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Revitalizing urban neighborhoods

"From the Bottom Up: Urban Development and Social Change" brought scholars, educators and members of the Clark and Worcester communities together for a look at how university/community partnerships create not only neighborhood development, but also new learning experiences for undergraduate and graduate students.

The event opened with a welcome address by Jack Foley, executive assistant to the president and Clark’s liaison for the University Park Partnership (UPP) neighborhood revitalization effort, and an overview of the history and redevelopment of the Main South neighborhood by Steve Teasdale, executive director of the Main South Community Development Corporation. It also featured a panel discussion with: Clark University Trustee Thomas Anton ’56, a Brown University professor and former director of Brown’s Taubman Center for Public Policy; James Caradonio, superintendent of the Worcester Public Schools; and Clark geographer Susan Hanson, director of the University’s new Urban Development and Social Change concentration. Paul Grogan, co-author of "Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival," delivered the keynote address (read below).

Grogan will leave his current position as Harvard University’s vice president for government, community and public affairs in July to become president of the Boston Foundation, one of the oldest and largest community foundations in the United States and the largest grant-making institution in New England. Prior to joining Harvard, he was president and CEO of the nonprofit Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), the nation’s largest community development intermediary. Under his leadership, LISC invested more than $3 billion of private capital in inner-city revitalization efforts across America, all channeled through local, nonprofit community development corporations. The investment produced more than 80,000 homes for low-income families and nearly 1 million square feet of commercial and community facilities.

In his remarks, Grogan discussed the ways colleges and universities like Clark and Harvard are contributing to the health and vitality of their surrounding communities. The University’s 15-year-old partnership with the Main South community, he said, makes Clark a leader in urban development partnerships. The panelists also praised Clark’s commitment to the University Park Partnership, as well as the University’s ability to create learning opportunities through its work with the neighborhood and city.

"This is the most exciting educational activity that Clark is undertaking. It is creating new opportunities to learn new things about the world and creating a more interesting intellectual climate at the University," panelist Thomas Anton ’56 said.

"From the Bottom up: Urban Development and Social Change"

Tuesday • March 27, 2001 • Jefferson Academic Center

Dr. Bassett, let me offer my congratulations to you, sir, on this wonderful occasion, and I’m glad to have a modest part in it. We’re in the business of breaking in new presidents at Harvard University as well, although Larry Summers might not be the kind of person who gets broken in.

But there is a big question about Larry, and there may be a big question about you [Dr. Bassett], and that is: What’s going to be the commitment of the new president to continue the tremendous efforts that have been made through partnerships with the community surrounding you? And I’m here to urge you to renew that commitment–make it your own, but renew that commitment. I think it’s one of the most important things going on in higher education today, but Clark has been a tremendous leader.

When I came to Harvard to take my job several years ago, I hired a Kennedy School [of Government] student right away to do a reconnaissance for me of what was going on all over the country in terms of partnerships between urban universities and their surrounding communities. And she came back with a very interesting report, which I will tell you put Clark at the top or very near the top of the list of what was going on, both in terms of quality, depth, comprehensiveness and institutional commitment. It also showed how early you got going on this agenda. Most of the new engagement with surrounding communities on the part of urban universities is just that: It’s very new, it’s very recent, it’s a hopeful promising trend.

But I will say as someone who’s involved on the other end of neighborhood revitalization in Boston and all over the country for 25 years, it is a blatant development. And much of it is, I think we have to frankly admit, of a defensive character. What has happened is that urban universities have found themselves in the middle of declining communities. And for a while, they appear to have believed that this would not affect them in any serious way because they did not get engaged until, as I said, very, very recently…But when it became very, very clear, unmistakably clear to Yale, to Penn, to Marquette, to Trinity College, that their own franchise was being degraded very, very significantly–and what is the franchise? Universities are very complicated places, but as someone outside of higher education, I always try to crudely reduce things. And I think if you crudely reduce the fundamental imperative of higher education at any level, it is this: To attract the very best faculty and students that you possibly can. That’s what gets measured, that’s what is rewarded or punished.

