Welcome to “The Mobile City,” our weekly roundup of noteworthy transportation developments.

One of the hot labor issues of the moment is whether workers in the “gig economy” actually function more like employees and thus deserve the same benefits and protections employees enjoy. Voters in California recently approved a ballot question that changed that state’s answer from “Yes” to “No” by overturning a state law that classified workers for ride-hailing companies and delivery services as employees instead of independent contractors. Fresh off its success on the Proposition 22 campaign, one of the two big ride-hailing companies, Lyft, is now working to head off a similar attempt to make their drivers employees in the eyes of the law in Illinois.

Meanwhile, on the transit side, the drive to make public transit free continues to gather steam. One city — Columbus, Ohio — has found a limited free-transit program launched two years ago so successful that it’s extended the program for five more years.

And where COVID has kept riders off the buses, some transit agencies have found other ways to put those empty seats in service to the community. In Tulsa, the city’s transit system has delivered so many meals to homebound seniors that the local Meals on Wheels agency has given it an award for its community service.

Ride-Hailing Companies Seek to Forestall Gig-Worker Protections in Illinois

Now that California voters have proved the effectiveness of the media campaign Uber and Lyft launched featuring drivers touting the freedom their status as independent contractors offered by approving Proposition 22, one of the two big ride-hailing companies has turned its attention to Illinois, where the state legislature is considering laws identical in effect to the California laws Prop 22 overturned.

Both Crain’s Chicago Business and Streetsblog Chicago report that Lyft is ramping up spending to sway legislators against the proposed laws. (As Illinois does not allow voter-initiated laws or referenda, their only chance to derail the legislation lies in the legislature itself.) According to both sources, Lyft has formed a SuperPAC called Illinoisians for Independent Work, donating $1.2 million to the committee through June 30. Crain’s reports that the committee spent nearly $500,000 on mailings and digital media buys on behalf of 11 State House candidates running for election this year. Lyft also donated $133,000 directly to 50 state legislators of both parties as well as more than 12 Chicago aldermen.

One beneficiary of Lyft’s largesse, State Rep. Terra Costa Howard, expressed surprise at receiving the money. “It came out of the blue,” a spokeswoman for Howard told Crain’s. “Terra is a strong union supporter. We were quite surprised. Terra believes employees should get health care, unemployment and retirement benefits.”

As Streetsblog’s report notes, “It’s hard to argue that ride-hail drivers are freelancers, when the only thing they get to control is whether or not they want to work on any given day. Pricing, not knowing where their next passenger is headed, and other rules are all set by the TNC company, not the driver. The same goes for people delivering for the myriad food apps like Grubhub and Postmates, as well as Instacart for groceries.” And indeed, the California Supreme Court agreed when it ruled against a delivery company in that state that sought to exempt its delivery drivers from employee protections. But, as Crain’s notes, providing the protections and benefits would likely put these companies out of business, which explains their massive spending ($200 million in California, the most ever spent on a ballot proposition there) to avoid having to provide them.

Columbus Transit Authority OKs 4-Year Eztension of Free Pass Program

Since 2018, people who live or work in downtown Columbus have been able to get around the city for free on its bus system thanks to a program launched by downtown property owners called C-Pass. The program, which distributes passes for free to workers and downtown residents, has proven so successful that the Central Ohio Transportation Authority (COTA) has renewed it through the end of 2025.

Intelligent Transport reports that the program, which is jointly sponsored by COTA, the Capital Crossroads Special Improvement District (CCSID) and the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC), caused the number of workers who use transit to get to their jobs downtown to double. And COTA credits the program for contributing to a 31-year high in ridership in 2019. Right now, while COTA has suspended fare collection on all its routes in response to the COVID pandemic, the pass program is suspended, but the free passes will resume once fares are collected again.

More than 15,000 downtown Columbus workers and residents participate in the program.

“Downtown C-pass has proven to be a successful program that reduces car trips into downtown and eases the scarcity of parking,” Marc Conte, acting executive director for CCSID, told Intelligent Transport. “This supports our property owners’ efforts to lease more space while providing employers with a valuable recruitment and retention tool.”

The move is also a bet on the viability of downtown Columbus as a place to work and live once the pandemic passes.

Meals on Wheels Applauds Tulsa Transit Agency

As COVID restrictions and advisories have kept more senior citizens at home since the first lockdowns took effect in March, demand for paratransit and shuttle-van services older and disabled riders use has fallen even more sharply than overall transit ridership. This means that fleets of transit vans now sit idle. The transit system in Tulsa, Okla., has found a way to put those vans to work, and the agency that furnishes hot meals to seniors has given it an award for its efforts.

KJRH and KOTV in Tulsa both reported on Meals on Wheels of Metro Tulsa’s presentation of a Community Service Award to Tulsa Transit at its “Community Celebration” event on Nov. 17. Tulsa Transit lift van operators began transitioning to meal delivery in April, and since that time have delivered nearly 43,000 meals to residents of Tulsa and environs. In addition, Tulsa Transit call center employees have made 2,900 check-up calls to Meals on Wheels recipients.

“We are so grateful that Tulsa Transit and our partners are able to provide this service to our community and help during this time of need,” Ted Rieck, general manager of Tulsa Transit, told KOTV. “All of our employees, contract employees and our call center played a vital role in making this happen and we’re happy to be a part of it.”

Know of a development that should be featured in this column? Send a Tweet with links to @MarketStEl using the hashtag #mobilecity.

Despite pulling out of the Paris Agreement on the federal level, the U.S. accounts for the most cities committed to environmental adaptation and mitigation strategies, a new report says.

On the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), an environmental non-profit tracking the world’s progress on climate action, released its 2020 “A-list” of the cities across the globe that are demonstrating climate leadership. The list shows that despite the challenges of COVID-19, a racial reckoning, and an economic depression, U.S. cities continue to show commitment to climate action and leadership, and the data shows that these challenges have not deterred cities from climate responsibility, but amplified it.

“Cities increasingly understand that tackling the pandemic and addressing climate change must go hand in hand,” says Katie Walsh, Head of Cities, States & Regions for CDP North America. “By design, many of the tools cities use to protect their communities from the effects of climate change could put citizens at higher risk of COVID-19 infection.”

Cooling centers, for example, that offer vulnerable populations protection during high temperatures, and displacement shelters used during hurricanes and flood events, are now considered health risks due to the inability to socially distance.

30 percent more cities were added to the A-list this year, with the U.S. representing 25 of the total 88 worldwide. Together with Canada, North America accounts for 35 percent of the total A list cities, says the CDP press release.

“As cities worldwide scramble to juggle the overlapping and urgent issues of COVID-19 and climate change, it’s especially impressive that over one third of A-List cities earned this distinction for the first time, including 10 U.S. cities,” says the press release.

The new U.S. cities include San Luis Obispo, California; San Antonio, Texasand Miami, Florida, with their documented climate actions ranging from expansions of electric vehicle infrastructure to investment in green jobs.

Other climate actions recorded in the tracker this year include San Antonio’s 409 completed energy efficiency projects between 2011 and 2018, and Los Angeles’ $8 billion investment in grid upgrades by 2022 as well as additional millions put towards transportation system expansion and cleaner buildings.

The analysis showed that since the Paris Agreement began in 2015, the number of climate-committed cities has more than doubled globally, with 25 percent setting net-zero targets for 2050 or sooner, according to the press release.

In order to gain a “A” rating, the city must have a comprehensive emissions inventory, a measurable emissions reduction target, and a published climate action plan, says the press release. The city must also have a climate action and adaptation plan with a list of specific climate actions.

“As with climate change, we know from the global pandemic that the best time for action is well before the problem becomes severe. The next 10 years mark a crucial time in the climate crisis,” says Walsh.

For Camden resident Erik James Montgomery, his city is many things, but “blighted” is not one of them. Montgomery, a self-taught fine art photographer and the founder and instructor at EJM Foundation, is part of a cohort of artists working on a Camden-based series called “New View Camden.” The project is endeavoring to remake Camden’s image as a city “invincible,” a reference to a line from Walt Whitman’s poem I Dream’d in a Dream, in which he writes: “In a dream I saw a city invincible.”

The scope of the series consists of eight different sculptures and installations throughout the city that will be placed on or around illegal dumping hotspots. Some artists will be using recycled and found materials, and all are placing their projects on a dumped spot, to both reclaim the area and deter further dumping.

Montgomery, whose project is titled “Camden is Bright Not Blight,” features powerful portraits of Camden residents, from a two-year-old to a person battling addiction to the mayor. It’s “a panoramic view of the city,” he says. The portraits are installed on abandoned and vacant buildings and houses, in areas targeted by illegal dumping.

“It’s to let you know that Camden is a shining beacon in this dark world,” says Montgomery, “and it’s the people that make it bright.”

The project, funded by a Bloomberg Philanthropies grant, also aims to reverse negative and harmful stereotypes about the city of Camden — stereotypes that have led to the community being “dumped on,” both literally and figuratively, he says.

“The goal is to change the mindset of how people from the inside and outside view Camden,” he says. For Montgomery, his project is more theoretical than the other seven installations.

“I don’t want people to be dumped on,” he says.

The project is a partnership between the mayor’s office, Coopers Ferry Partnership, and Rutgers Camden Center for the Arts, along with a team of curators.

“We are spreading the message that illegal dumping is a crime,” says Vedra Chandler, project manager at Cooper’s Ferry Partnership. “It is unjust and not going to be tolerated.”

The project is meant to look at trash in two ways, she says. First, is the illegal dumping that comes from outside the city. It’s not uncommon for people to come from outside the city with a pickup or U-haul full of household or industrial waste, and dump it, she says, adding that it’s happened in her own backyard. There is also the chronic issue of residents not knowing what to do with their bulk trash, she says.

Residents are no longer tolerating the consequences of redlining, she says, like waterfront property and neighborhoods being prioritized for dumping, sewers and incinerators, rather than people, bike lanes, greenspace and playgrounds.

“Because it’s not a wealthy or predominantly white community, Camden is subject to a lot of what we identify as “‘disrespect,’” she says. “And we are looking forward to an era of respect.”

The city spends about $4 million per year to clean up illegal dumping in Camden, and has an app and website for residents to upload photos and report incidences of illegal dumping. The City, Camden County Police, and the Camden Collaborative Initaitive’s illegal dumping task force have been tackling the problem head on, working to revitalise the city, reduce the financial burden and restore its residents’ sense of pride in their neighborhoods.

“I would ask people to please revise their expectations, and not think that they know everything about this city,” she says. “It’s time to take a different look.”

Seven of the eight New View Camden projects were put on hold for 2020 due to COVID-19, but the artists plan to unveil them on Earth Day of 2021. Montgomery and his subjects were able to safely social distance while he photographed them, so his project has continued.

Montgomery’s foundation emphasizes public, accessible art and classes for the “art insecure,” those who don’t have access to museums and galleries, or at least don’t think they do, he says, and the foundation has a special focus on reaching at-risk children.

“People [of Camden] think art is so far out of their sphere,” he says. “I want to break that mindset.”

When he heard about the Bloomberg grant, he knew he wanted to do a photography-based public art project, and he knew he wanted it to emphasize the “power of imagery,” and “self-esteem” in inner cities, where people of color aren’t often portrayed positively.

“Because if you feel good about yourself, you’re gonna treat yourself and your city very differently,” he adds.

The subjects are photographed all over Camden, in his studio, on their porches, or on the street. The portraits are black and white, and framed in gold.

“The mindset in inner cities,” he says, “is if you see someone in a picture like that — they are wanted by the cops, or they are dead.”

He went into the project knowing that this was the prevailing mentality: “I really wanted people to know from the door that I’m setting these images against what you can google about Camden — criminals, crime, mugshots.”

So, after hanging his artwork he often hangs around it for a while, waiting for residents’ inevitable queries and then explaining that he “likes to give people their flowers while they’re still alive.”

Under each portrait is a word, chosen by the subject, that characterizes what Camden means to them. Affirmations like “Camden is… up next,” “… evolving,” and “… my future,” adorn the portraits. During the photography process, Montgomery asks each subject to recommend someone else for a photograph. As a result, many of the subjects in the photographs know each other, or are recognizable to the residents.

“There’s really only one degree of separation in Camden,” he says. “It’s so small, and so connected, by beauty, and pain.”

Montgomery is about halfway to his goal of 100 portraits, which he hopes to reach by the end of November. With fears of another COVID lockdown looming, he wants to have the project ready as a sign of hope for the future.

“No matter what you say about us, no matter how much you dump on us, we’re going to endure because we’re an invincible city,” he says.

This article is part of “For Whom, By Whom,” a series of articles about how creative placemaking can expand opportunities for low-income people living in disinvested communities. This series is generously underwritten by the Kresge Foundation.

Between 2000 and 2020, the City of Kyle in Texas — located roughly 15 miles south of Austin — grew from just 5,000 residents to over 52,300. With the population forecasted to reach 60,000 by 2024, the city’s public transportation needs have changed drastically in recent years.

Until 2015, Kyle was served by the Capitol Area Rural Transportation Service, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and the first and third Fridays of the month. While fares ran between $2 – $4 for riders, it was costing the city around $74,000 annually — and that was after a roughly 40% match from the federal government.

“Our ridership was really low,” says Jerry Hendrix, Chief of Staff for the City of Kyle. “We really only had 12 people in the city who used it once per month.” So, around 2015, the city began exploring other options. The solution? A partnership with Uber.

After six months of collaboration and planning, on October 7 Uber Kyle was officially launched. Since Kyle is the Pie Capital of Texas, Kyle carried its branding over to the cost of a one-way Uber Kyle ride: $3.14.

Users get eight one-way rides for $3.14 each month. The city subsidizes up to $10 of additional fare per ride, which pretty much covers any one-way ride in the city limits (but riders are responsible for any overages). After downloading a voucher each month, it’s automatically applied. Users then just open Uber and hail a ride like they normally would. Riders can also request an ADA-compliant ride, which costs the city $40 per ride to cover.

“We’re still just getting started and with the virus going on, people aren’t going to as many places but so far, in just three weeks, we’ve had 168 people who have downloaded the voucher,” Hendrix says. “And that number goes up every day.”

“At Uber Transit, our bread and butter is working with transit agencies… that have a transit gap in services that they’re trying to fill,” says Katie Civgin, a client success manager at Uber Transit who works with the City of Kyle. “We’re starting to see more communities like Kyle that don’t have a public transportation system and are starting to think about how Uber can help.”

Because tax dollars are used to fund the subsidy, the program is only available within Kyle city limits, which Uber geofences on their end. Users are, of course, still able to take rides outside of Kyle, but the app shows that the voucher won’t apply to those rides.

The city originally had concerns that there might not be enough drivers. Uber has a variety of incentives they can deploy should that be the case, but so far there have been plenty to meet the demand. “In the past, once partnerships like this go live, the number of drivers will naturally increase without any marketing,” Civgin says.

A tangential benefit for the city is tying the voucher to the city’s app. After fielding complaints that the city doesn’t communicate enough, they used the Uber Kyle voucher as a way to drive people to the city’s app where a variety of information is housed, from city events to an opportunity to pay utility bills online.

The lingering question, though, is whether or not this is a sustainable form of “public” transportation.

“These partnerships between governments and ride hailing companies have become increasingly popular. They offer governments the ability to subsidize transit without investing in infrastructure,” explains Professor Sherri Greenberg of the University of Texas, Austin who has studied these partnerships in the past. However, “the big problem with [ride hailing] is finding a sustainable funding option.”

In the pay-as-you-go partnership with Uber, Kyle is only on the hook for subsidizing rides taken rather than a flat-fee arrangement that they had with Capital Area Rural Transportation Service. The program is funded with $150,000 from the city for the current fiscal year, which just started on October 1. There’s also another full year of funding that was set aside the previous year, but because the program wasn’t launched until now there are effectively two years’ worth of funding ahead.

While the earmarked funds are more than the old system required, the cost per ride to the city has shrunk from between $110 – $250 per ride to around $10 per ride. Plus, “if it’s not used, there’s not money wasted,” Koch adds. The issue, though, is that as Kyle or the popularity of the service grows, so will the cost of subsidizing it.

Looking at the immediate future, Koch sees Uber Kyle as being able to scale “for a little while,” but adds that the city isn’t married to Uber Kyle being their transportation system forever. “All our options are really open and on the table” for what the future will hold, he says. “We’re trying to see what happens and how people adjust to it.”

It says something about the persistence of food deserts in low-income neighborhoods when the managers of Carver Market, a new grocery store in Historic South Atlanta, have to drive 200 miles roundtrip each week to a small town in Alabama to stock Carver’s shelves.

There’s been a lot of talk and research about the importance of access to healthy food as a social determinant of health. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease — all are linked to diet. So putting a full-service grocery store in the heart of low-income, underresourced neighborhoods, where health disparities are high and persistent, seems like a sensible thing.

It’s why Promedica healthcare system now owns and operates a grocery store in the UpTown neighborhood in Toledo. It’s why Virginia Commonwealth University and Health Systems is locating its “health hub” next door to a new grocery store in East Richmond. And it’s why the managers of Carver Market in Atlanta drive 90 minutes roundtrip just to stock their shelves.

All three also know that the grocery store is integral to not just residents’ health, but to the health of the neighborhood itself. As new research is beginning to show, paradoxically, the indirect effects of a new grocery store on residents’ health are possibly more powerful than the store’s direct effects on their health. For local residents a grocery store is more than a place to buy food. It’s a signal that they matter and that their neighborhood matters. And that, says RAND researcher and food desert expert Andrea Richardson, can translate in numerous ways.

“If residents start to feel that the neighborhood is changing and getting attention, you can imagine how that might make them feel more hopeful, giving them the mental space to make better choices about their diet when things are improving around them,” she said.

A grocery store and its economic boost can also jumpstart other commercial activity in the neighborhood, and all that can have downstream effects in supporting residents’ health, she added.

But building and running a store in a food desert is not a walk in the park. As all three locations discovered, the store must be more than just a grocery store if it is to succeed, and that means commitment, nurturing, and a lot of listening.

Toledo, Ohio: A hospital opens a grocery store

In 2010 staff at Promedica health system in Toledo, Ohio, had begun to look more broadly at the social determinants of health among their patients and believed a full-service grocery store in the UpTown neighborhood could help spur better health. They approached local and national grocery chains and offered to be a partner by providing health education at the store. The chains politely declined. “It’s not our business model,” they said.

