The Hundred-Million Dollar Question

Are people or places more important? Those concerned with America’s poor have long debated this question and its permutations. Is it better to direct aid to individuals or to entire communities? Is it more effective to meet the needs of families, even if their chief desire is to move away from local problems, or to improve specific localities, and hopefully thereby improve the lives of the people congregated there?

This debate continues, in part because there are so few examples of a good place-based strategy to measure. While America has no lack of impoverished inner-city communities, it also has no lack of piecemeal and poorly-funded attempts to help them. Community development corporations build housing, and foundations sponsor various healthcare, job training and education programs in specific neighborhoods, but the efforts are usually isolated. There is new housing in one place, and computer lessons in another. But they do not benefit the same community, and no one is surprised that houses do not solve the drug problem, nor that children fail to benefit from after-school tutoring when they return each evening to a dilapidated home or unstable family situation. 

But what if there were a better example, a comprehensive and fully-funded attempt to improve the living conditions of a poor neighborhood? Would it finally show that an intense concentration of effort in one particular community can produce miraculous results? Would it prove that the best way to help people is with programs targeted not at them, but at the place where they live?

The Enterprise Foundation’s “neighborhood transformation” program in Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood is this better example. It is a truly comprehensive effort at community rebuilding, and yet a close examination of its performance casts doubt on the efficacy of the place-based approach.

Beginnings

The chief visionary behind Sandtown-Winchester’s transformation was James Rouse, a real estate developer and civic activist who spent much of his life at the forefront of urban trends. In the 1950s he chaired the presidential subcommittee that created the federal urban renewal program. A decade later he developed Columbia, a “new town” between Washington and Baltimore that now houses 90,000 residents. Then, in the 1970s, Rouse introduced “festival marketplaces” to American downtowns with Faneuil Hall in Boston and Harborplace in Baltimore. In 1979, Rouse retired from for-profit development and established The Enterprise Foundation, to “work at finding better answers to housing for the poor.” It did so by seeking out grassroots redevelopment groups and nurturing them with funds and training to increase their housing production capabilities.

By 1990, The Enterprise Foundation was the chief node in a network of 100 outfits in 30 cities, producing thousands of units of affordable housing each year. Rouse, the incredibly successful real estate developer, had proven himself to be equally adept at philanthropy. Still, he wanted more. He realized that good and affordable housing, while important, was not by itself enough, and as the 1980s came to a close, he started looking for a place to try a more comprehensive approach. With the help of Kurt Schmoke, the mayor of Baltimore, Rouse discovered Sandtown-Winchester, a neighborhood which bore all the marks of a confirmed slum–a thousand vacant houses, half the population earning incomes under $11,000, two out of every three children living in poverty. “It’s like the Third World,” one local minister told the Baltimore Sun. “Not a night goes by that I don’t hear the police helicopter at least five times, close enough that it could land on the roof.”

Rouse’s Enterprise Foundation, with the mayor and a local coalition of churches called Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development (BUILD) as partners, set out to reverse this situation, and not half-heartedly, but with a full-frontal attack on all the neighborhood’s problems. “[Rouse] brought in every expert from across the country–on workforce, on mobilizing churches, on health issues, on housing forms, onsubstance abuse, on prisoner reentry, education,” says Bart Harvey, the current head of The Enterprise Foundation. “You mention it, and it was there.” Six hundred local residents also took part in these discussions. The consultants outlined in a 2-inch thick book all the programs and projects that would be undertaken and how they were interrelated. Such planning for the poor had rarely been done before, and the Enterprise effort in Sandtown reaped widespread praise. There were front page articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times and accounts in many other publications around the nation. Clinton administration officials visited and said that Rouse’s neighborhood transformation program was an example of what should be done in every inner-city neighborhood.

“Nowhere in America has this obvious, comprehensive, reinforcing program, been undertaken on a scale large enough to demonstrate the rational results that can be achieved,” Rouse told them all. “There have been impressive demonstrations of a school that works here–of a drug-and-crime prevention program there–of child care, skill training and job placement–but each has been an island in a jungle of dysfunctioning life all around it. Good sense tells us to combine these isolated efforts in a whole program, to gain the reinforcement that each can bring to the other, to raise the expectancy and build the hope of the neighborhood.”

Outcomes

Not only did Rouse and his colleagues produce detailed plans for tackling the community’s problems, but they also attracted money for implementation from private donors, other foundations, and city, state and federal governments. The Enterprise Foundation conservatively estimates that $70 million went into the project, but if you count all the grants, all the public–and private–sector efforts, and especially all the physical construction, the actual figure is easily twice that amount. For each and every one of the 10,000 residents of the neighborhood, about $14,000 has been spent on improving their community. Together, the plans and funding meant that the Sandtown neighborhood transformation project was a dream undertaking, one that lacked the usual constraints. And yet, a dozen years into this unprecedented endeavor, the results are depressingly modest.