And for the strong universities, like Clark, like Trinity, like Harvard obviously, most or all of the people who join our faculty or become our students have choices. And I think it has become very, very clear, that the quality of the community–the vibrance, the dynamism, the health, the safety of the surrounding community–is of vital interest to universities. It’s just a shame that it took so long to get there. And that’s again why I’m so appreciative and admiring of Clark’s now 15-year-old effort, which has gone through phases, butis deep and has gotten more comprehensive as you’ve gone along.

I’m also delighted that you’re in partnership with a CDC, a community development corporation, and I argue in my book ["Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival"] that the development and proliferation of CDC’s across urban America is one of the most important things that’s happened to cities. They are tremendously effective engines of development and growth. Again, colleges and universities have been slow to awaken to them. So, here again, you are out in front of the pack and understood, as anybody does, that picking the right partner in an unfamiliar venture, unfamiliar but necessary venture, is very crucial.

Now, I think, as we’ve seen in recent days, that there can be some real rewards, Dr. Bassett, to this kind of commitment, because Evan Dobelle, of Trinity College, has just accepted a position as chancellor of the University of Hawaii. And I said to a good friend of mine, "So, you put in a few years in the inner city, and you get to go to Hawaii for the rest of your life. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me." But I think Evan Dobelle–although he has been criticized by some and kidded by the likes of me for his very effective promotion of what Trinity has done–my line about Evan is that he has done the best job I’ve ever seen of making a virtue of a necessity. But I think it’s been good for the whole field and to the extent that universities begin to redefine these attributes or abilities to be effective in these arenas, that’s part of being an effective leader of an urban institution. I think that’s all to the good.

Evan is fond in return of kidding Harvard a little bit. Though I’m going to what is perceived as a big, wealthy foundation in Boston [the Boston Foundation],…I realized that I’m going from a $19 billion endowment to a $700 million endowment. That’s a more breathtaking drop than the stock market’s been taking in recent years. Part of our job at Harvard is to really explain to various audiences and constituents, including our own donors, that $19 billion really isn’t that much money. Our record in putting that idea across is mixed.

But we have a very different issue at Harvard, and it was interesting. One of the things I found out in that report done for me by the Kennedy School student…is that in fact, a very, very large fraction of the activity was defensive and was motivated by encroaching blight. That was explained in an overwhelming majority. Well, if any of you have been around Harvard lately, encroaching blight is not exactly the problem that Harvard faces. So, I wondered how I was to generate that same level of motivation to do positive things in the community, and I thought about trying to create some blight overnight by myself. Demolition or something like that…But I realized that we would have to have a fundamentally different rationale. And we needed a rationale because one of the things I’ve learned…is that while altruism is very important, self-interest is a far more powerful motivator and likely to lead to more durable change. And Harvard had never really said to itself, or to anyone else, what it believed about its relationship with its surrounding communities. There literally wasn’t a philosophy or a framework, and at a place like Harvard, one would expect a philosophy. But it had never been addressed in any way.

So, what happened in that context, or lack of context, was that our relations with our surrounding communities became completely dominated by transactions. The job was to get transactions accomplished and to keep the trouble down. And the only time we were talking with political, civic or community leaders in our two cities was when we wanted something from them or had something embarrassing to explain. Now, in any relationship, take a marriage for instance, if the only time you’re talking to your spouse is when you want something from them or when you have something embarrassing to explain, it’s not a recipe for a happy union. And it’s not a recipe for building strong relationships in which transactions must occur, but can occur in an environment of some understanding and mutual regard. So, one of the first things we have tried to do is simply to build relationships, to find reasons, or to have no reason at all, to engage with our communities, to get to know them, to get them to know us, and to develop a presence on the part of the university in a broad range of community issues and partnerships.

