Congregations, the Government and Social Justice

Transcript

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: As Avis notes in her paper that we will discuss this afternoon, the role of faith-based organizations remains among the least well researched aspects of community development. We thank all our participants and all of you for making such a large contribution and I hope an increasingly larger one in the course of today to closing that research gap.

As you know we are going to have a session this morning where we are going to hear from Jeremy Nowak, who is the CEO of the Reinvestment Fund. We will have our group of respondents reply and I will introduce them in a moment. Then we are going to break for lunch where Bruce Katz has promised to give, as he always does, an informative and provocative talk which we will hope will raise some debate and questions in the audience.

Bruce is going to hone in a little bit on the role of the faith-based groups and then Avis will put her focus in a paper that she has worked on for HUD and she can explain to us the origins of this paper. We are grateful to HUD for loosening bureaucratic restraints and allowing Avis to talk to us today.

Jeremy is the CEO of the Reinvestment Fund and I'll introduce him in more detail this afternoon. When we asked around, it turns out everybody said that there is really only one person who understands this subject fully and that is Avis. She has a PhD in urban planning from Harvard University and a master's of city planning from Harvard. She was at Columbia University in the Department of Public Law and Government. She has an AB from the University of Chicago. I should say she got that magna cum laude. I won't list all of her publications and all of her work, but she is now at the Urban Institute. She is the principal research associate for metropolitan housing and communities at the Urban Institute.

Just to go down our panel quickly, we have Jennifer Quinn who is a special assistant to the secretary to the deputy director of HUD of its Center for Community and Interfaith Partnerships. She was also — I like the name of this group — chairperson of Operation Crack Down, a group of volunteer attorneys who tried to close crack houses. I don't even think they hired a high priced PR firm to get the name of that group.

We have Bill Dickens of Brookings who is over here. Bill is the Director of the National Community Development Policy Analysis Network and a senior fellow in economics studies at Brookings.

We have Ray Ramsey who has finally come in. We said you might have within a victim of sprawl in being delayed on the roads. Ray Ramsey is the president and COO of the Enterprise Foundation.

We have our own Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution who has written on a wide variety of topics and has turned increasingly to the problems of cities. He is one of the smartest people that I know and also one of the most fun people to argue with about all sorts of subjects.

We have Darren Walker and we thank him for being with us. He is the COO of the Abyssinian Development Corporation in New York. When we started this a lot of people told us that if we had this session, we absolutely had to have somebody from that operation — Darren was recommended to us as somebody who just knew about as much about this as anyone.

And finally, Monsignor Bill Linder, who is again someone who is incredibly well known in this field and who has done some extraordinary work in Newark, New Jersey. He is the founder of the New Community Corporation in Newark. I think when those of us who care about this now were in diapers, Bill Linder was organizing neighborhoods and communities and we are very grateful for his participation and his work.

So without further ado, I want to call on Jeremy. Jeremy is going to talk for about 20 or 25 minutes and then we will begin with the respondents. But as I said, we will go early on to the audience so, please, be patient because we want you to participate as much as we want the rest of us up here to participate. Thank you for joining us, Jeremy.

Jeremy Nowak: Thank you. Thank you, E.J. I want to mostly just talk about the paper and lay out what I think is a pretty simple argument. I'm not by trade a researcher and those of you who read the paper may advise me to keep my day job. But for the last 15 years I have spent my time making loans and investments largely in community development projects or in urban businesses in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.

Before I begin, I want to tell a little story because I think it will shed some light on how I think about the role of religious institutions. Prior to running the reinvestment fund, I was an organizer in two different neighborhoods in Philadelphia. The way that I thought about the job for the reinvestment fund was really the way an organizer thinks about their job. It was a matter of building relationship and organizing people around self-interests and having conversations, living room conversations, like church basement conversations.

And I remember in the early years, the first year of the reinvestment fund, making a loan to an organization that was building affordable housing in West Philadelphia. They were interested in homeless housing and they were building and financing some triplexes where they put formally homeless people from shelters. We were a very small organization with just a couple hundred thousand dollars and no track record. I was the sort of person selling cows door to door, you know, telling people if they gave me their money I would lend it and they would really get it back and everything would be all right. I had no track record as a lender. I think I loaned my brother some money once and I'm not even sure if I got it back.

A Catholic women's religious order called the Sisters of St. Francis got interested in us because of this particular housing loan, and I met and became involved in conversations with a woman named Sister Marie Lucy She said that the order might like to make an investment. So she invited me to the house where the order was outside of Philadelphia and I sat there in a room with 12 or 15 sisters who were all poring over our prospectus, in fact, and being quite diligent and looking at the numbers. They asked me very tough questions about the organizations and then they made an investment. As I got to know them, I realized that the Sisters of St. Francis also ran Franciscan Health Systems.

And I got to talk to them a little bit about what the hospitals were doing and after a while Franciscan Health System — which at the time had 12 hospitals as part of their holding company — became an investor, as did the holding company. At that time, I think it was around 1987 or 1988, we had no insurance company investors and as I began to get to know them even better, I asked them once who their insurance company was. They told me it was General Accident and it turned out they were General Accident's largest client, so they got me to General Accident and I had a conversation with a guy who is not still there, a guy named Jack Corbin. He and Marie Lucy talked Notre Dame football for about 20 minutes and then he made a $50,000 investment, which disabused me of this sort of due diligence concept.

Jack didn't want to be the only insurance company involved in the reinvestment fund. He didn't want to be the only fool in. So he put together a group of insurance companies in the Philadelphia area. We met at the Union League, which is a league that 25 years before I wouldn't be allowed in and he sold all the insurance companies on the idea that they ought to make investments. In fact most of them did and one of the people got really turned on and invited me to church at Brimore Presbyterian Church which is on the main line in Philadelphia. It looks like a campus and it turns out that most of the corporations in Philadelphia are run by someone either in Brimore Presbyterian Church or the Episcopal Church down the street.

Now, I say that because what strikes me in this conversation about community development and religious institutions, is not just the power of congregation and the role of the congregation. What strikes me is the interinstitutional, interfaith, interjurisdictional connections and relationships that religious institutions offer. So in my own naivety as an organizer, just having conversations with people, trying to understand who they were, I was able through these faith-based connections to raise an awful lot of money and build an awful lot of relationships.

I tell you that story because we are thinking about the challenge of community development to sort of reposition itself in a vastly new era from the 1960s when it was founded. It strikes me that this network role, this interjurisdictional, interinstitutional, interfaith and interclass role that religious institutions have is really quite powerful and quite important. So I'm going to put that story aside for a second because I think it is really fundamental to the way that I think about this.

The paper that I wrote is just an overview of community development. Let me just layout a few of the salient points and the argument at the end of it. Community development, as I understand it, has a variety of interesting historical sources — government action programs in the 1960s, philanthropic demonstration programs, and itself is rooted in a rich variety of community based efforts in the United States and mutual aid associations like African American church work.

If you went back and looked at the early work on CDCs and you looked at some of the early mission statements and spoke to people, you would get the sense that there were at least four purposes to community development organizations. To some people, they were social program intermediaries. To others they were going to be market actors, economic actors. To others they were demonstration projects for government reform and for still others they were building civil society.

In my view, there was always some lack of clarity, ambivalence may be the wrong word. I used the word "ambivalence" in the paper, but some lack of clarity in community development about the role of community development organizations vis a vis the notion of development or revitalization and the issue of poverty reduction or poverty alleviation. I think that sometimes the ideas around poverty reduction and poverty alleviation often collapsed inside the notion of development or revitalization. This is not only peculiar to this country but my own experience in the developing world tells me it is true there as well.

If I look over the last 35 years, my sense is that three dominant attributes of community development organizations stand out. Number one is locality. This sort of identity of place. In a world where identity of place is not the important thing for the marketplace, community development organizations are paramount place-based organizations.

The second attribute would be the prominent role in real estate development, particularly in residential real estate development, and some related human services that often have come from or been linked to real estate development.

Attribute number three would be a link to some form of public or private philanthropic subsidy. Again, I think the development over the last three decades of low income housing and rental management that integrates the right kind of social services delivery to tenants is quite important, especially when compared to some of the failures in public housing.

There have been other important developments, such as new construction in inner city markets where many people thought new construction was impossible. Father Linder's neighborhood would be one. East Brooklyn and many other places. We have an been involved in some new construction of quite important scale in Philadelphia as Enterprise did in Baltimore not long ago.

Additionally, we should look at the creation of all kinds of new market entry devices for low income people to get into homeownership — from mortgage counseling to some fancy secondary market work that groups like Self Help Credit Union in North Carolina have done.

The NHS style of community development is also helpful. These moderate income, moderate block interventions are important. For the most part, community development has had much less success in commercial real estate as it relates to retail development. Father Linder could probably talk to you about some of the day care and clinic work that he has done. The charter school work that we and many other people have done I think is also instructive in this way. My sense is around the country, the community development role in financing or building or managing day care centers, schools, clinics and the like is actually becoming a pretty important focus within the field.

Finally, I would say there is this tremendous policy infrastructure, built over the last 10 or 15 years. I mean, who have thought 20 years ago, Father, that you would be having conversations with the Brooking Institution about community development, yet alone have the institutional space to really reflect on it. So there have been national intermediaries, national policy work, significant research by Avis and others in the field that has built this infrastructure and given it some visibility.

At the same time, particularly in the last 10 years, as an adjunct to community developments, institutions like our own Risk Enterprise and others, community development financial institutions have played not only important financing and technical assistant roles, but I think most prominently important system-building roles. They have often had the relationship, the social geography to be able to build systems between public sources of subsidy and the market place. I can talk more about that, but I will leave that out for now.

I would say in the last five years in particular there has been a process of reappraisal in community development. At the same time, community development has in many ways had a great deal more public visibility than many probably ever thought it would. I think there has also been some anxiety about what is accomplished and where it is going. Internally, that reappraisal has taken coalesced around five different places.

One is just the issue of scale. You know, outside of Father Linder and 10 or 15 other groups, it gets hard to find how many examples we have of rebuilding something like the Central Ward in Newark. So the fear is that we are just swimming against the tide and that if we have this kind of limited scale, what does it really mean. That would be one piece of anxiety.

A second would be around the issue of service comprehensiveness and there is a lot of work, a lot of foundation interest in positioning community development groups, often in alliance with settlement houses and the like, in trying to develop more comprehensive service orientations toward low income neighbors.

A third approach is to worry more, think more, organize more about the issue of social capital —building the social networks that help connect people to jobs, help connect people to the main stream economy, help connect people to their neighbors.

A fourth is around the issue of economic growth, despite some of the good work in commercial real estate. I think if you went back again to the late 1960s, early 1970s when people talked about community development and they spoke about it as a business investment activity, it is clear that it hasn't been able to play that role for the most part.

Finally, there is the issue and the anxiety around just operating sustainability. If you have got most of the organizations in the community development field heavily linked to public subsidy or to private philanthropic subsidy in some way, to what extent can this field be sustainable? Lots of work and lots of system building around the whole issue of sustainability is important.

So we have got this field. It has done some wonderful things in residential real estate and at the same time, it strikes me that in the 1980s and 1990s it became increasingly clear that we are operating in a really different kind of environment and a lot of us have in the community development field have people like Bruce Katz to thank for engaging us in a conversation about these radical transformations that have happened over the last three or four decades.

We also have this emergence of a community development group, you have the transformation of cities and you've got cities being increasingly less competitive vis a vis their suburban counterparts as business formation sites and in terms of their ability to raise money for public goods, as an attractors to businesses and so forth. So you have community development which focuses around economic growth and being catalysts for economic growth and neighborhood development and some talk about poverty reduction happening and growing in a framework where the social geography of the metropolitan regions is fundamentally being reordered.

I would like to say that at the same time foundation executives in the 1960s were discovering and getting interested in community development, people like Dorothy Kadrow were suing the housing authority in Chicago because of the policies of the housing authority for concentrating around poverty. So you have got these different kind of contexts emerging that community development has to grapple with.

