Video: The Last House on the Block: Lessons from Brightmoor, Detroit on Disinvestment, Reinvestment and Community Power

Transcript:

NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.

Rountree  0:06 
Well, good afternoon, everyone. I’m Caitie Rountree with NCRC, and I’m really glad you’re here with us today. Today’s conversation started with a book, but it raises a much bigger set of questions for our work. What happens to neighborhoods after decades of population loss and disinvestment? What does reinvestment look like in a place where the challenge may not be too much capital arriving too quickly, but too little capital for far too long? And perhaps most importantly, who actually gets to decide what successful reinvestment actually looks like? We’re going to explore those questions through one particular place, through Brightmoor in Detroit, Michigan, and then think together about what that experience can teach communities across the country. So I hope that you will see yourself and your community in these conversations, and that you will find something to take into your own work here. For anyone who’s newer to NCRC, this conversation sits right at the heart of our mission. We care about whether communities have access to the resources that they need to thrive, but also about whether communities have real power in determining what that investment looks like. We’re a national network, but our work is deeply rooted in what our members are seeing and doing locally. A lot of our work lives at exactly the intersection we’ll be exploring today. Understanding how capital is or isn’t flowing into communities, strengthening the capacity of local leaders and creating mechanisms for communities to shape those decisions. And now we get to the fun part. To help us understand Brightmoor, we’re going to begin with Sharon Cornelison, author of *The Last House on the Block.* Sharon spent years studying Brightmoor and the people who call it home, and her work challenges some of the assumptions that we often bring into conversations about neighborhood change. Sharon, bring us into Brightmoor.