“That was a gut check,” said Kate Sommerfeld, who heads the Social Determinants of Health Institute at Promedica. The health system realized it might need to do this on its own.

Large supermarket chains are often quick to pass on low-income neighborhoods because they presume (often falsely) that there’s little value or spending power there. Yet as research has shown, if the analysts just looked a little harder, they’d find ample spending power. A recent analysis of Mastercard credit card data (made anonymous) in a historically Black neighborhood in New Orleans found that following several community development projects, growth in consumer spending was 12 times greater than the city as a whole.

In Toledo, the national grocery chain may have declined, but Promedica’s CEO was determined to push ahead despite the odds, said Sommerfeld.

So a hospital went into the grocery business.

Today the 6,500-square-foot Market on Green, which is owned and operated by ProMedica, is part of a much larger $50 million community investment as part of the ProMedica Ebeid Neighborhood Promise for place-based investments.

The hospital has learned many lessons in operating a grocery store, among them to be humble and pivot when things aren’t working out.

“It’s been a steep learning curve,” Sommerfeld said. “We build hospitals not grocery stores.”

The key, she said, is to engage many partners. The lightbulb has clicked on among hospitals that investing in neighborhoods is a good thing to do, but that doesn’t mean healthcare systems have to reinvent the wheel.

“Others have been doing this for decades,” Sommerfeld said. “There’s strength in partnering with people who have been doing this.”

The biggest lesson, though is that while food is important you need a holistic, intentional investment if you want to succeed. In this case, the project includes affordable housing, a financial coaching program, and a job training program.

Their efforts are paying off. A medical prescription from Promedica clinicians for free, healthy food for patients identified as at risk for food insecurity has led to a 15 percent reduction per person in health care costs. The grocery store’s impact will take longer, but said Sommerfeld, “we’re on the right path.”

Richmond, Virginia: Listening to the community

In East Richmond, Virginia, no national grocery chain had located in the Church Hill neighborhood for decades. It was too challenging when two-thirds of the neighborhood residents lived in poverty, the chains argued. It would require the stores to be far more engaged in the community than their business model allowed.

Long-time food bank operator Norm Gold, however, thought it could work when local philanthropists Steve and Katie Markel approached him about opening a new store in Church Hill, especially since they envisioned more than just a stand-alone store.

Like in Toledo, the $6 million grocery store, the Market@25th, is part of a larger $40 million development that includes a Virginia Commonwealth University-sponsored health hub, 54 affordable apartments, a Boys and Girls Club, and the Kitchens at Reynolds, a culinary school housed at the nearby community college.

The store itself is designed to foster belonging and a sense of place. It promotes minority-owned businesses, from Joyebells Sweet Potato Pies to Gimme Pound pound cakes, as well as a local butcher and florist. The aisles and departments reflect the history of the community, named as they are after schools, local churches, and more. To help with transportation issues, the store also partners with Lyft and a local van service to provide subsidized rides to and from the store.

Gold worked with local residents and a historian to create a timeline of the neighborhood dating back to the 1800s. “It doesn’t hide anything,” said Gold. “One gentleman who was pivotal in its design stood in tears looking at it. It both made him proud and hurt for his community.” They also hire locally, including an in-depth course in life skills and job-readiness training, which Gold said has helped several employees gain financial stability. To date, they’ve trained 50–60 residents, including the formerly incarcerated and homeless neighbors.

But it took a lot of listening to get to where they are today. Many residents didn’t believe the sincerity of Steve Markel and other white developers to follow through on the promises. Even after they opened, many residents felt the store was too nice for them.

“Many in the community still aren’t used to thinking they should deserve that kind of store,” said Markel, who followed the advice of renowned community leader Bill Strickland in Pittsburgh to build with the same quality as if you were building for a wealthy neighborhood. Building trust was hard, Gold added, but it is starting to develop.

Sheryl Garland, chief of health impact for VCU Health System, which, along with the university, jointly funds and operates the VCU Health Hub @ 25th next door to the grocery store, also stressed the importance of listening to and learning from residents.

“We want to make sure the Health Hub is beneficial for the community residents, and not just say it but show it,” she said. “Our stance is, if there was ever a place where we need to be engaging in a different and more intentional way with communities, this is the place.”

The grocery store and Health Hub work in tandem to promote a holistic view of health and well-being, and that means creating more than a storefront, said Natalie Pennywell, director of the Health Hub. A mother with diabetes, for example, may be struggling with her diet, so program staff might help her select healthy foods in the grocery store that fit her budget. Program staff might suggest a cooking class in the grocery store or with a community partner to help her discover new recipes. And they might connect her to a community health worker housed in the Health Hub to track her progress and support her through both success and any setbacks.

“You can’t just can’t plop a grocery store in a food desert and expect people to change behavior,” said Pennywell. “You need a more comprehensive approach.”

The grocery store has been up and running since spring 2019 and the Health Hub has been operational for about a year. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, says Markel, who began the project with the hopes of better understanding community poverty and how to alleviate it.

“It’s been such a long road, it’s hard to describe,” he said. “There’s no simple solutions. I wanted a deeper and better understanding of the problems, that’s why I got involved. I was optimistic I’d find better solutions. That hasn’t happened. It’s only gotten more complicated. At the end of the day, it’s about poverty and wealth. Putting in a grocery store and a larger development doesn’t solve all the problems. But I hope and believe it’s a step in the right direction.”

But if research proves right, it is these small steps that lead to other investments, and with them a sense among neighbors that they are indeed “worth it.”

Those ripple effects might be cropping up already. A 10,000 square foot Planned Parenthood and women’s health center recently opened its doors, and a several nonprofits and the Maggie Walker Land Trust have recently moved into a nearby renovated building. The Boys and Girls Club also acquired a block of land and is building a teen center.

The store’s first anniversary coincided with the COVID-19 crisis, so there wasn’t much celebrating, though Gold says the pandemic has helped to solidify for residents the importance of a local store.

“Trust is a hard thing to earn when there’s been so much in the community that developed the distrust,” he said. “But it’s coming back.”

South Atlanta: Above and beyond

Each week, Jeff Delp gets in his van and drives about 100 miles to Opelika, Alabama, to pick up Carver Market’s wholesale order from long-time grocer Jimmy Wright. The two met by chance in Atlanta as Delp was getting Carver Market off the ground. Delp’s day job is director of economic development at Focused Community Strategies, the nonprofit community development organization managing the market.

Wright knew what Carver Market was up against as a small store with limited revenue. Large wholesalers aren’t interested in small stores and corner store distributors want to see more liquor and cigarette sales.

“As a nation, we’ve sold out to the supermarket model,” Wright said, referring to buying power the large stores have over small ones. “Our commitment to that model is the problem, not that neighborhoods can’t support a store,” he said.

So he offered Carver Market the golden ticket — access to his own wholesale distributor. “We worked a deal where they order through me from my supplier and they come and pick it up.”

Despite the drive, Delp jumped at the offer because it meant that the market could keep its prices low while still offering a wide range of fresh produce and other healthy products, because as we know, in America it’s cheaper to eat badly than to eat well.

The arrangement is telling though, he said.

“It blows my mind that here’s Carver Market in a large regional hub like Atlanta and we have to go to a small town in Alabama to get groceries.”

The store opened in 2015 in a neighborhood whose nearest full-service store was a three-transfer bus ride away. Though still not turning a profit, today the 3,500 square foot market works hard to create a welcoming atmosphere for all shoppers. “That goes a long way to softening the mistrust,” Delp said.

The jobs the market provides are also “launching lives,” Delp added, and the market is giving neighborhood residents that all important sense of hope and positivity. And they are doing it without gentrification’s displacement, Delp stressed. After nearly 20 years of concerted effort in community rebuilding, “We’re getting closer to what we hoped for: a solid, diverse mixed-income community where different walks of life want to be here, and can afford to stay here.”

If you can’t beat ‘em…

Although these three grocery stores are beating the odds, their stories reveal the herculean work and commitment it takes to succeed. Plenty of entrepreneurs would be happy to run a small market if they could get their hands on the goods at an affordable price, if they could find the perfect mix of price and profit, if they could overcome the deep distrust in the community after years of disappointment.

All those roadblocks are one reason the Healthy Corner Store Initiative by the Food Trust has decided that if you can’t beat ’em, improve ‘em.

Although liquor and cigarettes are corner stores’ prime money makers — and the items their distributors push — as the Corner Store Initiative has discovered, the bodega owners are happy to shift to healthier options with a little guidance and support.

“Most are really dedicated to introducing and maintaining healthy products,” said Juan Vila, senior program manager at the Initiative.

The Initiative provides that support, from offering free coolers and shelving plus ongoing coaching in exchange for a guarantee that the owner will provide healthy items. They start small, asking owners to provide just eight healthy items in the store.

A corner store might start by adding a small produce stand near the cash register and learn how to display the produce to make it appealing. They may then graduate to a refrigerator with a mix of juices, yoghurts, and kid-friendly items. Gradually, the owners add their own healthy products based on their customers’ needs.

At first, Vila said, many shop owners are skeptical. They don’t think their customers are looking for healthy items, but once they see the demand — and profits — they’re on board.

The program has been such a success that in San Jose, where Vila’s located, several mom-and-pops have completely stopped selling cigarettes.

Snickers bars are not going away, he said, but when healthy items are more prevalent, shoppers will buy them. An early evaluation of the program’s impact showed a 60 percent increase in fresh produce sales across all the stores in the program. And many, said Vila, have seen even higher increases.

Food Apartheid

Today, more than half of all low-income ZIP codes across the U.S. fit the definition of food deserts — areas empty of good-quality, affordable fresh food. Karen Washington, founder of Black Urban Growers, thinks of the phenomenon not as food deserts but as food apartheid, she told the Guardian, a deliberately designed system whose root cause starts with inequity. She may have a point. But step by step, these grocery stores and bodegas profiled here are beginning to chip away at that insidious form of apartheid.

This story was co-published with the Build Healthy Places Network. Read it on their site here.

No one else in the office thought it was worth their time. So the task of processing certificates of occupancy requests and zoning inquiries from local businesses and residents fell to Desiree Powell, who at the time was the newest, youngest staffer at the city planning division for Lancaster, Texas, a small, majority-Black satellite city just south of Dallas.

Being in the Dallas area, it’s no surprise the first small business case Powell handled was a barbeque joint. The owners were an older Black couple, very close to retirement. They’d been in business for around 20 years, long enough for no one to remember why no one told them they had to update their certificate of occupancy — a standard local government document that certifies the building’s current use complies with all zoning and building codes that apply to that property.

“It was hard to say, like, ‘Yeah, I know you’ve been here a long time, you’re awesome people but by the way the zoning doesn’t allow your business,’” says Powell. “It was the kind of place that gives discounts to city employees — firemen, police. I’m gonna be the person in the paper if it’s me that shuts this down. I don’t want that on my conscience.”

It took a few weeks and many meetings, but Powell successfully walked them through the zoning requirements and building inspections process to update their certificate of occupancy.

Cases like those eventually inspired Powell to create BLCK SPCES, an urban planning and design consultancy. It officially launched in August, focusing on helping Black and Hispanic communities and businesses design spaces that benefit them and get those ideas and designs through the planning and zoning process. She even self-published an e-book about urban planning and Black businesses. And she’s finding time to do all that while she still has a day job as a city planner in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Her work has become about helping Black businesses and Black communities cope with planning departments that don’t seem to want or have the time for them.

“I never had a plan to be a planner, I just always loved people and I loved what community spaces did for me as a kid,” says Powell.

Like most urban planners she’s met, Powell says she got into the field by accident. Toward the end of her undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, she took a class with a professor that focused on social justice issues in education. The professor encouraged her to look into urban planning. So she applied to graduate school at UT-Arlington, and got in.

“As embarrassing as it may sound, I bought the book Urban Planning for Dummies,” says Powell. “That helped a lot, actually, understanding some of the terminology and jargon going into it. This whole profession is full of random acronyms and made up words.”

During grad school, she worked at the same rec center on the east side of Arlington that she went to growing up.

“It was just kind of divine intervention,” says Powell. “Every [class] project I had I probably did off that rec center. I saw how the space affected kids and Black and brown families every day.”

Naturally, she wanted to be a park planner. “But that wasn’t really a thing in Texas, it was hard to find jobs that had ‘park planner’ in the description,” Powell says.

Her first official role as a planner was that job in Lancaster. As a young Black woman who grew up in nearby Arlington, Powell gained a reputation as a friendly face at the planning department. It started with the barbecue restaurant, and one or two cases like that per week soon turned into consistently three or four, sometimes three in one day, Powell says.

Cities charge anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred dollars to update certificates of occupancy, and that doesn’t include the cost of any needed work to bring the building fully up to code. But small business owners generally find it’s worth it, once they understand the importance. Certificates of occupancy can be important documentation for a small business to have, especially if it’s just renting. Banks may require it to approve a loan for equipment or renovations, or insurance companies may need it to approve coverage.

Most of the small business owners that came to her for help with certificates of occupancy were Black or Hispanic — although they were frequently dealing with white commercial landlords who would complain to Powell about issues tenants or prospective tenants were bringing up that the landlord had neglected for years. Now those issues were becoming barriers to updating a certificate of occupancy.

“I would tell people before you get ready to go all the way through with [leasing a space] check with the landlord to make sure you know when was the last time somebody was in here, when was the last time they had the pipes checked,” says Powell. “And now the white landlords are upset because somebody let them in on the secret.”

Prospective entrepreneurs started coming to Powell to ask about sites they had their eye on to open a business. They wanted to check and make sure the zoning allowed for the business they had in mind. Or they wanted help going over what the buildings department would be checking as part of approving a new certificate of occupancy.

“People see vacant lots, they see for-lease, for-sale signs,” says Powell. “All small businesses, restaurants, hair salons, nail salons, gas stations, daycares. People trying to create their own version of the American Dream, trying to create generational wealth.”

But spending time on those cases meant time away from putting together briefing packets with zoning and other land use information on multiple potential sites for potential big employers from out of town.

The tension between supporting local and small businesses versus “attracting and retaining” large employers from out of town is familiar to city halls and planning departments across the country. And where there are large concentrations of Black people and businesses, there is a predictable winner between large corporations from out of town and local Black business owners. Even with a majority-Black council and a Black mayor, when it came to focusing her time on local, Black business owners, Powell was fighting a lost cause.

“It challenged me, personally, and it challenged me professionally in the sense of sometimes you’re going to have to step to people who are above you,” says Powell. “It’s a predominantly Black community in the southern portion of [Dallas-Fort Worth], in the state of Texas. If you’re not for them, who is?”

She eventually left her role, but she hasn’t left the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Her consulting clients so far have included Black and Hispanic small business owners looking to move into commercial spaces, nonprofits focusing on economic growth in predominantly-Black Southern Dallas, and two projects so far focused on creating safe and welcoming public spaces for Hispanic communities.

Out of all the factors tilting the playing field against businesses owned by Black, indigenous, or other people of color, city planning departments are one of the most opaque.

There isn’t anything close to a national database of land use applications like there is for home mortgage applications. Passed in 1975, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act mandates that lenders collect and report demographic data to the federal government on home mortgage applications, including borrowers’ income, race and ethnicity as well as gender. Since the data cover applications, they include those denied as well as approved, allowing journalists and activists to see and report on the continued pattern of Black and Hispanic applicants being denied at higher rates than white applicants, regardless of income.

There isn’t even local demographic data for land use applications. It’s just not collected as part of the application process. So it’s impossible to say with precision whether a city grants a representative number of land-use applications from Black- or minority-owned businesses — let alone whether it gets a representative number of applications from those businesses. There’s no way to track whether those outcomes reflect the kind of hands-on approach and attention that Powell tried in her time at Lancaster, or if they reflect business as usual.

What is known is that even in Lancaster, Texas — a predominantly Black part of a major metropolitan area, even with a Black mayor and a majority-Black city council, it was an uphill battle for the planning department to give the same level of support for local Black businesses as it gave to big corporations from out of town.

“I saw a lot of good, and I saw a lot of bad,” says Powell. “Everybody that’s Black or brown isn’t down for the cause. I saw a lot of Black people and Hispanic people putting in things they said was beneficial but in reality was just about their pocketbook.”

At around five minutes to nine on the morning of August 18th, a helicopter started circling over the Von Colln Memorial Field on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. People on the ground, gathered in small groups at the perimeters of the field, couldn’t immediately tell whether the chopper was flown by a local TV news station or by the police. But under the sound of the whirring blades, they had to raise their voices to carry on their conversations, and as they did, tensions started to rise, too.

For ten weeks, a group of more than a hundred activists and people experiencing homelessness had occupied the large field as a small tent city, complete with a shared kitchen, porta-potties, handwashing stations, and a medical tent. They had draped banners at the corner of 22nd Street proclaiming HOUSING NOW, and NO COP ZONE, and enumerating a list of their demands, which included the transfer of vacant properties into a community land trust run by the organizers, a repeal of laws against camping on park property, and a complete dissolution of the Philadelphia Police Department. Weeks of negotiations between organizers and city officials had failed to produce an agreement. And so the city had posted an eviction notice, telling campers to leave the park by 9 a.m.

By mid-August, residents of the surrounding neighborhood of Logan Square, a wealthy area packed with cultural institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, were increasingly frustrated with the encampment. But organizers were increasingly committed to defending it, too, and they had attracted a motley crew of supporters. That morning, as the dew evaporated off the grass, homeless outreach workers stood nearby hoping to offer services to any residents looking to move on from the encampment, legal observers lingered on the sidewalks, and news crews gathered at the corner of 22nd and the Parkway. Meanwhile, a group of camp supporters — most of them young and white and new to the encampment, some dressed in all black with helmets and shields, or big badges that said “MEDIC” — lined the fields, tying wooden pallets together with cords for makeshift barricades, expecting to beat back a full-blown invasion by police.

