Dear readers,
This summer has flown by. It’s hard to believe that the fall semester is just around the corner. As you may have noticed, it’s been a little while since I’ve published here — and I promise I have a good excuse. I’ve been so busy writing other publications!
In this brief update, I want to feature some of that other writing. But first, just marvel with me at this picture:
And also, when I say the expanded Child Tax Credit needs to be made permanent, here’s one graph explaining why:
Oh, and one more image to ponder:
The Reason I’ve Been So Busy…
Okay, so new writing.
First, I’m delighted to share my major summer side project. Capita is a think-tank style organization devoted to family wellbeing. For Capita, I wrote deeply researched and reported article entitled Reimagining Place-Based Policy and Social Welfare: The City of Chester as a Case Study. My article is equal parts political philosophy, sociological commentary, urban history, and policy wonk manifesto. The first portion critiques neoliberal approaches to poverty, the middle part highlights the city of Chester as emblematic of the challenges facing many cities across America, and my final section suggests concrete policy initiatives that can help impoverished communities leverage assets to build long-term wealth.
A quote from the intro:
As a nation, we are bad at thinking about poverty as a place-based reality. Our defining stories about wealth and upward mobility emphasize the individual absent any kind of ecosystem, physical or social. But when we step back to ask about the context of poverty, we start to see a more complex story that involves failing infrastructure, lack of public spending, restrictive zoning codes, and other such factors. Together, these factors inhibit efforts to attract new businesses while cutting off communities from important capital flows in adjacent prosperous areas.
And a quote from the final section, indicating policy solutions to concentrated place-based poverty:
Places like Chester require asset-based development that leverages existing assets to build communal wealth. Creating wealth-generating assets (or revitalizing underused assets) generally requires a combination of public and private investment working in tandem. For example, to respond to a food desert in North Tulsa, leaders worked together to create Oasis Fresh Market, a for-profit entity tied to a nonprofit and made possible via “investment from the Tulsa Development Authority, the city of Tulsa through HUD's Community Development Block Grant program, and various philanthropic organizations.” This asset provides everything from food to employment opportunities, while potentially generating local tax revenue that can be invested in other areas of development, including creating or revitalizating more assets.
Second, I co-authored a report for Brookings focused on labor markets and manufacturing in Mobile, Alabama. The manufacturing industry - particularly in areas like aerospace, robotics, and steel - employ a large chunk of the population, and offers some of the highest wages, particularly for workers with postsecondary education. But our research finds startling racial disparities in wages, across the education spectrum.
This analysis shows that simply increasing the number of workers with degrees in manufacturing, while important for boosted wages, cannot eliminate the racial earnings gap. Indeed, this data demonstrates that Black workers are forced to get a college or trade school degree just to achieve equity with non-Black workers without a degree. And when you combine this with the realization that Black students are likely taking on debt to finance these degrees, it becomes evident that it will take more than an increase in degrees to uproot the racism that is stealing wages from Black workers.
Third, I co-wrote an oped for Brookings entitled ‘40 acres and a mall’: How community ownership models can preserve economic power in Black neighborhoods. This article -outlines the challenges of devaluation and disinvestment and displacement - which form reinforcing cycles that undermine Black prosperity. We then provide concrete models for a how to respond to those cycles in a way that leverages development without leading to gentrification.
Community ownership is a tool that can reset the board by creating development without displacement. The term refers to an array of models and initiatives—including land trusts, co-ops, and community investment trusts—that allow like-minded residents to create a defined “community” (of varying geographic size) as a legal entity able to purchase property to be used according to agreed-upon purposes that benefit the community.
As Brookings presented in a recent research brief, community ownership has many economic, social, and civic benefits. In addition to preventing renters from being priced out—either through tightly concentrated development or fire sales of real estate—community ownership provides decisionmaking power to people who are often otherwise shut out of political processes and development initiatives. By giving residents a stake in their community’s future, protected by law, community ownership models encourage active citizenship.
Finally, I helped pen an additional report for Brookings focused on a university-led remedy to place-based discrimination in Richmond, Va.:
As local communities across the country experience such racial reckonings, universities are helping provide the historical research needed to contextualize contemporary racial disparities in wealth, health, and education. In this report, we draw on that university research as well as our own analysis to show how the legacy of encoded racism manifests itself spatially to limit opportunity in the Richmond metro area’s disadvantaged neighborhoods. We then explore how university partnerships can aid the city’s efforts to come to terms with its past while simultaneously boosting outcomes for disadvantaged Black-majority communities.
I have not had a lot of down time to put ideas together for this newsletter. But I’m seeing a lot of themes emerge as topics I plan to write about in future installments including: the role of government spending in macro economics and the need for public investment in struggling places; the power of basic exploratory statistics in helping identify problems and better understand disparities; and the philosophical shortcomings of the neoliberal project, considered from economic, social, and political vantage points.
For now, I hope you will dig into the pieces I’ve linked here. I’ll be writing more soon, I promise!
What I Am Reading Elsewhere:
Citylab has a disturbing report on how private citizens and groups (like homeowner associations) are using big tech to aid law enforcement in surveillance. Pair with this investigative report from Vice on an app that invites vigilantism.
In Church Life Journal, professor Matthew Shadle (Marymount University) has an important article entitled, Exposed Before Digital Omniscience: A Theological Reading of Surveillance Capitalism.
Urbanist writer Addison Del Mastro has an excellent article in Real Clear Policy exploring how Pennsylvania Is a Microcosm of America's Housing Crisis
In The Atlantic, Ed Zitron has an oped titled Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future that is chock-full of salient quotes. My favorite of which is this: “When you hire someone, you’re (supposedly) hiring them to do a job in exchange for money. But the anti-remote crowd seems to believe that the responsibility of a 9-to-5 employee isn’t simply the work but the appearance, optics, and ceremony of the work."