You also get the work of people like David Rusk and Myron Orfield, both whom I know have some association with this institution. You get either implicitly or explicitly a critic of community development and that critic is a regional system critic. It is a critic who says, there is a relationship between suburban sprawl and concentrated poverty and that unless you intervene in the broader framework of regional growth, it is really going to be hard to rebuild these neighborhoods. Another way to say that is that rebuilding neighborhoods is not a self-referential community project. It sounds good. It makes good press but you have got to put it into this broader framework of regional development and if you don't, you are in some ways swimming against the tide. So you get all kinds of interesting policy issues that come out of that. And when David Rusk writes a book like Inside Game/Outside Game, essentially what he is saying is that if you want the inside game to succeed, you better have an outside game. You better be dealing with growth boundary issues or with the deconcentration of affordable housing, et cetera, et cetera if you want to rebuild inner city communities.

So I think that in some ways it is helpful to have a critique of community development because it places the issue of inner city revitalization within the broader framework. And I would argue that religious institutions are as well positioned as any to help deal with the broader framework. I don't think it is an accident that both Myron Orfield and David Rusk in their work — and particularly in what Myron has accomplished in Minneapolis, St. Paul — have engaged church based organizations in cities and in suburban counties as the institutional mediation for building advocacy around regional development issues. Changing the dynamic of the way subsidy is produced or the way incentives are distributed across the regional framework.

So we have the tradition of community development and you've got at the same time this transformation that has happened in our social geography. We have got these regional systems critiques of community development and at the same time you have this great interest now in much more marketed-oriented approaches to community development and to urban governance and urban policy that emerge both within and without community development. Michael Porter is probably the best known of people that have written about this but it comes from a variety of different sources. It comes from mayors like John Norquist and it comes from the people like myself who spent 15 years trying to build a sustainable financial portfolio and when they approach neighborhoods think a lot less about deficits in neighborhoods and a lot more about capacities in neighborhoods. They think about neighborhoods as kind of a market and as an asset that has got to be grown and invested in.

There is sort of a changing sense of the way to think about places that uses the language of markets and tries to adapt public policy to the language and the accountability of the marketplace. So what does all this mean? There is an opportunity for community development to reposition itself so that it is more relevant to these transformations that have happened in the marketplace.

And by repositioning itself, there are at least three things that I think are important. The one thing is that for community development organizations, their turf is sometimes ten square blocks. There are limitations as to what you can do with ten square blocks. It doesn't correspond to anything like an economy in any way so it seems to me that what community development needs to do in many ways is build a broader geography — what I call a broader geography of influence. I think you see this among some of the most agile and productive community development corporations, and I would certainly point to New Communities as a good example. You see this naturally emerging out of their work. I mean, we started out in the Central Ward of Newark but we are in Jersey City now too. We started out thinking about neighborhoods and places. We are also looking at economic sectors. We are not thinking about the neighborhoods in that same way. We use that same language, but we are now on a new path. Maybe the mission is the same, but there are a whole series of new kinds of channels and relationships that come out of this broader geography of influence. Community development has got to rethink this broader geography of influence and maybe rethink the kinds of organizational or institutional musculature that has got to be build in order to carry out effective development work.

Secondly, I think that community development organizations need to have a much more explicit orientation around poverty reduction and poverty alleviation. For the most part that means not just operating in your neighborhood. It means having relationships with the broader marketplace. It means thinking about work force issues. It means understanding that the greatest contribution that your neighborhood has to the economy is the skills in that neighborhood and the positioning of the skills to the marketplace. It means building relationships with economic sectors. It means understanding the possibilities of regional growth and not just the — what it means to be on the decline side of regional growth.

Finally, I think community development needs to adopt a focus around a much broader policy agenda. The policy agenda for the most part in community development has really been a policy agenda around the real estate transactions. These are all important issues but the real estate transactions are a kind of old style community development. That is preserve the low income housing tax credit. Good important stuff. Let's keep the heat on the banks for community reinvestment act. But there are also questions of how we structure transportation investment. Questions of how we think about the deconcentration of affordable housing and maximizing people's access to public goods or throughout the metropolitan area. Issues in a region of how we organize and structure work force investments and whether those work force investments make any sense for people to get good quality jobs. Those issues become the defining attributes of whether people in the neighborhood are going to succeed in the 21st century economy. Whether they are going to be linked to a main stream economy. So it would seem to me that community development institutions, if they can step away from the transactions, the policy related to the transactions, they can think more broadly and build a broader set of allies. In many instances I think this is already happening. There is some very exciting work around the country. It provides an opportunity for community development organizations to become players in a much more fundamental way.

Let me return to that initial story. That initial story was a story of making a loan to a housing project and building a set of relationships through religious institutions, through congregations, through religious orders, through powerful church organizations, through the non-church relationships that came out of religious institutions, and using those as a way to build civic connections and to position community development to not only be an intermediary in terms of finance and development but to be a civic intermediary in a fundamentally new way.

The public sector has diminished capacity. It has less and less capacity and it is more and more fragmented, given the nature of the regional marketplace. So that leaves a civic sector that could organize aspects of the public and aspects of the private to get certain things like poverty reduction and rebuilding places to organize. Religious institutions are well positioned to play this role if there is the civic intermediation in order to support it and to catalyze it. Thank you.

E.J. Dionne: Before I call on Ray Ramsey and Father Linder, I want to make a small point. George W. Bush got into a lot of trouble because he said he read a book about Dean Acheson and then couldn't say anything about it. I just realized as soon as I sat down that we had one of the world class experts on community development about to speak and I didn't introduce him. I was so eager to get him up to this podium. What I would like you to do is not to think of this as an oversight but to think about it as a game of Jeopardy. He says a whole bunch of really smart things and then you try to figure out what he has done.

Now I will give you the answer to the question. Jeremy is, as many of you know, the CEO of the Reinvestment Fund. It is a community development financial institution that manages $70 million. Its mission is poverty alleviation and the revitalization of low and moderate income neighborhoods. It does this through the provision of capital and technical assistance entrepreneurs and helps entrepreneurs and community organizations and developers. Jeremy was selected in 1994 to receive the Philadelphia Award, the city's highest civic honor. He was recognized as "that individual who has done the most to advance the best and largest interest of community." He is on the board of many organizations including public private ventures and Economic Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. For those of us who got to this by studying politics or economics or sociology, it is noteworthy that he is a true expert, because he has his Ph.D. in anthropology which may help him understand all of us in this room better.

The last thing I want to say is when I told people Jeremy was doing this, people said two things. They said, boy, you actually got somebody who really knows what he is talking about when you got Jeremy to talk about community development. And they also said this is really an extraordinary and good person, which as you know in this field is not something everybody says about everyone and this is a special statement. I didn't even speak to a single member of your family.

So now having answered the Jeopardy question, I would like to call up Ray Ramsey. We will start down this way this morning and then we will go the other way this afternoon. Ray, welcome.

Ray Ramsey: Good morning. E.J., are you punishing me because I was the last person here? Just to defend my honor, it was not suburban sprawl that kept me — it is embarrassing because I'm probably living the closest. I do live in the city. It is just the subway was a little bit delayed today.

I want to comment on Jeremy's remarks for a moment and then try to tie it into our topic today of faith-based organizations. I'm going to be brief. I know that if I'm not, E.J. will be yanking or pulling the podium away.

First of all, I am not an expert on faith-based development. You are going to hear from several faith-based organizations today. Most notably, you are going to hear from Father Linder, but what I do want to talk about first is that faith-based organizations are in many ways in the same boat as community development. We are just in it in different slices.

I think when you think about faith-based organizations, the first thing people will think about will be churches, synagogues, other places of faith. But there are organizations who have gotten their start and who are involved in community development who had a tangential relationship to a faith-based movement. Enterprise was started by Jim and Patty Rouse and they were inspired by their church, the Church of the Savior here in Washington, D.C., so the principles of that church and the teaching inspired them to create Enterprise so that we would work around the country. So in our charter and in our mission, we don't say "we are a faith-based organization", but to do this kind of work day in and day out, I would say takes quite a bit of faith.

I have three things that I would say about faith-based movement and the community development movement overall. The first is the issue of standing. You are going to hear a lot about this when you hear from Avis Vidal later today and if you read that paper you will get a feel for what is happening with the faith-based movement in this country. First and foremost, I would say is that it is still relatively unknown vis-a-vis community development. People still aren't quite sure. They hear the word Habitat For Humanity and they say "I think that is faith-based" and you hear a little bit about something here and there, so it is not a widely known movement if the word "movement" can be used. And I think that the word "movement" can be used because it is a pervasive effort. It is pervasive because it is happening in communities all over the country, albeit in small amounts in many places. You can't drive into a city and say well, that is a faith-based development and that's a faith-based development but what you can do is see that there are places of faith who are becoming engaged increasingly into the work of community development.

When we think of community development, the first thing that typically pops into mind is physical redevelopment. A lot of the faith-based efforts are in the non-fiscal asset-building side of what is happening for individuals in neighborhoods and also in terms of standing, it is growing. This area is growing. There are more churches, more synagogues, more places of faith who are saying we want to do more to develop our low income neighborhoods. We can't wait for government or someone else. We have got to do something ourselves. So in terms of standing in this field, it is slowly becoming better known. It is growing and it is pervasive.

The second issue is one of need. I always think about it in three ways and this applies for community development organizations but also for faith-based organizations. It is a simple way of looking at it. When you think about the sheer needs of what those organizations need to move their agenda forward, three basic areas come to mind. The first is clearly capital. Two different kinds of capital. Human capital, which means expertise, technical expertise, skill and time. Second in terms of capital, clearly the issue of financial capital. Whether that capital comes from the congregation, whether that capital comes from the community reinvestment acts, lending or granting or philanthropy, capital is still needed in some way shape or form to move an agenda.

The second area — and I think not enough time and energy is spent on this — is the issue of just information. Enterprise is working all over the country, and as I travel so often I hear people constantly reinventing something that has been tried and failed or tried and started. People are hungry to say well, what is being done and how is it being done. That information needs to be in an user friendly format. What someone doesn't want to do if they are a practitioner working in a faith-based organization is to go to some dictionary, encyclopedia to read something. How do I get a hold of information is that is useful and valuable to me? I think there are ways with the Internet and other places to take advantage of ways to move that information into peoples' hands. And lastly, and this may sound somewhat over the top, but I don't mean it to be, is the issue of hope. Because so many people out there are thinking, boy, I'm in this alone. I get discouraged. I'm not sure if I can continue. One of the good things is simply bringing people together to say, you are not in it by yourself. That we are engaged in the same effort with you and that there is hope. There are successful models because for every Father Linder who is successful in the Central Ward, there are others in cities who have been banging their heads up against the wall and not being able to make any progress whatsoever.

My third and final area is what I would refer to as opportunity. There are several key opportunities, and I think right from the very start is this issue of the new economy. When we talk about the new economy, that means different things to different people. But one thing it clearly means is positioning the faith-based and community development movement to take advantage of what Jeremy was talking about — not just place-based solutions, but people/place solutions that transcend geographic boundaries. And so the unique opportunity is that if we can find resources, information and skills that we can affect the individual.

You look at the opportunity to aggregate. You think about what is happening with deregulation in the country; for example, you look at utility field. There is great power in the ability of individuals to aggregate, to aggregate themselves together even if they are low income because if you aggregate and package that, it is worth something to the private sector. It has value and we haven't quite figured out a way to take advantage of that particular aggregation in this new economy.

In addition, in terms of opportunity, it is clearly one of partnership. I think that there are all of these burgeoning efforts in the faith-based movement and that there hasn't been as much coalescing together to partner with others to achieve scale and to take advantage of their expertise. I think lastly, and I will conclude with this, E.J., is that there have been some great, great strides in the faith-based movement, the community development movement across this country and that is very heartening but at the same time it is very humbling thing because when you look at what has been done, you feel good about it for a while but then if you reflect on it too long, you really get humbled because you see how much more is required to move this agenda forward.

We need still the government to play a critical role in this. We can't do this without some form of government effort. Cushing Dolbeare is going to speak up on that today and if I didn't mention that the government needed to play an important role, she would have something to say to me about that later on, so I will conclude with that. Thank you.

E.J. Dionne: Ray, thank you very much. Father Linder, it is a great honor to have you with us today.

