Last month, Miller-McCune published a story of mine about the promise and perils of the New Communities Program, a multibillion-dollar initiative to help Chicago’s poorest residents. If you missed it, you’ll find it here.
I’ve been meaning to publish an addendum to the story, with some of the more interesting stuff that was cut for space.
The first thing I need to mention is that after reading the piece, Susan Lloyd, one of the architects of the initiative, said she was really influenced by Jane Jacobs and James Coleman, two giants of urban sociology. Frankly, I haven’t read as much of either of their works as I should, although it’s telling that a program that’s seen as innovative is, in many ways, just looking back to the root ideas of the field. Lloyd is now working with the Milwaukee philanthropist Joseph Zilber on a similar program there.
Another project I think didn’t get enough attention in the final version was a program called the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program, a mid-1990s Surdna Foundation project that attempted to remake New York City’s South Bronx. New Communities adapted many ideas from CCRP, most notably the more venture capital-oriented ideas. The report on the project, Going Comprehensive, is a must-read on community development.
A big theme of the piece was the difficulty of assessing so-called “soft” outcomes – the fuzzy feelings and attitudes of the residents that community developers see as every bit as important as job numbers. There’s actually a consultancy called MDRC that’s now evaluating the progress of New Communities. So they’ll know a lot more about how well things are going in several months, once that process is done. Nandita Verma, who’s leading the evaluation, was incredibly helpful in my own reporting, but couldn’t give me much hard data or thorough analysis because it was just too early in the process for her to draw conclusions.
I talked about the long trail of projects that had failed, but specifics on them were cut from the piece. The most notorious example was a William and Flora Hewlett Foundation program called the Neighborhood Improvement Initiative, which spent $20 million in three San Francisco Bay Area locales between 1996 and 2006. One of the three projects self-destructed early on. In the others, residents developed unrealistic laundry lists of ideas, and Hewlett staffers didn’t sharpen them into a workable strategy until it was too late. According to an after-action report Hewlett commissioned, “The (initiative) fell far short of achieving the hoped-for tangible improvements in residents’ lives.” If not a failure, it was certainly “a great disappointment.”
“There are problems with the mismatch between the ambitions of these initiatives and the reality of the implementations,” consultant Prudence Brown, one of the report’s authors, told me. “They’re not long enough; they’re not intensive enough; there are not enough resources. Implementation-wise, they don’t do what they often say they want to do, or operate in the way the theory suggests. There’s a big gap.”
That said, Hewlett deserves serious kudos for being transparent about what worked and what didn’t. Its findings clearly advanced the field. The report is here. Speaking of reports, there’s a ton of helpful information on the website of the Aspen Roundtable for Community Change. They were the only major organization in this area that didn’t return my calls or emails, but they do great research.
The last thing I want to share is more about Englewood, which has been one of the roughest neighborhoods in Chicago, and probably in the country as a whole. I spent a lot of time down there for the story, and the residents I met in the area were all very nice and welcoming. As I researched the history of the neighborhood, I was appalled at what had happened to these people, and I wish I could have shared more of what I found with readers. Again, not enough space. So below is an expanded summary of the history of Englewood, Chicago. The bulk of it is drawn from an excellent (though now slightly outdated) book called The Art of Revitalization by Woodstock Institute consultant Sean Zielenbach. It’s amazing that this neighborhood seems to be on the rise again, although the downturn has dashed any hopes of a revival in the short term.
Englewood was once a stable, middle-class area populated by farmers and railworkers, home to a shopping area full of movie theaters and department stores, the retail center of Chicago’s South Side. During the ensuing decades, it became the posterchild for the hard luck and government failures that decimated neighborhoods across the Rust Belt.
The end of racial restrictions on housing brought a flood of low-income blacks into the neighborhood and led to white (and middle-class black) flight. These new residents were alternately victims of neglect and hamhanded intervention. After suburban malls cut into sales in the 63rd and Halsted shopping district, the city directed $17 million in redevelopment funds to create a pedestrian mall. But poor siting of parking lots meant little improvement, and the forced displacement of 250 middle-class homes instigated a protest march led by Martin Luther King, Jr.
During the mid-‘70s, the Chicago South Development Corporation launched another multimillion-dollar renewal attempt, only to abandon it midstream, leaving the contractor with $800,000 in unpaid bills. A decade later, African-American Mayor Harold Washington took an interest, partnering with the Greater Englewood Local Development Corporation to target tax breaks and other city funds toward improvements on the local “L” stop and new stores. After Washington died, so did the project.
Along the way, a major hospital closed due to cash shortage and thousands of homes were abandoned. Local steel plants and stockyards shut down, cutting employment opportunities, with Englewood losing half its jobs between 1975 and 1990. Crime skyrocketed: after the first four months of 1990 brought 418 shootings, locals dubbed a two-block stretch “Little Beirut”. Between 1970 and 2000, population plummeted from roughly 90,000 to 40,000. Organizations like LISC and MacArthur largely retreated, citing a lack of confidence in neighborhood leaders.