Transcript
Sessions:
Introduction and Opening Remarks
Panel #1: Perspectives on Locally Based Community Development
Panel #2: Passing the Torch: The Next Generation of Urban Problem Solvers
Luncheon Discussion: A Conversation on Solving the Urban Crisis
Panel #3: Global Approaches to Fighting the Urban Crisis
J. Lander:
I would now like to introduce to you E.J. Dionne, who is a senior fellow here in the Brookings Institution. And E.J. describes himself at our Friday lunch as the Maitre d' of the lunch table. But, he is a columnist as well for the Washington Post, and syndicated. But more than that, he has a doctorate in sociology, and is a real scholar who has a very, very strong interest in civil society and in faith-based organizations. In fact, he had a wonderful conference last week on teen pregnancy prevention programs run by faith-based organizations. E.J. will preside over our discussion now.
E.J. Dionne: Thank you very much.
I always like it when someone says my degree is in sociology because I can tell the story of a friend of mine who was an economist who referred contemptuously to sociology as the dentistry of the social sciences. And he was very embarrassed when I looked at him and said, my dad was a dentist, which was true. He never said that again.
It's a great honor to be here because, as all of you know, Joyce Ladner not only knows about these problems that we're talking about better than anyone else, but cares more. And she's very gifted at fusing moral commitment and practical action, far-reaching goals and immediate results. She's very impatient about that, which is a very good thing.
I also think we should give a hand to Bob Margolis, who helped put this all together, and has been worrying all around the edges. And he's worried this conference to success.
I was watching some of this morning, and it was very, very moving. Some of the presentations were very moving, and also very heartening. My friend Tom Mann, who runs the Governmental Studies Program said that, you know, people always say, well, these problems are insoluble, and they use that as an excuse to walk away. And what Joyce has shown is, there are a lot of people out there who are actually solving these problems. So, if she gets that message out enough, people won't have the freedom to walk away anymore, and I think that would be a very good thing.
It's great honor to be here to moderate the session with these two guys. As everybody knows them, knows about their work, what they have in common is an innovative approach to urban problems, and great success in getting people to look at problems form a different angle.
Bob Woodson, as you know, is the founder and president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. It's a nonprofit group. And he has focused on strengthening neighborhood organizations, strengthening entrepreneurship in the inner city, and I think that's another thing that he and Bruce have in common, which they're both very interested in what's happening on the ground, and figuring out ways to strengthen neighborhoods.
Bruce has been, if Bob has gotten us to look at problems on the neighborhood level, Bruce has succeed, I think, in very substantially altering the national debate about metropolitan areas, and to have us look at inequalities within metropolitan areas, and how, in order to strengthen those local communities, we may have to go up a level to see what happens at the metropolitan level.
He is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. And the more I listen to him, the more I realize I am a Katzite on many of these questions, and I'm proud to be.
What I'm hoping, is that we will have a civil conversation. But I am also hoping for a real argument, not a crossfire argument, not pugilism, although that would make the event interesting, but a serious discussion about not only what you guys have in common, but also about how you're approaching these problems in a different way. And I'm hoping the audience will join in this discussion.
I'm going to ask Bruce to speak first, and Mr. Woodson, at his request, will go second. That way he can contradict everything that Bruce said, I think that's why he wants to go second.
It's a great honor to introduce Bruce Katz.
B. Katz: My grandfather was a dentist. So, this notion that sociology is the dentistry of the social sciences is greatly offensive to me. And I'm a lawyer by training, which is probably the plumbing of the social sciences, one rung below dentistry.
I'll talk sort of briefly and try to put into context, I think, some of the incredible work that the people in this room are doing in America's neighborhoods. I was chief of staff to Henry Cisneros, and left HUD about two-and-a-quarter years ago to start the Urban Center here, with its principal mission to focus on some of the larger demographic and market and government trends that are affecting cities and urban neighborhoods, and the metropolitan areas in which they're located.
And, I think after traveling around the country and talking with a whole bunch of different folks from different walks of life, I think at the end of two years, I come to sort of a sobering conclusion about where America's cities are at the end of '90s, which sort of is the end of an incredible period of economic prosperity.
But if you just look at the sort of structural indicators, and structural trends, I think you'd have to really come to the conclusion, despite all the popular media about cities are coming back, which usually are written about stadia here, or a convention center expansion there, that the decentralization of economic and residential life, the sprawling of metropolitan areas in the United States is really the dominant trend in this country, and really seems to have picked up speed and almost frenzy during the '90s.
And the cities, particularly in the Northeast and the Midwest, continue to lose population, particularly middle class population, as their metropolitan areas grow. People talk about Baltimore as a renaissance city. Baltimore has lost more people this decade than they lost last decade as places like Anne Arundel and Howard and Harford become really the population growth centers of Maryland. Philadelphia has lost more people this decade than last decade. St. Louis is the same. Washington, D.C., has lost about 70,000 people this decade, while we look at Loudoun becoming really the sort of Fairfax of the future, with the high-tech growth sector being based out there. As population goes, so does jobs.
This city had about a third of the region's jobs in 1990, just eight-nine years ago. And the outer beltway suburbs had about 38 percent of the jobs in this region. You fast-forward eight years, and the outer beltway suburbs have 50 percent of the jobs, and the District of Columbia has 24 percent of the jobs in the region, two to one. And I think the nature of jobs is changing. I think more and more the outer suburban areas are the place here the high benefit, high wage, new economy jobs are being located, and the cities, you know, with so much focus on entertainment and culture, are becoming places where the job mix is changing.