Cornelissen 1:52 
Thank you so much, and thank you to the entire NCRC team, and to Reverend Simmons, and to Josh Silver for kindly hosting me here and having this conversation. Unfortunately, it is as timely as ever, and I think I’m just grateful to have this conversation with the NCRC community too, because I think it’s so relevant. So, I’ll be sharing some insights from my book today, which came out last November. So, it’s still fairly new, and you know, this book started when I was a graduate student at Princeton University, but I’m originally from the Netherlands, so I moved to the United States for my studies, and I knew that I really wanted to study inequality. I knew that I really wanted to do a community-based study and kind of live in a community for a couple of years to really understand it. When I was a graduate student, though, I wasn’t quite sure where that would be. So in the next slide, as I was thinking about, you know, where to live, where to, you know, what community to live in, what to study, Detroit was in the news a lot. This was like around 2014, and the city had just gone through its historical municipal bankruptcy, the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history and the city was dominating both national and international headlines. And when I looked at all this news coverage on Detroit, really there were only two main storylines that were being told. On the one hand, there was this old story of Detroit as the so-called murder capital of the United States. This was a very kind of stigmatized representation of the city; it usually erased the around 700,000 Detroiters that still lived in the city from view, and kind of gave us visions of this emptied-out space where you know were stray dogs were dominating. On the other hand, there was this new narrative about Detroit as all of a sudden the city as the next place to be, especially for Brooklyn millennials and Michigan billionaires. That city, you know, was sort of being held up as this sort of next place to move, next place to be. And you know, this vision of the city was also more overwhelmingly White, right? So it really drew in my curiosity, and I thought, well, there is more to this story. This is just these are just stereotypes about the city. This is not really, you know, what it’s like. This, you know, this is not really about the city itself. So I was really drawn to think about, well, what is it actually like to live in one of Detroit’s neighborhoods and sort of go through the changes that the city is going through. So on the next slide, as I said, I was a graduate student at Princeton at the time, and I was actually living in Brooklyn. And I noticed even in my own neighborhood where I was living at the time in Bushwick, you know, graffiti and billboards about Detroit like appeared in Brooklyn. So on the left, you see this idea. It’s a part of Diego Rivera’s famous fresco; it says Detroit is just west of Bushwick. This idea that gentrifiers would be moving to Detroit next, kind of you know, as cities were becoming more expensive, they would be moving there. And then the photo on the right sort of references the idea: oh, there’s space available in Detroit. Right, it references this idea that there is emptiness, rather than communities and people, and sort of inviting people in Brooklyn, I guess, to gentrify Detroit next. So I was really fascinated by this. But as I said before, you know, in all these visions, where are the Detroiters, right? What’s what is it like? Where is sort of the everyday story of like really living through decline and living in a neighborhood and a community for a long time and sort of making do. In the next slide, that’s what I set out to do. So really wanted to tell kind of a story of changing Detroit from the ground up. So I moved into Detroit. Specifically, I moved into the Brightmoor neighborhood of Detroit, and you know I decided to I needed to live there for a few years to really kind of get the perspective of people living there and to truly understand how they were experiencing these changes. So in the next slide, you see that Brightmoor is located in northwest Detroit for people that are less familiar. So it’s pretty far from downtown. So downtown Detroit is more underneath where you see Detroit there, so it’s like right along the river. So it’s not close to downtown neighborhoods, as you see in the next slides. Brightmoor had gone through extreme changes and extreme decline, really since starting in the 70s. Brightmoor was a neighborhood that, when by the time I moved, there had seen over 50 years of urban decline. It had lost more than 60% of its of its residents from 1970 till the mid 2010s. And during that time, it also transitioned from what was virtually an all-White neighborhood. It was reputed a sort of hillbilly heaven, and the original developer of the neighborhood, you know, explicitly only allowed White families to buy there, so it was this sort of very explicitly segregated neighborhood. But over time, as people were leaving, it also transitioned to to predominantly Black. So by the time I moved there, it was around 83% Black. During that time, you know, the most sort of I guess visceral part of Brightmoor was just how empty this urban neighborhood had become. Right, this is not how we typically think about urban neighborhoods. But by the time I moved there, every third house that still remained was vacant, and every other property had become a vacant lot. It’s very different from the sort of maybe dense urban neighborhoods that a lot of people think about. It just had an abundance of greenery, really, and an abundance of fields by the time I moved there. Poverty, you know, was high, especially in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis. But another thing that was interesting about Brightmoor was that starting around 2006, a bunch of White newcomers had started to move into the neighborhood. They were drawn to Brightmoor because they could buy houses started at five, starting at $500. There are a lot of vacant lots there, so they turned vacant lots into farms and gardens. And these White newcomers called themselves urban farmers. So that’s really why they were drawn. They were kind of drawn in to the desolation of Brightmoor and the sort of greenery that had sprung up in the middle of the Klein. So it was very much kind of a changing neighborhood, and I was drawn to sort of understand both perspectives and and how these people were living together in in one neighborhood. I lived in Brightmoor from 2015 to 2018, so I lived there for three years to really take my time and to really be respectful to to to try to meet as many Detroiters as I could. Spoke to hundreds of Brightmore residents and Detroiters during my time there. I really devoted all my time to kind of understanding community life and becoming part of community life, and that looked like anywhere from going to the farmers market that the new urban farmers started, actually my first week there, to being part of, you know, boarding up homes, doing volunteering for blight cleanups, eating in the soup kitchen. That was a great way to meet families and have conversations, going to local churches and understanding sort of the religious aspect of community life in Brightmoor. So really, you know, anything I could do, I would be there to try to meet people. And sort of is a tradition in ethnography, right? A community ethnography. That that’s what my book is. After years, those three years I lived there, I even bought a bungalow in Brightmoor. I bought a house in Brightmoor. You can see the picture on the right. That was my house. I bought this bungalow for $7,000, which is less than what the average home buyer now pays for, even just for closing costs. Right? It’s kind of an unimaginable price, especially in today’s housing affordability crisis.

But at the time it was the it was an average it was a very normal home price in Brightmoor. You know there were people that were buying homes for $1 or for $500 or $3,000. Like this was a very common price, and you know it wasn’t just this simple issue of supply and demand or you know economics that had made homes so cheap in Brightmoor. It was very much shaped by legacies of disinvestment and exploitation and racism in this particular community. Brightmoor had been really hard hit by predatory mortgages and the foreclosure crisis. So a lot of people they may have bought a home for $80,000 in the 90s and then they saw their, you know, property value basically disappear. Also by time I lived there, Brightmoor was going through a second wave of home losses and kind of housing crisis, which was a tax foreclosure crisis, and a lot of people lost their homes due to back-out taxes and high interest and fees that were charged on top of that. This again sort of took the bottom out of the housing market and meant that a lot of people were losing their homes and that the county was auctioning off homes every year, starting at $500. So this really pressed people’s ability to build any equity and wealth in their home. I sort of, you know, located myself in that context, and I was, you know, uniquely privileged, even though I was an outsider, because I came in with cash. So this was a place, especially at the time, people were not getting mortgages for their homes, and I actually struggled a lot because I tried to sell my home with a mortgage, maybe naively, but you know it didn’t. It didn’t work. That was kind of part of the context too. The question of, you know, what is the book really about? Of course, the book is about Brightmoor and Detroit, and sort of there’s a lot of history also about sort of how Brightmoor and Detroit came to be and sort of the changes over time. In reality, it’s also about many places beyond Detroit that are not getting as much attention, but that are have gone through the same process of urban decline and disinvestment that maybe smaller cities or neighborhoods that are not getting as much attention. So it’s really about what it’s like to live through urban decline. Kind of early gentrification might look like in that context. So it’s it’s really about all of those places, and Detroit was just Brightmoor is just sort of one example, and I think the book will resonate with a lot of people. If you’re in Hartford or in St. Louis or Memphis, you know there are sort of I felt so far in my conversations with people there is sort of a recognition sort of a lot of these processes and changes.