Monsignor Bill Linder: It was especially nice to be invited here because the two presenters are long-time friends and that is really nice. I also would like to say that you have to indulge me a minute. I have a couple of comments, but one is that when you have gray hair, you have to talk about the context of the history of the community development movement and there are two elements that I like. They are not the only two elements, but two I want to say after reading the paper.

One is that we are very pragmatic people. The urban community development movement is an American movement really. I'm not talking about rural development. I'm talking about urban development. I'll give you a little story: During the poor people's campaign, one of the caravans went to Cape Kennedy to protest the amount of resources we put in technology and space as against what we were putting in fighting poverty. I think Hosea Williams was the one leading it. When they got finished after a conference, all the group including the animals they had actually had front seats for the next missile launch, rocket launch and a statement was made — issued by NASA — saying that it was very important that we redistribute the resources of our country to cover the war on poverty. I think that is the way we are. We are very pragmatic.

Which means if you remember in the 60s, all the rejections of our institutions and particularly our public institutions, it is not unusual that we come to a point where we talk about the three legs of the civil society and try to figure out how to work together. So I think that is one of the elements. It is in our pragmatic nature as Americans to solve things.

The second is that if you are in the area of just planning, people realize that the social dimension of life needs to drive the physical planning part. We had urban renewal, you had the replacement of the structures, for example, public housing and no one ever thought to find out what kind of buildings people might like to live in. We began to learn that. So these were running parallel.

I would like to move then to the future, and just say a couple of comments. Mostly what I'm remarking on Jeremy's paper and he is very much open to the fact that we are always really changing in this movement. That's the fun part of it. It was not what it was 20 years ago or in my case 33 years ago. It is very different.

One of that things that has happened is that we are now beginning to respond to the educational problems of our young people in the cities. I think if you ask people in the movement 20 years ago, they would never have considered that we would be in public education trying to create schools like Jeremy is with regards to a charter schools and that. That is growing. The second is that we are beginning to understand that if we have to take these entry level jobs and there is a minimal amount of time available to train people for them, then we better build a whole culture in our city based upon user friendly lifetime learning. And so for the first time we are all getting involved in as it were adult education. That's new.

On the regional side, I think what got us introduced into that was really the issue of transportation because we began to identify jobs and they weren't right where we lived and we began to realize we better start talking about these wider issues as Jeremy is on the board of one group that does and also is very personally interested in that. Then the last is what is growing very quickly is this international side. And we are beginning to understand that we are world citizens and beginning now to be able to, through our technology and transportation, begin to talk to others and they are interested in what is happening here in our urban centers because they don't have a private sector group as we do. They don't have actually a history of volunteerism and it is opening up to them a whole new dimension of trying to deal with the social problems of their cities. So suddenly what we have are groups that are working on poverty issues here in our cities beginning to have direct communication with others around the world who have the same experience, the same issues, the same problems and it is opening up for all of us, a whole new world. For us in the Central Ward; for example, if you ask our young people about something that is 20 blocks from their home, they usually don't know about it. And now to suddenly have this kind of interaction is very good for us and it is a changing movement.

E.J. Dionne: Thank you very much. I think what I would like to do is call on Bill and before I turn to the other end of the table, if some people in the audience want to join in at that point, I would love to have you and then we will turn to the rest of our respondents. Bill, thanks for being with us.

Bill Dickens: Sure. Rather than discussing the specifics of the paper, I think that I'm probably going to do what most of the other reactants did, because I thought both papers did a very good job of covering the materials. They are largely descriptive. I think that Jeremy's paper in particular is a very good representation of the state of the community development movement. It gives it very fair coverage. To the extent that he biases it in any directions, they are directions that I like so all I can say is, thumbs up.

There are four things that I would like to talk about. The first one is how we define the community development movement. Both Jeremy's paper and Avis's paper implicitly define the community development movement in terms of what community development corporations and similar organizations do and I think it is important to be a little bit more reflective about what we mean by community development. That will help form the discussion that we are going to have on the role of faith-based organizations in community development.

Another thing that I hope will help focus that discussion is a little bit of reflection on why it is that we want to do community development or what it is that community development does. From there, I want to go to talking about the comparative advantages of faith-based organizations. If we are going to talk about a special role for faith-based organizations or supporting them, it is a good idea to get a good idea of what they can do possibly better than other organizations. And then finally, I would like to talk about what the government can do to help faith-based organizations.

Now, that's obviously way too much for the amount of time that I have. I saw E.J. getting a little bit nervous as I got to the bottom of that list. Serendipitously I think it breaks nicely that the first two points are mainly relevant to Jeremy's paper and the last two mainly relevant to the Avis's paper so I will talk about the first two now and the second two later.

Let me first of all talk about why it is we do community development. No doubt a major motivation for most of the people practicing community development is the issue of social justice and the delivery of social services in a just and equitable manner. That covers an awful lot of ground. An awful lot of things would seem to fall under that rubric that we probably don't mean when we say community development. After all, the first word of community development is community and that suggests a focus on place. So is that while there is no doubt that the wider mission is often part of the motivation for a lot of what community development organizations do, when we are talking about community development, I think we are mainly talking about place-based delivery of services. I will get to that in a second.

I think there is another reason to make the distinction and to talk about focusing on place. It is not obvious that if you want to do is work for social justice or to be better or more efficient at providing social services that you would have a place-based focus. If what you want is to help people, then focus on people and forget about places, but there is a good reason for looking at places. Actually it goes beyond just social justice. It goes to how efficiently we run our cities and how efficiently we run our society. There are a number of places and number of cities in this country that are under-served, under-developed and hurt by the status of their social and economic internal environments . These neighborhoods are often characterized by a complex of interacting problems that makes each other's problems worse. By addressing those problems in a place-based manner, we can not only address of issues of social justice but also address the issues of making better use of the available urban resources, the people, the places.

And that leads me to my definition of community development. This is the definition that Ron Ferguson and I adopted in the book which I will now shameless plug, "Urban Problems and Community Development," that Ron and I edited. It is a Brookings book and the definition of community development that we adopt is "the creation of assets that improve the quality of life for neighborhood residents." And let me go over that again. "Creation of assets that improve the quality of life for neighborhood residents." There are three different parts to it. Going backwards, neighborhood residents are place-based. Improve the quality of life. That's what we are trying to do. That's what we are out there doing.

And the creation of assets. And we have in mind there a very broad definition of assets. Not just physical assets, which are obvious and what community development has to a very large extent focused on, but also human assets and organizational assets. So for example, building houses is clearly asset development and is clearly part of the role, part of what community development does. Building a network of people to help neighborhood residents find jobs is also developing an asset. You develop a network. You've developed a procedure that somebody follows when they are out to find a job for somebody. That is an asset. It may not be a physical tangible asset but it is an asset. It is something that will produce value again and again and again and help improve the quality of life of neighborhood residents.

Thirdly or so that is another example. What would not be an example of community development then according to our definition would be recruiting people to work in a soup kitchen. That is a provision of social services. It is something that is very important but it is not developing the assets. It is not helping to develop the community. It may be helping to maintain the community. It may be very important work, but if we are going to be talking about community development, I think it helps define that term. However, organizing, a new center for after-school care of children that provided very nutritious lunches or after-school snacks that helped them focus and get prepared for doing homework, that would be community development. You built the resource, you built the procedure and you are helping the kids learn. That is part of what we would call community development. So later this afternoon when we talk about the role of faith-based organizations, I'm going to try to use those definitions and motivation to talk about the potential for faith-based organizations.

E.J. Dionne: Thank you very, very much. I'm grateful that you actually plugged that book because one of the first apropos to this project is going to be published in April and is called What's God Got To Do With The American Experiment? Our friends Jim Wallis and Melissa Rogers are in the book as are John DiIulio, James Drew Wilson and a lot of other wonderful folks. I thank you for that opening for shamelessness.

I want to see if somebody in the audience wants to join in now, has a burning desire to step into the discussion and then if you can use the mike, we are recording this. We will never use your words against your will. What we found at these sessions is that sometimes some of our respondents have been among the most eloquent participants and when we gather some of this material together in a book, we might actually invite you to join the book if you want to. So bear that in mind.

Robert Gilmore: First of all, let me introduce myself and my colleague Mr. Tate. My name is Robert McKinley Gilmore, Sr. I traveled from Houston, Texas to be here to participate. I wrote a book in 1989 after receiving a commitment and a responsibility from the Congress on urban ministry. For the last 10 or so years in Houston, and in Texas in particular, we have tried to use some of those basic principle of urban ministry and faith-based development. Currently, Houston has had an explosion of community development, faith-based work because of some of the leap share of some pastors.

I didn't come this far to have a discussion about building and neighborhoods where in our cities, some people think moderate and low income starts at $80,000. My friends go back to the developers to bring the price down to $50,000 and let them recoup their investment. Our "future president," if you would, has made the statement to many of us which scares me in particular that if he was selected for the office, he will have a national office of faith-based development. He doesn't have any idea what faith-based is just like men of the clergy don't know either. Some of them are not participating in that way and the Lord knows they could unless it is by accident and they see how it grow their money.

Many African American leaders and church leaders as you know if you read Linder's book that he depicted 55 percent of the cases in our community don't have the talent, industry , leadership or support so there are theological questions that are on the table with faith-based development as a whole. Mr. Nowak, we are talking about members of Presbyterian churches and Episcopal but they didn't see any merit in putting that kind of money in poor development in the inner city in an area which has been reclaimed, so I guess my question is, are we going to keep going to the new millennium with the concept and put faith-based on the front of development? Now, I see banks jumping in for the sake of development in communities for the sake of investments. I'm a little confused and I don't like to be confused. That's why I'm in Washington.

E.J. Dionne: Thank you, sir, very, very much. I don't know if anyone would want to follow that. I certainly wouldn't, but if somebody is more courageous than I am....

Laura Ingall: Actually, I had another issue or concern that Jeremy's discussion raised. It is a question I don't have an answer for, so I thought maybe one of the panelists would — excuse me. I didn't mean to not introduce myself. My name is Laura Ingall and I'm a consultant and writer in this area.

Jeremy, you talked about the trend toward or the need for community developers to think broader and to look at the broader economic issues that impact their ability to do their work. To me that raised a question of, does that then change the nature of the groups that we have doing these activities? We think of community development corporations as focused on a particular area and if they need to get broader in their thinking and broader in their scope, does that change who they are? And so that was a question that I would like some answer on now or throughout the day.

J. Nowak: The short answer is yes. If they change the structure. The longer answer is, I'm not sure what that means. Does it mean that we start to build regional intermediaries? Does it mean that community development corporations in the Central Ward of Newark, just as an example, need to be plugged into other institutions? I'm not sure.

Let me give an example from the lending perspective. It used to cost a dollar for a bank teller to do a particular transaction, and now on an ATM machine, it costs 25 cents, and for the same transaction by the Internet, it costs a penny. That is quite a reduction in expense. Now, the meaning of that for banks, the meaning of information technology, has been that banks now can make small business loans at this enormously low cost. So all of a sudden banks that would never have made loans below $100,000 can do so through a credit scoring factory where there is no connection to place.

Now, you could look at that on one hand and you say, my God what a mess. We are further away from the good old-fashioned neighborhood banking and that's really the old stuff with the neighborhood. You could look at it that way or you could sort of take a little bit of what Ray was going to say, my God, what an opportunity. How can you employ that in order to get to the kinds of places and businesses and people that we want to get to? And if you are going to do that, what kinds of institutions will you invent to do that or what kind of partnerships would you invent between conventional financial institutions and community lenders and community investors? So it seems to me that we are so pragmatic, Father, because we are practitioners. Now, I'm sort of copping out by saying I don't know exactly what that means. But I think if you ask Father Linder, are you a community development corporation the same way that you thought of yourself 20 years ago? He would say no. I hope. Otherwise I look pretty bad up here.

Monsignor Linder: You are right.

J. Nowak: Thanks. I owe you one.

That's not about place in the same way. It is about an economic sector. It is a whole different way of thinking about it. He, like Michael Porter, is connecting locality and growth clusters. In a very practical and very pragmatic way.