Poverty is concentrating back in the central city as middle class households leave, as jobs, particularly good jobs decentralize. Poverty is concentrating, that is a racial phenomenon. If you're white and you're poor, you tend to live disbursed throughout metropolitan areas. The only pockets of white pockets we tend to find are in rural America. But if you're African American and you're poor, you're as likely as not to live in a neighborhood of high poverty, where the poverty rate is 40 percent or more, and you can correlate any kind of indicator you want to correlate, whether it's school performance, or crime, or family fragmentation, or substance abuse, you can correlate that pretty directly with these neighborhoods of hyper-poverty.
And it's not any surprise that welfare reform, the one place where welfare reform really has not seemed to be succeeding, if caseload reduction is our sort of measure of success, which has its own problems, but the cities are lagging behind, particularly in the Northeast and the Midwest, in terms of moving people off of welfare to work. Baltimore has 13 percent of Maryland's population, and it has 56 percent of the welfare caseloads. Philly is 12 percent of Pennsylvania's population, it has 48 percent of the welfare caseloads. Welfare reform is going to succeed or fail in the cities of America. And yet, we haven't really had that kind of focus, either nationally or at the state.
Now, what I see happening with these trends, and you could have stood here 10 years ago, and the story would have been a little different, but it still would have been a story of some real sense of urban distress and crisis. I think the difference in the '90s is, for the first time in a long time, we're beginning to understand that the suburbs are not monolithic, and that many suburban jurisdictions, particularly inner suburban jurisdictions, are beginning to look more and more like central cities, with growing school poverty, and declining fiscal capacity, and decentralizing jobs, and loss of population.
And then many of the outer suburbs, you think of a Prince William, you know, 35 minutes out from here, many of the outer suburbs in the United States, even though we think of them as, that's the place where the growth is so centered, are growing really without a strong commercial and industrial base, and without the fiscal capacity necessary to support the new infrastructure, and particularly schools for the growing number of children.
I think one thing we need to focus on going forward in terms of urban policy in this country is lifting it out of what David Rusk calls the inside gate. You know, all these kind of interventions, whether they're systemic, whether they're micro, that really take the borders of a city as a given, and basically stop at the borders and say, well, we're going to intervene on the corpus within these parameters. I think we need to think particularly as the suburbs become the dominant power in state legislatures, and within the Congress, we need to think about cross-jurisdictional and cross-disciplinary coalitions between cities and inner suburbs, between cities and older suburbs, around not only a new metropolitan agenda, but around a new urban agenda.
And I think that agenda really has a number of key points. One is the change fundamentally, the rules of the development game. I mean, these growth patterns in the United States, where the cities continue, where the poor continues to decline, as the hyper-growth is at the urban fringe, these growth patterns are not inevitable. They're not just the market restructuring. They have not just consumer preference, everyone looking for the bigger house with the bigger lot. They very much are a product of a series of federal and state policies, whether it's spending policies like transportation, or tax expenditures, like the home mortgage deduction, or regulatory policies, like environmental policies at the federal level, or land use, or the absence of land use at the state level. These policies facilitate the out migration of people, jobs and wealth. They make your job much more difficult to do, because they basically are allowing the rules of the development game to dictate that going forward we will build new, we will build out, we will abandon the older cores, and we will abandon the places with the built environment.
So, I think one of the key components going forward for an urban policy is to strike a new sense of coalitions between central cities and the suburban. Those jurisdictions in the suburbs that share common ground with the cities on some fundamental issues about how metropolitan areas can grow. You know, I think this region, and I see Hattie Dorsey from Atlanta, I think this region, like Atlanta, like many others, are growing in fundamentally polarized ways. They're stratified by class. They're stratified by race. They're stratified by ethnicity. You could draw a line right down 16th Street in Washington, D.C. You can draw it up into Montgomery County, you can draw it down into Arlington into Fairfax. If you go to the east, that's where you'll find African American, not just the poor, but the middle class. If you go to the west, that's where you're going to find the wealth. That's where you're going to find the new economy. That's where you're going to find the high tech. In Atlanta, it's the northern suburbs versus the southern suburbs. In Chicago, it's the northeast suburbs versus the southern suburbs.
And I think we are growing in ways that are fundamentally unsustainable from a fiscal perspective, from an environment perspective, and particularly from a social perspective. And I was very interested in hearing these conversations about the world "disconnect," because I think America is growing in ways where we are fundamentally disconnected from each other. Cities are disconnected from suburbs, different classes disconnected from each other, and so forth.
So, one thing I am beginning to advocate for, I guess I shouldn't use the word "advocate" because we're at Brookings. We are disseminating information to really focus on a sort of more robust and muscular urban policy, which of course has to include some of the elements of fixing the basics, fixing our schools, dealing with crime, rebuilding our local urban economies, building on competitive assets, extending neighborhood networks. But I think also needs to focus on fundamentally changing the rules of the development game, and fundamentally altering the politics of how cities interact with suburbs, both within the regions, within their states, and ultimately at the national level.
I think we are way past time where we can have sort of neighborhood only policies, or city only policies, and see the success. The types of statistics and the types of indicators, the types of structural trends that we're talking about, I think, are too deep, and too embedded. And, I think, undermine and eviscerate the work of so much of the community based movement that I think for folks in this room as well as many other central city constituencies, I think we need to lift the urban conversation way beyond the neighborhood to the metropolitan scale, and really focus on new politics and new policies.
Thank you.
[Applause]
E.J. Dionne: Thank you, Bruce.
I'm glad to call on our next information disseminator, Robert Woodson. I just want to note that one thing I didn't mention among his many achievements is, he's got a master's in social work from the University of Pennsylvania. So, those of you who say that the term conservative social worker is an oxymoron have never met Bob Woodson.