As the crowd grew, so did the atmosphere of suspicion. Was the clean-cut white guy with a floral-print shirt and no COVID-19 mask associated with the far-right boogaloo boys? Were the people taking pictures journalists or cops? What to make of the Black Guns Matter t-shirt? TV interviews devolved into arguments between camp supporters and people passing by. As 10 a.m. approached, two members of the city council showed up to try to help keep things from boiling over. While they were giving an interview to reporters at the corner of the encampment, a handful of camp supporters and opponents started to crowd in front of the cameras and argue amongst themselves. The cameras stayed put, the arguments kept on, and the two council women quietly walked away to talk to organizers, in hopes of negotiating a deal. Eventually, word spread that residents had filed an injunction to prevent the eviction from happening that day. The cops kept their distance. And everyone went back to their corners to reset.

In Philadelphia, it was a summer of conflict and solidarity, as the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests blossomed into new coalitions demanding housing rights for people experiencing homelessness. Two sustained protest encampments have forced city agencies to confront the failures of their strategies for housing the most vulnerable people. Organizers have now declared a historic victory, with the city and the Philadelphia Housing Authority agreeing to transfer dozens of vacant properties into a community land trust run by encampment residents. But even now, with the encampments cleared, many vulnerable people are faced with few options for stable, permanent housing, and the economic downturn threatens to push even more families into homelessness.

“We didn’t set out to end homelessness in Philadelphia. We didn’t set out and say we were going to feed every unstable and housing-insecure person in Philadelphia. But we honored the commitments to the people that we made relationships with this summer, to make sure that people got into housing before it got cold,” says Indigo, a 20-year-old organizer who lived at the Parkway encampment for most of the summer. “And some of what we were able to do sets a precedent, not just in Philadelphia but across the country, that there are tangible outcomes that can come from resistance.”

Philadelphia officials have been struggling to deal with homeless encampments for several years. In 2018, as the opioid epidemic gripped parts of North Philly, encampments of heroin users made national headlines. After clearing some of those camps, under criticism that it had let them develop out of neglect for not only people experiencing homelessness but the residents of the surrounding neighborhoods, the city announced earlier this year a new “encampment resolution program” meant to guide clearance of future homeless encampments by leading with social services. Still, homeless encampments kept forming.

Philadelphia is one of the poorest cities in the country. At the January 2019 point-in-time count, more than 1,100 unsheltered homeless people were living on the streets, more than half of whom had a substance use disorder and more than 400 of whom had a serious mental illness. According to Project HOME, a housing and homelessness nonprofit, more than 8,000 individuals used emergency shelters in the city in 2018, and more than 7,000 students experienced homelessness during the 2017-18 school year. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Housing Authority, like other authorities in other cities, has nowhere near enough housing to serve everyone who qualifies. The waiting list for an apartment or housing choice voucher is more than 40,000 people deep. Even before the pandemic began, officials were planning to launch a shallow rent-subsidy program to help some of the city’s thousands of low-income families pay for housing. The pandemic just exacerbated existing problems.

On March 22, as U.S. institutions were starting to come to grips with the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines saying that unless individual housing was available, cities should let encampment residents remain where they were. The very next day, the city cleared a homeless encampment near the Philadelphia Convention Center in Center City, carrying out a plan it says had been in the works for months. Just a few weeks later, a COVID-19 outbreak hit a local shelter where at least a few of the people who were cleared from the encampment had landed, and one man died, according to reports in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The city said at the time that there was no connection between that sweep and the outbreak. And in a recent email to Next City, a city spokesperson defended the sweep, noting that the CDC’s guidance “has since been changed to a ‘whole community approach’ that acknowledges what the City of Philadelphia already knew — people are not necessarily safer outside in a northern climate without access to sanitation, regular meals, medical care and social services.”

At the end of May, as the Inquirer reported, the city removed 25 people from the Philadelphia International Airport, while offering COVID-19 testing to anyone who was planning to move into a shelter. Within days, protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis were growing across the country. Protestors flooded the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, and, starting with a handful of tents, the seed of the protest encampment was planted.

By mid-June, dozens of tents were lined up beneath the allée of london plane trees lining the Parkway next to Von Colln field. One morning, a 44-year-old man named Frantz was sitting in a camp chair near one of the tents, getting ready to light a cigar. Declining to give his last name, he said he hadn’t been in permanent housing for a year and a half, and that he had recently been staying at the airport. He said he worked in home healthcare, and also did maintenance work, but didn’t have enough money to get a place of his own. He had spent time in shelters — most recently the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission in Center City — and tried to avoid them whenever he could.

Staying in shelters is “right next to jail, because of all the rules and stuff,” Frantz said. “It’s not the situation you want to be in. And with COVID I’d rather be outside.”

All the provisions at the camp, including the tents, had been provided by donors and people passing by, he said.

“It’s been quite peaceful. There haven’t been any real problems. Everybody has been working together and trying to survive out here.”

From the outset, though, city officials and homeless advocates were expressing concerns about the encampment, saying it had the potential to spread COVID-19, and claiming that activists were using unhoused people as “pawns,” as the Inquirer reported. Outreach workers were reportedly turned away from the encampment; one advocate told the Inquirer, anonymously, “We’re all equally baffled about who formed it, what it is.”

Organizers say the city’s official homelessness apparatus was antagonistic from the beginning. Indigo, a student at Temple University, says their father was evicted from his home in January. When Temple shut down campus during the COVID-19 outbreak, Indigo was allowed to stay in the dorms until the end of the semester. But in May, they were told they had to leave. They had nowhere to live until the encampment formed.

“I wasn’t per se sleeping on the streets, but I was homeless,” Indigo says. “I was staying in between friends’ houses, which I felt wasn’t safe during a pandemic.”

Indigo says there was “a campaign against the integrity of our fight” by the city, in the news media, from the beginning of the encampment. The city’s attempts to emphasize divisions between organizers and residents had an effect, they say. Meanwhile, the populations at the encampment kept shifting as some people accepted temporary housing from outreach workers or otherwise moved on and new people arrived.

“The biggest problem was being able to maintain joy and happiness amidst a space that was very much informed by trauma and neglect and disenfranchisement,” Indigo says.

Negotiations between the city and encampment organizers continued throughout June, as outreach workers continued offering shelter and temporary housing services to residents. At the same time, since the beginning of the pandemic, a group of homeless families had been squatting in a dozen vacant North Philly homes owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority. The actions were organized by separate activists, but the Parkway encampment organizers had begun demanding that PHA turn over vacant properties for people experiencing homelessness. By that point,, the Authority hadn’t even participated in negotiations, says Jennifer Bennetch, a North Philly woman who helped organize the occupation of PHA homes. So at the end of June, Bennetch and a group of others set up a second encampment in a vacant lot across the street from PHA’s new headquarters.

Bennetch says she has been protesting PHA since 2016, after an interaction with a group of Housing Authority police officers who she says were indistinguishable from Philadelphia police officers at the time. She says she went to the police station to complain about the interaction, only to be told that no Philly police had ever been to her house. (Bennetch doesn’t live in PHA housing herself, but she says she lives in between three homes owned by the Authority.) After the interaction with police, Bennetch says she began attending the Authority’s monthly board meetings, and pushing the Authority to change its officers’ uniforms and squad cars, so members of the public could better identify them. In the process, she realized that PHA was regularly auctioning off vacant properties to private developers, and last year, she staged a protest outside the Authority’s new North Philly headquarters with a long list of demands.

The choice to create a new encampment on the lot across from the headquarters turned out to be strategic. For the last half-decade, the Philadelphia Housing Authority has been spending much of its energy on a plan to rebuild the neighborhood known as Sharswood, in the area around the former Norman Blumberg public-housing towers, which were demolished in 2016. A key part of that plan is the development of a mixed-use project on Ridge Avenue with 98 mixed-income housing units, a grocery store, an urgent care clinic, and a bank. The project, which was slated to break ground over the summer, was planned for the lot where the second encampment was built. The encampment threatened to derail the plan.

After the injunction was filed in August, a federal judge ruled that the city could clear the Parkway encampment as long as it gave the residents 72 hours’ notice. The city posted another eviction notice for September 9th. That morning, as cop cars lined up on the Parkway, even more supporters showed up to defend the encampment than had appeared in August. Many of them were dressed in what appeared to be riot gear. The makeshift barricades were reinforced. Around 9 a.m., organizers began a press conference at the corner of 22nd Street, where police, city officials, outreach workers, and news reporters had begun to amass. In the middle of the speeches, a group of clergy briefly tried to enter the encampment, but were shouted down. There were tense arguments between camp supporters and antagonists.

By 10 a.m., after the press conference was over, the police had gotten no closer to dismantling the encampment. Helicopters buzzed overhead and cicadas sang in the trees. Small groups of black-clad camp defenders stood around talking and smoking cigarettes. Some of the defenders remained lined up by a barricade near where the press were gathered, repeatedly asking photographers not to take their pictures. A small argument formed about the presence of the press. Jamaal Henderson, an ACT UP organizer who had emceed the press conference, told the supporters who had arrived that morning that they should tolerate the press, who could help spread the group’s demands, and whose presence might keep the police from becoming violent.

“If you’re on the front lines and you’ve got a problem with the cameras, get off the front lines,” Henderson said.

“Seriously dude?” someone replied. Two of the supporters walked away.

Eventually, as crowds dwindled, the police backed away too. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney later said that the city was hoping to avoid a violent confrontation, and that dismantling the camp would be a “multi-day operation.”

“That was probably the biggest action that I’ve ever had any kind of leadership role in,” Henderson later said of the press conference on the day of the scheduled eviction. “It was challenging, especially when you have all those different people from all those different backgrounds, and some want to do one thing and others want to do another. But we just kept trying to lift up the fact that we were there for the residents. We were there to help them, and that was one of my main things, was making sure that their voices were always centered in that.”

Henderson, who has worked with ACT UP since 2013, says he lived on the street in various states for a number of years, but he began the process of getting permanent housing once he moved to Philadelphia. He didn’t live at the encampment this summer, but a fellow ACT UP member was one of the early organizers, and Henderson pitched in to help communicate with the press. Henderson says he knows from experience that shelters are unsafe. He had his belongings stolen in one shelter, and says someone tried to sexually assault him in another. At a third shelter, Henderson says, he had to stand in a long line to get his medication, where staff weren’t respectful of residents’ HIPAA rights. Navigating the various groups at the encampment on the day the city was trying to evict people was difficult, but it was validating too, he says.

“Being a Black person whose voice has almost always been silenced because ‘He’s just an angry Black man,’ there’s something to be said about being able to come together and see all those people from different walks of life,” Henderson says. “You had super privileged people out there right next to the people who have nothing. When we can replicate that on other issues, and on a much grander scale, we will see the change in this country that people have been trying to get.”

In the following weeks, the city continued sending outreach workers to the encampments and negotiating with organizers for a peaceful resolution. Between July and October, a city spokesman says in an email, city workers helped more than 180 residents of the protest encampments connect with transitional housing and other services.

But all along, the organizers’ primary demands had been the transfer of all city-owned vacant properties into a land trust controlled by the residents. And at the end of September, organizers of the Ridge Avenue camp, near PHA’s headquarters, declared victory, saying the Authority had agreed to let the families squatting in vacant PHA homes stay where they were, and to transfer fifty vacant homes into a land trust controlled by organizers of the protest camps. The Authority initially said the protestors’ declaration was “premature,” but later confirmed it would transfer properties in exchange for the dissolution of the Ridge Avenue camp. Congratulations poured in on social media. The announcement made national news.

“Public opinion really shapes the creation of policy,” Bennetch says. “We actually got results, which is a thing that is really hard to get from protests.”

On October 14, just days after the Ridge Avenue encampment was cleared, the Philadelphia Housing Authority held a groundbreaking for its Sharswood Ridge project. Bennetch and other protestors stayed away from the groundbreaking, but she says that the threat to PHA’s plans, combined with the high-profile protests on the Parkway, worked to the protestors’ favor.

Bennetch and others are now in the process of creating an organization that can manage a community land trust. She says that the organizers have decided to create a public-benefit corporation rather than a nonprofit organization, because they are all “loose cannons,” politically speaking, and don’t trust themselves to abide by IRS rules limiting political activity by nonprofit groups. The city says it’s supportive of the community land trust, but has no involvement in creating the organization beyond transferring vacant properties. According to a report in Shelterforce in early November, activists were still sorting out how to structure an organization and pay for rehab costs.

The agreement doesn’t meet all of the protestors’ demands. Even the organizers who were most involved in negotiating it acknowledge that it won’t serve everyone who needs housing from the encampments, let alone around the city. And some residents felt like the primary organizers failed to carry through on the promise of the encampments. mAstress Tara (they/them), a 29-year-old activist who lived at the Parkway encampment for part of the summer, says the agreement is “really a step downwards from the original demands.”

“Regardless of how many houses we got, it fails to really provide a system or a process that people can orient their expectations in,” they say.

City Council member Jamie Gauthier is chair of the council’s Committee on Housing, Neighborhood Development and the Homeless, and one of the two council members who showed up at the Parkway encampment during the scheduled eviction in August. That day, Gauthier told Next City, she had gone to the encampment because “I think I have to share the experiences of the people who live here.” She said she also felt a responsibility to use her presence to try to keep things peaceful.

Gauthier and other city leaders also acknowledge that the city’s system for dealing with housing is too fractured, encompassing everything from the Office of Homeless Services to various city land-holding entities and the independent public housing authority, which too rarely work together to address the obvious needs of the city’s most vulnerable residents. One of the strengths of the protest was its emphasis on the fact that the city has many thousands more vacant lots and properties than homeless people, Gauthier says — a “very simple point” that doesn’t require any knowledge of land-disposition policies or HUD regulations to understand.

“People will ignore the issue of homelessness if it’s not in their face,” says Gauthier. “That was one of the brilliant things about this protest. The organizers and residents, they’re folks who are not always listened to. And they were facing off against huge bureaucracies. So I think protest is a beautiful way of leveling the playing field between people who are traditionally ignored and overlooked and people who are in power.”

This story was produced with support from Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the city’s push toward economic justice. Next City is one of more than 20 news organizations in the collective. Follow us on Twitter @BrokeInPhilly.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a series called “Zig Zag: The Winding Path to Making Ends Meet in Philadelphia,” which focuses on how improving one facet of a person’s life — from housing, to education, to business — can establish a stable foundation for economic mobility. The series is produced with support from Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the city’s push toward economic mobility. Next City is one of more than 20 news organizations producing Broke in Philly. Follow us on Twitter @BrokeInPhilly.

Rocky, 32, a South Philadelphia native, fell into fentanyl addiction after a series of traumatic events that left him scarred with PTSD: In 2014, he lost the love of his longtime girlfriend; his cousin, who was more like a brother, died a tragic death that Rocky still can’t bring himself to talk about; and his brother went to prison.

“I kept on getting worse and worse with the drugs because I was trying to numb the pain,” Rocky says.

He wound up homeless, sleeping on his parents’ porch for a month before crashing on park benches and eventually finding his way to the “tubes” in South Philadelphia — enormous steel pipes stacked one atop another like logs at an abandoned construction site. He was starting to get “comfortable,” Rocky says, having his fentanyl delivered, sitting on a couch inside his hideout.

But then he met Edward Dover, known simply as “Dover” to friends and colleagues, the lead outreach worker for Project HOME, one of the Philadelphia organizations that tries to connect those experiencing homelessness with housing and other services, such as rehab.

“He asked me if I needed anything,” Rocky recalls. “I told him, ‘Yeah! I could use some boots and some clothes maybe.’ The next day he came with a nice pair of boots because it was wintertime, and I had holes in the bottom of my boots. I was getting my feet soaking wet every day. He kept in contact all the time.”

The minute Rocky was ready to get help, Dover found him a bed at Kirkbride Center, a behavioral health care facility in Philadelphia. When it proved to be a bad fit, Dover got Rocky into another treatment center, Journey of Hope in North Philadelphia.

“I say it all the time that I could not be where I am right now if it wasn’t for Dover,” Rocky says, on his 205th day sober.

Pretty soon, Rocky will be eligible for an apartment through the Journey of Hope program and is applying for disability because of his PTSD. As an extraordinary outreach worker by all accounts, Dover had the compassion and tools that Rocky needed at just the right time.

“People need to understand that they shouldn’t judge homeless people,” Rocky says. “They don’t know their past. They don’t know what happened to them that led to them being homeless.”

Plus, Rocky says, Dover understands that many people don’t — that substance use disorder is a disease.

“When I was battling drugs, I used to say, ‘I wish I could change places with someone so that someone could feel the pain that I do for one day.’ … just so they understand and kinda feel for us,” Rocky reflects.

Dover not only understands, he takes action to help combat the escalating problem with homelessness in the United States — especially since COVID-19 hit.

According to the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, 17 out of every 10,000 people in this country experience homelessness on any given night, according to HUD’s 2019 Annual Point-in-Time Count. HUD stresses that “these 567,715 people represent a cross-section of America” — that they are “associated with every region of the country, family status, gender category and racial/ethnic group.”

Permanent supportive housing, an intervention that combines affordable housing with social support services, currently represents 41.8 percent of all homeless assistance beds, according to HUD, though these numbers are based on 2017 counts. Emergency shelters are next, representing nearly 33 percent of homeless assistance beds. Rapid rehousing, in which unsheltered individuals move directly from the street into permanent housing, is a newer program that accounts for more than one in 10 beds nationally — a 372 percent increase from 2013 to 2017, according to HUD.

Liz Hersh, director of Philadelphia’s Office of Homeless Services, says that one of the things that “plagues” outreach workers is that “people don’t believe homelessness is solvable.” That’s a myth; she says she and others in the field have seen “over and over again that when we are able to give people what they need, they don’t want to be homeless.”

Outreach workers such as Dover are the connective tissue between people on the street and finding placements. Research shows that helping unsheltered individuals find permanent housing can be the catalyst that turns their lives around. Those who work with people experiencing homelessness say that making these matches is not easy under normal circumstances and has been made exponentially more difficult by COVID-19. Not only have outreach workers been having to worry about those living on the street being unsheltered and at risk of contracting coronavirus, but they have also been concerned about keeping themselves healthy, retrofitting shelters and other sites to meet CDC guidelines, and educating people about the dangers the virus poses. To fully grasp the empathy and relationship-building necessary to transition people experiencing homelessness into permanent housing, it helps to understand more about Dover himself.

