This is about the experiences I had trying to pull all the systems together at a neighborhood level back in the seventies and eighties.
In order to help A neighborhood of 20,000 people that's already in a period of disinvestment where property values are beginning to decline.
You really have to engage all the stakeholders that are party to that decline and convince them that allowing the neighborhood to continue to decline isn't in their best interest and that there is a solution that is possible if only they would change some of their processes and systems and thinking.
The challenge was getting all those stakeholders at the same moment to sign off and contribute to a **Development Corporation** that would be in charge of putting all their contributions into an effective program that would in fact stop the decline of the neighborhood.
I got involved in this when my wife and I moved to the Blue Hills Neighborhood of Hartford which had been a largely Jewish and Irish community for most of its history kind of houses built back in the twenties and thirties, and those were the immigrants of the time. They wanted to be close to the jobs in downtown Hartford. There were bus lines, so it made sense.
By the time Sharon and I moved in, in 1971, a lot of that older population was frightened--too frightened to remain in that community. Once they saw that more than 15% of the population moving in was African American, 15% at the time seemed to be the tipping point for neighborhoods that tipped from white to black in the United States, and that was holding true in Hartford.
The **neighborhood boundaries** were well defined. It was at the edge of the city so it had a suburban boundary on one end. It had a major urban park as a boundary on the other, and a small boundary with an already existing ghetto that was closer to the inner city. It was everyone's opinion that ghetto would spread block by block through the neighborhood over time, because that's what had always happened in African American community.
Just about the time black people moved in **absentee landlords** would start to disinvest. They would no longer keep up the property. They would continue to rent. But their expectations were that the property would just deteriorate and there were **tax write-offs** that made an incentive to get all the money you can out of rents as long as you can, and then close down the building and take a loss.
That is the history of ghettos in the US and that's what would've happened. We moved in not knowing all of that. We knew it was an emerging black community. We knew people, black people who lived there. They encouraged us to move in because we were asking them how we could create a **multiracial community**. They said, move in with us. Don't expect us to move in with you because if blacks move into a suburban neighborhood where we were they have no **support** at all. There are no black teachers, no black police force, no black hairdressers or products, no social circles, no churches that they feel comfortable in. And so they've integrated, but they are all by themselves.
We can move into a black neighborhood and we would be surrounded by black residents, but we still had a preponderance of whites in the black schools, we still had whites in the police department predominantly. We would never be feeling quite so isolated as they would in the suburb, and that made sense.
And so we made that move. It was definitely an **anti-racist move** before we understood exactly what anti-racism was. And in the process encountered the **real estate industry** and the **banking industry**, which tried to get us to move into the suburbs, not move into the city, into the neighborhood. Some of them were out, out, racist about it, some kind of had other language, like it's not a good cultural fit, et cetera. But we saw that they were discouraging whites from coming in. When we got into the neighborhood.
We could see that housing values year over year were deteriorating by 1% or 2%. While the suburbs that we had not moved into, were going up 3% or 4%. So there's a 5% net wealth gap between living where we were, the advantage of living where we were versus the advantage of living in the suburbs.
And all predictions were that would continue and exacerbate. But we knew what one problem was. We knew that the white realtors weren't encouraging us or even treating us fairly. And we suspected and heard stories that they were doing the same with black families. So we organized a major test sending white couples and black couples to the same realtor on the same day with the same financials, asking for the same type of home.
And then we had them all wired so that we recorded the conversations and quickly had 150. Instances recorded of what was racial discrimination, but we didn't know how illegal that was at the moment. We simply went to the realtors and asked them not to do that anymore, and they were very demeaning and laughed at us.
And at some point we just in anger said we'll start a real estate company and we'll, Compete with you to the point where you won't be able to survive there. And they dared us to do that. And so I quit teaching and we did that. And long story short, over three years, we took over the real estate industry with a nonprofit real estate company that was managed by the local resident leaders.
And they made sure we got all the listings that we could and. And encouraged us and in turn we paid salaries to our people that were reasonable, but we also had money left over. And with that money we could buy, rehab and sell absentee owned properties that were let go. That was all very successful.
But we also realized as realtors that we had now become. That the behavior that we tried to get the realtors to stop doing, which was called racial steering and block busting, trying to frighten people out to get more listings that we actually had criminal cases on our hands. And without a budget to pursue that in court, we turned it over to.
The Justice Department in Washington, which got their interest and then they sent the F B I to replicate our sting and they are got the same data that we had and sued the top. Seven, I believe it was real estate companies in that region who had been practicing in the neighborhood and basically put an end to some block busting and steering.
So that was one constituency that we were able to, we were able to change their behavior through legal means, but that left the banks who were also not willing to make, to lend. As equally as they would to if we had bought in the suburbs to insurance companies who would not insure because they were all sure it was gonna become a ghetto and they didn't want to get stuck holding those mortgages or having that insurance.