It's a great honor to have you.
R. Woodson: I'm a reconstructed social worker.
There's an expression that says, if you want to go some place you haven't been, you've got to do something you haven't done. And so, I consider myself a radical pragmatist. Someone said that you praise Allah, but first tie your camel to a post.
So, my presentation will be of that nature. That is practical. And I believe that for years we've believed that social injustice, racism and economic disparity explained the social explosion and spiral decline of our nation's inner cities. And on that assumption, we have targeted program to these issues. We've spent over $5 trillion programs to aid the poor. We have black and Hispanic people running many of the major cities and the institutions.
Washington, D.C., is a laboratory for failure of social policy. When this city leads the nation in 21 separate indicators of poverty programs, we lead the nation. And yet, we cannot confront this nagging question, why in the face of these huge expenditures, where we've had had black political control, where the black community here has the highest median income of anyplace in the nation. That it also coexists with the fact that a black child born in this city has a lower life expectancy than any child born anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, second only to Haiti.
If our conventional approaches were effective, then why do we have these phenomena coexisting in this city? One of the reasons that I believe it exists is because we're working on an incorrect paradigm. Urban renewal, and many of the Great Society programs have done more to devastate these communities than the Klan or the Night Riders of the KKK could possibly accomplish, not only in Washington throughout this nation.
For example, in the Southwest section here along Maine Street, that used to be occupied by lower and moderate income black folks, there was a massive movement of people from this community, where we replaced it with upper and middle income housing. The city gave generous tax exemptions to those businesses that occupy Maine Avenue. We took public money, built the parking lots, built the boat marina. Said to those businesses, in the course of a 30 year, a lease was signed in 1965 to all those businesses along the waterfront, that allowed them to lease that property at a cost less than $100,000 per year. And a clause in the lease enabled the city to sell the owners of the property the land at the 1965 price, which just took place in 1995.
The same took place in the Ninth Street corridor when we built—and what did we do with all those poor black folks? We shoved them up on Alabama Avenue with public housing, or they went out, they were better off, went to P.G. County, no services, no commercial development, nothing. The same is true with Durham, North Carolina. That was the black Wall Street of America. And throughout the 10 years of the Depression, not a single one of the 100 businesses in that city went under. But, yet in the under two years of urban renewal, 100 business were bulldozed, 600 residential properties, and 75 acres or property was flattened, with the promise that we would rebuild. Only 25 percent, or 25 acres has been rebuild. That's the same with Overtown in Atlanta, where it used house the Harvard and the Calvert Hotel, a rich legacy of black entrepreneurship was sacrificed on the alter of urban renewal in the name of poverty programs.
And we wonder why we're in this sad state of affairs, where there's a huge bifurcation in the black community today, with black families with incomes between $35,000 and $50,000 doubled in 20 years, black families with incomes of in excess of $75,000 went up 300 percent, while black families with incomes below $15,000 expanded 150 percent. Same social forces operating. Why is it that one group prospers where the other group suffers? There is something wrong with this picture.
I believe that while policymakers focus on technical and economic issues, the fact remains that urban decline or restoration is also an event in the autobiography of urban residents. That we must take some of the same principles that operate and drive our market economy, and apply them to the social economy. We know that 80 percent of the jobs are created by small businesses, not the Fortune 500. And that it is the commercial entrepreneur that drives our economy, someone with a good idea comes together with capital and management, and then takes that idea to scale, and eventually we have a corporation that is formed that hires thousands of people, that helps to pay taxes.
If you look around the nation at the various ethnic groups and their economic profile, a healthy community generates about 2.5 businesses per thousand people per year. The black community generates about 3 businesses per 100,000 per year, and the Hispanic community a little more. So for us to continue to emphasize in our social policy social justice, and race policies is missing the boat. Yes, racial discrimination—let me do my compulsories now, so we can dismiss this criticism. As a veteran of the civil rights movement, having gone to jail, racial discrimination is a problem and will continue to be, and we must address it. It is not the most crucial problem. On the very day that the brother was blown apart by these police officers, we lost six young kids in Washington, D.C., on that same weekend. But, yet it did not generate the kind of outpouring or protest. Evil has to have a black face—a white face in order for us to get all animated about it. If it has a black face, we're silent about it, which we are making therefore a heavy statement about what we think and believe about black life.
And if we are to develop a change, this has to change. We have to focus on the problems in terms of this whole magnitude that exists. Okay. What should we do? First of all, the restoration of a community has to be based upon the establishment of civic health, and a prerequisite for civic health is the establishment of social order. Social order cannot be done by having a regional plan. It has—it is a retail endeavor. You've got to begin neighborhood by neighborhood.
So that's why in our work at the National center, what we do is we go around the country and try to look for the social entrepreneurs. We look in low income neighborhoods, and try to find the people who are not dropping out of school, in jail, in drugs, and ask ourselves, how these experts are able to thrive in the presence of despair, and what is it that explains their success? How can we as venture capitalists insinuate into these communities capital, but also management, and insinuate them in such a way that it doesn't smother the entrepreneurial event, nor does it starve the entrepreneurial event. That's a policy challenge. How do we insinuate money, technical support to these neighborhood organizations that have demonstrated that they can change the values of young people who are gang banging, who are drugging, women who are prostitutes, men who are prostitutes?
The way that the neighborhood organizations who are not only salvaging their own families, but are able through faith, it is faith in God, not faith in the chair, not faith in the leaf. Most of the groups that we have found that are effective in transforming some of the most desperate pathogenic people in our society do so because many of them have walked those same paths. Their lives have been transformed. It is not therapeutic intervention that works. I can tell you that. Therapeutic intervention has nothing to say to somebody who is a drug addict, or selling their child to a pedophile to buy crack. No psychologist or analyst can solve that problem. That is a morally spiritual crisis, because you've got to understand that a rational problem has to have a rational remedy.