Finding the Way in

Early on in his 15-plus-year outreach career, Dover learned an important lesson: not promising more than he can deliver.

“That’s one of the first mistakes I made is you can’t promise anybody because they’ll hold you to it, and if you don’t deliver, they won’t mess with you anymore,” Dover says. “That person will spread the word to everybody else what you did, and [then] that next person won’t deal with you. And it will trickle all the way down until you [think] , ‘Damn. I don’t even know why I’m doing this anymore. Ain’t nobody trust me.’ That’s the one mistake I made.”

Tim Sheahan, director of homeless services for Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services, says, “As our commissioner [David T. Jones] who just left said, ‘Under-promise and over-deliver.’”

His early learning curve aside, Dover has used this approach well as he has helped place people in secure housing during the closing of encampments around the city, including most recently the one on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which supported between 175 and 220 unsheltered people at its peak. He also visits the nooks and crannies around town where he knows people experiencing homelessness hang out. Dover uses compassion and remains persistent in his outreach work, but tries not to push too hard.

“If you push, you can’t build a relationship,” Dover says. “If you are pushing and pushing, they’re never going to talk to you.”

Fostering relationships is the goal, Dover says.

“I try not to be a nuisance to [the clients] and come up to them with the same information every day,” Dover says. “I try to change the subject up — you know — talk about different things to build a relationship with them. That’s the whole point of what a person doing outreach does. After I get the relationship with them, it makes my job easier, especially trying to meet their needs.”

One of Dover’s tricks? He uses a cigarette to draw people out.

“It’s amazing the kind of conversation you get from a cigarette,” Dover says. “They talk to you through the tent. As soon as you offer them a cigarette, they come out of the tent — so if I never offered that cigarette, they’d still be talking to [me] through the tent. So I’m, ‘You like a cigarette?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah. Sure. Let me put my pants on.’ And they talk to you to find out what we do.”

“Our big thing is you live a longer life when you’re housed,” Sheahan says. “Often, no, it’s not immediately permanent housing.” It may be a safe haven or a shelter. “But it gets you in the [system], and eventually it leads to a housing match. And folks move along that continuum.

In fiscal year 2020, 82 percent of those who left an emergency shelter, safe haven, or transitional housing project did not return to homelessness, according to Philadelphia’s Office of Homeless Services FY 2020 Data Snapshot. The goal is to make homelessness non-recurring, according to the report, and the numbers seem to support that individuals who enter the temporary housing system have a higher chance of becoming permanently housed.

Holding Steady During COVID-19

Adjusting to the pandemic made existing challenges steeper. “It was really a very seismic system change overnight,” says Hersh.

Since the beginning of COVID-19, many of the day programs for unsheltered people have shuttered. The focus has been on getting food and other basic necessities out to people on the street. Outreach workers have been educating individuals about sanitation and social distancing, and guiding people to handwashing stations and portable restrooms that the city has set up in different neighborhoods, Sheahan said.

In addition, the city had to de-densify every shelter to move beds at least six feet apart and install bed barriers.

“Remember, early in the pandemic, there was no PPE [personal protective equipment], so trying to get even hand soap and hand sanitizer and trash cans and Kleenex and, god forbid, masks … I don’t think it was practically until May that we had enough masks for everybody,” Hersh says. “[We were] trying to keep beds open so that people could come in and be safe.”

She continues, “We had been spending the last several years making it easier to come in, and suddenly our staff had to be all masked up and take people’s temperatures and ask people personal questions like, ‘How do you feel today? Do you have any respiratory symptoms?’ before even talking to them.”

The city negotiated with several hotels to set up a quarantine site for unsheltered individuals who had contracted COVID-19, as well as two prevention sites to get those at high-risk and elderly folks out of congregate settings where there might be outbreaks. In addition, the city had to look out for its own workers, Hersh says.

“Just like healthcare workers, our people are essential workers, and they all have children at home whose lives have been disrupted, or aging parents who were very vulnerable themselves,” Hersh says. “But [the outreach workers] were still coming to work every day. So we had to keep them safe, and there was a lack of information about the virus and how it spread, so it was really working with them and supporting them and answering all of their questions and trying to offer all that information so they could continue to do their jobs.”

Dover has not let fears about contracting COVID-19 disturb him. He wears a mask and frequently sanitizes his hands. His wife FaceTimes him several times a day to make sure he is doing so, he says with a laugh.

“You won’t be able to focus on doing your job if you worry about it,” he says. “It’s tough, and it’s definitely scary doing what I do. But, you know, somebody’s got to do it, and I’m that person.”

Building a Foundation of Respect

Dover said his father always taught him to finish what he started, so that is a rule he lives by. As one of nine siblings growing up in South Philadelphia, Dover learned his work ethic early. In order to buy the sneakers he wanted, he landed his first job detailing cars at 13.

“I’ve been working ever since,” says Dover, who, in addition to his outreach, has a second job transporting individuals from Project HOME’s after-hours intake center for men to a shelter in Southwest Philadelphia. He works 11 to 12 hours a day before going home to his wife and four children, the oldest of whom attends Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

As a child, Dover would look for odd jobs around the neighborhood, such as shoveling snow. He spent years scooping ice cream at what is now called the Wachovia Center, a job he says kept him off the corners where so many of his peers were dealing drugs. In addition, he graduated from high school and simultaneously completed Job Corps training in building maintenance.

“I was what they would say in my neighborhood a ‘go-getter,’” Dover says. “I knew I couldn’t get [money] from my parents. I didn’t want to go the illegal way, so I tried to find a positive way.”

At 19, Dover got his first job working in a city shelter. At first it felt “weird” and a little “scary.” But he soon developed deep respect for the people he was trying to help.

“I’ve seen too much as far as staff, how they treat clients,” Dover says. “You don’t treat them like they’re nothing. They are still human beings. They’re not dogs… You could be them on any given day. You treat them how you would treat yourself, with much respect.”

“I just try to maintain myself and put myself in a position where I won’t fall [apart] like that,” Dover adds. “But I also keep in mind that that can be me any day. So I try to treat people with the same respect I would treat my mom, my dad, anybody in my family, and myself. That’s the most important thing about doing this job.”

One of the ways Dover shows his respect for the people he is working with is by accommodating them in little ways that lead to strong relationships.

“So if I come to you and introduce myself as an outreach worker and [ask] … ‘Is there anything I can do for you today?’, they might say, ‘Well, what is it you offering me?’” Dover explains. “So I come back with, ‘What is it that you’re looking for?’ If it’s like, ‘Well, I need to get my I.D.,’ [then I say] ‘OK. I could help you with that.’”

Dover says other requests might be, “’I need some socks or I need some clothes or I haven’t eaten all day,’ you know, little things … I try to work with them.”

Playing Matchmaker

Dover also goes the extra mile when trying to place people in housing. He arranges tours for individuals before they commit to going inside somewhere.

“I would suggest to them that this would be a good fit for you, but I could set up a tour to see if you like it for yourself, and we could proceed with a placement,” Dover explains. “If not, I bring you back, and we could work on another plan.”

One of his proudest moments lately, Dover says, was placing a man named Billy, who had lived on the street for about 20 years, in an apartment in Nicetown. “We got him housed, and he’s living his best life right now,” Dover said.

He has also been trying to get medical care and housing for a woman who is pregnant with twins and who was living in the Parkway encampment. One day he was interacting with her, and the next day she was gone. Dover doesn’t know where she went, but he keeps calling her number to try to get her into prenatal care.

Philadelphia native Jennell Anderson, 58, recently left the Parkway encampment — where she would sit outside her tent and crochet — for a spot at Cedar Park Safe Haven, a facility that houses 20 women.

“I like Cedar Park,” Anderson says. “[The] staff has compassion and heart. We get some dynamite food, and I can keep busy as if I was in my own home because I do my hobbies, and I’m going to work.”

Anderson has been spending four hours a day helping people with voter registration. After a head injury from an accident put her out of work as a dental assistant for two years, she ran out of money and lost her home. She wound up in the Parkway encampment, where she lived for several months.

Her goal is to secure permanent housing, which she’s working on with the help of case managers.

“People need to understand about being homeless, that you could be where you are today, and where I’m at tomorrow,” Anderson says.

But she has hope. “I’m rejoicing because I know what’s coming. It’s coming. It’s coming.”

To express her gratitude, Anderson is crocheting 28 scarfs: one for every staff member at Cedar Park.

Fighting the Frustration

Anderson is a success story, but persuading people to take a placement is not always easy, Dover says.

“What burns me out is in the summers, you rarely, rarely get people who want to come in,” Dover says. “’I’m cool with being out here.’ You got people who say, ‘I’ll let you know once it gets cold.’ I mean, they tell you that, and I just laugh. ‘Ok. I’ll see you when it gets cold.’ I still end up checking on them anyway throughout the summer.”

The real trick — and possibly the most challenging part of outreach, Dover says — is reaching people right at the moment they are ready to come inside.

“Man, when you miss that opportunity, it’s like trying to catch Jesus,” Dover said. “You [may] never get them… Because it’s like they get discouraged. I guess they’ve been misled so much in their life. When you are that one person that they finally trust, and you don’t deliver at the point when they need you, you ain’t never going to get [the chance] again.”

What keeps him going, Dover says, is his family and also playing semi-professional football for the Tri-County Owls.

“I mean, it’s basically my therapy,” Dover says. “For those three hours, all I think about is football. I don’t think about nothing else. Whatever is bothering me before I hit the field, I don’t think about it.”

One of his frustrations lately, Dover says, was having to stay on the perimeter of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway encampment to respect the wishes of the activists and those living there. But Dover is so well-known and popular that it wasn’t a huge obstacle in his work.

“We just stay around the perimeter on the sidewalk area, and if people spot us, or I saw somebody I knew, I’d yell out for them to come towards me,” Dover explains. “And then they spread the word, ‘Oh, Dover’s out there.’ ‘Oh yeah? Where’s he at?’ I let them know where I’m at. They all come over and start talking to me. I’ve been out there every day since the encampment started, so they’re pretty much looking for me now.”

Responding to the Encampment

Hersh says that the city is really proud of what they accomplished at the Parkway encampment.

“It has been also some of the hardest work any of us have ever done in our lives, and that’s speaking all up and down the chain,” Hersh says. “We all agree with the goal that we need more permanent housing that is available and affordable to people with very, very low incomes. We’re talking $700 to $800 a month that people are living on, so that has really driven us to try and find a pathway forward.”

Hersh says her team was also mindful of the “rage and frustration” that erupted at the racial justice protests this spring, and committed to approaching the encampment in a way that did not “spark violence.” “We didn’t want to do something that would be hurtful to people who were already vulnerable,” she says.

“It’s a lot easier to go in with bulldozers than it is to find the pathway forward to negotiate a peaceful settlement,” Hersh continues. “So we have worked very hard, and we’ve been working day in and day out since the beginning of June on many fronts. … There’s no roadmap. Nobody knows how to do this, so we’re making it up as we go along, driven by a set of values that we have about trying to dignify the people there and the work that we’re doing.”

The advocacy coalition at the encampment reached an agreement with the city in October to take over approximately 50 vacant houses to retrofit for people experiencing homelessness. Many of these homes have been vacant for as long as 30 years, Hersh stressed, so they will need a lot of work before they are inhabitable. The agreement created a community land trust to manage the permanent low-income housing. But at this point, the land trust is still aspirational.

“It’s really important that people understand that Philadelphia doesn’t have a stock of vacant, livable houses,” Hersh says. “I think that’s a myth that’s out there — that somehow we have this treasure trove of empty houses, and that we’ve been sitting on them and holding onto them while we have people on the street.”

“If we had a way to house everybody who needs it, we would have done it by now,” Hersh says.

Confronting the Urgency As Winter Approaches

Sheahan says that those in outreach are really proud of the fact that since the end of June, they have made nearly 200 placements from the Parkway encampment — about 20 percent of which are people who have been placed several times.

Dover notes that when someone moved out of a tent, another person tended to move in. But surprisingly, Hersh says, since the beginning of COVID-19, the number of unsheltered individuals in Philadelphia has remained close to 1,000, with no real uptick in numbers.

What has happened is that people have bled into various other neighborhoods, as Center City traffic dried up and those who subsist on panhandling have lost their audience, Sheahan says.

“We feel you will die in a tent in East Coast weather,” Sheahan says. “It gets extremely hot. It gets extremely cold. It’s also often very unsafe in tents.”

That’s why people such as Sheahan and Dover have been working so hard to place people from the encampment before winter hits.

“I’ve been around for a while, and I’ve worked with several encampments,” Sheahan says. “And I’ve seen this often, but it really is [who] we do the job for, which is folks who initially maybe don’t want to talk to you, maybe they’re in a bad mood that day — we’re used to that. Our adage is that if you don’t get told to scram at least once a day, then you’re not doing good outreach.”

Hersh says that one of the “silver linings” of COVID-19 has been how it has “revealed to the world … [that] there’s so many people among us who don’t have that basic protection of a home, right at the moment when there was a stay-at-home order, and there were still hundreds of people on the street who had no home to stay in. I think it could not have been clearer or more stark that people’s basic needs are not met, so I’m hoping that this will be a wake-up call for changing our policies and our investments.”

Dover says that every day he is able to help bring an unsheltered person inside is a “good day.” But the work is challenging.

“It’s intense,” Dover says. “You just gotta have a heart. You gotta have a heart.”

D.C. Rent Control Debate Heats Up

The debate over a proposed overhaul to Washington, D.C.’s long-standing 35-year-old rent-control law was subject to a “marathon hearing” before the D.C. Council this week, DCist reports. The proposal is based on the demands of the Reclaim Rent Control campaign, according to the report, and it would expand rent stabilization policies to cover thousands of new units in the district. Currently, buildings with five or more units built prior to 1976 are subject to an annual rent-increase limit equal to 2 percent plus the rate of inflation, according to the report. If the new bill passes, it would apply to an additional 26,000 units by 2033, and only allow annual rent increases to match inflation. Advocates say the change is needed to slow displacement, according to the report.

“We cannot say that Black lives matter and be complicit in the continued displacement of Black people in the city,” said Veronica Mosqueda, a senior tenant organizer with the Latino Economic Development Center and one of more 170 people signed up to testify at the hearing, according to the report. “The erosion of rent control has greatly contributed to the displacement of Black communities, of the breaking up of Black families and Black neighborhoods in D.C.”

The council is currently undecided on the bill, according to the report, but two newly elected council members have said they support the overhaul, and could help secure its passage next year. Landlords and real-estate industry representatives testified in opposition to the bill, saying it is poorly timed with the pandemic and could put small landlords out of business, the report says.

“Anything that will stifle my ability to increase rent gradually, should I face any hardship, will cripple me and honestly put me in a position of foreclosure in about no time,” said Rody Damis, a member of the Small Multifamily Owners Association, according to the story.

Affordable Housing Plans Coming to Fruition in San Francisco

After getting only 193 new affordable-housing units between 2010 and 2019, San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood is currently undergoing an affordable housing “boomlet,” according to a report in the Mission Local. Four new projects with a total of 508 new units are scheduled to open in the neighborhood in the next five months, according to the report. One new building, Casa Adelante, completed late last year and occupied earlier this year, includes 93 studio and one-bedroom units renting for between $266 and $1,162 a month, the report says. The units are restricted to tenants earning 50 percent of area median income or less, according to the report. Other projects, according to the story, include:

• a 157-unit building for people earning 45% to 60% of AMI (AMI in San Francisco is $128,100 for a family of four), with 20% of units set aside for people previously experiencing homelessness,
• A 127-unit building for people earning between 30% and 60% of AMI,
• An 80-unit building for people earning between 30% and 60% of AMI, with a portion of units set aside for residents of two public-housing projects that are under renovation,
• A 143-unit building for people earning 30-60% of AMI,
• A 130-unit complex with 30 percent of units set aside for previously unhoused people,
• And a 63-unit condominium building with units for sale to residents earning between 80% and 120% of AMI.

The latter project, as Next City reported earlier this year, is the first condo project to be developed by Mission Economic Development Agency. The condos will be sold on a shared equity model, in hopes of keeping them affordable for median-income residents long-term, Next City reported.

Retail Slowdown Squeezes New York Co-Op Owners

A slowdown in New York City’s retail economy caused by the pandemic is also raising housing costs for some residents of the city’s many co-op apartment buildings, according to a report in the New York Times. In order to help struggling storefronts on the ground floors of their buildings, co-op residents have begun raising maintenance fees to offset rent discounts to retailers, the report says. Rent prices are down and vacancies are up for storefronts in the city, because of the pandemic and larger brick-and-mortar retail trends, the report notes.

Many co-op owners are loath to evict store owners because of the convenience of having onsite retail, the potential for rental income in storefront spaces, the difficulty of finding new commercial tenants during the current pandemic and economic downturn and, in some cases, loyalty to the people who run the shops, according to the report. One Manhattan co-op raised maintenance fees by 15 percent, effectively raising rents for residents from $1,200 to $1,400, and lowering rents for an onsite clothing store, coffee shop, deli, and cobbler, the report says. Half of the building’s 70 units are occupied by working-class people on fixed incomes, the report says.

“Most neighbors say they are supportive,” said Robert Chasen, the building’s treasurer, according to the report. “These stores contribute to our neighborhood.”

America’s Red and Blue Political-Economic Divide is Not Going Away

The nation’s economic standoff between red and blue states has intensified this election cycle, according to new data, reports Brookings.

The analysis shows that Biden’s winning base in 477 counties accounts for 70 percent of the nation’s economic output, while Trump’s losing base accounts for 29 percent. This aligns with similar data released in 2016, which showed the 2,584 counties Trump won made up 36 percent of economic activity while Clinton’s 472 counties made up almost two-thirds of the aggregate economy, reports Brookings.

The updated economic-political map suggests an increasingly heightened divide between metropolitan areas that voted blue and small towns and rural areas that voted red.

“Blue and red America reflect two very different economies: one oriented to diverse, often college-educated workers in professional and digital services occupations, and the other whiter, less-educated, and more dependent on “traditional” industries,” reports Brookings.

Furthermore, educated places, already blue-leaning, voted even more Democratic this election than the last, with concentrations of highly educated, red-leaning counties growing sparser with each recent election, according to the New York Times.