When we talk about cities and urban life, often for a lot of people, the first thing that pops in mind is maybe a city like New York City or Boston, right? Like a densely populated city where rents are really high. The city is growing. There’s mix of like residential and businesses. You can walk everywhere. There’s a subway system. Kind of you know, there’s an affordability crisis. Like that’s how we often think about cities and kind of urban, urban issues. But of course, not all cities and neighborhoods are like that. There’s a different type of urban life out there. Less talked about, but there’s many cities from parts of Chicago to Memphis to Newark, Trenton in New Jersey as well. And many of these places have seen decades of disinvestment and decline. Residents that are living there, they’ve been kind of living through these different waves of disinvestment, really, and decline. So this is not unique to Detroit at all, right? Detroit may be the sort of biggest story about it. It’s not unique to Detroit, even to these like New York City or Boston and Washington, D.C. You know they were struggling in the 70s and the 80s too, right? Like this is a fairly new reality that we think about cities like that. But many cities have not fully recovered from that, and they’ve seen ongoing decline, you know, throughout today really. The declining neighborhood or disinvestment is not something from the past, but it’s something that lives on in many of these places. I don’t think I need to convince my this audience, but in my book, you know, I did more analysis and to really show people like just how common decline is. You know, I did some analysis on all cities that lost population between 2000 and 2020, so that’s very recent. So looking at all these cities, I analyzed 1,060 cities. I found that one in five of those cities lost population over the last two decades. And all the cities that you see labeled on this map with their names, all these cities lost more than 10% of their population between 2000 and 2020. So many of these, as you can see, like they’re small to medium-sized cities. They’re not cities like Detroit. They’re kind of smaller cities. Many of them are in the Midwest, you know, that have seen kind of, you know, the deindustrialization, but also former agricultural hubs in the South have seen a lot of depopulations and are continuing to see that. And then many of these cities are predominantly Black, so the experience of urban depopulation continues to be a predominantly Black experience, mostly due to legacies of redlining and racism that kind of continue to this day that really disproportionately impact Black neighborhoods and predominantly Black cities.

So based on this context, in my book, I answer two key questions. As I said before, you know, the book really goes into the sort of everyday experience of living through decline and making your home and your being with your family in the middle of decline and what that’s like. What is it like to live in the literally the last house on the block, right? Like what is that experience like? What does it mean to be a homeowner when your house may only be worth $10,000, right? What struggles do low-income homeowners face to maintain homeownership under those conditions, and how do people relate to safety, to their urban identities, to how do they dream about the future in such a place? That’s the that’s all questions that my book kind of dives into through the stories that I tell. And then second, what are the White newcomers doing here? Like we talk a lot about gentrification in these sort of dense cities, but what does early gentrification look like in this very different place, right? What is it is it gentrification or not? Like, what does gentrification look like at these very early stages, and what does it mean that it could fail, right? We always talk about gentrification as something once it starts, you know, it’s already too late. But what does it mean to have White newcomers move into such a disinvested place, and then to not transform the neighborhood into a middle-class kind of White place? What does that mean?