That's why we're getting ready to spent $100 million on drug education, as if drug addiction is a rational phenomena. If it were rational we wouldn't have Ph.D.s from Harvard, pharmacologists or chemist drug addicts. Theirs is not a lack of information. We wouldn't have people like River Phoenix, Paul Newman's son, all these other folks who are rich and famous drug addicts. We would not have kids in the suburban schools, Fairfax and others, blowing their brains on drugs. This is not a crisis of families, this is not a crisis of economic or race, or political injustice, this is a morally spiritual crisis.
And therefore, America is in a morally spiritual free fall that takes expression by the kind of violence that we witnessed in Colorado, but it also takes expression by drive-bys in the inner city. They are different pages of the same book. And therefore, what must we do to solve the problem? A, we've got to understand, as I said, that if a problem is irrational, which that is, the solution has to be irrational. And belief in God is irrational. It doesn't make any sense. But, it works. And therefore, it seems to me that: a) we've got to reach out to these neighborhoods as we have done in Benning Terrace in Southeast Washington by engaging people that already have the trust and confidence of the kids, people that have already made an investment in there. You don't have to create trust, you have to find people who already have established trust. Provide the money for them to quit their jobs washing cars. Capture them when they've come out of prison. Employ them as providers of service to the young people. And then provide jobs, as David Gilmore, the housing receiver did. We have 178 young people who were gang banging and selling drugs, employed now, and now they are buying homes, they are also—we've exported that model to Park Morton. It's being exported to Dallas with the same results. There are thousands of people that have the confidence and trust of the people who are tearing these neighborhoods up. What they lack are the money, the technical skills, and the resources to build the kind of social infrastructure in those communities so that we can begin to revitalize.
Let me end with some examples of where this juncture has taken place. And I think it's Prosaic [sp] or some other place in New Jersey, my friend, my counterpart in Philadelphia, worked with a Pathmart, they're like Giant's supermarket. There was not a single food store within a five mile radius of this community, because of crime and disorganization. So what he did was say to the Pathmart, I can take you to an institution, a black church, that has ex-drug addicts and people with hearts they have transformed. Why don't we bring you into partnership with them, and let them select all of your personnel to work in your store, because the reason stores don't function in those neighborhoods is because of crime and employee pilferage.
Well, to make a long story short, they partnered, there is no employee pilferage, highest performance rate, no crime around the store. And as a consequence, they have been able to perform better than any of the Pathmart stores in the wealthy suburban communities, because of the density of our population, we use those stores more. And as a consequence, people like Floyd Flake, that has taken the church as an institution, and purchased—set up his own school, commercial strips have been reclaimed, hundreds of homes have been built, but they have been able to take people who's hearts have been reclaimed through the power of God, and trained them and put them in building the houses, building the commercial strips. So that the church is the fourth largest employer in Queens.
There are models like this throughout this nation, where individuals have been reclaimed. They in turn have reclaimed communities, and then we take these reclaimed entities, marry them to the economic realities of these neighborhoods, and then these individuals should tell you what social policies are in place that would help expand on what they have already established. But, they ought to be driven by concrete and specific outcomes, and we ought to be making investments in, and learning from. It's fascinating that in all of our experience throughout this city, of reclaiming the lives of troubled young people, not a single scholar from any other institutes have come to ask us, how did you do it, can we study this success, what is it that we can learn that can inform public policy. Not a single one. And the question is, why?
Let me just conclude, when people keep asking, well, Bob, what is—where is the data. Okay. We'll we're working with some researchers at Howard University. We have documented that not only are we saving lives, but doing so at reduced public cost. The housing receivers office here has saved $13 million alone in this one community. And we're taking this throughout the community. But, how do you know it works? Well, my daughter Tanya who has accompanied me here this morning, who is 15, she's too young to worry about whether someone tells you how old she is, but when she was 13 years old, she will tell you that I took her and my 16 year old son to spend a week with Pastor Freddie Garcia in a faith based drug and alcohol treatment program in San Antonio, Texas.
And about three days into the trip Garcia turned to us and said, to two of these ladies, I want you to take Tanya and my three granddaughters out to the amusement park, to dinner, and swimming, and bring them back by 9:00 tonight. And as they walked out the door, he said, Bob, relax, relax, they're ex-drug addicts and ex-prostitutes. The kids will be just fine. How many psychiatrists or social workers, or psychologists would take people that they announce are cured, take their keys, turn it over to them, and say take my daughter out. When people who are social activists, or social policy advocates can develop solutions that can withstand the personal test of voracity, by taking their keys and turning them over to someone that you announce is cured, and letting them take them out the door and get in your car, then we ought to take you seriously. I don't need any other data source to know whether or not the approach that they are taking is correct.
You ought to support it, not because of the theological input, but for the secular outcomes. Secular outcomes is what we ought to be supporting in public policy, it ought to attract the money, and they are the source of new solutions to the problems of urban decline.
Thank you.
[Applause]
E.J. Dionne: Thank you, Bob, very much. By the way, if anybody wonders why I sat here, it's because I thought people would have a higher opinion of me if they thought I was Lisa Sullivan. So I'm very glad to be sitting here.
Bob I think showed us that while he was at social work school he snuck off and learned a lot at divinity school, somewhere along the line. I really appreciate that. I want people in the audience to join this discussion, have either questions or arguments with the speakers.