The implications of this analysis mean an increasing lack of possibility for consensus on economic policy priorities in Congress, and between the White House and Senate, reports Brookings.

“Despite some demographic realignments, the economies of red and blue places drifted further apart. And as these gaps widen, it gets ever more challenging for America to have a shared view of the state of the economy and of the policies most urgently needed,” reports the Times.

Two National Foundations Will Probe The Diversity of Investment Firms That Manage Their Money

The Kresge Foundation and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, will be partnering with Lenox Park Solutions, a financial technology firm, to evaluate their individual gender and racial makeup at the firms that manage a combined $10.8 billion on their behalf, in an effort to improve diversity in a field where women and people of color have chronically been underrepresented. (Editor’s note: The Kresge Foundation supports Next City.) The foundations are following in the footsteps of others like the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has made efforts to diversify the asset managers it works with in recent years.

“We know that diversity of thought, background, and beliefs leads to better investment decisions and returns. So dismantling barriers that impede opportunity is not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart way to work,” said Kresge vice president and chief investment officer Robert J. Manilla in a press release. “We are early in this journey, but one thing has become glaringly apparent: talent is spread evenly across the investment industry, but opportunity is not.”

Asset management firms manage more than $250 billion on behalf of the top fifty foundations in the United States. However, firms managed by women and minorities account for only 1.1 percent of the total $71 trillion in total assets under management, a 2017 Knight Foundation study found.

The potential social and economic benefits of diversity show the investment industry has much to gain from their efforts, according to a McKinsey report that evaluated the merit of workforce diversity. The report showed that organizations with more racial diversity were 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their national industry median.

“All the research we’ve seen supports that firms with greater diversity and cultures of inclusion perform better; they are also better at minimizing staff attrition and at mitigating risk. The challenge has been how to more sustainably incorporate these factors into investment practices. Our experience is that limited partners who are intentional and consistent in assessing the [diversity, equity and inclusion] of their managers are able to do this by establishing clear accountability measures, and then following up to guide their partners toward improvement,” said Lenox Park Founder and CEO Jason Lamin in the press release.

California Voters Reject Property Tax Measure Reforms

Proposition 15, California’s sweeping tax reform measure, was voted down this election, according to a tallying of votes that was only called Tuesday. The ballot measure would have modified longstanding property tax protections and require commercial and industrial properties, except those zoned as commercial agriculture, to be taxed based on their market value, rather than their purchase price, making those property owners subject to billions in additional taxes each year. The measure would have added an estimated $6.5 to 11.5 billion toward public schools, community colleges, and local government services, reports the LA Times.

Supporters of Prop 15 argued that the current state tax policy has allowed powerful corporations to avoid paying property taxes they can easily afford. The proposal had the support of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who called it a “fair, phased-in and long-overdue reform to state tax policy,” in an email to supporters, reports the Times.

The Prop 15 campaign garnered more than $129 million by backers. The California Teachers Association, a California labor union with powerful political sway, supported the new reform, and contributed more than $20 million to the campaign, reports the Times.

Coastal counties including Los Angeles and the Bay Area had the support of the new reform, but it was overwhelmingly shot down pretty much everywhere else, according to unofficial returns, reports the Times. A leading business opposition group focused on the potential consequences of the reform on small businesses, emphasizing the economic insecurity of the pandemic through advertisements. It was enough to sway already voters who were already nervous about any kind of big change during a time of economic insecurity.

“People have a very strong sense of uncertainty,” Larry Grisolano, a Democratic campaign consultant to the effort supporting Proposition 15, told the Times. “Those insecurities make it very difficult for them to take a risk on a change.”

Lending Institutions Continue to Discriminate Against Minority-Owned Businesses

According to a mystery shopper test, National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) revealed that federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) lenders were in violation of Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) even after being made aware of discriminatory practices.

During the last two weeks of the year that PPP loans were available to businesses impacted by the pandemic, NCRC conducted the undercover testing of 47 different financial institutions. The study was intended to follow up a previous study that revealed discriminatory behavior of financial institutions towards minorities and women business owners, to see if changes had been made.

The testing, carried out by 60 Hispanic, Black and white testers reaching out to the same institutions with the same financial requests, showed that white testers were favored over Black female and Hispanic male testers by 35 percent, or 21 out of the 60 applicants, even when the testers of color had stronger financial profiles. Black female and Hispanic male testers received less information about the loan products than white male testers, and Black female testers were given less information than white and Hispanic female testers.

On October 20, the Greenpoint Library in Brooklyn, New York, reopened after a three-year reconstruction. The formerly drab brick building from the 1970s doubled in size and boasts a modern design with ample outdoor space.

What’s more, it’s not just a library anymore. Due to funding from the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund — settlement money from a severe oil spill that happened under a mile away over more than a century — the building doubles as an environmental education center. Once it’s safe for New Yorkers to gather again, the library will serve as a hub for locals to learn about — and act on — environmental issues.

Many modern libraries include sustainable design elements, and the new Greenpoint library is no exception: Architecture firm Marble Fairbanks and landscape architecture firm Scape included eco-friendly components throughout, including a sustainable green roof, solar panels and a cistern for rainwater management. The building tracks and displays its energy usage, which is reduced through LED lights, light sensors, energy efficient glazing, solar shading devices and well-insulated building panels.

But Greenpoint Library goes further: After discussions with local community groups, the architects designed two large, flexible “eco labs” with sinks, refrigeration, storage, ample counter space and digital projectors, for community groups to host interactive projects. There’s the cistern to collect rainwater, which Ames O’Neill, project manager with the Brooklyn Public Library, hopes librarians and teachers will use as a teaching tool, and a rooftop garden, which students or local community groups can plant and care for.

“We want people in the neighborhood to understand the importance of sustainability and fighting climate change,” says Linda Johnson, president and chief executive officer of Brooklyn Public Library. “It’s all designed to promote awareness of what happens when we don’t take care of the environment.”

Thus far, the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund has dispensed $17 million to 47 local projects, but the library is the fund’s first hub to tie together the community’s sustainability efforts. “The grant money has gone to great environmental programming, but it’s all kind of ephemeral,” explains Dewey Thompson, founder of the North Brooklyn Community Boathouse and member of the Greenpoint Library Community Advisory Committee, a group compiled by Brooklyn Public Library to advise on the design and functions of the new building.

“We felt the library could be a brick-and-mortar, highly-resourced hub, and all these existing but much smaller environmentally focused organizations around the community could tap into that central hub,” Thompson continues. “In that way, it really is a legitimate description of the library as an environmental center.”

There’s now virtual environmental programming with in-person events to come; Thompson is already envisioning how North Brooklyn Community Boathouse will take advantage of the eco labs. “We have something called the Citizens Water Quality Testing Group, connected all over the city, where volunteers go out every week and take water samples, bring it to laboratories and compile that data,” he explains. “It has a history that can be archived at the library and it’s an ongoing activity we could include the library, making presentations to groups and bringing them out on boats to do this fieldwork.”

As for tracking environmental data and community engagement, there is the Greenpoint Environmental History Project, which documents the local environmental history through oral histories and community scanning, in which local residents scan photos, documents and other related materials. The library will highlight portions of the project inside the branch and hopes to offer tablets for patrons to peruse the collection, which is fully preserved in a digital format.

Both O’Neill and Johnson emphasize that in the age of digital technology, libraries have to be both creative and flexible when it comes to dispensing information. “Library service and technology will evolve over time, and having different ways to support different services throughout the building is important,” O’Neill says. Johnson called it “a great example of what a library should be in the 21st century.”

It’s unique, however, that this library seized the opportunity to engage its visitors about the future of the planet, suggesting there’s an important role for libraries as we increasingly confront the climate crisis.

“It’s very important to have a space,” Thompson says, “But to have a space so beautifully and purposefully designed to support this conversation and work? It’s just awesome.”

Editor’s note: We’ve corrected the attribution of two quotes in this piece.

Welcome to “The Mobile City,” our weekly roundup of noteworthy transportation developments.

Delawareans all know that president-elect Joe Biden is a super-commuter: as U.S. Senator from Delaware, he commuted from his Wilmington home to Washington every day via Amtrak to do the people’s business. And the national passenger railroad will likely be one of the main beneficiaries of President-elect Joe Biden’s transportation program, but the nation’s road-builders should also be happy, for he is likely to deliver the huge infrastructure spending bill legislators in both parties support but President Donald Trump never delivered.

Something else that may be coming to a transit system near you: On-demand bus service using actual buses. In the course of arguing that technology could make mass transit better for everyone, a Washington State transit advocate points to the transit system in Sioux Falls, S.D., where buses no longer run on fixed routes according to a schedule but rather go to where the passengers are to pick them up, then deliver them closer to their destinations.

This kind of service would be next to impossible to provide in most of our post-World War II suburbs, where dendritic street networks make getting around by any means other than a car exceedingly difficult. So perhaps a recent research paper is stating the obvious when it finds that reintroducing street grids to new communities would reduce car ownership.

What We Can Expect from a Biden Transportation Program

The nation’s best-known Amtrak commuter has just been elected as our 46th president. So it should perhaps be no surprise that the national passenger railroad should be one of the big beneficiaries of president-elect Joe Biden’s transportation plans. But, as Curtis Tate writes in USA Today, Amtrak won’t be the only winner.

Airline and other transportation workers should also come out ahead. Many of them have been laid off since the first coronavirus relief package expired without a followup. Biden has pledged to support additional coronavirus relief, but in the meantime, unions representing airline, Amtrak and hospitality workers say they can’t wait until January to get the assistance they need. (Given President Trump’s fixation with proving he won the election, however, they more than likely will have to wait.)

Biden also plans to deliver on a promise the Trump administration never kept, namely, shoveling lots of money into transportation infrastructure. His “sustainable infrastructure and clean energy” plan calls for investing $1.3 trillion over 10 years in transportation infrastructure, starting with $50 billion in Year One for highway repairs.

The plan also promises to bring zero-emissions public transportation options to every U.S. city of 100,000 or more residents. These include light rail, electric-powered transit buses, and bike and pedestrian infrastructure. This part of the plan also aims to expand the use of electricity and other clean fuels in transit vehicles, school buses and ferries.

High-speed intercity rail should also get more support. That includes putting new Hudson River tunnels into New York back on the front burner along with eliminating Northeast Corridor slow spots, but projects in Texas, California and elsewhere should also get support.

And electric vehicles should also get a boost: Biden proposes spending $1.7 billion over 10 years to purchase electric cars, trucks and vans for government vehicle fleets. (At least one U.S. car and truck manufacturer will be ready to supply them.)

Finally, by bringing the United States back into the Paris Accords on carbon emissions, the Biden administration would recommit to decarbonizing the nation’s passenger air fleet.

Transit Police Departments Answer the Call for Reform

Generally speaking, the protesters issuing calls to reduce police funding and redirect the money to social-service interveners weren’t thinking specifically of transit police departments. But the transit cops are responding to the call anyway, reports Progressive Railroading.

Some agencies actually are cutting their police forces. The board of the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (Tri-Met) in Portland voted in July to reduce the size of its police force by six officers and redirect $1.8 million in funding to community-based public safety programs. It also committed to piloting non-police crisis response strategies such as mobile crisis intervention teams for mental and behavioral health issues of community members the agency engages with.

Others have redeployed funding and personnel to community-oriented policing strategies. The New Jersey Transit Police Department, for instance, has increased the size of its community outreach unit from two to five officers, and Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) CEO Jeffrey Parker announced that his agency’s police department would be grounded in community-oriented policing approaches.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) has referred the issue of reforming transit police practice to a 15-member Transit Public Safety Advisory Committee charged with developing community-based policing approaches and developing a more accountable police culture.

Mobility on Demand Rides the Bus

Micromobility providers like Via and Moovit have been leaders in creating a whole new kind of mass transit. Known as “microtransit” or “mobility on demand,” the systems these companies set up rely not on riders going to bus stops and waiting for vehicles to show but on riders summoning minibuses and passenger vans to locations near them when they’re ready to ride. The vehicles then continue on their way, picking up other riders on demand and delivering them to or close to their desired destinations.

In theory at least, nothing prevents the technology that makes this possible couldn’t be applied to ordinary city buses. And a Washington State transit advocate, writing in the Tri-City Herald of Kennewick, notes that one U.S. city has already gone there.

That city is Sioux Falls, S.D. The Sioux Area Metro (SAM) transit system there has partnered with a Canadian technology company called Pantonium to supply it with technology that will allow it to “shift fixed-route service to corner-to-corner on-demand service.” The technology comes in the form of an app called SAMFlex that allows passengers to book rides on buses and pay fares ibn advance. Once a SAMFlex user books a ride, the app directs them to a nearby bus stop no more than three blocks away. The bus that picked them up then continues on its way, picking up other riders who have summoned it and bypassing other stops. According to the article, up to 70 to 80 percent of bus stops on a route can be bypassed using the technology, allowing for more efficient use of the bus fleet. And it makes possible expanding the area a bus route serves and attracting new riders thanks to the faster trip.

“As a result,” Mariya Frost of the Washington Policy Center writes, “low-income workers had more options to get to work. Rather than a traditional hub-and-spoke system, where routes run downtown and then back out to a suburb, the on-demand algorithm can route buses on the fly, allowing people to travel directly to their destination without long detours. Workers tend to look for jobs they can reach in less than an hour and expanding the territory they can reach with transit opens up new job options for them.”

Pantonium calls its service “on-demand macrotransit” because it applies the algorithms that make microtransit services work to standard city bus service.

More Street Grids, Fewer Cars

Maybe instead of pouring money into bike lanes, improved pedestrian facilities and light rail lines, American transportation planners and their city-planner cousins should go back in time in order to create a lower-car future by using an ancient but long-disfavored city-building technology: the traditional street grid.

At least that’s what a research paper in the current Journal of the American Planning Association argues. Titled “Off the Grid…and Back Again?”, author Geoff Boeing presents research in progress that finds that there is a correlation between the griddedness of a city street network and car ownership: the greater the gridded connections, the lesser the level of car ownership. The longer blocks, greater curves and greater dead-end and cul-de-sac streets that characterize American suburban development since 1940 are associated with both a higher level of car ownership and more vehicle miles traveled. And as the reintroduction of gridded community plans has advanced since 2000 — a trend we can perhaps credit the New Urbanists with advancing — the level of car ownership and use has also fallen, though not by as much as It might have were these communities connected to more gridded road networks around them.

“Interconnected grid-like street networks offer practitioners an important tool for curbing car dependence and emissions,” Boeing writes in the abstract. “Once established, street patterns determine urban spatial structure for centuries, so proactive planning is essential.”

Boeing is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy and director of USC’s Urban Data Lab.

Know of a development that should be featured in this column? Send a Tweet with links to @MarketStEl using the hashtag #mobilecity.

When Dave Wanpue was a kid, he and his cousins would take a bus from his house in Minneapolis to the downtown Light Rail station before taking the train south to Bloomington, just outside the Twin Cities, to get to the Mall of America. They’d spend afternoons window shopping and talking about what they’d buy one day. As a teenager, he would shovel snow in the winters, rake leaves in the fall, and cut grass in the spring and summer in order to buy the new Air Jordans whenever a new pair dropped. “We would sleep in our cars at the Mall of America to get in at 8 a.m. and be the first in line at Champs or Foot Locker,” he recalls.

Today, thanks to a new program designed to support small retailers in the wake of COVID-19 and this summer’s civil unrest, Wanpue has his very own store at the Mall of America, the biggest mall in the country — a dream come true.

“It’s been an important project for us at the mall. We recognize the impact of not only COVID, but the unrest in Minneapolis and St. Paul,” says Jill Renslow, executive vice president of development and marketing at the Mall of America. “In times of crisis we wanted to reach out to see how we can help.”

That help has taken the form of the mall’s Community Commons project that has offered six months of free retail space to 17 local small businesses that have been impacted by either (or both) the pandemic or civil unrest. All of the 17 retailers, which range from traditional apparel companies to art and prepackaged food vendors, are minority-owned and 10 of the 17 are women-owned.

This is, according to Dr. Hye-Young Kim, professor and director of the Center for Retail Design and Innovation at the University of Minnesota, exactly in line with how malls were intended to function and, perhaps, how they should endeavor to stay relevant in today’s rapidly changing retail landscape. “The mall was originally conceived of as a community center where people would converge for shopping, cultural activity, and social interaction. Throughout the history of American shopping malls, the huge success and impact of a particular shopping mall has largely depended on its potential to enhance community life,” Kim says. “Especially during these challenging times, the basic premise for a shopping mall like MOA is to make itself an indispensable servant of the community.”

Mall of America began conversations with local community groups in June to figure out how they could best be of service. “We were finding a lot of businesses looking for temporary spaces to continue to operate,” Renslow says of the scene on the ground after the unrest following the killing of George Floyd died down. “Many had to shift operations online and didn’t have a physical space.” Renslow and company landed on the idea of offering dedicated, rent-free space within the mall.

Launched in October, the six-month project includes the busy holiday season — a boon for the small retailers, many of whom had dreamed of or planned on eventually expanding into a space at the Mall of America one day as a part of their business goals.

“I’m like, the Mall of America during the holiday season? Really?! The biggest retail stage in the nation?!” says Joyce Sanders, whose apparel company, Urban 29, was one of the selected businesses. Urban 29 had been located on the corner of Chicago Avenue and Lake Street in Minneapolis for just one year before its building was destroyed during the civil unrest. “Being in a mall was my next step anyway. It just pushed my goals and dreams one step further. It kind of doesn’t seem real,” she says.

While the Mall of America is approaching the project strictly as the right thing to do, chances are there will be benefits in it for the mall as well, which was completely closed from March to June because of the COVID-19 pandemic and which has seen its mortgage go into “special servicing.”

“Community Commons may create new excitement for holiday shopping as we see more and more diversity-seeking consumers who engage in ‘ethnic crossover shopping,’” which is when a product or service reflective of a specific cultural group gains traction with a wider customer base outside of that group, Kim explains. “The ethnic minority entrepreneurs who dream big can benefit from this expanded market exposure. To build a successful crossover to a mainstream market, they need to appeal to an audience sizable enough to ensure profitability. Community Commons can provide a great opportunity for that purpose.”