The city itself had begun to disinvest because at the moment it was still white politicians. And they needed to get votes from white communities. They were redirecting capital improvements police protection, everything, libraries, all the things that cities do. They were redirecting it toward the white neighborhoods and taking the money basically out of the black neighborhood.
So we. We knew that we needed the city as a stakeholder. We to change their behavior. We need, we needed, we need the banks and the insurance companies to change their behavior. We need, we needed residents to have more confidence to invest their own money in their own homes, and we needed to allow the city's code enforcement.
To be very active in the neighborhood so that you could force people to fix up their homes by requiring to make code repairs. But of course, the city wasn't doing code inspections anymore there. And so we discovered in our research around the country, a program in Pittsburgh that had pulled those.
Stakeholders together and formed a nonprofit development housing development company and actually changed the behavior of all those stakeholders. It took them about 10 or 11 years, but they had reversed the disinvestment cycle in their very similar neighborhood. And at the same moment, the urban reinvestment task for neighborhood reinvestment task force was.
Engaged with Pittsburgh in understanding how they did that and with the help of all the bank regulatory agencies and housing and urban development in Washington would replicate that program. So we volunteered and we were one of the first eight cities to replicate that program. And I was involved as a volunteer in my neighborhood.
In that development process, which took nine months there were five workshops that had been laid out to accomplish the things Pittsburgh had accomplished in the same sequence that Pittsburgh had done that, but in a much faster time cycle because we had Pittsburgh as an example and we could use that.
First you had to have interviews with all the stakeholders, tell 'em what you wanted to do. Talk to them about what their interests in the neighborhood were and what kind of a deal they would be willing to make if we could pull it off. That gives you a pretty good read on whether you've got the makings of a neighborhood housing services program are not.
We don't expect them to commit. At first. We, it's a six week process, and what we ask them to do is to consider coming to a two and a half day offsite retreat with lenders, insurers, the city representatives, housing department, code enforcement, all the major neighborhood leaders. There would be ministers of big churches taxpayers association, neighborhood associations, informal leaders newspaper people. And at that offsite, we would try to cut a deal and if they would commit to coming to that event, we would. Think we have a good chance of success, and so we did get everybody to come. It was, we had 120 people for two and a half days at a retreat outside of Hartford.
That includes seven bank presidents and we were able to get them because the federal regulatory bodies invited them and encouraged them because they were coming. We were able to get the mayor and all the key city administrators, and we already had the connections in the neighborhood to get the neighborhood people.
And we invited some of the key insurers and they all showed up. And at that first workshop we had a really well facilitated session with a a graphic artist who was drawing the conversation in real time using metaphors visual images on a four by eight foot sheet of butcher paper. And he was drawing the conversation as fast as we could talk.
And basically what we did was to say, look the straight line projection of this community is that residents will lose their money. Bankers will lose their mortgage money. Insurers will no longer be able to ensure, and eventually the voters will stop voting or vote. For somebody other than the people who are currently in office because they have no reason to do that.
And once you've established that picture, then you turn to solutions. And because we had Pittsburgh to look at, we knew the elements of a solution, and we also knew what contributions people would have to make that solution work. And so we were able to map out the solution, refine it for Blue Hills, and then before we left that workshop asked people to commit to making their contribution.
The banks would have to put up Phil Philanthropy money to fund a nonprofit housing development corporation. We had foundations there that would contribute to a revolving loan fund that was for non bankable people. The city would have to agree to do door-to-door code inspection of the neighborhood at our discussion starting with the area closest to the ghetto and then backing up through the neighborhood.
Basically making sure each house was up to code and in one street at a time. We would encourage everybody on that street to fix up their property at once. And if they would do that, we would have the city do the capital improvements simultaneously and we would able to turn that block around very visually, very visibly, starting with the weakest area, and then move back into the areas of strength.
And we did that over a three year period. And that we did, that did reverse the it reversed the housing losses housing values went from a one or 2% loss to, or two to 3% gain, and we now had momentum. And that neighborhood continued to be relatively healthy, I would say, as healthy as any other urban peripheral neighborhood.
So with that victory in hand, I was offered an opportunity to go to Neighborhood Reinvestment Task Force, which then became the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation because all of those neighborhoods had been successful. And the organization grew and we replicated that across the country about 300 times.
I sent you the hearing that happened in Congress when we were at about 250 neighborhoods, and you can see in that hearing all the testimony about the program and what it did and what it meant, and you could see why it. It was able to continue to get its funding from the banks, from hud, from the federal government and the fact that it was bipartisan, so it didn't matter who was in office.
We continued to grow that organization and it's remained that right up to today. And the reason it remained that, it was because it was driven by a private nonprofit corporation made up of all the partners, but not. Not controlled by anybody except the neighborhood partners. They had the majority. So it's very clever.
I think it fits right into what Marc is thinking about for doing health associated work, neighborhood by neighborhood and then being able to replicate it, to scale it, and I'm happy to answer any questions you have in our next conversation, so I hope that's helpful and I think I've covered the main things we were talking about then.
So I'll sign off and look forward to talking to you soon.