I'd like to kick it off by asking each of them a question. I'd like to ask Bruce if he could answer one of Bob Woodson's basic points. Has government been as unsuccessful as Bob suggests and, if so, what can be done about it, and how do rely upon it?
And I'd like to ask Bob Woodson, the pattern of disinvestment and dislocation that he describes in D.C., which he accurately describes, is repeated in big cities all across America, and might that not be the result of a failure of government, but rather the result of the workings of a larger economy which, after all, in the end is much bigger than government in its economic impact?
Bruce, if you could take the first one.
Bob, you could take the second.
And then I want people in the audience to be thinking up their challenges for these folks.
B. Katz: I think, particularly when I was working for Henry Cisneros, there was a clear sense, from our perspective, that many government interventions from the federal level, let's talk federal first, and then we'll talk about local, had in some ways exacerbated the problem. I mean, we've had a housing policy in this country for a good many years that basically said, let's subsidize affordable housing for very low income families back within the core of central cities and to a lesser extent inner suburbs, and let's have our wealth creating subsidies, basically the home ownership deduction, and other tax expenditures, move with households who principally earn $40,000 or more a year. And so, what we have is this incredible polarization of where government funding goes.
We have dependency subsidies, to some extent, going back towards the core. We have wealth creating subsidies going out towards the fringe. I mean, that's what government has basically done. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars.
And in terms of what the feds in the past number of years have focused on, with a few minor exceptions, the feds have tended to focus on sort of micro-interventions, micro-urban policies, whether it's empowerment zones, or brownfields, or some of these other, even public housing redevelopment, to some extent. Whereas, the systemic effect of many of our federal program is to really facilitate the concentration of poverty on one hand, and the out migration of jobs, people and wealth on the other.
But, I don't disagree with a lot of what Bob is saying. And I think the problem we have in urban policy is always an either/or conversation. People come in and say, I'm for X, I'm for Y, I'm for Z. That is why urban politics have been so diminished in this country. We have vulcanized and fragmented ourselves. We're the welfare bureaucracy. No, we're the housing folks. No, we're the job interest. No, we're the economic development folks. No, we're the environmentalists. We have so vulcanized ourselves, and we have diminished our political power at the state level and at the federal level, it is pathetic. It is pathetic.
And it is time for sort of a reunification of those who care about not just central cities, but also about older communities, both in the inner suburbs, and so forth, to come together in a more holistic, integrated, comprehensive fashion, and not fight each one of these wars separate and apart from each other. So, I think, there needs to be sort of a joining together of those who are focusing on metropolitan solutions, those who are focusing on school reform, and other sort of basic issues of urban governance. Those who are focusing on economic competitiveness, how cities regain their traction in the new economy. Those who are focusing on extending neighborhood networks beyond affordable housing into many of the areas Bob is talking about. That's what has to happen in the coming years, and it has to be secular, and it has to be faith-based, it has to be cross-disciplinary, and it has to be cross-jurisdictional. We have a fundamental dearth of leadership, I think, around urban issues in this country up and down the line.
So, yes, government has been a problem, but to tell you the truth, I think the response to it has also been a problem, in that we have so separated ourselves, and so gone after each separate piece of it, so that we haven't been able to respond in any sort of fundamental way.
R. Woodson: Let me just say, that's why, when I accepted this invitation, it was an invitation for dialogue, because I don't debate anymore. Because when you're in the debate format, you're obliged to disagree with people. And I agree with you.
Let me just say, on my side, where government has been effective. In the '60s, when Kennedy was going around, we had old people in Miami dying with no food in their stomachs. We had kids with—[Inaudible]—government intervention there helped a great deal. We don't see kids starving to death in rural areas. We don't see old people dying with no food in their stomachs. So, government intervention was very effective doing that. So, let me just say that.
The issue is that with government, not just government but the large institutions, provide perverse incentives for maintaining a problem. We've got to change the incentive system. Prior to the 1930s, the care for kids who were abandoned and neglected were with the church. But the church's moral commitment was compatible with the economic interest. It was too expensive to maintain kids in foster care. So, you had an economic incentive to place them in adoption, or with relatives, or back with the families. But when the government intervenes with the purchase of service agreements, where they would only pay for kids if they were away from families, then you had an explosion of kids in foster care where salaries and the whole economic infrastructure was contingent upon having kids away from these institutions.
And, so, there is a case where the other part where government, and not just government, but this whole notion that certification to serve is synonymous with qualification. A lot of my people who have raised kids very successfully in Caprini Green, all of them have gone to college, but they couldn't get licensed to operate a day care center. But you can hate kids and have a master's in early childhood and be certified. So, there's something wrong about that.
And to address the other question, the question that you asked me, I had this discussion with Andy Young, the Mayor of Atlanta, five black mayors on a PBS forum, and I asked them this, they were saying, we'll we're a part of the larger forces. Then explain to me in Atlanta—who's from Atlanta?—the question I asked them was, why does Auburn Avenue look the way it does, and Peachtree Street looks the way it does? Now, they're supposed to be black advocates. So, how could they allow federal monies pouring into the city, the federal government didn't say that you cannot develop Auburn Avenue, no. The bankers bought off a lot of the friends of those politicians to develop on Peachtree Street, making them consultants and what-have-you. So, many of the black middle class were bought off by the developers, so that they worked and feathered their own pockets. That's why you've got this economic bifurcation of the black community. But people don't want to discuss that. That's off the charts.
And one other point about that is that, while we're ready to sanction white police officers who abuse their authority, we're unwilling to challenge black owners of institutions that abuse people under their charge. We won't even engage a dialogue and talk about social sanction against evil. As a person in the civil rights movement, I didn't fight to get white pigs away from the trough to replace them with black pigs. Our enemy is evil. And so, therefore, we need to have a policy dialogue that says, you've got all these poor folks out here suffering, who is causing that suffering and what should be policy sanctions against them for doing that? But as soon as race walks in the room, everything else walks out.