I think the answer is yes, but it means we need to reinvent different kinds of institution, but we haven't spent enough time thinking about what that means and advocating policy that would help us get there. In fact, I would argue and because I'm among friends, I can do this, that we probably spent too much time defending the status quo. Including the status quo of existing infrastructure of community development.

You could argue that one of the problems in community development is that the customer became a nonprofit organization. That's not the customer. The customer is low income people. And nonprofit organizations were just the mediating institutions to get to these customers. So if the question is how do you get to these customers, then in some instances the existing infrastructure is useful and in some instances it is not. It has got to be reinvented or in some instances it obscures the issue.

I think it is probably because of the anxiety about community development, the sort of internal sense of not being so sure of whether we are good or not, that we don't have the broader, tougher conversation about where we might we go. Where are we going. I would say if we don't, we will become irrelevant. Banks are institutions that are becoming irrelevant all the time. A friend of mine at the Federal Reserve says we just simply won't use the word "bank" as a noun anymore. It will be over. Why would we think that something that got invented around the OEO program would somehow have eternal resonance. It is going to be transformed. The question is, do we get ahead of the curve here in the transformation? Do we become a part of the conversation? Do we think about what we can be in a fundamentally different way? Do we have the courage to do that?

Central to that is that the low-income workforce is getting miseducated, not educated, in the inner city. I agree with Lester Thurow — if you don't have good skills in the 21st century, forget it. Turn out the lights. The premium for being an American is over. Globalization has halted that. We are not going to stop it. I don't care how many core groups are going around Seattle. It is going to occur. Certainly in terms of skills. There are 200 million middle class people in India. I was just in India doing something with community banking. You know, there is still the old India of poverty and dread, but there is also 200 million middle class people. It is a transformed world. We have got to have a kind of an ambition that fits the problem and be willing to challenge the organizational basis of our work or else I think we become irrelevant.

E.J. Dionne: I want to turn to Pietro I would like to have all the respondents think about something that struck me in the course of this conversation. Bill Higgins made the point that there is no accident that the word community is in front of community development, and that if these organizations, whether faith-based or not, increasingly turn away from their sense of place, who is building community in these neighborhoods? I would like to have people focus on that.

I also noted that you said that banks saved 75 cents on bank machines which is why we pay a $1.50 for the transaction, but this is not a problem that faith-based organizations is going to solve so I'll take that immediately off the table.

Gail Starks: Hi, I have a question. Gail Starks. I'm here in my role as founding chairperson of the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights. I guess I wanted to have some clarification and, at some point, a meeting of the minds around the definition of community development. Mr. Dickens said in his comment that he would classify the after-school care program as community development, but not the soup kitchen and I would like for us to look at the more holistic approach and allow communities to be involved within the umbrella of the definition. Because I do feel that the soup kitchen have merit if hunger and homelessness is a problem in a community. If you can feed people first and then educate them, give them a skill, then they can go onto be the carpenters, the skilled laborers, the school teachers or whatever. That's why I certainly do support after-school programs. I think we have to be flexible enough in our definition to allow communities to plug in and to define what are the most pressing problems that we are looking at and that certainly does help stabilize our community and economic structure so I just hope that we will revisit that.

J. Nowak: I don't think we disagree. I played a little game there. I said recruiting people to work in an ongoing soup kitchen was my definition. If you've got a problem of hunger and homelessness in the community and that is an immediate problem, then building a soup kitchen to deal with that is building an asset to improve the lives of the people living in the community.

Gail Starks: Thank you.

E.J. Dionne: Thank you. Pietro, thanks for joining us.

Pietro Nivola: I do want to address the main question that we have been batting around here, which is what is the purpose of community development and should community development organizations redefine their missions? But before I get to that, I do also want to spent a minute or two on the paper itself because it is really good. I urge you to read this. This paper and Avis's are the best things that I've read on the subject, at least for a neophyte like me.

Jeremy's central point is that community development needs to move beyond a parochial scope which tends to focus principally on the provision of housing services and perhaps the provision in management of "affordable housing." It needs to move beyond that kind of narrow mission to what he calls it a broadened geography, that involves not only issues of access to housing, but also economic development and a better interface with emerging labor markets. I think his delineation of the challenges that face community development corporation are very much on target.

In my opinion, and I think it is also his, the continuing concentration and isolation of an urban underclass in American cities and the relentless disbursal of everyone and everything else to sprawling suburbs is a huge problem. And I think we all agree in this room that CDC can make some difference — no one really knows how much — but they possibly make a difference in relieving this concentration of poverty at the urban core and thereby letting viable households and businesses back into the cities at some future time.

But how? Jeremy's point is that what is needed here are regionally oriented housing, job placement and networking strategies. Back in the 1960s we used to call these kinds of strategies ghetto disbursal, which was not a pretty designation. What are my criticisms of his analysis? I guess my only quibble with this paper is that I think it may be a bit too optimistic about the ability of these organizations to pull off the rather formidable paradigm shift that is implicit in what the paper recommends, which is switching from a strictly place-based type of orientation and becoming organizations with a wider geographic reach and a regional sort of market oriented type of mission. The reason why this switch is probably difficult and, by the way, I suspect that it is particularly difficult for faith-based organizations, is that at the end of a day, they have a vested interest in limiting the scope of their activities to the community.

So it seems to me these organizations are intrinsically interested in acting like passport agencies, you know, issuing exit visas to their members, to their clients and that would seem to be particularly true if they are congregations or parishes. To put it another way at the risk of sounding a little bit Marxist here, E.J. —

E.J. Dionne: I love it when Pietro tries to be Marxist.

P. Nivola: There is an inherent contradiction. There is a tension at least between implementing programs that facilitate an exit strategy for the inner city poor to job and residential access to regional markets and on the other hand community development with an emphasis on the word "community." That is, efforts to improve their existing neighborhoods, their place, if you will, the place where these people happen to live. One approach is sort of saying we want you to stay put. The other is saying we want you to join the other million Americans who move every year. In part CDCs are naturally inclined, I think, to prefer the stay put or the place-based approach because rather than the sort of regional mobility enhancement approach because mobility eventually implies disbanding one's membership, one's constituency. So I hope that I'm beginning to answer Laura Ingall's questions here.

Regrettably, and here I really do agree with Jeremy's take on this, the place-based focus which is trying to arrest the decline of inner city neighborhoods without changing their demographics is probably pretty futile at the end of the day.

E.J. Dionne: Thank you, Pietro. Pietro said that he is a neophyte. He is a neophyte the way that the Pete Manning is a neophyte NFL quarterback. His most recent book, I should note, is Laws of the Landscape: How Policies Shape Cities in Europe and America.

Now, Darren Walker, who is the COO of the Abyssinian Development Corporation in New York City. As many of you know, the Abyssinian Baptist Church has one of the longest traditions of social and neighborhood activism, I think, of any church anywhere in the country. It is very good to have you with us.

Darren Walker: Good morning. I have the privilege of living and working in a community called Harlem, which in many ways is a metaphor for urban America. For years it was a place where the social dysfunctions and the things that were wrong with particularly people of color and particularly black people seemed to play itself out in a very big way. Most recently we have seen a change in that perception and a change in how the public at large is starting to see Harlem and hopefully how the public at large is starting to see urban America and particularly inner city communities and communities of color.

For those of us in Abyssinian, our perspective on this is very clear. We have to change perceptions. The perception of what and who we are in our community is what has been the biggest impediment to our community moving forward. Hovering above all of that, and sort of casting a cloud over it, is the issue of race. I'm not the sort of person who sits around being obsessed about race. However, if you sit before some real estate developers and bankers and people with money to invest and have to answer the kinds of stupid question that I have to answer on a weekly and monthly basis, you get obsessed about race.

And that is because you sit in front of people at a conference table at a bank or in an investment banking organization and you pitch a deal. You pitch Harlem and you are going to convince Mr. Banker, Ms. Banker that in fact their investment is safe and it would be a prudent decision to put money in my community. As I said, the kinds of questions that they ask clearly indicate that perception is what is standing between their capacity to write that check. For us it is clear that we have to change the perception of the private sector because whether we like it or not, the body politic in this country have put the private sector in the front seat and many would say in the driver seat with respect to helping to formulate policy for investment in inner cities.

So we are very appreciative and understand, Jeremy, when you talk about a market-oriented approach to community development. That's really where we come from. In part that's because in urban communities, CDCs act as a proxy for private capital. Why is it that, why does a church build a $16 million supermarket on 125th Street in Harlem? That really should be done by individuals the same way it is done in stable communities. However, we have the added burden and responsibility to be a leveraging point for private sector investment in inner cities. It is also our job ultimately to really get out of the way because we want to see the same kind of infrastructure in our community with an asset base, with philanthropy, with corporate taking care of the community, local people taking care of the community.

These are principles that are critical, that are absolutely essential to our ability to bring community revitalization. We don't talk about community revitalization. We talk about transformation at Abyssinian because revitalization has an overtone of going back to the way it was. For us in Harlem, we really don't want to go back to the way it was. In fact, Harlem was never owned by black people. We want to change that paradigm . We want to have local people have ownership and have a buy into the assets in the community. The role of churches, the role of the faith-based CDC in particular, is critical as a catalyst for private sector investment.

I will give you a perfect example of that and I speak very much from the ground, so while I appreciate social theories and social scientists, for me it is really about what is happening on the ground and the practical challenges that those of us who are doing community development day to day must face and overcome.

We had a project, a housing project in Harlem, and we had to convince some banks that they should finance the project. Our good friend Mark Yaw out there at List who gave us our first grant recognizes this because Mark deals with this too on a daily basis. But we have to go around and convince these banks and the creditors that in fact the value that we were projecting on the housing that we wanted to build was real and that those numbers could be met. No one would believe it and the reason they wouldn't believe it was because they said there aren't any cops. There aren't any cops in Harlem because nothing has been going on there for years so there hasn't been any new development. There hasn't been any kind of market rate housing development. There hasn't been any commercial development in over three decades. So it is hard for us to make a decision about really going forward and financing this project.

What really made them go forward with financing the project was our institutional strength in saying you've got to do this. We are putting our own money on the line and as an institution in our city, you've got to do the same thing. We were positioned to do that and we do those kinds of things, particularly with the private sector but as well with the public sector, every day. It is a challenge and it is frustrating but it has got to be done. In terms of perception, the irony about the perception about Harlem has really been that while Reverend Butts, who is my pastor and our leader of our organization, and Reverend Flake and many other people including Reverend Jackson had been in the forefront in terms of perception, it really has been my proponent that has changed perception of my community.

I owe Michael a lot because — and I say this sadly and with some regret — it has been Michael who has been able to convince white corporate America that in fact they should come to the inner city. And for those of us who are on the field, what Michael Porter writes ? I mean with all due respect — there is nothing revealing. It certainly is couched in terms that are academic from the perspective of a researcher, but there is no rocket science there. We know that where there is density and where there are people piled up on top of each other, even though they may have lower incomes, the aggregate of that is buying power. But what we needed to do was to have a white man at Harvard Business School say that.

And that's really important. There are many stories my friend Debbie Wright who used to run our empowerment zone has a wonderful story about Michael's ability to do something to sell and to get someone to sign a lease on a major, major deal in Harlem after her basically giving up. She realized what was missing here and as I said to her, what is missing is the face of a white man. And, in fact, that's what sold it. So whether we like it or not, that is where it is. That's the challenge that those of us who are in community development have to face. How do we change the perception about our community and make people feel that their managers are going to want to get on the subway and get off at 125th Street and do their training in Harlem. That they are going to be able to park. That after dark it is possible for them to walk the streets of Harlem and not be mugged or raped or mangled in some way.

One point that was made and, Pietro, you did a good job of talking about and that is this whole issue of regional coalition and coalescence. It is one thing to talk about that. It is another to make that a reality. It is hard to get people in a community to work together.

It is really, really hard to get people from different communities to work together. There are some models that we can replicate, that we can look at and learn from. But the reality is that it is a Herculean task. The body politic does not support communities coming together, certainly not suburban or second ring communities outside of the urban core coming together with the urban core to solve problems. Maybe we need to look at new paradigms to make that happen. But the reality is that we do not have any sort of political intermediation that would support that.