Wanpue shares Sanders’ goal. “I would always say we’re going to have a storefront at the Mall of America,” he says, “even last year when I just started my company,” 4 The Love, an apparel company focused on offering experiential shopping events. “I had been hosting community events where… there might be a real estate agent to help with homeownership or a barber doing free haircuts to empower customers,” he says of the “before times.” Of course, the pandemic has deeply affected his events-driven business model, so the opportunity from the mall has been a godsend.

The Mall of America worked with Knock, Inc. a Minneapolis-based, women-run creative agency to design and develop the roughly 5,000-square-foot Community Commons space as well as help any of the 17 retailers with all things branding. The mall also partnered with Juxtaposition Arts, a local youth arts non-profit, to help decorate the space.

The mall worked closely with community groups to reach potential applicants. Interested businesses had to fill out a questionnaire designed to share the applicants’ stories while laying out the mall’s expectations for the partnership.

Just a few weeks in, “we’re already seeing fantastic traffic and sales numbers,” Renslow says.”Even with COVID, we’re predicting a pretty solid holiday season.” “Opening weekend got them kicked off to a great start. They had to replenish merchandise immediately after the first weekend. Wanpue says he’s on track to close out the month with $10,000 in sales—quadrupling his typical sales.

Renslow and her team are constantly sharing new ideas with their sister properties also owned by Triple Five Properties. While there are no concrete plans to expand the program to the other two Triple Five malls, the Mall of America is hopeful for continued partnerships in the future. “As much as they’re going to learn from us, we’re going to learn from them what success would look like beyond the first six months,” Renslow says.

At 2178 Centre Avenue, in the heart of Pittsburgh’s historically-Black Hill District, time has stood still for nearly a decade.

From 1971 to 2011, the building was home to Hamm’s Barbershop, a pillar of the community. Iconic barber Walter Hamm and wife Janice Hamm owned the building.

“I went there as a child,” says Thomas Boyd, a lifelong Hill District resident. “I looked up to Mr. Hamm.”

The barbershop closed after Mr. Hamm died unexpectedly in 2011. Mrs. Hamm sold the building to the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh. It’s one of 170 vacant or idle properties the agency owns along the Centre Avenue corridor, once a vibrant commercial and cultural hub, playing host to jazz legends and Black cultural icons from around the country.

Meanwhile, Boyd grew up to become a barber himself. He cut his first client’s hair at age 14 — a friend who couldn’t afford to pay for a haircut before the first day of school. He’s been a professional barber since 1996, and in 2005 opened Big Tom’s Barbershop. It’s become a Hill District institution in its own right, with clientele coming from the neighborhood and as far as West Virginia or Ohio — “Drug addicts, attorneys, professional athletes, preachers,” Boyd says.

Earlier this year, the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s board voted to enter exclusive negotiations with Boyd to buy the property at 2178 Centre Avenue. He’s planning to relocate Big Tom’s from the space he’s been renting, renovate the two floors above into four units of affordable housing, and also create an outdoor community space next to the building.

It’s still not guaranteed at this point that Boyd’s vision will become a reality. He’s still many months away from securing the financing required to acquire and rehab a property that’s been vacant for nearly a decade. But the Urban Redevelopment Authority is already using this transaction as a model for supporting community-led and community-owned revitalization of Black commercial corridors in other parts of the city.

“It’s a lot more to the process than I thought it would be,” says Boyd. “But they made it a little bit easier, and there’s been a lot of groups trying to encourage and help people get through it.”

When it comes to development in Black neighborhoods, cities across the country still have a tendency to favor larger, wealthier, usually white developers. Race isn’t officially the reason given any more, but the preference for developers with deep pockets and established track records ends up perpetuating a history of harmful patterns.

In Minneapolis, Belt Magazine recently reported on the city and a predominantly-Black neighborhood at odds over the exclusive development rights for a former shipping terminal given to a development team of wealthy, white-led companies.

In Indianapolis, groups working to preserve the Indiana Avenue Corridor’s history as a hub for Black business and culture are now battling against a large, white-led development company looking to build an apartment complex along the corridor for mostly white college students.

In St. Louis, residents of the predominantly-Black north side have long fought for years with wealthy white developer Paul McKee over the notorious “NorthSide Regeneration” project. City officials told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last year they would do development differently moving forward.

Pittsburgh and the Urban Redevelopment Authority have their own contentious development histories — including right here in the Hill District, where in 1961 the city bulldozed 95 acres to clear the way for a new hockey stadium. It was a textbook case from the era of Urban Renewal, or, as James Baldwin called it, “negro removal.” Some 8,000 people and more than 400 businesses were forced out, with little to no compensation. The rest of the neighborhood, cut off from downtown, never really recovered.

Attempting to do something different, the Urban Redevelopment Authority and the City of Pittsburgh recently announced the “Avenues of Hope” initiative, which includes a handful of projects already in motion, including the Centre Avenue Corridor work. In a press conference announcing Avenues of Hope, Mayor Bill Peduto put an emphasis on going directly to communities to lead development work.

“Instead of looking for developers to do it, what if we asked the community to do it themselves,” said Mayor Peduto. “This idea was borne by the community-based organizations and community development corporations of Pittsburgh. Their leaders have been calling for this program for years.”

Easier said than done. The Urban Redevelopment Authority first issued a request for proposals to develop 170 properties it owns along the Centre Avenue Corridor in March 2018. It was expected to generate responses from the community, but nothing came of it.

The authority started meeting with community members to understand why. Those discussions quickly centered on the 27-step process of responding to a request for proposals.

“When we went to the community and we started walking through those 27 steps, folks in the audience started raising their hands and saying ‘wait a minute,’” says Diamonte Walker, deputy director at the Urban Redevelopment Authority. “An RFP [response] costs about $8,000 to put together. Nonprofits cannot spend $8,000 on that. A barber is not going to have $8,000 to put together that book.”

Walker says they took out about half the steps, including some of the most intense documentation required, like a full project budget. Instead of an analysis of the project’s financial capacity, they’re asking instead for the respondent’s financial capacity. They also removed what the Urban Redevelopment Authority calls a “p4 narrative” — a document that requires developers to go through 12 different measures for community benefit and explain how their project will contribute to each.

“When the developer is a socially responsible party, you no longer need all of the protracted steps,” says Walker. “We’re not trying to protect the neighborhood from itself, we’re trying to protect the neighborhood from unfettered market forces that are not going to be cognizant of the fact that we want development without displacement.”

In the summer of 2019, the Urban Redevelopment Authority re-issued its request, instead calling it a “request for qualifications,” for developers interested in one or more of its 170 Centre Avenue Corridor properties. The Urban Redevelopment Authority also brought in the local nonprofit Neighborhood Allies to provide one-on-one support for respondents as needed. Some sought out more support than others, says Zak Thomas, one of several consultants with Neighborhood Allies who worked closely with Boyd on his response materials.

Each respondent also had to present their vision to the community before being selected, giving residents a chance to score each project based on its alignment with existing community-driven development plans.

“I think the Hill District is unique in that it completed a community-driven master plan in 2011,” says Marimba Milliones, executive director of the Hill District Community Development Corporation. “Then we followed up at Hill CDC with the Centre Avenue development redesign plan in 2015. It’s really important to understand the amount of planning and groundwork that was laid in the Hill District for us to be able to move into the implementation phase of those plans.”

Eleven teams presented their plans to the Hill District in November 2019. Boyd’s was one of multiple proposals that included 2178 Centre Avenue.

“I was very nervous about all of it, even though I knew a lot of people in the room,” says Boyd.

The Urban Development Authority voted in February 2020 to award exclusive negotiations to Boyd and five of the other developer teams for the first round of the Centre Avenue request for qualifications. In March, the authority issued a second request for qualifications for the rest of its 170 properties along the corridor.

“Now that we’ve figured out the process, it’s replicable, and that’s where Avenues of Hope started to take shape,” says Walker. “We’ve learned a lot through the Centre Avenue process. We now know there’s a different way to do this and we’ve seen six Black developers getting ready to take on six publicly owned sites and redevelop them for their neighbors’ benefit.”

The pandemic has delayed everything — Big Tom’s had to shut down for three months. Originally, the exclusive negotiation period for the six first-round Centre Avenue corridor properties was for six months, but in July the board of the Urban Redevelopment Authority voted to extend that period another six months, till January 2021, due to delays related to COVID-19.

It hasn’t all been setbacks. At that same July board meeting, the Urban Redevelopment Authority awarded $50,000 in matching funds to Boyd’s project, which combined with $50,000 from Neighborhood Allies will pay for the pre-development architectural work and engineering analysis required to apply for basically every development subsidy they can find — state tax credits and state community development funds, as well as some local funding for affordable housing, to name just a few.

“There are a lot of different sources and we’re reviewing them all and we’re cautiously optimistic that we’ll get enough to make the project work,” says Thomas. “It does require us to go after every single one.”

The reliance on subsidies means exposure to the possibility of steep budget cuts in the wake of the COVID-19 recession. But as perilous as it seems, the subsidies and the land owned by the city or Urban Redevelopment Authority may be the last remaining hope for community-owned or community-led development in Pittsburgh’s Black neighborhoods, as speculation has already begun.

T.J. Bogdewic is CEO at Bridgeway Capital, a community development loan fund serving the Pittsburgh area. “Hypothetically, let’s say a property appraises at $200,000, you go to the property owner and say the business owner wants to buy the property for $225,000, and we have seen situations where the owners come back with astronomical dollar amounts, like they wouldn’t sell for less than a million,” Bogdewic says.

“Landlords in a lot of cases are just content to collect the rents that justify the appraised value and hope that sweeping development comes to [Black] neighborhoods like Hazelwood and they get the big payday someday,” says Bogdewic.

Looking further down the road, Milliones at the Hill District Community Development Corporation sees even more possible peril. For Milliones, community-owned development means something deeper than just a local Black-owned business owning the building it’s in. She’s thinking about a few years from now, as property values rise, will business owners be tempted tomorrow to cash out on properties that they acquired today?

“It’s not community ownership if somebody can sell it in three years,” says Milliones. “Think about it, a lot of folks, they will, as the neighborhood gentrifies. We have been pressing for [covenants or deed restrictions] hard. I’ve been doing this work long enough for me to be emotional about it.”

Milliones has been pushing for projects that have any public subsidy to require a community-based group receive at least a small ownership share or right of first refusal, to guard against that kind of loss. The Hill District Community Development Corporation is in the process of standing up a community land trust to play that kind of perpetual community ownership steward for the neighborhood, for commercial properties as well as residential.

“We need to figure those pieces out,” says Walker at the Urban Redevelopment Authority. “We don’t want to support profiteering or gentrification in any respect.”

When Impact Justice brainstormed what would later become the Homecoming Project, the concept was simple enough: The organization, founded to find better solutions to criminal justice reform, would act as matchmaker between Oakland residents with an extra bedroom to rent and people leaving prison who needed a place to stay. It wasn’t unlike Airbnb.

It also wasn’t always an easy sell. Tyler Jank had an empty room in his Oakland home. A teammate through his rec league, who works for Impact Justice, suggested he rent it through the program — an idea he initially deemed “weird.” When Eleanor Lefiti heard about it toward the end of her 27-year incarceration, she worried such a new program would be filled with drama.

Both, however, decided to give it a shot — and joined a growing group of people willing to open their homes and lives to one another. “We started this thinking we were building a housing project,” says Impact Justice president Alex Busansky. “What we ended up building was a relationship program.”

In September, Impact Justice was announced as the winner of a $2.5 million award to both expand the Homecoming Project in the Bay Area and create a model for other cities to replicate. The grant provides much needed funding the organizers have struggled to secure since the pilot launched in 2018. “We now have a bank of resources to allow our participants to feel valued, included and supported,” says Terah Lawyer, program manager for the Homecoming Project.

Previously, she notes, the small team scrambled to meet the needs of the program and its participants. In two years they have placed 27 participants across Alameda County, spending roughly $10,000 to secure a six-month stay for each participant — meaning rent paid directly to their hosts — alongside case management and training for hosts.

On the front end, hosts learn about the school-to-prison pipeline, challenges with the traditional transitional housing model, what causes recidivism and needs of people returning from prison. Once a participant is placed in their home, the Homecoming Project provides case management to help them secure things like a driver’s license, Social Security card, bank account, employment and tools to navigate life on the outside.

For Jank, who decided to open his home through the Homecoming Project in the midst of this summer’s protest movement, it’s been about putting a human face and story to the challenges of returning home after years in prison. “You see the struggles firsthand — you realize this is necessary,” he says of the Homecoming Project. When his roommate faced barriers in opening a bank account, Jank wrote up a proof-of-residence form as his landlord.

For Lefiti, now adjusting to life outside after nearly three decades in prison, she still tears up when speaking of support provided by the program. “I cried when I saw the home and I’m still feeling it right now,” she says. “They made me feel so accepted — and there were a lot of fears coming out here, of how are people going to perceive us?”

When she moved into her Fruitvale, Oakland home, Lawyer gave Lefiti bedding and took her food shopping. Her case manager provided her with a laptop and offered a crash course on the internet and email.

“I get attached to every placement and I know every single story of every placement,” Lawyer says of her role as matchmaker. Over two years, she intimately knew this program worked on multiple levels, by providing a more secure, safer residence than transitional housing offered by the state, by connecting formerly incarcerated individuals to a supportive community on the outside, and ultimately reducing the stigma of being incarcerated.

None of the participants recidivated; all are either employed or enrolled in school with an average of securing employment within two weeks. After six months participants are free to sign their own lease agreements with their hosts, which some have chosen to do, or move on to other housing.

But even as the program attracted media coverage and interest everywhere from New York to Wisconsin, funding the program was a challenge. “Before the grant, this was the most popular project I’ve ever been involved in that had no money,” as Busansky put it.

Beyond the challenge of pitching an outside-the-box proposal, private funders often hesitate to support housing initiatives (as opposed to programs like job training), as it’s seen as an expensive and daunting endeavor. An application for $3 million for rental assistance from California’s Board of State and Community Corrections, which connected the dots between reentry and homelessness, was denied.

But homelessness is expensive for cities, as is relying on new construction to solve housing needs. At the same time, reducing recidivism and prison populations can dramatically save taxpayer money. These were all arguments Impact Justice made in its application for the Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge offered by Enterprise Community Partners and Wells Fargo this January. Out of 885 proposals, they were one of six winners to secure a two year, $2.5 million award.

“The fact they piloted this idea with such success gave our judges across three different application rounds a lot of confidence that this is not an idea that’s so out there, who knows if it could work?” says Christi Smith, senior program director at Enterprise. “They’re doing it, showing success and demonstrating impact. It’s a terrific opportunity to build as a model because every city, every state, is facing this challenge.”

This funding will house a total of 120 people returning home from prison, expanding it from Alameda County to neighboring Contra Costa County. That expansion will still not meet the huge post-prison housing need the Homecoming Project has identified, Lawyer notes.

That’s why their investment into evaluating the program impacts and creating a model for larger replication is so important. “Over the next year we are going to build that toolkit,” Busansky says.

He points out Impact Justice is not a housing organization; rather it works in innovation and research. “We want to stand up ideas, prove they work and show how they could be replicated,” he says. “Homecoming Project is cheaper than any other housing option that government has — they should take it on. There may be other nonprofits that want to do this — a church group or community-based organization — they should take it on. If we can give them the tools to do that, it will spread across the country in a way we could never do.”

The Impact Justice team already planted seeds with people around the country showing this model works. “They’re all really interested but don’t quite know how it works or why it works,” says Busansky. “We tell them there’s nothing magical about it, it’s all practical.”

In her transition home from prison, what Lefiti knows is that a welcoming home and community have become crucial components to rebuild her life. “Being around everyone I was around for Homecoming Project,” she says, “It basically gave me the sense that I was going to succeed.”

This article is part of Returning Home, a mini-series about housing after prison. Returning Home is generously underwritten by Just Cities.

The presidential election was still far from being decided last week when Ruy Arango, chair of the “No Eviction Without Representation” (NEWR) campaign in Boulder, Colorado, told Boulder Beat that he’d seen enough. Ballot measure 2B, which would levy a tax on landlords to fund legal representation for tenants facing eviction, was ahead by a healthy margin. Arango and the NEWR campaign were “pretty confident” it would pass, and he was going to bed, Boulder Beat reported.

“We’re working people,” he said, according to the story. “We have shitty jobs we need to get up early and go to.”

As election officials continued to count votes and the presidential race was too close to call, results on local ballot measures began to pour in. Aside from measure 2B in Boulder, voters in Denver voted to approve a sales-tax increase to fund new housing and services for people experiencing homelessness, according to the Denver Post.

More than 70 percent of voters in Raleigh, North Carolina, voted in favor of an $80 million housing bond, the News & Observer reported.

An effort to raise $50 million for an affordable housing trust fund in Charlotte was supported by more than three quarters of voters, according to the Charlotte Observer.

Atlanta voters overwhelmingly approved a measure creating a $30,000 tax exemption for each home owned by a community land trust, WABE reported, while statewide, Georgians approved a measure waiving property taxes for nonprofit groups that build single-family housing — specifically groups like Habitat for Humanity.

Voters in Portland, Maine, approved a local “Green New Deal” initiative focused on affordable housing and building-energy efficiency, along with a measure that caps annual rent increases and links them to the rate of inflation.

San Francisco voters passed Measure K, which, as Next City has covered, overcomes what one local official called “a racist obstacle of the redlining era” and pre-approves the creation of 10,000 publicly owned, affordable “social housing” units in the city.

Detroiters approved a $250 million bond measure to tear down 8,000 vacant homes and preserve 6,000 others for affordable housing.

But California voters rejected an expansion of rent control, like they did in 2018, the L.A. Times reported. And one of the bigger bond measures in recent years — a $900 million effort to fund supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness in San Diego — looked like it wouldn’t meet the two-thirds threshold needed to pass.

The San Diego bond effort, organized by the San Diego Housing Federation, earned support from 57 percent of voters. But Stephen Russell, executive director of the San Diego Housing Federation, said that while a broad coalition of groups supported the bond, it never had the full support of San Diego’s mayor or chamber of commerce, which helped kill the momentum.

“A solid majority of citizens were willing to tax themselves to do this,” Russell told Next City. “A solid majority is not what it takes in California. It takes two thirds, and that’s an incredibly high standard.”