E.J. Dionne: Thank you.
Who would like to ask next?
Participant: I have two questions for Bruce Katz. My name is Eve, and I'm working with Reverend Rivers, and some others in Boston, we're just now, along with William Julius Wilson beginning to talk about some of the metropolitan issues that you raised.
We're doing it from a faith-based perspective, and there seems to be a moral imperative for the suburban church to take up this issue. I'm wondering if you could talk more about what are the incentives to get some of the outer ring suburbs to participate in these conversations? It seems to me that people in the suburbs are secure and tend to feel very removed from what's happening in inner city areas. I can see what's in the interest of inner city groups to do this work, but it's not so clear to me, apart from the moral imperatives I see motivating suburban churches we're working with, what will be the motivating force for the outer ring suburbs?
And my second question for you is, do you see a division developing between inner ring suburbs and the outer ring suburbs, do you see the same dynamic within suburbs that you see between suburbs in general and cities? And if you could talk about that? And practically what some of the groups are doing to address similar issues?
B. Katz: I think there's a sort of a paradigm in American politics, in American life, where we think of the city as a unified whole, you know, declining, which is obviously not the case, cities are very diverse, neighborhoods are very diverse. We think of the suburbs as a unified whole, which is also not the case. And we think of rural America pretty much the same.
We have this sort of mental map of America, city, suburb, rural, which doesn't really make any sense anymore. The suburbs are at least three different kind of places. They are older suburbs, usually built after the war, in the '50s, that are experiencing and have been experiencing for some period of time decline. They're the places where the first malls were built, and the first malls were abandoned, as we continue to march out. They have declining fiscal capacity, their schools have poverty going up. They have much more integration, race, ethnicity, and so forth. They have much more job decline. It's not at the extent of the cities, but they tend to have many of the same characteristics of the cities, sort of high tax, low service kind of suburbs.
As you move out into the suburbs, the suburbs sort of bifurcate. There are suburbs that are really the wealth enclaves of the American economy. I mean, the Fairfaxes and the Loudouns of the world. They are the places that are really capturing the bulk, the preponderance of economic growth, industrial and commercial growth in this country. And because of the way we set our rules, they get 100 percent of the revenue from that growth. They don't have to share any of that growth.
There are other suburbs, however, that are the bedroom suburbs to these places, the Prince Williams of the world, the Fredericks of the world, et cetera and so forth. They're not really experiencing any commercial/industrial growth. They are townhouse suburbs. They're suburbs people go to run away from failing school systems, right, and to go to places where they think their kids can get a decent education and they can live a decent life. But those are the places that have the highest property tax rates in America, because they have to pay for the new infrastructure and the new schools.
Okay. So there is an enormous amount of volatility in suburban America today. There's volatility in the inner suburbs because they're experiencing decline, and they're very angry about it. And there's volatility in the outer suburbs that don't have this commercial/industrial foundation, because they have pocketbook anxiety. They're seeing real high property tax rates go out to Prince William, and you'll find this fairly quickly. But they're also experiencing anxiety of the level of their commute. The decline in the quality of life. The frustration over the loss of open space. And a general sense that they didn't move out there for this kind of business.
Now, that to me is the essential for real live coalitions, coalitions around land use, coalitions around fiscal equity, coalitions around smart growth, where do we put our infrastructure money. It is not inevitable that we build a new bypass from 95 to the Potomac River, that's a political decision. That's a political decision for 10 counties to make as a whole. Well, let me tell you, eight of the 10 counties probably don't win from that decision. So, why would they participate in it, unless they can really see some of the growth and some of the prosperity.
I saw William Julius Wilson last week, and we were talking about these kinds of collaborations. They are not built on consensus, they are built on self-interest. The self-interest of the cities, the self-interest of the inner suburbs, the self-interest of the outer high tax/low service suburbs. They're built on self-interest. And, you know, we all don't need to love each other. We all don't need to have the outer suburbs say, you know, we're in this to save the city. What we need to understand is that the market dynamics which are occurring in metropolitan America have some of their root in government policy. And those government policies need to be changed through new kinds of coalition building.
R. Woodson: There's another quick, not to this, there's an opportunity for cultural exchange, too. It's very interesting that suburban and rural white kids are inner city wannabees. That's they why wear their hats on backwards, they're wearing baggy—you're from Iowa, you've seen people from Iowa, little kids are wearing their hats on backwards, baggy clothes, and buy up all the rap music. We, our kids dub it, so we don't buy it. So, all of the platinums are being driven by the suburban kids who buy them. And that's why they begin—there's a three-year lag when a gang occurs in the inner cities, about a three-year lag until you see these same kind of names cropping up in the suburbs.
If our communities are able to transmit these kind of negative cultural items, then if our young kids that we work with around the country, in Benning Terrace and others, are able to transform themselves, and put down the drug trade for a $7.50 an hour job, it challenges all conventional wisdom. And they're able to stop fighting one another in environments that are very difficult. Could not some of these same kids sit down with kids in Fairfax and have some dialogue about why they have stopped, why aren't they the ones dealing with conflict resolution, instead of some psychologist who has never been punched in the face or shot.
So, I think that when you're talking about a coalition of interests, I think if the parents—
[End of tape 3, side 1]
R. Woodson: [In progress]—those kids out there who are fearful that their children will be becoming Goths and whatnot, because there's a value vacuum in their lives. And if that vacuum can be filled by a relationship with some kids in the inner city, that they respect more than their parents, maybe we can just bring folks together, so then the inner city will have something to export, rather than always being an object of charity and help. And so I just think that's another out of the box kind of remedy we're pursuing.