I think the last thing I want to say is that what I am most concerned about with faith-based community development is that this is a fad. That is what we at Abyssinian are most worried about it. We are most worried because every Tom, Dick and Harry church, at least every black church in America, wants to be a CDC now. That is a major problem. For those of us who are looking at building a national movement of faith-based development, we have got to face up to that and deal with that head on. So I will cut it there but I do have some more things to say specifically about faith-based development this afternoon. Thank you very much.

E.J. Dionne: Jennifer Quinn, who will get to be first this afternoon.

Jennifer Quinn: Actually I'm going to be replaced by Father Hacala this afternoon.

E.J. Dionne: So this is totally unfair.

J. Quinn: Yes. Completely unfair. But I do want to focus on some of the things that Pietro and Darren were talking about. I have three points to make and they focus around this issue of place and locality and community development and regionalism. And the specific point that Jeremy makes that I want to talk about is this notion that CDCs should become regionally focused and brokers between people in urban communities and housing and job opportunity. I think the paper is correct in that it points out that this anti-sprawl sentiment has created a new opportunity in terms of concern that it has generated about urban communities. But I do have one very large concern about the regional focus — it doesn't really adequately address the issue of affordable housing.

It is true that there is a big disconnect between where poor people are and where jobs are and for that reason I think there is a lot of work that can be done with CDCs that are trying to open job opportunities and improved transportation between urban communities and the suburbs. But it is not the case that the suburbs represent a vast untapped pool of affordable housing. So in that sense I am concerned that if the CDCs adopt a more regional focus, that this pressing issue of affordable housing is going to fall by the wayside.

Just to highlight this point a little bit more, the National Low Income Housing released a study earlier this fall that said the median housing wage for someone nationally to afford a two-bed room apartment is $11.86 an hour or something like that. In the D.C. area, it is over $15, so the idea that CDCs are going to be able to connect people with jobs that are paying this kind of wage drives home the scope of the problem and how serious the challenge will be to go in that direction.

The second point that I would like to make about the paper is that it presents the gap between people in urban communities and housing and job opportunities as a vacuum. There isn't a lot of discussion about government or the role that CDCs should play in the future with government in terms of bridging that gap. I think that there is a lot that the government can do; for example, the president's New Markets Initiative has done a lot to draw attention to places in the economy that had been left behind, labor resources that have not been tapped by corporate America. I think there is a lot in the future that community development and grass roots activism can do to bring pressure on governments to bring the private sector to the table because it takes a lot of time to build those relationships with the private sector and you can't have every church out there trying to build relationships with corporations out in the suburbs. You need a central point and government has a lot of those relationships with other local governments and with the private sector that I think should be a resource to people involved in community development.

And my last point is that I think that there in broadening the focus, there is a risk of losing touch with the grass roots. That brings me to the other point for today, which is the role of faith-based organizations. I think that the real challenge is not to continue to preach to the choir but to broaden the constituency that cares about these issues. I think that faith-based organizations are really uniquely situated to address these problems in a regional way. Actually I disagree a little bit with one of the things that Pietro said because I think the idea that the congregations are very wedded to place is a myth. Some are, but in fact there are a lot of congregations that have a very large commuter constituency and so by engaging some of these congregations, you can actually have a very large scope of influence.

A second point is that there are mainline denominations that have a regional infrastructure in place. So my personal hope for the future of faith-based organizations in a community development is not so much on a side of faith-based groups that are doing the activity directly themselves but to expand the opportunities that are available for everyone.

E.J. Dionne: Thank you very much. If you want to stay, you can still go first.

Thank you so much. What I would like to do, we don't have a whole lot of time for lunch, what I want to make sure of if there are people here who are not going to be able to stay for the afternoon but who do have something to say, I would like to give them the first shot to speak and then I would like to collect some comments and then have some responses from the panel before we go to lunch. Does anyone want to join in at this point? Sir.

Pat Coliver: I'm Pat Coliver. I'm a policy advocate for the United Church of Christ and I cut my teeth in this in the southside ghetto of Chicago which was a very difficult area to work in at that time. I worked with the Woodlawn Organization which was at that time very focused on community development as opposed to civil rights efforts, which caused a certain kind of stress in that city.

I wanted to say two things. One is that some communities are a whole lot easier to develop than others and the strategy that works in some places is not a strategy that necessarily works in others. Within the distance of just a couple of miles I got to live and work in a situation that was largely home owning even though it was right next to a situation with every imaginable urban ill that you can talk about. What we could do with a strategy based on home owners who had an investment was very different than what you could do just a few blocks away where people were desperately trying to get out of that neighborhood and move to neighborhoods where they could become homeowners. So I think we need to think about that a little bit.

The other thing that I want to say is even more basic and hasn't been said so far, as far as I know. That is that I know that some churches that are truly parish based and have their membership in the neighborhoods that they are trying to work with and, if they are successful and vital congregations, they are exactly the kinds of reasons that people will stay in that neighborhood. People will stay in neighborhoods because they are linked into a caring network, a place where they are known and understood and even if they become successful, they may not just choose to move out to the suburb as fast as possible because they have a commitment to the neighborhood, to Joe and Sam and Sally and Rachel and real people that are alive, places where their mother lives and all these things.

I think we haven't thought about the self-interest of congregations to sustain that. It gives us a base for holding a core of people who care so that even though some people will move, there is going to be a base of folk who will stay and that is a resource of hidden infrastructure of people that know and care about community and who know some of the stories and why this building has never been able to develop. It sat on the corner. It is an obvious building. Why haven't you been able to fix that one? There are people that know that is a dead end place for the next ten years. Those kind of bits of local information are critical when you are doing on the ground version of this thing.

So those are the two comments and one thing is in the Woodlawn organization, the best thing we did in community development was to go after slum lords and force people in the private sector to fix up their own buildings if they were going to get any income out of them. That is very relevant in some neighborhoods and totally irrelevant in others. So I really perhaps more than any felt drawn to Father Linder's comment, we are pragmatic people and what works in one place doesn't work in another and sometimes when we get to conferences we talk so strategically that we forget that there are so many different ways of skinning these cats. I don't like that.

Father Ryan: I used to be pastor of two different parishes here in D.C. It's good to see some old friends. Great conversation. I am especially fascinated by this place-based thing of faith-based community development. I have spent the last seven years at Woodstalk running around trying to get Catholic priests to wrap their tongues around a two syllable word called justice. Biblical justice, one God, one world, we are all sisters and brothers. It is a fascinating notion and very, very easy to swallow unless you are sitting in California and Proposition 187 is on the ballot when people don't want to deal with other people or places.

I live in the shadow of Gino Baronie every day of my life. He said we belong to the largest, most arrogant operation in the world, the Roman Catholic Church, which divides the whole world, puts some pastor in charge of some piece of property and calls the whole world its own. What I have found is that the institutional form of individualism known as parochialism is alive and well in the Roman Catholic church. And that the pastor in parish X sitting next to the pastor in parish Y and they have little idea what they are doing together. Rarely are they coming together in community-based development. Rarely are they coming together in a variety of kind of things that make things happen.

I think what Jennifer talked about is very clear. I sit on the weekends in Potomac, a new challenge for me, Our Lady of Mercy. It's known among the folks around town as Our Lady of Mercedes. They asked me to bless brownies and cookies going to the inner city and to those kinds of meals. I said this is pretty self-serving until I found out that that particular parish is pouring $, a year into inner city school scholarships.

Secondly, I find out that parish has got board members on Victory Housing that is building housing and the potential is there. To awaken that potential takes a hell of a lot of work and I don't think that we can underestimate the kind of work that it takes to get a whole church involved. Cardinal Hickey goes out in an ecumenical operation and they break ground for a bunch of houses out east of the river. That operation comes from an IAF kind of organizing that a bunch of bishops have been involved with, a bunch of church leaders have been involved with across the country. But parochialism is the big danger here.

The other side of that is the largest Pentecostal and Holiness and nondenominational churches need some kind of linking in order to be able to see this. Just a quick story. I'm in Jamaica where the local pastors are telling me 70 percent of the folks are not in the economy. I feel like I'm in parts of Washington, D.C. I go to Maganow Island to do another one of these. All the workers are contract workers from Jamaica and talking about their parishes back home. The connections are there. Wake up this church to the possibilities, to the national, and international possibilities of pulling things together.

There is another thing Jeremy and Bill hit on. Not only education of kids in cities and education of adults, this charter school thing. Let's think about prisons. The thing that sits in my craw is that in February we are going to hit 2 million in prison folks. There is a work force there, a labor force there in terms of training and retraining to put the work in this country. We need to begin to think much more creatively in terms of the development of the economic potential of the folks who found their way into detention kinds of places, and I think we've got this notion of profit making on the part of those that are building the prisons has got to be replaced by a real sense that there is asset there that can be developed for the common good of us all. Thanks.

E.J. Dionne: Thank you, Father Ryan. We haven't heard from Ray Ramsey or Father Linder for a bit so I would like to bring you in and also if anyone else wants to join and then I would like to give Jeremy a chance to close.

R. Ramsey: I just want to say one brief thing because we've talked about it a little bit, but I think it still needs to be teased out some more. That is what has been called this tension — and I don't know whether tension is the right word — between people and place. It is not a bright line. It is a very murky line and it is not a zero sum game between a place-based strategy or a people-based strategy. It was mentioned earlier about whether there is a tension between having an exit strategy from a neighborhood versus keeping people there. The work we have been involved with is to give people choices and to try to create communities of choice. Because there are times even when it is low-income community or a poor community when a person chooses not only to live there, but to stay. So that requires helping that place. There is nothing wrong with giving assets to that family so that they or their children may choose to eventually leave and maybe come back.

So I think that whatever strategies we are teasing and talking about, we have to recognize that there is this murkiness between people and place and it is okay.

Monsignor Linder: One of the points I would like to make is that we have to be careful to not define faith-based as one institution. It can actually be based in religious people who are not necessarily representative of their institution. Certainly that happened with us and our experience at New Community, because — frankly — I was put in exile. So it is very clear that there was no longer a tie to the parish. We do have some tie now to the one that I happen to pastor, but that's just because I'm the pastor there.

Basically, I think many of the groups come out of a much more ecumenical, non-institutional background, very much the role religion played in the civil rights movement. And I think that is influenced by many of us coming from that movement and not wanting to be identified with any one given institution.

E.J. Dionne: Thank you, Father. Avis wanted to say something.

Avis Vidal: Yes, it strikes me that this issue about place-based strategies as opposed to regional strategies comes back in an odd way to the earlier question about whether the CDCs have to change if they go regional. Obviously, they do. But then there still has to be somebody who is minding the store, actually building community on the ground, worrying about neighborhood planning and getting people registered to vote and this and that.

The community development movement is often criticized for having helped to focus the work of CDCs on affordable housing and so you hear people saying CDCs just do housing. Why aren't they paying attention to all these other problems? I think that Jeremy doesn't fall into that trap. He acknowledges a broader action arena. But what brought the community development movement together and got people starting to call it an industry instead of a social movement and invite its representatives to testify on Capitol Hill and to acknowledge it as a force in low income communities was the fact that very diverse organizations

If it is the case, and I think it is, that the CDCs have to become more diversified among themselves, because everybody can't be a regional broker reaching out to Ford, then that means that there is an increasing tendency for the boundaries of field to blur. The question then is how the movement, the industry, retains enough cohesion to retain and enhance its political voice.

E.J. Dionne: Thank you. Pietro and then Jeremy.

P. Nivola: Avis brings up an important question. If I had to guess, my best would be that the role of CDCs in focusing on affordable housing matters is likely to grow rather than decrease. One reason for that has to do with the smart growth movement in the suburbs. It is simple economics. Smart growth, if it succeeds in many metropolitan areas, is likely to limit the supply of low cost housing, so there will be a need for these community organizations to try to find affordable housing for inner city and other low income groups.

E.J. Dionne: Thank you. Jeremy, you can wrap everything up in that package.

J. Nowak: Just a few points. I want to agree with Ray that healthy neighborhoods are both incubators and attractors. And if you think of place in that way, as a dynamic set of interconnections that people in and out of, then the question is, how do you make this place competitive? How do you make it a place of choice? It strikes me in doing some of the people/place issues that those categories are themselves a reflection of the disconnections in our social geography. The social tensions and social life. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having that conversation about their opposition.