Based on these questions, on the next slide, there’s two key takeaways from the book. First of all, you know, I really complicate our understanding of gentrification, and I show gentrification is not inevitable, right? It’s not this sort of first of all. It’s not this kind of natural force, but also it’s something that can start slowly but fail, right? Fail to transform a neighborhood. It can be something that starts as early gentrification. We see in a lot of other places too that gentrification often starts in the seeds of disinvestment. These things are closely connected. We see often that it starts with kind of poor artists, you know, people that are not necessarily rich themselves. We see a lot of commonalities of gentrification with what happened in Brightmoor, but in Brightmoor it did not turn a neighborhood in this gentrified space. You’re interested in gentrification, I think it’s a great way to kind of think more deeply about that. And then second of all, you know, and I think I’ve sort of talked about it a lot already, but is that we don’t talk enough about neighborhood decline and the experience of decline and what that means for people and what it means for their biographies and their opportunities in life and in their neighborhood.

So I really show in this book like what it’s like to to live through decline and how that really shapes people’s outlooks and sort of everyday experience of decline beyond the headlines, right? Beyond the sort of oh, stray dogs are roaming the street. There’s no street lights. Like it’s very different to live through that on a day-to-day basis. As I said, my book is driven really by story. So you will get to meet a lot of residents of Brightmoor. They will bring you to you know no church. They will bring you to soup kitchen. You’ll kind of walk along with them to and and and see them over multiple years as well to really get a sense of their perspective and and how they see Brightmoor and you know have dreams and hopes for Brightmoor. I think if you look at a photo like this, you know of Brightmoor as an outsider, you may think, oh, this is just an empty field. It’s overgrown, you know. It’s desolate, but for residents of Brightmoor, this corner is full of stories, right? Many of them may remember. Some of them may remember, you know, may have their childhood home was on this block, right? So they remember walking to school here. They remember when there was a sidewalk here before it was overgrown. The place remains really inhabited by a lot of these stories, even though there’s no memorials to the population, right? It’s kind of a slow loss of place and of identity that people experience in places like this. But residents, you know, held on to these memories in their own ways. And another really important insight is that they held on to their urban identities, right? I think for a lot of outsiders, they may say this place is not even an urban neighborhood anymore, but a lot of Detroiters were very strongly feeling their identity as Detroiter and as urban, and that sort of really inspired people’s imaginaries too of what Brightmoor could be again. And for many people, they had stuck it out through the hard times, so they wanted to be around to see the good times too, right? So it sort of you’ve invested so much time in this place, you don’t want to leave before you know it may turn around, right? So like that’s a really difficult kind of relationship to place. In the end, and I think Josh may talk a little bit about this too, and maybe the reverend, you know, in the end, Brightmoor did not gentrify. Like it didn’t turn into this urban farming paradise. It didn’t turn into this, you know, middle-class neighborhood, but also it didn’t quite live up to sort of the urban dreams of a lot of long-timers either. I think it’s the story of Brightmoor is still in process, but I think an interesting thing that I refer to in the conclusion of my book is that the city actually neither aligned with, in some ways, with the long-timers nor with the newcomers, and that you know, rather than gentrification, part of Brightmoor will get flooded and will disappear, you know, under what’s you know a new stormwater retention pond, right? So kind of a Lake Brightmoor will emerge in the places of some of the stories that I tell in the book. So I think we’ll talk more about it perhaps in the discussion, but it raises really interesting questions about disinvestment and reinvestment and where is money, what kind of money is available for what, right? And the sort of very difficult issue of like, you know, how to move on from decades of disinvestment and to really construct an inclusive future. So thank you so much, and I look forward to the comments and the discussion.

Rountree  19:35 
Thanks so much, Sharon. I am just really struck by how beautiful it is when you combine rigorous academic data-driven insights and the deep qualitative work that you did to really understand the individual and community experience of Brightmoor. It just creates a really powerful picture. Yeah, you’ve given us a really interesting way of understanding what extreme population decline does to a neighborhood, and I saw the folks in the chat saying, “Wait a second! I do hear shouting out my community. I see I do that. That’s me. And you challenge that assumption that neighborhood change inevitably ends in successful gentrification, whatever that means. That this is not a linear process by any stretch of any imagination. I want to turn now to Reverend Larry Simmons, long-term Brightmoor community leader and executive director of the Brightmoor Alliance. Sharon and Reverend Simmons got to know one another when Sharon was in Detroit, and we’re really not starting a conversation here. We’re picking one up. Larry has been deeply involved in organizing residents and around a community-driven vision for the neighborhood’s future. And Larry, rather than asking you to start over, I’d love to just jump into the conversation that you’ve had with Sharon that plays off of some of what Sharon has been speaking about here, and help us understand what we need to know about the community behind the conditions she’s described, its history, the people who’ve sustained it, and as Sharon said, the dreams that the residents themselves working towards have for themselves.