But what was to be the rationale? We don’t suffer from encroaching blight, but we have sort of the reverse problem, in a way. Or to put it this way, go back to the question of faculty and students. One of the things that is watched very closely at Harvard College is the yield rate, the undergraduate yield rate. Now, before I came to Harvard…I didn’t know what the undergraduate yield rate was, but now I do. It’s the percentage of high school students to whom you extend admission who come. And Harvard has the highest yield rate in America. Over 80 percent of the high school students to whom we offer admission decide to come. And it’s more than 10 points higher than the second place school, which is Brown or Princeton…I actually went to Williams, so I’m not a Harvard maniac.

This really matters, and if you delve into this a little bit, you find that though we don’t have to be defensive in terms of trying to stave off deterioration and blight, that it’s a big reason why faculty and students, who have lots of choices, who come to Harvard come. It’s because Cambridge and Boston are dynamic, vital, vibrant urban communities. And an awful lot of people define that as part of being at Harvard, one of the riches of being there. And so, we were able to say to the university, to the corporation, to the president and to the deans, is it the proper course of action to sit on our lead, to assume that we will always have this advantage?…Or should we be proactively investing in that competitive advantage and seeking to maintain it, if not increase it further? And this kind of discussion at Harvard began to open some eyes, and it began to forge a connection between a kind of a murky marginal set of issues and activities–Harvard and the community–to forge a connection between those issues and the real interests of the university and why it really mattered.

And then you can get other things in it. You can get in the pragmatism of being able to carry out and develop a plan and get transactions approved. You can talk about the altruism of the community and the special privileges that higher education enjoys–our tax exemption, the iconic status we enjoy–that’s worth something. And another way to preserve those extraordinary privileges is to give back. So, once you open this discussion about why this really matters or does it matter at all, perhaps not everyone will agree, but many people at Harvard, including the leaders of the university, in a way that surprised me at how quickly they embraced this idea, began to move to the center a set of things that had been very much on the periphery, to which the university had been inattentive to its great discredit.

And whatever Mr. Summers chooses to do, I do know that the Harvard Corporation gave him and all the serious candidates for the job a very strong message about the commitment to local affairs that they expect from the new president of Harvard University. So, it can be done and it has been a very heartening experience.

In addition to building those relationships and getting into a more constant discourse, establishing a presence for the University, we have brought attention to aspects of the university’s presence that are either taken for granted or not understood at all. We do have, it seems to me, an ability to do this. We all in higher education complain about being misunderstood or underappreciated. One hears this refrain everywhere you go. But the reason that’s so is that we have declined to make more transparent what the nature of these [activities] is. And when you begin to look at it, of course, the benefits of having a university in an urban community are astounding, really. And another thing we did was, for the first time, Harvard–lots of universities have done this and I’m sure Clark has–Harvard never had even a simple presentation on the economic impact of the university on Cambridge and Boston. And of course, when you begin to look at it, Harvard is an economic colossus. It’s astounding–15,000 full-time employees, a $2 billion budget. We import $1 billion net capital every year to the greater-Boston area.

Research universities, particularly ones like Clark with strong graduate programs, as you know, are the new geography of business. The private sector in America has less and less attachment to geography. The old infrastructure of locally based corporations, in many cases, is disappearing. The geography that a lot of businesses care about, particularly in the new economy, is "where are the institutions of higher education?" Where are the talent flows? Where are the research dollars? And there is this clustering going on. So, not only are institutions of higher education major enterprises in and of themselves–employing lots of people, buying lots of stuff–they are simulating business formation, human capital formation…

But, you know it’s interesting to get into this and to make it more transparent. And we have made a major effort to do that, and it has had an effect. It hasn’t made everyone love us, but introducing that into the conversation in an important way, it’s who we are. And we’re going to matter more than ever in the years ahead. Particularly, interestingly, in a softening economy, it becomes even clearer how important the economics of these universities are, which are perhaps not completely immune to the business cycle but do not go up and down the way other enterprises do.

