rather than charity. Taking the time to lift and celebrate the communities, histories, networks, institutions, creativity, spirit, and strengths of neighborhoods that have long been screwed over and deserve solidarity and reparation is an extremely worthwhile endeavor.

Take for example, the way CityLab’s Brentin Mock describes poet Hanif Abdurraqib’s approach in the New York Times feature “American Road Trip”:

“Abdurraqib introduces and frames each city he visited by how the black people among them are living, in terms of both beauty and struggle. The problems and disparities are present in Abdurraqib’s narrative—gentrification, economic deprivation, disaster, poor protection of queer and trans black folks. But they are carefully couched in tales that speak more to how black people are engaging with and enjoying each other, despite those problems.”

Going Beyond Asset-Based Language

Nonetheless, I was a little skeptical of the framing of this session going in. I wasn’t sure if “asset-based” language was the answer to these problems. Some of the classic examples I’ve seen both didn’t solve the narrative problems and introduced their own. For example, flipping the phrase “at-risk youth” to the phrase “youth eager to learn” in a mission statement is so vague, it’s in danger of being meaningless. Yes, the youth an after-school program works with are absolutely eager to learn and should be honored as such, but so are lots of other kids. Programs that aren’t precise about who they are trying to reach tend to miss their mark in serving the populations who have more obstacles to access.

Perhaps even more importantly, though, using exclusively positive language can have similar kinds of problems with feeding into the “bootstraps” narrative as deficit-based language does—if everything is so great, what’s the problem? Why are we putting resources there? If we don’t name the harm that has been done and assign responsibility, are we really undoing the perception that populations and neighborhoods in trouble brought it on themselves?

General relentless positivity culture has been called out as unhealthy and unhelpful to social justice work, and for good reason.

I was extremely heartened, therefore, to find that the panelists were actually advocating for something much more subtle and powerful than merely using only positive language. They did want us to not lead with negatives when introducing a group of people or a place, and to include those asset-framed stories, which I’m completely on board with, but they weren’t suggesting we pretend there aren’t problems. Their presentation also included a lot of useful communications suggestions about making problems feel solvable and leading with shared values, such as everyone likes to help people achieve their potential. (For more of this sort of thing, see Frameworks Institute.)

However, one particularly part of the approach that the panelists were presenting stood out and seemed to largely resolve the tension I was feeling. And that was their principle “Focus on systems.”

The way to avoid the problem of having the struggles of individual people or places represent something inherent and immutable is to explicitly point out the systems at work—past and present—that cause them. If you’re talking about a problem, use language that reflects that systematic disparities and communitywide problems in fact have systemic causes, that harm has been done, and that these are not self-caused problems, and explicitly describe those systems whenever possible.

“Talk about what the factors are going into the issue,” said Price. “How did we get here? Stats alone don’t tell people why you are sharing that statistic. Don’t forget why you are telling the story.”

She added that when leading with values, we should emphasize values that uphold collective responsibility for solving collective problems. In Frameworks’ work with Enterprise on affordable housing communications, for example, these values included regional interdependence and fairness across places.

“When we focus on the individual,” agreed Ilsa Flanagan of Social Change Strategies, “it’s easy for people to say ‘Why can’t everyone do that?’ Success stories can promote the fallacy of rugged individualism.” Even if you are telling a success story, Flanagan said, take time to spell out the many supports that were required to overcome system-caused obstacles and challenges, and talk about why not everyone can access them.

In fact, when I brought up the question of naming the harm done, Oldham agreed we should, and said that the antidote to blaming the victim was in fact “telling the whole truth.” “Be more specific,” she said. “Yes, it’s more words. Give yourself that space.”

I think this is an extremely important point. It won’t always be easy—we default to commonly understood shorthand for a reason, and I can’t say that I know exactly how to elegantly and succinctly change that in everyday writing. But it’s a goal worth tackling.

Let’s not define people and places by their deficits. But let’s also commit to telling the truth about how those deficits got there.

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Miriam Axel-Lute is editor of Shelterforce and associate director of the National Housing Institute. She lives in Albany, New York, where she serves on the Community Development Alliance board.

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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.

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