E.J. Dionne: Belle was next.
I'll try to get everybody in, I promise.
Belle.
I. Sawhill: On the first panel this morning we talked a lot about education, and we heard from a group of people who are doing wonderfully innovative things on the educational front, and in many cases challenging existing bureaucracies and systems. And as many of you know, this wealthy business group led by—[Inaudible]—has just offered scholarships under a lottery to low income families. And there were 40,000 of these scholarships that they had to offer, and the number of people applying for them was 1.2 million. And if you ask how many of the applicants were from cities, as opposed to outside of cities, that's how you figure out from data I've seen so far, the application rate in cities were in the 30-40 percent range, Baltimore, I think, was particularly high at 40 percent, but in the application rate nationwide was about 6 percent. So that implies that it is low income families in large cities who are most dissatisfied and distressed with what's happening in the public school system.
None of you heard the little debate we had this morning about charter versus public schools in the District, and now we can add vouchers to the mix. But, I think the issue that I want to raise here, particularly for you, Bob, is if we're talking about education, which is a pretty critical thing for everybody to have, it seems to me we do need more flexibility. We may need opportunities for kids to go to private schools, including religious based schools, but we certainly need public resources to finance that. How do you think about mixing, both of you, public resources with private action?
R. Woodson: I totally agree with that. I think we need a variety of choices, public and private. I think with the availability of money it would create new schools. You've got some churches and others that have schools that go up to kindergarten, that could expand. We really have to create more of a market environment, so everybody competes. But, yes I would agree with a mix of public and private funds.
B. Katz: When you think about these metropolitan trends, and obviously on purpose today I was emphasizing the sort of pull factor, as opposed to the push factor. The number one push factor is the failure of the school systems. If we don't put choice and competition back into our school systems, the way we've started to do it in public housing, the way we've started to do in some other places, we're never going to really resolve this. And I have no problem with the mix of public and private, whatsoever. And plus, Henry Cisneros is on the board of this 40,000 voucher thing, so I have to be in support of it, because he's still my former boss.
R. Woodson: It's interesting that the civil rights leadership is opposed to it. And a lot of the members of the Black Caucus, even though most of them have their kids in private school.
I. Sawhill: I have to tell you that Charlie Rangel was quoted as saying, I'm all for scholarships, but I do not support vouchers.
E.J. Dionne: Lisa and this gentleman, Bob or Joyce, give me about a 10 minute warning whenever you want it to shut down, because I want to get—Lisa first, this gentleman, and then this lady.
Participant: Mr. Woodson, I find a lot of what you said very compelling, and I wanted to pick back up with the questions that you were raising about class inside the black community, because as I think about the work I'm trying to do, I'm running into—it's the black middle class that I'm bumping into when we start talking about doing youth work, and doing youth development, and youth leadership development in a holistic way, where you're connecting young people back to community, when you talk about best practices, and you talk about training professionals that, you know, it may be the folks from the neighborhood that need to be leading.
And there's this sense that you can't lead if you're not certified, credentialed, and the young people have picked up that the black middle class really doesn't care about them. That they are a number. That they get counted as a head count in fathering programs. So I want to ask a rhetorical question back to you. How do we make that debate open up, how do we begin, because I think my generation sees it, like we—you know, for us now it's about race and class, and we really do understand that. But, that dialogue is not going on.
R. Woodson: All right. Well, just a little information, two out of six whites with college education works for the government. Six out of 10 blacks with a college education works for the government. And so they are—have a tremendous investment in these systems that are in receivership in this city. So their class interests are compatible with their economic interests, so therefore it's hard to get a dialogue. What you've got to do, though, is there are moral—but they cannot say that. So the moral authority that keeps them in power is that they are truly acting in the interest of the poor. That's why you've got to give the poor a voice to speak for themselves, and not you or me challenging them, but providing our resources so that they have a voice to speak for themselves.
I just left Caprini Green public housing, where we're trying to help the residents to own it. We're trying to get 60 Minutes to go back. It would blow your mind how much peace and development is occurring among the people there who have taken ownership of their development. But, again, the resistance is coming from the middle class. But, we need to have a discussion of that in the black community. But, it's hard to even get a discussion of that.
E.J. Dionne: Sir.
Participant: In 1987 I had an opportunity to see Mr. Woodson actually deliver a speech where he mentioned that a large number of black males in Detroit actually had married some of the women who they had children by. And I was a young person and it struck me very profoundly. Looking at it in 1999, I'd like to know what are some of those young men either in Detroit or other programs where you work, what are they doing in terms of trying to become involved in the next generation urban problem solvers. And second, since your program seems to strengthen families, which is something we're trying to do, what can you advise policy makers to do, in terms of looking at your program and trying to turn it into good policy?
E.J. Dionne: Could you give the mike to that lady, because that will save the woman who has to carry the mike a lot of steps.
Thank you.
R. Woodson: Part of sustaining change when young men, particularly who were violent, and changing their—part of sustaining them first of all is to—they're tired of being preached at. They want someone to live the values you want them to emulate. So that when we engaged these kids out at Benning Terrace, when I say kids, they're between 18 and 29, they need reparenting. You can be reparented at age 40. Many of them—and the way you reparent is say to them, for instance, all of us have taken three of these young people, my young men are 21, 22, and 28. And I take them to my home, we go away on weekends, and they have dinner with my family, and they go where I go.