Simmons 21:08 
Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it, Caitie. I guess what I would say is, like a Rubik’s cube, depends on which side of the cube you stand as to what you see, and what you see is true, even though it’s different. The Brightmoor that I see is a little different than the one Sharon described, and I’m sure that flows out of how we relate to the community, and also flows out of race. Now, race is such an intertwined element in American life, and such a sensitive sore spot, it’s hard to talk about it without igniting emotions, which shut down our analytical effort. So I present this map of Brightmoor to make a couple of points. One, you’ll notice my map is different than Sharon’s because this map was created by the community in a community-wide discussion back in 2010. Every does not buy the map. There are areas of Brightmoor that you look at, like in the lower left corner. That would that’s a community called Castle Rouge. They don’t want to be called Brightmoor. Up at the upper left in the northwest, there’s a community called Riverdale. They don’t want to be called Brightmoor because Brightmoor has a reputation of being poor, and like many poor communities, there are social challenges. This map, however, is what the community, the kids, the young people said was Brightmoor, and then we took it out and shopped it to communities, and they confirmed it. So we’ve used it every since 2010. The second point I want to make here is the depth of poverty that you see on this map. The darker the color, the poorer the area. Now, the area where the farmers lived is the area in the center on the left. It’s census tract 5441, and you’ll notice that it has one of the lowest poverty rate on the map, and that is directly in relation to the phenomenon that Sharon spoke to. However, they only make up probably about 15, maybe 10% of the total population of Brightmoor. What drives Brightmoor is the intense poverty. The median income in Brightmoor is $27,000 a year. The median, the area median income is $71,000 a year. That is a $44,000 difference in the income of families of four in Brightmoor compared to the area, and this level of poverty drives the everyday life of Brightmoorians, and it accounts for a lot of what we see and what Sharon addressed very well. By the way, I might say it’s always funny to see yourself in a book called by another name, but to see yourself and your friends referenced in a book. So I really got a kick out of that, Sharon. But she is very careful to speak to the racial element and the exploitation element. So let me try and summarize this, and you all will know this far better than me. It’s your area of expertise. But the American driving ethic is to move up to the east side. You remember the Jeffersons? Everybody wants to get a good job, hit the number, sell a brick of cocaine, whatever it is you do to make your money, you want to get that money and move into a big house. You want to live in a “good neighborhood.” That driving ethic has pushed American urban life for at least the last century. Brightmoor was built originally, and Sharon mentioned this as a community for White auto workers. It advertised itself as a community for White auto workers and remained predominantly White even through the 1967 civil disturbance up until probably the mid-70s, the mid-80s. It rapidly began to change. But every population that has lived in Brightmoor has been poor. The Whites who preceded the African Americans, the Blacks who live here now, they were poor, comparatively speaking. Now, as auto workers rose in income, they left because they wanted to move up to the East Side. They wanted to go to the new shiny houses in the suburbs in Redford or Southfield or places beyond, and as they left, African Americans came in behind them, lower in income. As their income increased, they left poorer African Americans came in. Finally, there was not a poorer community to replace those who were present, and you began to get the depopulation of which Sharon so eloquent.

This is to say that Brightmoor is changing. It’s changing not because gentrification has failed so much as the underlying economic driving force. The original I need some place to sleep when I go to work in the factory, which is not far away from where Brightmoor is at Ford to the successors who also worked in the factory, and then to the poor who needed a place to live, and Brightmoor offered low-rent districts. At one point 10 years ago, you could rent a house in Brightmoor for $200 a month. That has its own dynamic. But this poverty is now quietly, very subtly being replaced. This house you see here is on a corner near where I pastored for 25-23, years, and where I currently work with the Brightmoor Alliance. I’ve been here in this neighborhood 27 years, and this house on the is the same house on the left that you see on the right. Some entrepreneurs came in, bought it, stuck a cap on it, framed it, painted it, and put it up for sale for $199,000. Now you know that house is not built to sell to people making $27,000 a year because people making that kind of money can’t get a mortgage for $199,000 a year. Let’s just say $200,000. So this kind of subtle change you see beginning to happen at different places in Brightmoor.