Overall, though, the election showed that there is typically strong support for local governments spending money on affordable housing, says Phillip Kash, a partner at HR&A Advisors, which published a pre-election roundup of ballot measures affecting housing, transportation, open space, and other urban issues. HR&A helped create Detroit’s Multifamily Affordable Housing Strategy published in 2018, and Kash says the new bond (which HR&A did not work on) will help advance some of the goals of that plan.

“To state the obvious, it is a lot of money,” Kash says. “And it’s even more money when you think about the relative price of housing in Detroit. It’s an opportunity for extremely significant impact.”

A lot of cities have faced spiking housing prices over the last several years, but in Detroit, housing remains relatively cheap, and vacancy rampant. That makes it easier for public investment to have an impact, Kash says. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who backed the bond measure, also recently announced a $48 million investment in new affordable housing. Kash says that the efforts to rehab and build new affordable housing and increase homeownership for low-income people in Detroit could help close the racial wealth gap.

Nationally, there’s a trend toward greater local involvement in housing, as the federal government has gradually stepped back from its role over the years, and the presidential election has left city and state governments wondering what to expect.

“Nobody knows how the federal piece is going to play out right now, but how these [ballot measures] intersect with whatever stimulus package we get will be really interesting to see,” Kash says. “If the federal government really doesn’t step into this space, which is a very serious possibility, then you’ll see a lot more state and local action, because you’ll start to see mass evictions, and you’ll also see landlords start to fail.”

John Pollock, coordinator of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, says the success of Boulder’s “No Evictions Without Representation” initiative is a “sign of how mainstream the right to counsel movement has become,” in that legal representation is now a widely acknowledged factor in tenants’ vulnerability to eviction. This year, Congressional Democrats even introduced bills that would fund legal representation for tenants facing eviction, Pollock noted. So far, of the six cities that have approved some version of a right to counsel for eviction cases, two of them — Boulder and San Francisco — have done so via ballot measure. (Both efforts have been organized partly by local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, Pollock pointed out.) Pollock says he doesn’t see any basis for a legal challenge to Boulder’s Measure 2B. And he expects that advocates in more cities will start seeing ballot measures as a viable way of creating new rights for tenants.

“The people want it, and this is a perfect example that sometimes you have to do it this way,” Pollock says. “Sometimes to get the will of the people heard, you have to do it through a ballot initiative.”

Cities did this.

It started like a close but not too close murmur, like the sound of a public pool down the street in a non-pandemic summer. Then the banging of pots and pans, recalling the seven o’clock routine from the early peak of the pandemic, celebrating healthcare workers at change of shift.

It’s not quite over just yet, but in cities across the country, a collective celebration broke out over Saturday morning’s news about the results of the presidential election. For days prior, people were captivated by voting maps and coverage that showed voters in cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia having the final word. The president who cut their federal funding and then blamed their mayors for running them into the ground, who called them “anarchist jurisdictions,” lost.

And cities had help. A look at the electoral map of Arizona shows that sparsely populated rural areas helped flip the key swing state to vote Democrat, thanks to Native American voters and the organizers who got them registered in time and to the polls on election day — even on horseback.

The work isn’t finished. The U.S. Senate still hangs in the balance, with a rare double run-off election for both of Georgia’s senate seats, on January 5. Without knowing whether there will be a divided government come January 20, when President-elect Joe Biden is sworn into office, it’s impossible to predict whether he’ll have to compromise with a Senate led by an opposition party or his own party. But even within his own party, there are significant differences in perspective that he’d need to navigate, starting with who he’ll be appointing to his cabinet and key sub-cabinet positions.

Here are the presidential appointments we’ll be watching closely over the next few months for what they might say about the future of community and economic development in cities.

Housing and Urban Development

The Biden-Harris transition website has “racial equity” as one of four priority areas for the incoming administration. That includes a housing plan that “makes bold investments in homeownership and access to affordable housing for Black, Brown and Native Families.”

A future HUD secretary will of course have the opportunity to influence how that plan unfolds. Under the last Democratic presidency, even investments in public housing depended largely on bringing in the private sector, through the Rental Assistance Demonstration program. Also known as RAD, the program allows local public housing authorities to convert public housing units into Section 8 rental assistance program units, but offers plenty of leeway in how that conversion happens, leading to mixed results.

In San Francisco, under RAD the local housing authority turned its units over to established community-based organizations with decades of goodwill and experience serving residents. Elsewhere, private developers have taken over and started evicting residents at unprecedented rates, raising alarm and questions about process.

The HUD secretary will also have the opportunity to influence how the federal government handles distressed mortgages in a foreclosure crisis that is looking likelier by the week. Under the Obama Administration, HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got into the habit of selling distressed mortgages — those at least one year behind in payments — to private equity firms. From 2010-2016, HUD alone sold 116,000 distressed mortgages to private equity firms, turning some of them into the largest single-family residential landlords in the country.

One thing is more than likely at this point — the future HUD secretary will almost certainly restore the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule and process set up under the Obama Administration and gutted under the Trump administration.

Treasury Secretary

The most immediate priority that comes to mind will be the powers given the Treasury secretary under the CARES Act to shape emergency financial relief programs in conjunction with the Federal Reserve.

Under the Municipal Liquidity Facility, the Federal Reserve has offered to make up to $500 billion in short-term financing available to state and local governments and agencies around the country. But so far, the facility has made just two loans — one to the state of Illinois, and one to New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The hangup has been the terms — the facility is charging rates above what basically every other state and local government or agency can get from the market, a decision that the Treasury secretary could help to change.

The HEROES Act, the relief package passed by the House in October, contains a provision to lower the Municipal Liquidity Facility’s rate to 0.25 percent and increase its borrowing terms up to ten years. Others are calling for the Fed to make zero-interest loans available to state and local governments on an ongoing basis, beyond emergency situations.

Similarly, the Fed’s Main Street Lending Program has promised up to $600 billion in emergency loans for businesses with up to 15,000 employees. But so far just a few hundred businesses have borrowed around $4 billion from the program.

Again, the terms have been the culprit, leaving out many businesses that might be interested in accessing the Main Street Lending Program. When first announced, the program’s minimum loan size was $1 million. With much pushing from members of Congress, responding to their constituents, it’s been lowered three times since, down to $100,000 as of October 30. The next Treasury secretary could help sway the Fed to eliminate the minimum entirely.

Looking further down the road, the Biden-Harris’ Administration’s pick for Treasury Secretary will also say something about the existing policy proposals floating around in Congress that it wants to support, especially policies that would have significant influence on cities.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, floated by progressives as a favored Treasury Secretary, seems to be a longshot at this point. But among her own legislative priorities, she introduced the “Stop Wall Street Looting Act,” seeking to rein in private equity firms from a consistent pattern of taking over healthy corporations and running them into the ground, causing significant job losses for cities.

The future Treasury Secretary will also have the opportunity to influence legislation and potential implementation of a more robust system to monitor and enforce accountability around Opportunity Zones. The Biden-Harris transition website already notes that reforming Opportunity Zones will be a priority. There were earlier drafts of Opportunity Zones legislation containing more robust monitoring and accountability measures, but those were lost in the final version passed as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act at the end of 2017.

With its pick for Treasury Secretary, the Biden-Harris transition team could also signal its relative openness to the idea of state-owned or municipal-owned banks. Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib — both members of the House Financial Services Committee that oversees the Treasury Department — recently introduced the “Public Banking Act,” which would make a range of reforms that would complement and ease efforts around the country to create state-owned or municipal-owned banks.

Right now only North Dakota owns its own bank, as well as the Territory of American Samoa, but there are active efforts in dozens of cities and states, including California, New Jersey, New York and electoral lynchpin Philadelphia. But even without the Public Banking Act, new city-or state-owned banks would require intense coordination with the Treasury Department to get necessary clarity on a number of issues, including deposit insurance and access to the Federal Reserve.

Comptroller of the Currency

Speaking of banks, the Biden-Harris Administration will come in with a rare opportunity at the beginning of a Presidency to appoint a new Comptroller of the Currency.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency charters, regulates and supervises nearly 1,200 banks, federal savings associations, and branches of foreign banks that account for approximately 70 percent of all banking business in the United States. The Comptroller is appointed by the President with Senate confirmation to a five-year term, but previous Comptroller Joseph Otting resigned from his office in the spring, leaving the agency with only an acting Comptroller until now.

Otting’s resignation came immediately upon completing an overhaul of regulations around the Community Reinvestment Act, a Civil Rights Era anti-redlining law that affects the annual flow of billions of dollars in mortgages, small businesses loans and community development financing to low and moderate income communities across the country. Bank watchdog groups and community development advocates decried the overhaul as a giveaway to big banks, encouraging them to get credit for complying with the law by financing stadiums or large infrastructure projects with little to no direct benefit to low- and moderate-income communities, while reducing incentives for the traditional Community Reinvestment Act activities such as home mortgages, small business lending and community development financing.

The banking industry meanwhile has mostly been outwardly concerned with an unprecedented situation of having two sets of rules for the Community Reinvestment Act. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency shares responsibility for enforcing the law with the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, and they have used one shared set of regulations to enforce the law, until now. The Federal Reserve recently kicked off its own regulatory update process, receiving a cautiously optimistic response from all sides so far. All agree some kind of update is necessary, as the last major overhaul of Community Reinvestment Act regulations occured in 1995. It is possible that the next Comptroller of the Currency elects to join the Federal Reserve’s update process, bringing all three agencies back into harmony.

It should be noted, the point person at the Federal Reserve for the Community Reinvestment Act has been Federal Reserve Board of Governors Member Lael Brainard, now rumored to be a top candidate to become Treasury Secretary under the incoming Biden-Harris Administration.

Others to watch

There’s a few other appointments with some well-known as well as not-as-well known potential impact on cities. The Small Business Administration’s shortcomings with regard to reaching communities of color and women were on full display this year, thanks to the Paycheck Protection Program. But for nearly a decade now, the SBA has had the Community Advantage Program running as a small “pilot” program to allow small nonprofits to make SBA-guaranteed small business loans to communities they work closely with, including Black communities and immigrant and refugee communities. The next SBA administrator could prioritize making the program permanent.

The next Labor Secretary could bring back wage theft enforcement as a priority. Under the Obama Administration, the department’s Wage and Hour Division at times recovered more than $700,000 in stolen wages a day. The Trump Administration was still stripping away the tools it had to enforce wage theft laws as of this past summer.

Ever heard of the Economic Development Administration? If your city has a revolving loan fund for small businesses, it’s likely the funds came from this relatively obscure arm of the Department of Commerce. The City of Berkeley recently tweaked the rules for its EDA-funded small business revolving loan fund rules, making it more friendly for worker-owned cooperative businesses and paving the way for other cities to do the same for their EDA-funded revolving loan funds. The Biden-Harris transition team has an opportunity with its Secretary of Commerce choice to signal whether worker-ownership can be a key element of an equitable recovery or continue to be something relegated to the margins.

Community and economic development are just one part of the picture. There’s criminal justice and incarceration, education, health and more. If the past four years have reminded cities of anything, it’s that progress is never guaranteed. Even with an incoming Biden-Harris Administration, even with a potential Democratic majority in Congress, the ideas and causes that Black, indigenous and other people of color are organizing around in cities aren’t guaranteed to have the influence that their votes appear to demand.

These next few months will reveal much about whether the Biden-Harris Administration’s plan for cities starts with ideas shaped by the lived experience of Black, indigenous and other people of color in cities, as opposed to ideas that reflect a disregard or discounting of their lived experience.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is an excerpt from The Opioid Epidemic and U.S. Culture, edited by Travis D. Stimeling, which will be published in December 2020 by West Virginia University Press. The chapter from which this excerpt is drawn was written by Natalie Shaffer.

Our Secrets Keep Us Sick

I was one of those people who never entertained the thought of staying in West Virginia past high school. I knew the accepted narrative around success in the Mountain State was, if you wanted to make something of yourself, you had to leave and do it fast before you got stuck. So I did. After graduating from West Virginia Wesleyan College, I spent years away from the lush forests and electric autumns of my home, away from friends, and away from the familiar. I found myself “forced” to return due the nonrenewal of a job contract and a mother freshly diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. I returned viewing West Virginia as a necessary pit stop on the way to my next successful endeavor.

During those years away, roughly 2006 to 2011, the use and prescription of opioids increased in astronomical percentages. The resultant heroin usage, as it was simply cheaper to obtain on the street, became a commonplace conversation in my home state. A study conducted in February 2019 using data collected from the West Virginia University Medicine health care system found the hospitalization rate for opioid overdoses increased 13 percent on average each year in a similar fashion to the opioid overdose death rate for the state, 12 percent, between 2008 and 2016. During the same time, the percentage of patients with a repeat opioid overdose increased annually by 13 percent on average. Drug overdose deaths more than doubled in the United States between 2000 and 2016, and since 2010, West Virginia has found itself at the center of the crisis with the highest opioid overdose death rate of 52.0 per 100,000, more than 250 percent higher than the national rate of 19.8 per 100,000 in the United States. In 2019, more than 80 percent of the overdose deaths in West Virginia were attributed to opioids.

I knew none of those statistics when I returned to Morgantown, West Virginia. After settling back in, I entered what would become a long-term relationship with a brilliant and charismatic athlete. A few years later, they sustained a back injury during a soccer match and were placed on high-dose opioid medication following their surgery. During this recovery their grandmother passed away, and they learned their team, and livelihood at the time, would not offer them a spot the following season due to the injury. Physical, emotional, and spiritual emptiness ushered in a new age of what I now can label as “active addiction” into our home. Eventually they came to identify as an addict, sought help, and oscillated between periods of being “in” and “out” of recovery. As I fought to finish a graduate degree, pay all our bills, and “make sure they were not using” (i.e., babysat another adult), resentment festered on both sides that could not be dissolved. I was irritable, unreasonable, and angry. They were all of those things too. At the advice of a friend, there I sat in an NA meeting, on an uncomfortable folding chair, listening to what other addicts do to get through the day and unlearning the story of what addiction looked like.

Replacing Existing Cultural Narratives

The cultural narrative I knew pertaining to addicts was that they were “bad” people who made the “wrong choice” of using and deserved what they got as a result. I knew from the personal experience of watching a disease take over and tear down another remarkable human being’s life, remove their passion, and erase their connection to anything and anyone other than drugs that this narrative was not accurate. It was just easier. I knew from listening to the stories shared in various twelve-step meetings filled with dignity, authenticity, and courage that these were not “bad” people. In fact, most of the individuals I met had more self-awareness and genuine intention behind their actions than the “good” people I knew and interacted with on a regular basis. But these were all thoughts I struggled to reconcile in my personal life. My professional and academic life seemed as far removed from addiction as possible, a good arm’s length, a safe distance.

I was back in a graduate program at West Virginia University in March of 2017 and attempting to finish writing my uninspired thesis on violence in American opera and new second degree in choral conducting when I traveled to the American Choral Directors Association National Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and had the pleasure of attending a session presented by Dr. Kristina MacMullen of the Ohio State University titled “A Voice of Reason: Social Justice, the Greater Good, and Why We Sing.” She shared her experience identifying an issue of social injustice in her community, human trafficking, and the steps she took to generate a platform to educate and inspire others by creating a multimedia choral concert as part of a three-day summit hosted at the Ohio State University. I knew this session would become the new focus of my thesis and, perhaps more importantly, that this was the work I wanted to do.

At the same time I was finishing my thesis, I found myself offered the opportunity to take over as director of a homeless choir. The choir began earlier that year at the request of a local free medical clinic, Milan Puskar Health Right, in a conversation with my conducting advisor. Health Right was looking to expand activities at their local drop-in center, the Friendship House, as a means of promoting harm reduction and social engagement among their clients. I was involved from the beginning as an assistant and enjoyed attending weekly rehearsals with the group. After hearing about my change of thesis subject and passionate interest in social justice through choral music, my advisor suggested I take over their role as artistic director of the yet unnamed choir. As the group and I continued to work together, we began to trust one another. Over time, I learned their stories. As I listened, I came to realize addiction was at center of nearly every narrative. It became exceedingly clear that this issue of social justice, present in both my personal and professional life, would become the focus of my work in collaborative social justice.

Getting in the Work, Not in the Way

The “homeless” choir I have the pleasure of working with came to be known as the Voices of Hope Choir, a community choir for those experiencing homelessness, addiction, mental illness, and their allies. I assumed everyone would be on board with my elaborate plans of constructing and presenting a counter-narrative concerning addiction and want to push full steam ahead. Many of the members are happy simply coming and singing once a week for an hour. That is the best they can do, and that is all they can afford to give of themselves. Their mental energy is conserved for meeting their tangible needs for the remainder of the day and not for the betterment of society. I can hardly find fault with that and would be blind to my own privilege to expect more.

Some of the members are social workers and healthcare providers from Health Right who come next door to participate with us. They spend their entire workday attempting to bring about a more humane existence for others. They, too, reserve the right to not want to march into a city council meeting every month and explain why refusing to install new benches out of fear that homeless people will start sleeping on them, or addicts will pass out on them, in a nice part of town is less than humane and then sing a song as proof of the inherent worth of each choir member. The work is hard and tiring, and not everyone signed up for that.

I knew nothing formally about directing a choir of people dealing with homelessness, mental health issues, and addiction, so like any academic worth their salt, I started researching. I read about the Dallas Street Choir in Dallas, Texas, founded by Dr. Jonathan Palant in 2014, and discovered some basic ideas about incentive programs, repertoire selection, and behavior expectations. It was from an email exchange with Dr. Palant that I realized I would need to make song lyric sheets simple and ensure they were printed in a large font, as many members would have vision issues and most would not have corrective lenses to assist their reading.

The general setup of his group rehearsals would not work for us, so I continued researching. I came across the website for the Voices of Our City Choir in San Diego and its founding directors Steph Johnson and Rob Thorsen. Their vision statement and mission explanation provided a basic example that I showed the Voices of Hope members as we crafted our own. They also provided an education and advocacy model that I shared with [my assistant director] Ryan [Fieldman] and other core group members. These are members who are present at nearly every rehearsal and feel a sense of accountability to the choir and to the other individuals who attend on a regular basis.