But finally, we have also decided to make a series of significant and long-term investments in our communities along the lines of the University Park Partnership. Not focussed on a particular adjacent neighborhood–as I said, our situation is very different–but really on our two cities. And the first of these was the housing program 20/20/2000, which established a long-term, very low interest loan fund for affordable housing. Four community development corporations operate in Cambridge and Boston. We have a marvelous network of effective grassroots organizations [and] a million dollar innovations fund to try to pioneer new approaches to creating affordable housing, particularly in the super heated market that the Boston housing market is today.

And we have announced recently in Boston a major initiative, including a $5 million investment on the part of the university that goes well beyond dollars, into a major new after-school partnership in Boston, trying to bring up and improve significantly after-school opportunities for inner city children, with all the research showing how important that is in terms of academic performance, never mind public safety, personal development issues, to have children constructively engaged during those times.

And we’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do, because it’s going to be effective, and it’s a way to engage the capacities of the university as full partners with our cities, with nonprofit organizations, with private corporations and many other parties. And it’s not that Harvard wasn’t doing anything. Despite Harvard’s poor reputation, another astounding discovery I made–I didn’t have a sense of this, but there’s an amazing level of engagement and altruism at that university, and at many other universities, on a completely self-initiated basis. What students are doing in the community, what faculty and staff are doing, on their own, we call sort of the thousand flowers. And we put out a very sophisticated Web-based index of all these programs, and there are more than 240 student public-service programs across a broad range of issues: health care, education, housing and neighborhood development, mentoring, tutoring, summer camps, it’s incredible. We estimate that undergraduates at Harvard alone donate a million hours annually of free time to Boston and Cambridge in this work.

But it is very diffuse. It’s all over. It’s unregulated and unorganized, perhaps it’s [not] directed by the university as it should be. And so, you had these conversations with people about just how diffuse this was. In fact, an alumnus who, before my arrival, was pressed into service to repair a damaged relationship with the mayor of Boston, recounts this conversation he had with my good friend Mayor Menino, who said to him, "What does Harvard do for Boston anyway? Tell me." And this alumnus, who is also a good friend to the mayor, said "Mayor, Harvard does a lot for Boston." And the mayor said, "Well, tell me what." And the alumnus said, "A lot. A lot." But it was kind of hard to gather all this up in one place, so at least now it’s all in one place and we can show it.

But the other kind of reaction we would get is, people would say, "Wow, it’s terrific what the undergraduates are doing for underprivileged children through the Phillips Brooks House." Or "It’s wonderful what the law school is doing…" Or "It’s great, all the free consulting that the MBA’s are giving Boston nonprofits. And isn’t it great what the Divinity School is doing in terms of their community service work. But what’s Harvard doing?" And as many of you know, it can fairly be said that Harvard isn’t a university at all, it’s kind of a loose association of these fiercely independent faculties. But it is appropriate that "The University" get behind a limited number of issues and engage in what we hope are high impact, and frankly high visibility, initiatives to really move the needle on a problem–not just to do some good, run a program, but to move the needle…

So, that’s the strategy. I think it’s doing a lot of good, and more importantly than that, there’s great support for it across the university. And I would say in addition that universities who are contemplating these kinds of things are doing so at a very propitious time and we try–I’m not going to take you all the way through it–but we try to lay out in the book ["Comeback Cities"] that things have never looked better, not only for cities, but for inner city neighborhoods, the places we used to call slums and ghettos and now call inner cities, those neighborhoods where the problems were the most concentrated, the poverty the most intense, all the indexes of social pathology, places that were written off, with reason. And certainly there are many who still believe the prospects of these neighborhoods are not good. But [these neighborhoods] are being listened to, and the inner city has vistas opening to it that we have not seen since before World War II and the great exodus to the suburbs that began at that point.