I think it is clear that there is not a supply of affordable housing in the suburbs. I wouldn't say that we should back off the issue and shouldn't try to increase the supply of affordable housing in the suburbs. In fact, the very churches that you were yelling at that I talked to in the suburbs that were investors loved the idea of feeling good about giving me an investment to do a Habitat for Humanity project in North Philadelphia. However, if I said, why don't we come up with a regional Section 8 distribution situation where every three blocks of the region should take one Section 8 housing, I wouldn't be as welcome in some of those places. Let's be clear about that.

It is not either or, but living in the tension is important. That is the social justice issue and therefore I still would push trying to increase the supply of affordable housing throughout a regional system so that you can maximize choice, which I think is a good old-fashioned American value that we can all stand for.

E.J. Dionne: Thank you. Thank you very much. We are going to break for lunch where I know Bruce Katz is going to get into some of the very issues that we got into.

[END OF MORNING DISCUSSION]

LUNCH KEYNOTE

E.J. Dionne: I'm sorry to interrupt this discussion so early, but Bruce Katz has to get on an airplane early today. He is doing many things, including giving Jerry Brown advice on how to run Oakland. At least that's how I will cast it. He could cast it differently.

I'm going to ask him to come up and talk and also he will kind of lead us in a discussion after he says many provocative things to this group. An awful lot of people in this room know Bruce. He is a senior fellow in economic studies here at Brookings. He is the director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. He was Chief of Staff at HUD from 1993 to 1996 and has done all kinds of things which I won't read here. He went to Brown University and to Yale Law School and no one will hold that against him. I want to say personally that I used to work down the hall from Bruce. Bruce can teach you more about cities and metropolitan policies in two to five minutes than most of us can teach anyone anything over a period of several hours.

I'm very grateful that he is here today and I'm also grateful for the help that he has given us in organizing this session. Thank you, Bruce Katz.

Bruce Katz: Good afternoon everyone. I apologize for doing this to you during lunch because I know this is a good time for people to talk and sort of reflect, but I do have the unfortunate problem of getting out to Dulles Airport on a rainy day which means I probably won't make my flight. I want to commend EJ for doing this and for bringing together this gathering. I recognize some of the people in this room. I think this is a great mix of folks who are doing very important work.

You know, we talk about these two to five-minute universities or minute universities. E.J. is writing two columns a week and somehow he is managing to pull this stuff together. If I had one tenth of the energy that he has, I might actually be dangerous. I'll leave it at that.

I want to talk about a couple of things today. I will try to ask and answer three questions which I think will resonate with people who participated in the morning session. First, what are the major trends affecting metropolitan areas in the country today. Second, how is government responding to these trends. Within that there are two major policy shifts that I see emerging around the country. One is the smart growth movement, the curve sprawl and promotion of urban reinvestment and the second is the increasing interest in investing in our working family in this country. And finally, I want to focus on where community development and housing fit within these two larger policy shifts.

First, an admonition: A sign of a truly educated person is to be deeply moved by statistics. That was supposedly said by George Bernard Shaw.

It is one of these things that you pick up in the most quotable quotes of the 20th century. I find it hard to believe George Bernard Shaw ever actually said that but I'm going to try to walk you through a bunch of statistics. If anyone ever wants gets to the hard copy of this, we can do that. We have a PowerPoint presentation which we can e-mail to you.

Let me focus on the first question, what are the major trends effecting metropolitan areas today? I'm going to focus on four trends. First, decentralization. In a word, sprawl is the dominant trend in the U.S. economy and society. Two, poverty is becoming more concentrated not only in our central cities, but in our older communities, older suburbs as well. Three, suburbs are beginning to suffer the consequences of uncontrolled metropolitan growth, not just the older suburbs that are losing fiscal capacity and falling behind, but newer suburbs that are choking on congesting and overcrowding and so forth. And fourth, the incomes of working families are not sufficient to make ends meet. In the past, we tended to talk about spatial trends, but we didn't really focus on this fourth trend ? the incomes of working families.

So first, the decentralization of America as the dominant trend. There is a lot of mythology about the comeback of American cities and there are some cities, including this one, that look fundamentally different than they did a few years ago. But the bottom line fact is that the spreading out of metropolitan areas remains the dominant trend in the United States today. The population growth centers are suburbs that are further and further away from the central core.

Look at Denver, which has had a pretty good 1990s. It recovered from the recession of the 80s. It has gained about 30,000 people. The suburbs outside of Denver, whether you look at Jefferson or Arrapaho or Adams, have gained population ten to one. If you go to Seattle, and Seattle is obviously one of the most vibrant cities in our country, it has had anemic growth in terms of population in the 1990s. Chicago, after a brutal 1980s where the city lost about 200,000 people plus, has gained about 18,000 people in the 1990s. Yet the growth is further and further out, not just in Cook County surrounding Chicago, but in Lake and McHenry and other counties as well. Cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia and St. Louis have lost more people this decade than they lost last decade, but yet their metropolitan areas continue to grow further and further away from the central core.

So in terms of population, in terms of demographics, what we are seeing is population growth away from the core throughout the United States as a universal trend. Not surprisingly, the outer suburbs are experiencing substantial job growth partly because of this residential boom. We looked at the seven Ohio metropolitan areas and the seven principal cities in Ohio. Together in the mid 1990s, they gained about 210,000 net new jobs. About 90 percent of that job growth was in the suburbs and increasingly targeted to the outer suburbs. The seven central business districts of those cities together gained 636 net new jobs in the mid 1990s.

We talk about an urban renaissance because we see Camden Yards and we see some other convention centers being expanded, but when you actually look at some of the hard statistics about job growth and net job growth in these central cities, it is very anemic. In this region, we started the 1990s with the District of Columbia having a third of the region's jobs and we will end the 1990s with the District of Columbia having a quarter of the region's jobs. In part, this is because of the federal downsizing and in part because of the growth of the information technology and biotech quarters.

Now the decentralization of the economy has three kinds of spatial effects. The first is on the central city. What we've seen since the early 1970s is a growing, alarming concentration of poverty in the central cities. The number of people living in the neighborhoods of high poverty in this country grew from about 4.1 million people in 1970 to about 8 million people in 1990. These are the number of people living in neighborhoods of high poverty where the poverty rate is 40 percent or more.

In certain cities like Detroit or Miami, literally 40 percent of the population, of the entire population, is living in neighborhoods of high poverty. In places like Cleveland, about 20 percent. In Baltimore about 15 percent. These are the neighborhoods where all the social indicators that we are so concerned about, whether school performance, crime, teenage pregnancy, family fragmentation, substance abuse ? all of these have a direct correlation with children growing up in neighborhoods where disproportionate numbers of people don't work.

Because of the decentralization of the economy, what we are also seeing are these cities and neighborhoods falling behind in welfare reform. Not surprisingly, as jobs drift further away from the central core and as the poor, particularly the minority poor, tend to concentrate back in the central city and inner city neighborhoods, the ability of people to make the transition from welfare to work is very difficult. So we are seeing cities like Baltimore, that have 13 percent of Maryland's population, and now have 56 percent of the welfare caseloads in that state. Cities like Philadelphia that have 12 percent of the population in Pennsylvania, but 47, 50 percent of the welfare caseloads. These are structural issues, about where jobs are going, where opportunity is migrating.

This can be an old story, the decline of the city. This is what has been happening since the end of World War II. What is different now is that the older suburbs are beginning to look more and more like the central cities in terms of poverty rates, particularly in the schools, in terms of lack of investment, in terms of lack of opportunity, in terms of lower fiscal capacity. We did a study in this region earlier in the summer and we looked at the number of kids who qualify for free or reduced cost lunch in this region. It's not surprising that the District of Columbia has 75 percent of the kids qualify for free or reduced cost lunch. And Alexandria has 50 percent. Prince George's County 40 percent. Arlington County over 40 percent. Again, the sense that the city has all the problems, the city has all the distress is beginning to change as many of these issues begin to affect older suburbs.

What we are seeing also, however, as decentralization occurs, as demographic pressures and market pressures affect newer suburbs, is that these developing suburbs, these places at the fringe of metropolitan areas, are choking on congestion. They are dealing with overcrowded schools. They are losing open space at an alarming rate. They are concerned about their quality of life, the reasons why people moved out there to begin with.

Again, to talk about this region, in the 1990s, enrollment in the district schools declined by 11 percent. The District had to close a bunch of schools that were not performing. Loudon County saw the number of kids in their public school system grow by 78 percent. They have to build 22 new schools just to keep pace with this explosion of children that are out at the fringe. So the key thing about these spatial trends is that they affect not just those places that are left behind in the new economy, the central cities and older suburbs, but also in a very different way, those places that are "winning" in the new economy. As I will talk about in a second, this creates enormous potential for new political coalitions across jurisdictional lines, across disciplinary lines.

The other trend I want to talk about just briefly is the failure of the income of working families to keep pace with the cost of daily living. We generally don't talk about this because there is a people discussion and there is a place discussion. I know that you had some of that this morning. These are totally separate things. We do housing. You do welfare. You do transportation. You do child care. We can't talk to each other because our language is different and we are so fragmented. The bottom line is another body blow to our central cities and our older suburbs where disproportionate numbers of working families live. These people do not have sufficient income to make ends meet, through no fault of their own. They are working hard. They are playing by the rules. They are doing the right things. Yet they can't afford health care. They can't afford child care. They can't afford housing which so many of you work on.

When you look at the statistics about the percentage of families without health insurance, for example, these are working family issues. Think about the housing crunch — this is a statistic from the Joint Center up at Harvard, assuming a take-home pay of $7 per hour, which is higher than the minimum wage, full-time work, 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year. A single earner cannot pay the rent on an average moderate two bedroom unit anywhere in the United States.

We now have 5.3 million households in this country either who are paying more than 50 percent of their income for rent or living in substandard housing. The stock of affordable housing at a time of tremendous economic pressure and pressure on rental markets is declining precipitously.

So those are the large trends that are affecting cities in metropolitan areas today. You are not going to see this is one of those airline magazines praising the renaissance of Baltimore or Philadelphia. This is the reality of life in America today. There are two major forces at play. The rapid decentralization of the economy, with all that means for these different jurisdictions and the people who live there, and the market failure, the failure of income to keep pace with the cost of daily living. That's the bad news.

The good news — and this is the second question — is how government is responding to these major trends. We like to talk about the private sector and philanthropic sector and so forth, but so much of this is about government rules and investments. It is critical that we think about government policy.

There are two major policy trends at play in the United States today. At the federal, state and local level, we are beginning to focus on smart growth, new ways of looking at growth. At the federal level in particular, we are beginning to focus in a very exciting way on new investments and working families. Let me talk about each one of these, the new metropolitan agenda and the new working family agenda, and try to connect community development to them.

Around the country, what I think is happening is that both the constituencies of older communities — mayors, city councilmen, corporate and civic leaders — and leaders in the newer suburbs — environmentalists, conservationalists, farm preservationists, anything with an ?ist at the end except for socialist — are beginning to see the fact that they have a common agenda. That if you are stuck in traffic in Loudon County and you have to pay higher property tax rates every year to pay for the school facilities, maybe that has something to do with the fact that we have not invested in Prince George's and we have not invested east of the river in D.C. That situation plays out across the country.

What these coalitions are beginning to focus on is that sprawl and decentralization and the spreading out of our metropolitan areas is not inevitable. It is not just the market. It is not just consumer preference. It is not just the failure of the cities to provide services. A lot of this has to do with large sets of government policies. Spending, tax, regulatory, administrative policies at the federal and state level that took the playing field against older communities and towards the green field with all the effects that we talked about before. So what these coalitions are beginning to focus on is a very robust musculature policy agenda, reform at the federal, state and regional levels.

At the state level, it takes a couple forms. First, it takes the form of governance. A lot of these issues that bedevil us — transportation, workforce, housing — are not parochial issues. They cross borders. They need to be thought about in a metropolitan context. The media markets are metropolitan. Yet we govern parochially. So increasingly around the country, people are focusing on transportation and workforce and all of these issues in a way that respects local autonomy, but also acknowledges that these issues really have to be dealt with in a larger context. In Georgia, in Minneapolis, in Portland, we begin to see this focus of metropolitan governance as a new form of dealing with our area of challenges.