The transient nature of the choir’s members offers perhaps the largest hurdle when it comes to planning and performing from a director’s viewpoint. The core group of individuals supporting Voices of Hope make it possible to invite new members each week and help everyone feel up to speed. At this point the core members are Ryan Fieldman, assistant director and peer recovery coach; Caitlin Scott, director of The Friendship House; Diane Green, business manager of Milan Puskar Health Right; Jacob Eye, peer recovery coach; Wes Bergen, local minister; and Jordan Hunter, a social worker for Health Right. These individuals set up chairs, arrange rides when we perform outside of walking distance, run rehearsal if I am not present, and create accompaniment for some of our pieces. Because each of them comes to the group with a different background and level of understanding of addiction, homelessness, and music, their voices offer insight, ideas, and necessary feedback throughout the process. That is not to say that their voices are valued over other members. I encourage anyone to suggest repertoire, provide feedback about performance events and rehearsal, and simply check in emotionally if they feel so inclined.

Our rehearsals work like any other choir I have directed in the past. We begin with warm-ups. For individuals not familiar with choir, these can sometimes feel foreign, silly, and unrelated to just singing some songs. Some members come to Voices of Hope with years singing experience in school choirs and jump right into this practice. Others attend multiple rehearsals before they are willing to participate in warm-ups. Ryan feels that warms-ups are one of the most functional things we do during choir because they get everybody centered. When we make our way through the breathing exercises and get everyone focused on just enjoying that hour, he sees a change. He observes that whatever was going on mentally seems to dissipate and by the end of the hour choir members seem noticeably calmer: “Everyone seems to be getting along.”

As a director, this is the main time I can actively work on technical aspects of singing like breath support, relaxation in the jaw and neck, intonation, and counting. Some members requested the opportunity to learn the basics of reading music, so I use the end of our warm-up period to introduce basic rhythms that we read and clap and basic pitch patterns that we work out using numbers rather than solfège (do-re-mi) syllables.

When teaching a new song to the group, I primarily work by rote. This instruction strategy is efficient for us as I get to model proper breathing, vowel shape, and phrasing for them rather than try and explain all those parts. Once we have worked on a piece for a while, I invite any members who feel confident to sing with me and newcomers to echo back. Some pieces that were suggested by members, like Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name,” were not familiar to me and full of variations on the written melody. In this case I asked a member who knew the song well to do their best to sing parts for us, and I amended my score accordingly to be prepared to lead in the future. I believe the experience of watching me not knowing everything was comforting and equalizing, as well. For melismatic passages, I simply use hand motions to convey the melodic contour.

Some members have asked to start using sheet music, so they follow the shape there while others follow my hand. Our binders are organized alphabetically and contain a simple lyric sheet as well as a copy of sheet music for each song in our repertoire. A table of contents became necessary as some members became easily frustrated with the alphabetical order, so amending the binders to include page numbers and a table of contents served us well.

At this point, Voices of Hope has standards that we keep in rotation all the time in both rehearsal and performance and seasonal pieces that are new and added to the end of the binder. We divide our year into fall semester (August–November), holiday (December), spring semester (January–May), and summer (June and July).

The Voices of Hope has successfully hosted members of the city council and the mayor at the Friendship House, introduced these government leaders to individuals who frequent the drop-in center, and performed some of our favorite songs including “Hotel California” by the Eagles, “Linger” by the Cranberries, and “Let It Be” by the Beatles. Choir members voiced their desire to be a part of the Morgantown Art Walk last fall, so we set up outside the Friendship House and prepared three different sets to perform throughout the evening. Passersby could sit and listen or explore the drop-in center, which was left open so people could view the client-created art that adorned the walls. Choir members invited friends and family to come see them perform, meet the group, and to sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver with us. Ryan recalled the sense of belonging and fellowship present among members as they rushed to set up chairs, hang additional lighting outside, and prepare refreshments for visitors on both occasions.

I do not want to paint the picture that every discussion goes smoothly and along my time frame. Nor do I want to portray our rehearsals to be the epitome of efficiency, professionalism, and collaboration. We strive to adhere to our guidelines and vision statement, “Rewriting the narrative around homelessness and addiction in our community through music making, group participation, and advocacy,” and we are completely human in that attempt. When writing our first song together, our version of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” I planned for one rehearsal to be enough time to complete lyrics for three verses and one chorus together. I thought we would use a whiteboard and work together seamlessly to create our song. That process took four weeks and almost inspired a fight as some members felt their voices were not being heard in the process of creating lyrics.

Do we have days where we warm up, run through eights songs, and leave feeling totally accomplished? Definitely. Do we have days where everyone is stressed out, talking over top of one another, arguing about whether a passage should say “she said” or “and said,” or passing out in a chair at the back of the room because they used right before they came by? Yes, we do. And the members keep coming back. So do I.

As Ryan and I discussed why our recipe seems to work, we identified the emotional and physical reactions to the rehearsal and performance processes. Ryan, a recovering addict and peer recovery specialist for Health Right, shared his experience that any kind of connection is going to help. His basic understanding is that, neurologically speaking, enjoyable group activity that offers human connection releases endorphins, and the brain will in return produce dopamine:

And it just feels you know … people may not be able to describe it the same way I just did, but it just feels good. It’s like a natural high. So I mean maybe it’s a sneaky way of saying like, hey, there is something else that like can make you feel this way. And I think if people are able to consistently do those things, then they just kind of inherently learn that like, hey, there’s other ways I can make myself feel good, you know? It’s like ok, well … there’s the seed, and maybe something will grow from that.

Other members have shared at the conclusion of rehearsals that choir was the best hour they had in weeks. Some members sit quietly crying or in reflection while others sing around them; some members get angry or frustrated and leave rehearsal only to return and apologize to the group. The open space created at rehearsals coupled with the ability to gently hold one another accountable are both building a sense of community.

A specific moment I saw this community pull together was at a family- friendly holiday event hosted by the West Virginia Black Bears baseball team. The Voices of Hope was invited for the second year to sing carols while families made crafts, had cookies, and took photos with Santa. The holidays can be a challenging time for individuals in recovery and for those experiencing homelessness, as memories and intense feelings of nostalgia and grief can cloud present reality and lead to disconnection. When we attended the event, a member who had not sung with us long, in early recovery from addiction and recently released from incarceration, told us they invited their ex-partner to stop by and bring their daughter. They shared with the group that the child was born while they were in prison, and because of the rules and itinerary of their recovery house, they had only met their daughter once. Near the end of the event, the member found them and spent a few minutes holding their daughter and speaking kindly to their ex. Group members stood back taking pictures and sharing in the joy that their friend could spend this small amount of time with their family. They offered support after the child left, and sadness crept across the member’s face. The new member smiled through his tears and thanked everyone for their kindness and sharing their stories of estranged loved ones. One member replied, “We are all a lot of things, but we are also members of the Voices of Hope, and this is kind of what we do.”

Off the Page

At times, our vision statement—“Rewriting the narrative around homelessness and addiction in our community through music making, group participation, and advocacy”— seems lofty, but it is what we do. On the advocacy front, the Voices of Hope performances open channels of communication with city leaders, state legislators, and members of local law enforcement and judicial systems as we invite them to sing with us at the Friendship House or offer holiday carols at their doorsteps. A different face of addiction is shared with the outside community as we sing, laugh, and generally get down during family-friendly events downtown or organize a fundraising concert with all proceeds going to the Morgantown Community Kitchen that has fed them many times and to which they would like to give something back. We have attended city council meetings as a group, not to perform, but to support one another in voicing concerns about topics from bench installation, Narcan accessibility, and safety.

Some of the seemingly smaller scale and less tangible accomplishments occur in our group participation and musicking. Milan Puskar Health Right considers the Voices of Hope part of their harm-reduction approach to recovery. Rehearsal is an hour of singing and generally some time in fellowship before and after during which members are not using. Any measurable amount of time in which their clients are not actively harming themselves is an achievement.

The Friendship House views Voices of Hope as one of its most successful groups, where members continually bring friends with them to try out choir and are always ready to share why they participate. I view it as a successful group because members tell me things like, “Well it was either come to choir or sit at home and shoot some smack, so I brought my ass down here,” and then flash me a smile like a child who is fully aware of their level of orneriness. I am not conceited enough to believe my choir is keeping this addict from using all day or ever again, but I do share in their joy and freedom of engaging with life, without drugs, and truly enjoying those moments. Recovery involves building a tool kit of people, places, and things that help keep you sober, grounded, and accountable. For some members choir is simply enjoyment, and for others it is a functional tool.

Success in the twelve-step recovery programs is a life that is happy, joyous, and free. As I redefine success with Voices of Hope and in my career through that lens, I am happy to see collaborative social justice, the truly effective kind, evolving from choral musicking. We are building community, both insular and external, through connections centered around choral music, which, I hope, will continue to foster social change. Social change and the notion of social justice, working toward a society where every individual is honored as they are at that moment, equates to a sense of freedom. The path to solutions is already present in the voices of those individuals around me. As we keep connecting those voices to community members in positions of leadership or with talents and means to collaborate with them, changes will occur. Most imperative to me is the reminder that the changes may be solely within the members of my group and myself but not the community at large, and that is still a West Virginia success story.

“Gaping Loopholes” in Eviction Protections in Pennsylvania

When Pennsylvania’s statewide ban on evictions expired at the beginning of September, it was simultaneously replaced by an order from the Centers for Disease Control which was meant to ban evictions for people facing income losses or high medical expenses through the end of the year. But a new investigation from Spotlight PA found “gaping loopholes” and inconsistent application of the CDC moratorium, with the result that many tenants face eviction notices without knowing or being able to exercise their legal rights. Evictions in the state are handled by more than 500 small courts, the report says, where landlords often have legal representation and tenants do not. The state has also failed to establish clear guidance on the “vague federal order,” the report says. Landlords have found some ways to circumvent the CDC moratorium, for example by evicting tenants because a lease has expired rather than for nonpayment of rent, according to the report. The investigation found “an inconsistent system of justice across the 67 counties, leaving many vulnerable residents without the protections they were promised. All told, despite the federal order, whether or not families get kicked out of their homes often comes down to where they live, and which judge happens to hear their case.”

Under the order, tenants are supposed to sign a form declaring that they are unable to pay rent. But many tenants don’t know about the form in the first place, or landlords accuse them of lying on the form and leave it up to any of hundreds of judges to determine the outcome, the report says. Governor Tom Wolf’s office told Spotlight PA that it can’t control how local judges interpret the order because it is a federal rule, according to the report.

“In practice, it creates a loophole that allows landlords to get around the reach of the CDC order,” Bob Damewood, a staff attorney at Regional Housing Legal Services in Pittsburgh, told Spotlight. “It means a lot of tenants who should be covered by the CDC order aren’t.”

Annapolis Public Housing Families at Risk of Eviction

Around 285 families living in public housing in Annapolis, Maryland, “may soon be at risk of eviction,” according to a report in the Capital Gazette. The tenants owe a combined $512,000 in rent, which is putting a strain on the Housing Authority of the City of Annapolis’s ability to hire open positions and deliver services, according to the report. The Authority had set a deadline for families to sign up for payment plans to settle past-due rent, which was extended after the CDC eviction order in September, the report says. The Housing Authority’s own eviction moratorium expired on Monday. So far, according to the report, 25 families have signed up for payment plans. Melissa Maddox-Evans, executive director of the authority, told the Capital Gazette that the agency had done “pretty much all that we can” and would need to start filing “failure to pay rent judgments,” the first step in the eviction process, “soon.”

“We’re in an extremely difficult position because we still have to manage these programs,” Maddox-Evans told the paper. “And we really can’t afford to lose staff, and we don’t want to cut any programs, but we will have to review all of our operations.”

Residents are still able to sign up for payment plans, according to the report. They may also sign declaration forms under the CDC order saying that they are unable to pay rent and could become homeless if evicted. Maddox-Evans said that so far only eight tenants had signed declaration forms, according to the report.

Eviction Reprieve for Homeless Living in Hotel Near Minneapolis

Officials agreed not to evict a group of 50 homeless people living in a hotel in Bloomington, Minnesota, just outside Minneapolis, after a rally held earlier this week, according to a report in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. But the long-term fate of the Extended Stay hotel hasn’t been decided yet, according to the story. Officials in Hennepin County had previously planned to buy the hotel for $13.3 million and convert it to a permanent shelter with 100 units for people experiencing homelessness and high risk for COVID-19, according to the report. But they backed away from that plan because of concerns about the timing of spending federal money from the CARES Act, the report said. Some of the rooms in the hotel have been paid for by ZACAH, a local nonprofit group, according to the story.

Earlier this year, amid the uprising after the killing of George Floyd, activists took over and briefly managed a Sheraton hotel in Minneapolis for people experiencing homelessness who were at risk of COVID-19 and exposure to chaos on the streets, as Next City reported. Some of the same people who had stayed in that hotel are also staying at the Extended Stay in Bloomington, according to the Star-Tribune. One of them was Brian Wallace, a 50-year-old man who had been living in parks after leaving the Sheraton until about two weeks ago, when he began living at the Extended Stay.

“For as long as it lasted, it’s a good thing, but I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Wallace told the paper.

San Francisco Votes To Tax CEOs and Big Businesses

Economic disparities have been exposed by the coronavirus pandemic, during which the wealthy have grown wealthier and more than 8 million Amerians have succumbed to poverty, and San Francisco voters aren’t having it. On Tuesday they voted to approve several tax measures targeting property owners and big businesses with bosses paid far higher than their average workers, AP News reports.

Under the new law, any company whose CEO earns 100 times more than their average worker will pay an extra 0.1% surcharge on its annual business tax payment. If 200 times more, the surcharge increases to 0.2%, if 300, the top executive gets a 0.3% surcharge, and so forth. On average, top U.S. executives are paid 320 times more than an average worker, according to a recent Economic Policy Institute study.

A vote was also passed to target major tech companies, raising their taxes, as well as implementing a higher transfer tax on property sales between $10 and $25 million, AP reports.

The tax looks a lot like one passed in Portland, Oregon in 2016— an idea that was considered by San Francisco leaders, but ultimately bypassed at the time.

“But now you’re seeing a big segregation between the have and have nots as executives get absurdly paid while others are struggling,” political consultant Jim Ross told AP News.

COVID-19 restrictions have emphasized that segregation, as critical elements of the city’s economy have been suffering during the pandemic, particularly due to decreased tourism and more city-dwellers working from home, reports the AP.

The new tax is estimated to generate $60 to $140 million annually, and city supervisor and author of the new tax ballot measure Mark Haney, said he wants most of it directed towards health services, according to the AP. He is not concerned about the surcharge driving companies out of the city, calling it “modest,” compared to the cost of relocating a company.

Meanwhile, Arizona approved a massive state income tax hike on high earners, while Illinois and Colorado went the other direction, the former rejecting a graduated tax amendment, and the latter voting for an income tax cut.

Voters in Four States Opt to Legalize Marijuana

The running joke that drugs won the election isn’t entirely unwarranted, as conservative and liberal parties alike voted to roll back the war on drugs. In fact, every state drug policy reform on the ballot won this year, according to Vox.

Arizona, South Dakota, New Jersey and Montana voters opted to legalize adult cannabis possession, bringing the total tally of states to legalize recreational marijuana to 15. 36 states now allow medical marijuana distribution, including this election’s addition of South Dakota and Mississippi. (Oregon further relaxed its drug laws, and became the first state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of street drugs including meth, heroin and cocaine, according to USA Today. The use of magic mushrooms for therapeutic purposes was also legalized in Oregon.)

“People are realizing it’s not just about getting high,” Avis Bulbulyan, CEO of SIVA Enterprises, a cannabis business development and solutions firm based in Glendale, California, told NBC News. “This is a tipping point for drug policy absent any federal reform.”

There will likely continue to be economic hurdles in equity for marijuana sales. Lack of access to capital and systemic racism leave entrepreneurs of color out of the game. In Chicago, a lottery system which was intended to bring equity to dispensary licensing processes ended up favoring white men, Next City previously reported. Massachusetts has faced similar disparities, where 11 out of the 309 provisional licenses have been awarded to minorities, reports GBH News.

This is due partly to the fact that prior to legalization, people of color were arrested at higher rates for possession of weed, resulting in criminal records that excluded them from starting over legally. Furthermore, big operators are prioritized because they offer more incentives to cities and towns.

“One of the things that we have definitely learned since the establishment of equity is that a license doesn’t go as far as need be,” Jacob Plowden, co-founder and deputy director of the Cannabis Cultural Association, a New York-based nonprofit that helps “marginalized and underrepresented communities” compete in the legal cannabis industry, told NBC News in February.

Californians Vote to Exempt Gig Companies From Classifying Drivers as Employees

On Tuesday, California voters approved Proposition 22, allowing major gig companies like Uber and Lyft to continue classifying their workers as “independent contractors” instead of employees, saving the companies big bucks and allowing them to withhold the benefits of being an employee, like paid leave and unemployment benefits.

“Billionaire [corporations] just hijacked the ballot measure system in CA by spending millions to mislead voters,” a coalition of gig workers opposing Prop 22 said on Twitter. “Uber, Lyft, & the other gig [companies] took a ballot measure system meant to give voice to ordinary Californians and made it benefit the richest [corporations] on the planet.”

Once the rule goes into effect in mid-December, it will require companies to pay workers an hourly wage equal to 120 percent of either the local or state minimum wage, and stipends for health insurance coverage for workers driving at least 15 hours per week. However the minimum wage protection applies to “engaged time” only, meaning drivers could legally be allowed to make as little as $5.64 per hour, according to a study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

“Instead of paying their drivers, gig corporations forged a deceptive $204-million campaign to change the rules for themselves and provide their workers with less than our state laws require,” Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), who wrote AB 5, the original state law that had required gig companies to pay benefits, and opposed Proposition 22, said in a statement obtained by Chicago Tribune.

The corporations argue that the new rule will benefit gig workers, as many had threatened to leave the state entirely if Prop 22 was not approved.

“Passage of Prop. 22 means more than a million Californians will be able to keep driving with Lyft and other rideshare and delivery platforms, and millions more will continue to have access to reliable, affordable transportation services while the nation continues to struggle with COVID-19,” Lyft spokesperson CJ Macklin said in a statement obtained by LA Times.