This is where I will end. I want to leave you with this idea. Even poor people have dreams, and they have phenomenal aspirations for their children. I’ve been involved in community and political work for over 50 years. I have never met a parent, Black, White, Asian, Middle Eastern, who did not aspire for their children to do better than they had. Today, only one person out of six gets who’s born in poverty gets out and stays out as an adult. One. That means five people born in poverty are likely to remain in poverty and to bear children who, in turn, are born in poverty. The Brightmoor Alliance goal is six out of six. Yeah, it’s a big hairy. I’m a minister, so I can’t say that apart. It’s a big hairy goal. But if we don’t have goals that are big and audacious, then how are we ever going to achieve them? So what I would say to you is, in your communities where they are dismissed as poor, where they are dismissed as other negative stereotypes. Look more closely, and you’re going to find what you see in this picture right here. You’re going to find young people who are working to do better. You’re going to find adults who are working with them to help them do better. Yes, you’ll find the blight. Yes, you’ll find the vacancy. But the thing that gives us hope is that, in spite of all that has been pushed up against those who are poor in America, they still push back and help each other to come up out of that deep hole. I hope that you, in your work, will see them and think about what are the policies that we have to change so that a person making $27,000 a year can have a decent place to live, and their children can hope to rise up out of that poverty. Thank you,

Rountree  28:48 
Reverend Simmons. Thank you. Thank you so much for centering, and Sharon, you as well, for centering this conversation in the real people whose dreams we’re trying to protect and give the opportunity to flourish-it just feels so important. About to turn to, as you said, the you know what kind of policies enable the flourishing of communities like Brightmoor. What does it actually take? Instead of having poverty by design, what does it take to have flourishing by design? But I just I think it’s so important that this conversation is rooted in the beautiful faces and hopes and dreams of of the community of Brightmoor. And with that, I’m going to introduce my colleague Josh Silver, a senior fellow at NCRC and one of the country’s leading experts on the Community Reinvestment Act. Josh is really going to help us think about not just how we move money into a community like Brightmoor, but how do we actually make sure that those resources, that capital, actually helps more than one out of six children move out of poverty. How do we actually make sure that flourishing is a result of the ways that that money moves in communities? Josh has spent decades working on how communities can use CRA and leverage it and other forms of bank accountability to influence where capital goes and who it serves. It’s been a privilege. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him over the years. Josh, I’m really excited for you to help us connect what we heard from Sharon and Larry to the systems and levers that help shape investment in a community like Brightmoor. So I’ll turn it over to you.

Silver 30:14 
Well, thank you, Caitie. And it’s been an honor, both Sharon and Pastor Simmons. This is a great webinar. Thank NCRC for doing this. I’ll give a plug for Sharon’s book. I hope people can see it. It’s really well done. Ethnography is one of my favorite things. Let me segue from the pasture. And actually, I just mentioned real quick. Detroit has a special place in my heart. I worked there as a young man out of college, 1987, working for the United Automobile Workers Union, and I met my wife in Detroit. So it’s a very formative city for my life. Just love the spirit and the history of Detroit. So Brightmoor motivates me to think about the Community Reinvestment Act and how it can help bottom-up development and how it can help people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and to not be in poverty anymore, to lead a comfortable life. And one thing that Sharon documents is this is a neighborhood where the housing market is basically collapsed. There, she couldn’t enter the mortgage market. There are no lenders making mortgages in the area. So how can you help people when Sharon talks about when the furnace breaks or the pipes burst? Could banks offer unsecured consumer loans or credit cards or other affordable loan products to help residents fund repairs? They often did not have the money to fund these basic repairs, and they would face homelessness in some cases. And CRA is supposed to encourage banks to respond to community needs. So even though it’s not a housing market, can banks get in there and really help people remain in their homes? And you heard Sharon talk towards the end of her presentation, and I couldn’t believe this when I read the book. A lake, and it’s not really even a pretty lake that they were thinking about in Brightmoor to deal with stormwater and flooding. Will this really help the neighborhood, or will it just displace people? One alternatively, could banks engage in financing green space and parks so the kids have a place for recreation? And banks can get favorable consideration on CRA exams for doing things like this. And how about a community plan led by organizations like Pastor Simmons and other community-based organizations to really involve the neighborhood in developing their own community plan, which will then be financed by banks and other institutions.