Eleven states now have growth management statutes and are trying to bring some coherent approach to the use of land in a state context. Tennessee, not the most progressive state in the world, joined the group last year by passing growth management provisions which will basically require every county to project out growth for the next 20 or 50 years to draw urban growth boundaries around their metropolitan area and bring some coherence, some rationality to what has been almost an irrational push. We also saw in the 1998 ballot referenda $7.5 billion voted on by nine states in hundreds of jurisdictions to buy up open space at the fringe.

Smart growth basically refers to how we spend our infrastructure dollars. Do we spend our road money to build the next generation of Beltways? Do we use it to build large bypass projects to build new intersections so that we can get to new big boxed retail establishments? Or do we begin to re-envision our infrastructure for the 21st century, as they are doing in Boston, as they are doing in other places around the country, so again we can try to think of compact development, regions that make both market sense, but also social sense and finally tax sharing?

Many of you are familiar with Myron Orfield. Jeremy probably talked about him this morning. What Orfield is talking about is essentially a common sense solution. We have places in this country where growth is occurring. The Loudon counties of the world. These are the places where the high-end retail, high-end residential, the new commercial facility, the new industrial facilities are congregated. They are getting a percentage of the revenue from that growth and yet there are all of these costs to that growth which are spilling back over into other communities. So how do we begin to build regional tax systems that recognize that we need to share the costs and meet the challenges?

I think the metropolitan agenda in this country is one of the most exciting things that has emerged in the past five to ten years because it is about unifying coalitions that have been kept separate and distinct for a long time. People that care about the city and people who care about the environment. People who care about competitiveness and people who care about equity and opportunity. So that is one major trend that is occurring. It is occurring in state legislatures, in regions and even at the federal government, with Al Gore talking about it.

The other major trend pertinent to community development is the increasing investment in working families. It is principally a federal issue, but also an issue that involves state governments. Federal spending on working families is one of the best kept secrets in the U.S. government. I'm not sure it's that they don't want you to know. It is just because they are incompetent and they can't tell you.

David Elwood actually had us tally this all up. We think about the revolution of social policy from the perspective of welfare reform. That has been the revolution in social policy in the mid 1990s. There has been a quiet revolution going on since the early 1980s, during which the amount of spending on the working family, people who don't receive cash assistance, has gone from about $6 billion to over $51 billion on an annual basis. These are people making $15,000, $20,000 a year. We are talking about Medicaid expansion, about child care expansion, both through appropriated resources and through the tax code. We are talking about the expansion of your earned income tax credit. We are talking about the children's health insurance program that was enacted a couple years ago.

This is an enormous increase in investment at the federal level in families who, in the past, were sort of in a policy no-man's land. If you are middle class, you get all the deductions, mortgage interest deduction, etc. If you are very poor, you get welfare and maybe some housing assistance. These are the families who, again, are working and yet can't seem to make ends meet because of the cost of healthcare, child care, housing, etc. So the interesting thing that is happening is the federal government is talking about healthcare, lifting children out of poverty. Gore has his own healthcare policy. Even Governor Bush has a tax proposal that he talks about targeting to working families.

So these are the two major policy trends that I see happening around the country and, in some cases, in federal, state and local cases. Very much around metropolitan issues — governance, tax reform, smart growth, use of transportation dollars, land use reform. A very spatial agenda. How do we stop distorting the marketplace and how do we level the playing field between older communities and newer communities so that growth can occur in a more fiscally, socially, environmentally sustainable way ? these are the questions. At the same time, we are having a conversation of how to invest in people who get up every morning, do the right thing, work one or two jobs and yet can't afford healthcare or childcare. Think about the consequences of that just for the stability of the political system — where people are doing the right thing and yet can't seem to make ends meet. Now, what the hell does community development —

Sorry. I forgot I was in front of a group of faith-based people.... But what does this have to do with community development and housing? I think it has a lot to do with this agenda and that it has enormous implications for what you do.

First, housing is a key component of metropolitan growth. The lack of affordable housing in the suburbs exacerbates congestion, it exacerbates labor shortages. The lack of affordable housing in the suburbs hinders the ability of low-income families, particularly the minority poor and minority working families, to access opportunity, good schools, good jobs. Community development is also a key component of metropolitan growth. What you folks are doing is basically creating neighborhoods of choice in the city. You are creating a place where people can decide, I'm going to stay here because it is safe, I can send my kids to a decent school. I have access to decent services. But it is also a place where people may want to move in so that we can resettle the city. The more we talk about urban neighborhoods becoming attractive choices, particularly as the demographic shifts in this country and we move towards a more elderly population, the more we can take the pressure off of sprawl.

The stronger cities are, the more we can talk about more sustainable development patterns. People talk a lot about how urban revitalization is the flip side of farm preservation. You want to preserve the farms, you want to preserve the open space, you want to take the pressure off of the Loudon counties of the world and restore the core. Think about investing in and rebuilding the neighborhoods of Washington, DC and Prince George's.

Housing and community development is also a key component of the working family agenda. Housing is the major expenditure for low and moderate income households. We talk a lot in this country about healthcare and childcare. We talk about all of these disparate needs and challenges that working families have. At the end of the day, it is the housing expenditure that is the largest and yet we don't talk about it in the same context as we talk about the others. The build of the housing challenge, as Cushing Dolbeare knows more than anyone else, is affordability and not supply. So much of our response to housing is about low-income housing tax credits — all of these are good programs, but they are all about expanding the supply of affordable housing as opposed to providing income transfers. The lack of affordable housing is also an impediment to welfare reform. We are telling people, we are dictating to people, that you must get off of welfare. But guess what? You still can't afford housing.

So much of what you folks are doing are components of these two larger agendas that are emerging in this country and yet we don't marry them, don't really integrate them. These are now the new macro approaches to urban revitalization and community development is still a micro approach. What I suggest to you is that the biggest challenge we have in both the secular and the faith-based communities is to begin to integrate community development and housing with metropolitan growth and working family conversations.

Jeremy gave you a three-part piece that is consistent with what I think is the way community development needs to evolve. We need to know where community development corporations work. Do they work only back in the central city neighborhoods or do they begin to reach out and build regional consortiums around affordable housing? I think that is absolutely fundamental. The second part is poverty alleviation. How do community development entities think about this income gap, market failure? And the third point is public policy. So much of what we've done in this country that has been helpful in the community development arena has been a provider kind of role. We fill the gap. The market is not doing it.

What we begin to lose sight of is that these large government policies can have negative effects on the neighborhoods in which you are working. I think the role of the churches is to bifurcate this a little. The role of the churches can be central and already we are seeing this in places around the country.

When we think about these two major issues — sprawl and decentralization — they are not just market issues, not just social issues or issues for policy thinkers and academics to focus on. These are, at the core, moral issues about how this country is growing and developing. We don't tend to talk about this in spiritual or moral terms because this is the stuff of policy. But at the core of this is who we are as a country and I don't think there is any group of individuals or institutions better situated to talk about that than the churches in this country.

So as you struggle with this, whether you are an existing community development corporation and you are expanding your role or continuing your effort, or whether you are a faith-based institution thinking about getting into this business and forming your own CDC, I urge you to lift this conversation beyond the micro approach to these larger trends and challenges facing our cities. More importantly, I urge you to lift it to those solutions that are beginning to emerge in this country around smart growth and around working family investments so that we can join in the power of coalitions and constituencies that have for too long remained separate and distinct in their little boxes and failed to see the power of a common agenda to motivate and make real change.

With that, I'll stop and open up for questions. Again, I urge you to take this opportunity to lift the conversation because I think we are at a point in this country where it is substantively right to do. It is politically feasible to do, and it is morally legitimate and valid. Thank you.

Margie Wallace: Sorry. I'm Margie Wallace from the Progressive Policy Institute. I wanted to underline the point that Bruce made about investing and working families. All of the money, all of this new investment coming from the children's health program, Medicaid expansions, new welfare block grants can be used to support working families. But the fact is that a lot of that money is just sitting there and not reaching the families it is supposed to reach. I think that CDCs and faith-based organizations have a great role to play in putting pressure on governors and state legislatures to make sure that money gets used to support the working families it was intended to support and not build a new road or something.

Just to add one other thing on your list of the costs to working families, and one that I haven't heard much talk about here today, and that is transportation. Some people have a blind spot about expanding our public transit system and CDCs have played some important advocacy roles there. We also haven't talked about getting cars to poor people and the ways that CDCs and other places are starting to play a role in helping poor people access down-payment assistance for a car or creating IDA programs for cars. Cars can be the asset that helps you get to the job.

B. Katz: I just want to reinforce something that Margie just said. You know, the children's health insurance program CHIP is one of these great government accruements ? half a billion dollars available in 1998 or 1999, 11 percent spent. We looked at these numbers in July when Margie and I were out in Denver with the mayors. 11 percent of $8.5 billion spent in health insurance money that is meant for families who can't qualify for Medicaid. So what is going on there? The governors are not implementing the program that in many cases they asked for. We gave them the flexibility and the authority. They are sitting back and going, well, I guess this doesn't work. No one is applying for it. How do you get organized so that funding and the investments that are already out there are being used?

Robert Gilmore: I just came out of a campaign to defeat an arena deal, $175 million arena deal, and a new franchise awarded to Houston, Texas with a $700 million franchise fee. Where is the moral ground? The church leaders were not with me.

B. Katz: I think what you are seeing with mayors and other central city leaders is almost the policy of desperation. My sense of what is going on here is they see the economy decentralizing and they know the game. They know the game around spending and taxes. They know the game around state legislatures. Their view is we have got to rebuild whatever we have and we seem to have the entertainment and culture niche. At the minimum, we can't lose the teams we already have but we obviously we need to go beyond that.

I think what is missing is a larger definition of the positive effects of government but also of the negative role that government is playing. What is also missing is the new language around working families. For a long time we were ashamed to talk about any of this because the country perceived this as about the people that are not working. This is the old welfare system. This is broken. This is dysfunctional. Another sign of government failure. We are beyond that now. We've reformed welfare. We've moved millions of people off the roles.

What that has unveiled is the inability of these people to make ends meet through no fault of their own. Again, they are doing the right thing. They are working one or two jobs, and yet they can't afford the basic necessities of daily life. Now, mayors don't see that as their responsibility because they don't administer that program. That is administered by the government or by the county executive so they don't see that as having anything to do with them. The same is true for many other urban constituencies. What is our role?

What I'm trying to say is that we need to redefine some of our basic urban policy to include the larger challenges that face up. I think when we do that we may actually find some supporters and allies that we didn't know existed before. The newer suburbs are for smart growth. They are for anything that will stop the bulldozers behind their homes. The older suburbs are looking for some revitalization. That's an ally. These are things with real political juice in them and I think they relate fundamentally to community development.

Audience Participant: [Inaudible question]

B. Katz: One interesting thing is when you go around the country, everybody thinks they are the capital of fragmentation. St. Louis says, we have more governments per square inch of anyone else. We are it. There are a number of ways to go about this and tax sharing is one of them. You could look at Rochester and Monroe Counties in upstate New York. You can look at Louisville in Jefferson County and you could look at Dayton. These all places that have struck tax sharing deals principally around sales taxes, but occasionally around other taxes where there is a recognition by the suburbs that if our city goes down, we go with it.

These are mostly smaller markets. These are not Chicago and Philadelphia. These are the cities of about 150 to 200,000, metropolitan areas about 600 to 650,000 people. These are manageable places and they are also still somewhat compact, so dysfunction or distress in one part of the region is not something that you can hide for very long as you might be able to in a major market. In those places, there is a clear recognition that as the city goes, as some of our older communities go, so go we. That our ability to market ourselves in the global economy to become a place to attract a quality workforce is diminished when our city is diminished.

The question is whether you can provide that package of amenities in your core and in your newer communities so that you can remain competitive. I think that is what sharing wealth or prosperity is about. It is very much a self-interested motivation. Some people may be interested in it for other reasons, but for many folks it is basically this self-interest.