There are, of course, some disclaimers. While Enterprise’s neighborhood transformation program is one of the best examples of a comprehensive community-focused effort, it has had some setbacks. Many of these stemmed from the novelty of the approach. Sandtown was intended as a prototype, and as a result resources were often used inefficiently: in devising new systems, grafting together existing systems, and discovering community needs that had long gone unmet. In some cases, the available funding and technical assistance did not exactly match the planned programs. Indeed, Enterprise’s own chief expertise was housing, not school reform or healthcare or crime prevention, and this showed.

There were also more unique problems. Norman Yancey, a Sandtown resident, hinted at two of these when he stood up at a community meeting to declare, “You know what, Mr. Rouse? This is great that you’re so involved and you want this transformation to happen so badly and everything else, but you know, if something were to happen to you, and you weren’t here, we can do it now.” The first problem presaged by Yancey’s statement was James Rouse’s death in 1996.With his passing, Sandtown lost its most prominent advocate. Second, Yancey hinted at the tussles for control that occurred between Rouse’s organization and the community it was trying to help. A recent study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation examined this dilemma and found, “Although [both the outside professionals and the local community] leaders recognized Sandtown’s many desirable attributes, including its rich history and dire need for development, each party had a different understanding of the other’s capacities and assumptions about fundamental issues–and they didn’t take time to work those differences out.” Even Bart Harvey, head of Enterprise, has to admit, “We tried to move faster in Sandtown than the neighborhood could follow.”

Nevertheless, each of these problems of execution was relatively minor. Given how many things the project had going for it, a few missteps cannot fully explain the middling results. Instead, these must stem from the strategy itself. Quite explicitly, Enterprise’s work in Sandtown was place-based. Their programs were constrained to the 72-square blocks considered part of the neighborhood. The idea was to raise the entire community at once, and every portion of the undertaking reflects this aim and its limitations. Constructing and rehabilitating housing is the most popular way to improve a specific neighborhood, and thus Enterprise and its allies started there. They built almost 500 new units of affordable housing in Sandtown, and the city rehabilitated several hundred vacant row homes. A local public housing project was completely overhauled. The positive outcome of this work was a doubling of the neighborhood homeownership rate. Unfortunately, at 24%, it still fell well shy of the stated objective that half the residents would own their own dwellings. The program was targeted primarily at Sandtown residents, the notion being that they should be the ones to benefit from the construction work going on around them. However, it turned out that most of the existing residents were not in a situation to meet the requirements for owning a home. Today, one out of five units in the neighborhood remains vacant. 

Education was, of course, another priority. Enterprise hired a principal from Chicago to work closely with the three local elementary schools. Her first step was to clean them: graffiti was removed and deferred maintenance finally performed. Then the schools began combining their resources to hire shared instructors in music and art, eventually implementing an entire new curriculum. Test scores improved significantly, but the overall achievement rate remained low. For instance, in the fifth grade of a representative Sandtown school, the percentage of students scoring satisfactory or above on the state reading test rose from 2% to 10.4%. Language usage went from 15.6% to 35.3%, and math from 2% to 11%. One barrier to greater gains was the constantly changing student body. While the Sandtown transformation program worked with the schools in just this one place, the children kept moving. This is typical in the inner city, where youth usually shuttle between a variety of different caregivers and relatives. And it is unclear whether even those kids that stayed in a Sandtown elementary school for the entire six years will benefit in the long-run. They will eventually have to attend a high school that is outside the neighborhood, and thus not part of Enterprise’s program.

In an attempt to regain control of Sandtown’s streets, The Enterprise Foundation and its partners worked with residents to establish block watches. An obnoxious liquor store was closed, and handgun turn-in days made some feel a little safer. The number of robberies fell from 204 in 1997 to 132 in 2000, the number of aggravated assaults from 324 to 283. The neighborhood is still far from secure, though. After all, criminals can easily escape to nearby neighborhoods where residents are less vigilant, and then return to Sandtown once the police cruisers have passed. The number of violent crimes fell from 563 to 435, but this is still more than one shooting, stabbing or beating per day in a relatively small area. Sandtown remains a place where an 89-year-old woman can be knifed to death in her home, or an old man selling snow cones on the sidewalk outside his house can be gunned down at 10:30 in the morning. Following this winter’s city-closing storms, one local store-owner summarized the situation this way: “If you were to ride around when the snow came, the only people you’d see out there making money would be the drug dealers.”

