Stories and News
The proposed St. Louis Housing Report Card, modeled after the successful New Orleans Housing Report Card, will evaluate the current affordable housing need and allow advocates to reassess whether the region is actually making progress toward meeting our affordable housing needs.
The AHTF Coalition is currently looking for equity-minded data researchers to help them create our Housing Report Card! Submit a proposal by July 10 at 5pm.
The scope of Black Lives Matter is undeniably vast, but the meaning behind the movement is far more powerful. Black Lives Matter is not a new concept, but the ubiquitous call for change that can be heard around the globe is truly indicative of the immediate need for that change. If you don’t currently acknowledge or celebrate Juneteenth, now is as good a time as any to consider doing so.
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.
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.
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?
Florence in January 2020
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.
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.
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.
![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].](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holc_redlining_1937.jpeg)
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].
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.
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].](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jimmy_Carter_signs_the_Housing_and_Community_Development_Act._-_NARA_-_176470.jpg)
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.
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.”
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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