And we know now the 800-pound gorilla in the room is now the proposed changes to CRA by two of the federal agencies, the FDIC and the OCC. And NCRC will be doing more presentations and will provide more materials. But I will mention a couple of things. One thing is when you are changing what banks have to be examined for, and you are taking hundreds of banks and saying they no longer have responsibilities for doing community development financing. Community development financing is for things like affordable housing or green space. Is this going to help communities? So there’s a comment period that is now open, and I encourage you to use NCRC’s materials to comment. And one specific thing, one aspect of this proposal is what counts for revitalization and stabilization. These are large-scale projects, projects like revitalizing Main Street or putting in a park or putting in a lake. Banks can get credit for this, but if these projects are not done with community input, they threaten to displace the community. And there is one aspect of revitalization criteria: the agencies are now saying you no longer have to document that the projects will help retain residents or keep residents in a neighborhood. This is a very bad change, and it could result in things like the stormwater storage facility that may not benefit communities and may not benefit Brightmoor and may displace residents. And actually, I wrote a blog about that very thing-the revitalization and stabilization criterion on the CRA exam. So, if that’s of particular interest for you. Look it up and comment about that. And this slide just reiterates the importance of not giving banks favorable consideration for large-scale projects that end up displacing community residents.

Also, Dan Immergluck, a colleague of ours, wrote a really terrific book about this in Atlanta called “Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in 21st-Century Atlanta.” He talks about a transit line that is basically a circle. It’s called the Belt Line, and how that was not really planned with community input and did facilitate. You know, some gentrification is good if you can keep the long-term residents in the neighborhood, but if gentrification is primarily resulting in displacement. Not good. That’s one thing that documents in this book. So I just want to mention as well a CRA. There was a lot of discussion in the 2000s because that was the subprime lending crisis, predatory lending. And Sharon talks about one out of three residents in Brightmoor being displaced in the wake of subprime lending and foreclosure crisis. You know when Congress passed a law, 2010, Dodd-Frank, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. A little too late, right? And you just need a law and regulations on the federal level to say do not make loans beyond a borrower’s ability to repay. Sounds very simple. Do not make loans beyond a borrower’s ability to repay, passed in 2010. Little too little, too late. That’s why it’s important for advocates to keep doing what we’re doing, and hopefully the next time the intervention is sooner. And also, Sharon talks about local policy. The forbearance and property tax policies in the city of Detroit did not help residents of Brightmoor stay in their houses. How about forbearance and property tax relief, so people could pay back gradually rather than being displaced from their homes? So policy has a huge impact on whether we’re going to change to one out of six who live in poverty and instead who escape poverty. One out of six, and instead let’s try to make it more like six out of six-an audacious goal, but let’s keep fighting and try to get there. I look forward to the discussion.

Rountree  36:26 

Thank you so much, Josh. And before we get to questions, I do want to underscore Josh’s invitation. You can find NCRC’s resources for understanding the CRA rule proposal and taking action at ncrc.org/cra. We put that link in the chat, and we also have a deeper public briefing coming on Friday, September 18 at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. But for today, I want to bring all three of you back to the larger question Brightmoor puts in front of us, and we’ll take a couple of Q and A from the audience as well. Sharon and Larry, you two have been in conversation about Brightmoor for a long time, and from very different vantage points. You’ve alluded to the ways that you learn from one another, but I just I would love to hear just specifically something you’ve each learned to see differently because of the other person’s perspective. And Sharon, I’ll let you start.

Cornelissen  37:12 
No, that’s a that’s a great question. I mean I’ve been to the Reference Church services as well, and to the Pride More Alliance meetings. So the the Brightmoor Alliance is the community organization that he’s led for so long. I really appreciate his creativity in sort of getting maps, you know, getting maps together, getting community input. How do we get how do we get people to show up to meetings to begin with, right? Because it’s often a problem with community organizing. It’s the loudest voices in the room are not necessarily the one that represent community, and I think just sort of seeing his work day in day out, you know, is very inspiring for me. Is sort of okay. How do we like engage all of these people and truly, because Brightmoor is very complicated and it has many different constituents and a lot of different perspectives and there’s a lot of disagree. There’s not one story about Brightmoor, so I think I really learned that from the Reverend. And I want to flag too that I appreciate his perspective on sort of centering poverty in thinking about you know how to create pathways out of poverty from a very young age, right? To kind of focus on the children as well and sort of think about that. Whereas I think the instinct of people like me and Josh is often to also kind of step back and think big, right? But it’s also important to be the community organizer and to say, well, how can I get this this child get get here, right? Like, what are specific local interventions that we can do now to kind of break through this cycle?