But, I say to them, as we said to them, I don't want you swearing around me, I don't swear around you, don't swear around me. I don't smoke around you, and don't smoke around me. I don't swear around you, don't swear around me. They desperately want people to tell them what's right and what's wrong. I'm not value-neutral when it comes to these kids, or any of us. A parent isn't value-neutral. And so that—and the other thing that we do, once they get a job, and they clean up their life, and put down the drugs, how many babies do you have? What are you doing about seeing these babies, not just writing checks, going out and seeing these babies, some of them have married the mothers of the children. So part of your parenting of these kids has to communicate to them your expectation that they are to be responsible men, because I say what every black woman needs is a BMW, a black man working.
E.J. Dionne: Ma'am?
Participant: You talked about Atlanta, so I was coughing and I've got my voice now. I remember a long time ago walking by a candy store and looking in at some candy I couldn't buy, and I would parallel that, or put that in the context of Atlanta going through integration. And all of a sudden being offered opportunities to go someplace else, because the candy looked better on the other side. And integration in the large sense was detrimental to the order of what was Atlanta, Georgia, once upon a time, and Orbin [sp] Avenue. It was also, I think, encumbered by policies, federal policies, that took a highway and split a community in half. And so you likened that with what's happened in D.C. with reference to urban renewal, and we oftentimes coined it with urban removal. And all of those things happened to a community once upon a time that had a sense of community.
And we've lost that sense of community. And we are not only separated by race and class, but by class among the races. And so if you look at Atlanta, we have an opportunity which Bruce touched on. I think that is the first time that we have something that can rebuild the core, so we can, in fact, strengthen the region, because of the fact of, again, a national policy, and that is the EPA saying that the air quality is so bad that money won't come back in to build more roads, so that you can further sprawl, that continues to decimate the central city.
So we have a chance through some community economic development empowerment to begin to reverse a process, not through the federal or local government sector, but by the people themselves. And so this is an opportunity that we've got to work and take advantage of. I was going to touch on it a little bit in my conversation, but you know, we won't have as much time. But, that I think is the opportunity. So I agree with what both of you are saying with reference to what we have to do in order to change some things.
E.J. Dionne: Could I just say, the lady right behind you wanted to talk, and then I got a signal from my boss here that we should start to shut this down. So let me turn it over to the two gentlemen, then you can have the last question.
Go ahead.
R. Woodson: I'd rather take my time and yield just to hear another—I've talked.
Participant: Mr. Woodson, I wanted to thank you for what you had to say. I'm a youth worker. I just moved from Boston to D.C. to specifically, I've organized youth workers in Boston, folks who don't have education around this, but have committed their lives to working with young people. But, in my process, also, it's been about helping and supporting people, getting training, and thinking about this work more strategically.
One of the things that I've been trying to really work on is thinking about how to raise the political awareness of this group of folks, because there is a base in terms of how we can impact policy and develop our own voting blocks, because it's happening across the country. I sat this weekend with 14 cities who are interesting in organizing people who are working with young people, and young people who we've been helping do the work themselves, you know. And what I'd like to know is to hear a little bit about how you're supporting and training the folks that you're working with. And also, because I want to think about how we can connect to that process, too.
R. Woodson: I'm like a lot of Americans. I'm so disenchanted with politics that I try to keep my young people away from it right now. I really do. I'm more concerned about them redeveloping themselves and their community, and I want them to help create islands of excellence throughout their neighborhood. So we're just at the level of community building. And I can't—and I don't want to take it beyond where we are. We're trying to create these islands of excellence, in maybe 10 cities, so we can deal with all of our critics who say, first of all, you can't do it. When you do it, they say, yes, but it's this modest and the problem is large. So then when we've built critical mass, yes, but you know, we're trying to deal with all the yeah-buts. So that's where we are right now. So I don't have time to deal with the politics of it.
B. Katz: I don't want to dispute the strategy that Bob is pursuing, but I think there's a desperate need for reengagement in politics at this stage, because there is such a dearth of leadership, locally, regionally, state, federal. I mean, when people ask me, you know, whether they're Americans or from abroad, you know, what is it that you can point to that has the potential to have systemic effect on the future of cities, to tell you the truth, there's a lot of very interesting neighborhood initiatives going along. There are some places where some more macro sort of efforts are going along. But, for the most part, there isn't as much in the way of efforts that really looking from a 10 year period, or a 25 year period you can sort of look back and say, yes, that really changed the physical landscape of a place, and that really began to change the social fabric, and the connections.
And so I think there needs to be a reengagement in politics, because I think right now our political leaders, you know, when they from the mayors, or they hear from established constituencies, or they hear from others, there's a sense of, things are okay. I mean, perhaps we need some more interventions, but there's no sense or we need a radial sense of reform in some of our basic policies. And until you hear that, there's only a few political leaders who are going to lead. The rest of them are watching, basically. You're either watching the polls, or they're watching each other and watching the person who is about to run against him. They're watching. And until there's a sense that there's a galvanizing force out there, they're not going to offer up a set of policies from federal on down, local on up, that really I think are going to have systemic effect on people's lives and the way in which we live
I'm not saying that has to happen within some of these efforts. But, I think there's a desperate need for reengagement in political life.
E.J. Dionne: I want to thank Bob and Bruce. No one will ever accusing them of being value-neutral or yes-but kind of guys. I'm inspired by the reverend Woodson, if I can put it in that role. I was thinking as they were talking, the Jesuits formulate it this way. They say, pray as if everything depends upon God, work as if everything depends upon you. Dr. King reformulated that. He said God isn't going to do all of it by himself. And I'm glad these guys were helping.
Thank you very, very much.
[Applause]
J. Ladner: I'd like to thank this panel very much for their participation.
We'd like for the next panelists to come to the platform.
[END OF LUNCHEON]