Part of it is the proliferation of CDC’s, nearly 4,000 of them across the country like the CDC in your University Park Partnership, maybe not all of them are that good. But it’s an incredible development. We have in effect created this vast decentralized apparatus for urban problem solving. Organizations that are accountable to local communities, skilled at getting things done, oriented to real results, that house by house, block by block, street by street have rebuilt some of the most desolate places in our cities. It’s astonishing what they’ve done. And they’ve won for themselves a tremendous amount of support from some universities, including this one, but at an earlier point from foundations, from corporations, particularly banks, from state and local government and some from the federal government. So, They’re tough. They’re durable. They’re not dependent on the whims of any particular government program, and they’ve made a huge difference.

Joining that has been the reappearance of private markets in inner cities, where the private markets, most Americans know, had collapsed. Supermarkets folded up and left. Commercial corridors became desolate, bleak dangerous places. But now we see, in part fueled by this very long economic expansion, but also related very closely to the revitalization work that has been done by CDC’s and others, that markets are reforming. Residential revitalization is an act of economic development in these communities. It recreates the basis for at least a modest retail economy. And you’re seeing that with supermarkets moving back in, commercial corridors getting healthy again, small business formation is way up. National pharmacy chains and apparel stores have begun to see the untapped urban market…

Immigration has been crucial to market reformation. We say in the book that immigration is the greatest urban policy never called an urban policy–profound effects on the life of cities. Our cities became great in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when immigration was open. But [we] closed the door after World War I, and tragically we kept it closed through most of the early stages of suburbanization, so that there were no immigrant replacements coming to the cities for those who left. And the migration of African Americans from the South was not sufficient to make up for the loss. Populations of cities plunged. Happily, we’re in a relatively open period in immigration now and the census data is wonderful confirmation that that’s the source of urban growth that’s occurring. Boston’s population is up, New York’s is up even more substantially, and many cities that had been hemorrhaging people for a very long time are at least holding the line. Having enough people in the city is maybe the fundamental thing that you have to achieve. So, markets are coming back, and that visible reconnection to markets in isolated communities is hugely important.

Crime is way down. This is not something any of the experts predicted. In fact we had gone a long way to internalizing the notion that out-of-control, inner-city crime was just a fact of life and we had to live with it. But New York and Boston and a growing list of cities have turned that conventional wisdom on its head. There’s an argument about why this has occurred and whether it can be sustained–I believe much of it can be sustained. I was a citizen of New York through the early stages of the New York crime miracle and the revolution in policing tactics…that made a enormous difference, and those tactics are being adapted and copied all over the country. Boston has done that, but they have gone a step further in building, at the same time, extraordinarily strong partnerships between the African-American community and the police department and the whole criminal justice establishment–the fabled Ten Point Coalition that so much has been said about. So, I think if we learn the lessons from the cities where the success has been greatest, we can sustain much of the improvement. And both the reality and the perception of public safety has had incalculable…effects on the prospects for life in these communities. Now, under any scenario, millions and millions of children will be raised in lower income communities in the foreseeable future, and this matters greatly to them.

Finally, we have belatedly embarked on the Herculean task of trying to clean up some of the big public-sector failures that were designed to help the cities out and tragically did just the opposite. And I’m speaking here of the welfare system, public housing and urban public school systems–all three systems born of good intentions and representing significant public policy success for extended periods. But in the inner city context, these systems have worked to foster dependency, to concentrate poverty and to drive people with choices out of cities altogether.

But we have embarked on a rather remarkable process of trying to re-engineer all of these systems. It’s really amazing if you think about it, because they were the fixed immovables for a very, very long time and ideologically polarizing, which paralyzed reform for many, many years. Remember Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to reform welfare, tried to build in a work incentive in welfare during the Nixon Administration. And it was a sad story about polarization and ideology denying change, needed change. So, we lived for decades longer with a failed system.

Similarly, public housing–remember the famous pictures…blowing up Pruitt Igo. Well, we blew up Pruitt Igo in 1972, and we kept pouring money elsewhere into the same failed model for several decades afterwards. But in both welfare and public housing, a remarkable thing happened during the last eight years. A democratic president and a republican congress decided to create radical change. And those processes are underway.