Simmons  38:41 
What I would appreciate, I would say, and this is from the moment that I met Sharon, I appreciate the way she respected the community. So often, when people come to interact, and people come a lot to interact with the residents of Brightmoor, is I call it the zoo visit. You know, they come like they’re to watch animals in the zoo. Now I’m sure they’re far more harsh than anybody ever intends, but they think that those people, those folks, and I’m not just this is Black people as well as White and others. But Sharon came with a respect for the people who are there and a respect for the fact that, in spite of all the difficulties and challenges, they are solving the fundamental problems that every human being, whether you’re Elon Musk or Enrique Montague, you got to get three pounds of food a day, every day, and not just for you, but for all of the members of your family. And the folks who are in Brightmoor are doing that, and Sharon respected them, and you can see it in the way she speaks of them in her book. I deeply, deeply appreciate that because so often that is not the case. The other thing I think is important is is the systemic approach or the ecological approach. Things are rarely one thing in society, and she does a great job of. Different elements of the sociology going on in Brightmoor with with some of the economic, but I would say the one thing that I want to say here, and I hope that the folks who are listening will take this as a personal challenge. America has no prosperity policy. We talk about poverty, which is really looking at the empty part of the glass, but we don’t have a policy for every family in America to prosper. There is no coherent systemic community. What, for example, we have a policy to equip electric cars. We’ve gone from almost zero stations to charge an electric car to what a couple of million of them in a matter of five years; we have a policy to facilitate driving cars. We have millions of miles of paved road. That’s a lot of concrete and asphalt. Those are representative of a policy, a community-wide accepted policy. What is the paved road for? For those who are challenged to live a decent life, we have to engage this, and we have to, I guess, can’t ever put our feelings away. But we have to allow that our feelings may be getting in the way of our intention, and look to each other and say, all of us will benefit. Can you imagine, for example, if there was really a national housing policy to build sufficient homes so every person in the United States could live in a decently conditioned, safe home. We put millions of people to work. It would have billions, trillions of dollars of spin-off money. A national policy like that would more than just house people. It would create prosperity for people. It’s way beyond my pay grade, but you all get paid. You all are smart. Y’all can do that.

Silver  41:46 
Hey, Caitie, real quick, I want to just segue real quick off of Pastor Simmons’ remarks, and I think prosperity policy. I think that’s brilliant, and I think that we need candidates that have a vision like that and talk about prosperity policies, and what I’ll mention real quick is the Community Reinvestment Act. I regard as building wealth, building individual and community wealth through home ownership and small business ownership and community facilities. And I’ll mention real quick. I will plug my own book here, Ending Redlining. That’s the first two words of it through a community-centered reform of the Community Reinvestment Act, and the idea is that we need a reform of CRA that’s community-centered that promotes bottom-up development, and that is the best way to build wealth in this society. And amen to a national housing policy. That’s actually what one of my favorite elected officials, Senator Elizabeth Warren, she actually had bill that would have created a national housing policy and national and federal funding for that, as well as modernizing the Community Reinvestment Act. So, you know, let’s just work together to support efforts like that.

Rountree  42:56 
Thank you, and Sharon, Larry, Josh, thank you so so much. We’re just about out of time. I wish we had more time for questions, the more conversation happening in the chat. But I want to thank you each for not only sharing your expertise but helping us to look at the same place from three really different vantage points, but with such aligned hopes for the Brightmoor community and for communities like it across the country. I want to leave us with something that I think was running through this whole conversation, and that’s that reinvestment isn’t just the opposite of disinvestment. Putting capital back into a community doesn’t by itself repair what decades of disinvestment have done, right? The harder question is whether that capital actually supports the people who are already there, responds to what they say they need their hopes and dreams, and expands their power to shape what comes next. And that’s a question that Brightmoor raises particularly clearly, but it’s not unique to Brightmoor. And at a moment when the rules governing community investment are themselves being reconsidered, these aren’t abstract theoretical questions. We need communities to be part of deciding what those rules require and what meaningful reinvestment should actually look like. So put one more time some resources to point you towards to help us to defend CRA to make sure that the proposed rule changes do not weaken our ability to make sure that capital serves communities and give you some ways to get involved in there. Thank you again to Sharon, Larry, and Josh, and thank you to all of you for spending this hour with us. We will be sharing the recording and slides afterwards with all who registered for the event. Thank you.