Housing, education and crime-prevention were programs that made some headway. Initiatives in healthcare and community pride performed in a similar manner. The impact was measurable, but minimal, as Enterprise discovered that the problems of Sandtown were not just limited to the community’s boundaries and that local solutions were therefore inadequate. The program where this unfortunate reality became the most obvious was employment. Community Building in Partnership, the entity established by Enterprise and BUILD to carry out their projects, hired as many local residents as it could, and the various other initiatives in the neighborhood followed suit. At the effort’s midpoint, about 250 residents had jobs rebuilding their own community. For others there were placement and training programs. By 1997, about 600 residents had found employment this way, but in a community of 10,000, that improvement was mostly meaningless.

But joblessness remains a major problem in Sandtown, with an official unemployment rate of three times the national average, which likely translates into an actual unemployment rate close to seven times the national average, given the commonly acknowledged undercounting of unemployment in inner-city neighborhoods. As long as the focus was just on Sandtown, the dearth of jobs was not something that even this dream project could change. There are not many decent, semi-skilled positions to be found in inner-city neighborhoods, or in all of Baltimore. Those employers have been steadily abandoning the city for half a century, heading for the suburbs, or the rural south, or overseas. In fact, the first new affordable townhouses in Sandtown went up only after a large bakery was torn down — symbolically supporting the assumption that inner-city land is good for nothing but housing poor people.

Lessons

The neighborhood transformation program in Sandtown-Winchester was a valiant effort, one that The Enterprise Foundation continues to pursue today. Since they started, hardly a week has passed without a hammer pounding nails, counselors making house calls, or a training session being held somewhere in the neighborhood, yet the results of all these efforts have been mixed.

“There’s been progress, but it’s not done,” concludes Allan Tibbels, co-executive director of the local Habitat for Humanity chapter. And the continuing Enterprise effort is itself a sign of diminished expectations: Rouse had originally said that the transformation could be completed in five years. One person to whom he had expressed such hopes was Robert Embry, a man well-versed in the cause of better cities, having headed Baltimore’s community development agency and served as an assistant secretary in the federal department of Housing and Urban Development. He now leads Maryland’s Abell Foundation.

“Rouse was very much on place, that you could fix up a place and that was the answer,” Embry learned from their conversations. “I was skeptical that that was possible. I think it involves people. It’s not an either/or thing, though. There is no right or wrong answer.” Sandtown proves the wisdom of Embry’s stance. The project there was not a complete failure, but it was also far from being a complete success. It did make a difference, just not the large one that was needed. The plans and money, adequate as both were for the assigned task, could not alter the larger forces that were working against the neighborhood. In the end, a Sandtown that maintained the same people in the same place was a Sandtown that could not change dramatically for the better.

Rouse and Enterprise’s hope was that Sandtown could become an island of prosperity and stability. Unfortunately, they found that the surrounding sea could still easily wash over their handiwork. Now, instead of trying to raise the shore, they should worry about giving lifeboats to the people clinging there. The alternative to concentrating solely on a needy neighborhood is, as Embry indicates, to concentrate on needy individuals. Such a strategy would include many of the same issues that Enterprise addressed, but it would not limit their provision to one small community. Instead, services like healthcare, supplemental education and jobs training would follow individuals and families. People would be helped to find decent housing, even if it was outside their original neighborhood. Indeed, a people-based approach might actually encourage families to move. It could identify locations where opportunities, like jobs, are available, and then it might ease families’ transitions to those locales. This strategy would help the poor to deal with the city as it now exists, rather than telling them that they should stay in one place and wait for their community to become an exception to general trends. In the long-run, a people-based strategy would work to alleviate poverty, rather than just make life a little better for the poor.

And place need not be ignored entirely. Inner-city neighborhoods like Sandtown can be improved, but this should not be done with the aim of preserving them as the same communities. Programs like crime prevention and school reform must continue, but homes and services should be redesigned to attract new, already-employed residents. Such people could afford homeownership and thus provide some stability to the area. They would reseed the neighborhood and make it an asset to the city, rather than a liability. They would prove that Sandtown can be a place useful to more than just the poverty-stricken. If The Enterprise Foundation’s neighborhood transformation program had ended with Rouse’s exciting plans, Sandtown-Winchester would be unimportant. It would be just another sad story for advocates of the poor, something that could have been. But not only were the plans comprehensive, the funding was there to support them. Thus, Sandtown is the long-sought example of a complete community-based revitalization. In that it has produced some changes for the better, it shows the potential of the comprehensive approach. This potential is already being harnessed by similar efforts around the nation. But the program also shows the limitations of the place-based strategy. Even if perfectly executed, there was only so much that it could accomplish, since the problems of inner-city decay are larger in scope than any one neighborhood. With many millions spent, this has been a valuable lesson.