In Minneapolis, many of the older suburbs receive funding from the tax-sharing scheme. The city of Minneapolis does not because it was a large office space. The city of St. Paul does not receive money from that tax share. It is the older suburbs, including Brooklyn where Jesse Ventura was the mayor before becoming governor. The older suburbs in the region gained.

Audience Participant: There is concentrated poverty, but there is also concentrated spirituality. In most urban city centers, you have five churches on one block, but none of the members usually belong to the neighborhood. It is a question of utilizing your suburban members, relating them toward the working poor. We are talking about a new definition of church now just like we are talking about new definitions of CDCs. That is going to require teaching and we need to have this kind of dialogue in our ministers' conferences and associations and theological schools.

There is no mystery to me that there is concentrated poverty and concentrated spirituality in the city because I believe that those who are in poverty are constituting a new kind of church. Oftentimes the sheep are ahead of the shepherd. We have to redefine our relationship to the poor and to the church's responsibility to those who are in the community. I want to applaud you and E.J. for this, but I wish this could get out to the urban pastors.

Audience Participant: E.J., begin to think about developing some type of roundtable. You have three or four seminaries here in the district and I know they will be glad to have this kind of discussion among the seminarians and the theologians. It won't happen overnight, but we can begin to develop a core base and a collaboration. It is a structural problem. There is a need for this information to be deposited within our theological institutions and even city ministry associations and get the thinking to change.

Jim Wallis: This is just to underscore and follow up that point. We had a roundtable last week and we had church leaders from across the country. At this Call to Renewal, what emerged as the first plank was a commitment from church leaders across the political spectrum to a living family wage. So that if you work hard enough and full-time, you shouldn't be poor. That is a sound bite that works in this country and we can win this debate over work if it is a moral conversation.

I watch evangelical leaders, Catholic, African Americans sit together across the political spectrum. This is a moral question. We have to talk about it in macro words. We are talking about it as a contract with America. In February, on the East Capitol steps, we talked about a covenant with America's poor on the part of religious communities. This can be the first plank — that working families have a right not to be poor. We are going to propose a mix of things that you are talking about that make that possible. It is going to be a moral conversation and that's where the faith-based communities can make it a valid discussion and not just a policy conversation. I want to applaud your direction. We are finally getting to that consensus around what the moral issues are.

B. Katz: The one thing that I learned in the Clinton administration is that you don't do anything that doesn't resonate with middle class values or else you are going to marginalize yourself and ultimately be defeated. This simple notion that if you work, you shouldn't be poor resonates with enormous proportion around this country. It's such a simple proposition, complicated to deal with because of all the myriad issues of housing and healthcare and childcare and transportation and so forth. But such a simple proposition. I think that for a long time we've lost course in trying to articulate a progressive agenda for this country that crosses party grounds and that can also cross spatial and jurisdictional grounds as well.

Gail Starks: Gail Starks, founding chairperson of the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights. First I just want to I guess make a comment that I feel the moral foundation, the biblical foundation is already there. I think that maybe there has been a lack of teaching about it. It is laid out in the scripture in Corinthians that, "none suffer the lack. That each joint supplies the needs of the others." So the scripture is there and the church is functioning as God intended it to. That is, to embrace all areas of need within the community.

When I was the sitting chairperson of the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights, something really struck me at one point when I was having a hard time getting the CDC to embrace a human resources subcommittee. They were very hesitant, to put it mildly, to get into what they called social issues. The only way you can do community development, economic development is in a balanced way and that is to invest in the human capital. Otherwise you get into the dilemma of pushing people out and not embracing that they can take advantage of the very thing you are developing.

So I think as CDCs have a vital role to play if they would just embrace it and know that the pie is truly large enough, that we don't have to vie for who is going to have this piece and who is going to have that piece. That we need to look at it in a broader way. We need to do balanced growth and we need to claim the resources and get them out where they are intended to be.

I think sometimes CDCs are very reticent about looking at the broader picture in a balanced way, so I commend you for your insights and input on that, and I hope that we will really begin to do that and dialogue and help one another.

B. Katz: I think that life is too boring to do one thing. We are very good at specializing in this country. I was a lawyer for while so I was beyond specialized. I knew how to do the whatever filing with whichever appeals court and it was just surreal. It was absurd. I think what we have in this country is a lot of constituencies that have perfected what they do. Everyone does their own little separate things and that is a natural evolution in a way because these things are complicated and we have to excel at them. But at the same time, we need to remember why we got into this business in the first place, which was to lift people out of poverty and to revitalize neighborhoods and to create sustainable regions. So somehow, we have got to do the narrow piece, our daily work. But at the same time, we need to engage on these larger conversations and build larger coalitions and reach across divides that have really separated us before. It sounds simple, but I think we are going have to grow out of some bad habits.

Audience Participant: One of the founders before said that every day in the Washington Post in the business section we are reminded in one story or another that isn't it wonderful that we are not having any inflation and isn't it wonderful that working people are not getting any increase because of bottom 40 percent have income that will lead to inflation. Nobody talks about the crazy growth of income for the economic elites and nobody ever says that the growth of income for economic elites might possibly lead to inflation and reality is that most of the gains in productivity as they have been distributed have been distributed to the upper end of the sector.

There is a class issue here between those who are the managers and who are thinking in terms of bottom line profits and those who are seen as the ones to press and to squeeze. Because the low income jobs have been squeezed, that's not only hard on low income individuals and theirs families, it is a divestment from low income communities and so people can't buy the kinds of goods and services that would begin to create positive cycles working back into low income neighborhoods. And then to complete the circle all the way around, so many of the things that we buy now are being marketed and controlled and sold by multinational corporations who not only don't have much interest in neighborhoods and states, but in many cases, they don't have much interest in countries and are working at extracting and escaping from not only labor conditions and environmental constraints but from all those different kinds of taxations.

It seems to me that we not only have to think regionally in terms of reaching across geographic sectors, but politically we have to find out how to get real tax income out of multinational corporations. If you look at what has happened taxation wise in the United States, corporate taxation has dropped enormously because so many corporations have discovered ways of getting out of the old taxation.

B. Katz: The most important point of intervention is to change the way that people fundamentally think about the world. Are you winning or are you losing? Is it fair or is it inequitable? Basic questions about your life and your community. These are simple propositions. Why shouldn't we have regions that are able to preserve open space and the rural heritage that we have, protect our environment, be economically competitive and give every person in that region access to opportunity? Why, if people work, shouldn't they be lifted out of poverty? These are such simple propositions and I think what we've got to do as a collective is get back to those basics because from there the policy descriptions flow. If you don't get agreement on the simple assumptions, you don't get to the policy prescriptions. We have to present it as simply as possible and in a form that is accessible to the general public and from there we can build sustainable majoritarian coalition that will last for a good portion of time in this country.

[END OF LUNCH KEYNOTE]

AFTERNOON SESSION

E.J. Dionne: You should know, as I said, that Staci is a very good Southern Baptist and she helped set this up, so she takes all responsibility for the presence of two Catholic priests up here. Although I must say, in the theological converses, Catholics are very close to the Book of James. I'm a fan of the Book of James because I have a son called James and so the notion that faith without works is dead has always struck me as a slogan for this project. But I don't want to claim sectarian ownership of the book of James by saying that.

This has been very inspiring and Avis will only raise even the level of inspiration, hard as that is to do. I can say that I introduced Avis, so we won't play Jeopardy a second time. I'm very grateful for all the help that you've given us in putting this together. And I'm glad you can give us a paper — Avis Vidal.

Avis Vidal: Thanks, E.J., for a very generous introduction and more credit than I probably deserve. I start by saying that when I was in my first year in my masters program in city planning, I managed to cram two mistakes into a single decision. I signed up for a course in transportation planning which I rapidly discovered was a topic in which I had no interest whatsoever. And the course met at 2p.m., right after lunch. Most people find that is their low energy point of the day. I can tell you for sure that as a master student, I wasn't eating lunches anywhere as good as we had today. So I hope that you don't suffer the same fate I did in my masters program, particularly since in contrast to the morning where we had the benefit of broad and sweeping trends and ideas, my paper actually has some data in it.

I received some funding from HUD last year to do a literature review of what it is that the world of scholarship thinks it knows about the role of faith-based organizations in community development and to supplement that literature review with a series of interviews with knowledgeable scholars and practitioners, a couple of whom who are here today. I thank them for their time. Also, I want to thank the department for allowing us to distribute this paper here before they have had the chance to themselves distribute their own publication. This is not intended to steal their thunder.

I have to start with a caveat that while there is a voluminous literature on faith-based organizations of every type, the literature that looks at this particular topic is both very small and not very good. The research community really has failed in this particular part of their endeavor. There are major methodological obstacles and they have to be acknowledged, but you also need to understand that the factual base from which we move as we try to understand where the targets of opportunity are for congregations to make their greatest contribution is just not a very solid knowledge foundation.

I thought it was interesting this morning when one of our members raised the point that we have to get information out there. People are reinventing the wheel and a bunch of things that don't work. The literature reflects that compartmentalization. Even the good lines of research, the really meaty and thoughtful pieces, tend to not to speak to other audiences also interested in similar topics. And we know almost nothing about the work of certain parts of the faith community, particularly Latino churches, mosques, and temples.

I was going to skip the definition of community development, but since Bill Dickens brought it up this morning, I think it is worthy of focusing on. The definition that he provided us — the creation of assets that increase the quality of life for neighborhood residents — is very similar to a definition that I use in most of my work. It is not the lens that I bring to bear in this paper because I view this paper as being very much about practice. How is community development practiced and how is it that congregations and other faith-based organizations could integrate themselves and their work into an ongoing stream of professional and social activity— But I think that the broader definition that Bill gave us does provide a way to think about how we might do a better job of integrating congregations into a line of work that currently has at its core a set of activity that many congregations will simply not find appealing as something for them to engage in directly, namely, building houses.

I want to start, however, by looking at the broad range of what congregations do — social ministry. And I do this because I think that lens provides an insight into the kinds of things that congregations have chosen to do. They didn't make these choices in a flippant or foolish way. These choices reflect their understanding of what is in their interest to do. What their congregants want to do. How they want to be involved socially. What they think needs to be done and what they think that they have the capacity to undertake and complete well. So this provides a framework.

Where does community development fit? Where is its niche? The interesting congregations getting involved in communities come from not only their omnipresence but the omnipresence of their engagement in secular activities. More than 90 percent of all congregations report that they engage in some kind of human service or social service activity and almost that many report that they engage in some type of health activity. That is a lot of congregations to have more than 90 percent. These activities in services tend to focus on youth programs, marriage and family counseling and various kinds of food programs ranging from food pantries to actually serving or delivering hot meals. The health programs typically are programs of visitation either for people who are in the hospital or who are shut into their homes.

There are many, many other kinds of activities under the social ministry umbrella, but the others are much less common. Commonly cited categories include international work, which could mean supporting missions or hunger famine relief drives and the like. Education programs, which can mean schools, but means mainly adult education. Arts and culture and the environment. The difference between those two broad categories of activities — the health and human services piece — and everything else is that first piece is almost omnipresent. The vast, vast majority of congregations engage in them and they are part and parcel of congregational life. The other activities present a variety of challenges in terms of their adoption by congregations. We observe a very clear pattern that for those other kinds of activities, which include community development, large congregations are substantially more likely to participate than smaller ones. The less common and the more difficult the activity becomes, the more strongly we see the activity concentrated in large congregations.

Now, the notion that over 90 percent of congregations engage in community benefit activities comes from what was for many years the only national survey of what it is that congregations do. It was known to have some methodological problems which I will not detail for you but it was the only game in town, so people used it because it was the best available. Recently, a new national survey called the National Congregation Study that uses a different and undeniably superior methodology has produced a somewhat different portrait. It confirms that congregations are active in a huge variety of issues but it flags the fact that social engagement of that kind is much more limited than the commonly known numbers would lead us to believe. Specifically the lead author of that survey finds that 57 percent of congregations reported engaging in some type of service or community activity. Now, 57 percent is still a very big number and still a lot of congregations, but it does give us a little pause about whether congregational involvement in community ministry is universal, which was the overall impression that you got from the earlier information. I think that the true numb