You’re familiar with welfare. It’s going to take some time to see how this has really worked. I think the strong economy has made it work much better than even those folks who resigned in protest from the Clinton Administration thought…And they’ve had to grudgingly admit that this was a gamble that so far has paid off. And welfare rolls have plunged, and in the inner cities where intergenerational welfare dependency was most concentrated, where whole generations of children were being raised literally without the experience of witnessing an adult in their life get up early in the morning, get themselves together and get themselves to work. Work–there’s lots of work in the cities, lots of people are working. And thanks to the economy and the earned-income tax credit and other measures, for the first time, a lot of this work appears to be paying better than welfare. And we need to keep that going.

Public housing–here again, remarkably, we reached an understanding that we could not keep pouring money into…these human filing cabinets, which we call them in the book. And we’re pulling down the worst of this public housing in every city in America and replacing it with just the kind of smaller scale, architecturally appropriate, mixed income communities that you’re building in University Park, and CDC’s have shown it can be built in inner-city communities all over America. And the early results are unbelievable in terms of the physical and social transformation of these horrifying places, where very vulnerable people were left to the predations of drug lords and gang lords and drug dealers, and it’s beginning to work.

Schools are the hardest. [It’s] not a federal system, but here again important change is underway. The proliferation of charter schools, the development of at least a few privatization schemes, we are entering a period of what Franklin Roosevelt called for during the Depression: Bold, persistent experimentation, both to find our way to the new urban education models and also to discipline the existing monopoly and to empower the reformers within. The point of school choice is not really that charters will be the answer, or that vouchers will be the answer, or pilot schools, or this kind of school, that kind of school. It’s to create an environment of reform and change. We have created an urban public school monopoly…And public schools still work and are very popular in many places. But why do good public schools work? Here again, a crude reduction–not appropriate for a university setting, but that’s what I’m going to do. And here’s why they work: Parents insist that they do, and they have the capacity to enforce that insistence. That’s really true of any public service. Public services are accountable because people with power insist that there be reforms.

Sadly, the great urban decline created, or left, a remaining constituency for urban public schools of largely minority, low-income, single-parent, non-voting [families]. And it is no disrespect to people in that group to observe that they lack the clout to compete with organized public education. So, what that has meant, even with examples of success and great idealism among many people in the teaching profession in those schools–I’m not teacher bashing–but what it has meant, in stark political terms, is that those school systems have been operated primarily for the benefit of those organized and powerful constituencies, and that has to change.

A partial antidote has been the trend toward mayoral control of urban public school systems, which I think is an entirely positive development. Think about this: Did it make sense to separate the most important public service the municipality provides from its major means of enforcing political accountability? To take the number one person, at least in the strong mayor form of government, and say ‘you’re not responsible for the most important form of public service?’…Richard Daly, Tom Menino and Dennis Archer, many mayors around the country, now are saying, ‘I can do everything else right and have everything else working, and if the schools are failing middle- and working-class families with children who need an affordable education, they are going to leave my city, and I can’t take it anymore.’ That’s a partial answer.

But I believe that choice and competition is also crucial and that the immune system of the monopoly has been pierced. We have embarked on a new course. Its end, its destination is not yet in view, but a great weight is being lifted, and at least the possibility of change, of removing the schools–and this is the final frontier–as the push factor still pushing people out is critical to the full restoration of cities.

But it is a propitious moment, as I said. We’re practical people, and for a long time, there wasn’t much but faith and hope, not real evidence, that change could be made. Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote recently that a sense of possibility is essential nourishment for political endeavor. And he was speaking of the civil rights movement, but he said it equally of the broader job of bringing cities back–a sense of possibility. Ladies and gentleman we have that sense of possibility. You’ve done an awful lot at the University to create that here in Worcester. I congratulate you for it. I congratulate Dr. Bassett on this wonderful opportunity, and I thank you for having me here.