David Brauer wrote:
WM: That is an aggregate figure, too. Singly, some neighborhoods went over the 52% mark. My neighborhood spent most of its money on housing. A huge portion of that was used to contend with, originally, 83 vacant/boarded houses; this number changed during the process. We could not even say much about affordable or any other kind of housing until we had a handle on the vacant/boardeds. I don't keep all the NRP paper for fear of becoming a fire hazard house, but my sense of the original mandate was to deal with housing issues. This is not to say that no money went to helping less wealthy people get decent housing, but it did take 2 or 3 years to dispose of questions around most of those houses, dispose of about half those houses, and refurbish the rest of them. The next part was to arrange for in-fill housing. Where we failed our failures were around helping people correct delayed maintenance issues. Because our minority families have, in general, lower incomes, they could not make those corrections in the first years of NRP. If more low income families and renting families had been recruited to the process there would definitely have been either a different approach to prioritizing issues or a several-pronged approach..... It's all relative, but housing was still by far the biggest chunk of NRP spending...to within 80% of the target. And everyone - thanks in part to the press doing its job - knows that the first half fell short. City leaders and neighborhood leaders all know the 52 percent must be hit - it's state law. I'd say even if NRP is mortally wounded, the money must be found to meet the housing goal.
Certainly, the falloff (from majority to plurality) is not enough toWM: This program cannot be called a failure. You cannot take the approach that because everything was not perfect therefore the outcomes were trash. The best you can do is compare the outcomes to the approved plan--with addenda--and see if the targeted work was performed and if the work performed appreciably improved the neighborhood. If you can stroll down the streets of your neighborhood and observe changes that have improved it and tie those changes to the NRP, to that extent your plan worked. If your school, park, library, traffic, lighting, crime stats have improved and you can tie it to your NRP plan, you made headway. On another, and much more important level, if your neighborhood is getting more neighborly and you know and have learned to trust more of your neighbors, if you can sit down and discuss or stand up and debate how to move forward at this juncture, then you have gained a lot through the process. Better yet, if the characteristics of your neighborhood have been proportionally represented through the process, then you got a major win. As a corollary, the poorer your neighborhood, the greater the problems and the number of problems, the smaller will be the amount of headway made. The more mixed, demographically or housing/industry/commercial property, the smaller will be your headway. Too, it will also take longer to see the results of the effort.
pronounce the program a failure.
At the same time, cutting a 20 year program at the halfway mark definitely gets in the way of quantifying the results. Neighborhoods prioritized issues, pushing some into the second half of the NRP and expecting to look at their progress to date and reevaluate their original long term plan against what they had accomplished in the first half of the NRP. If the program is cut to ribbons, that possibility dies with it.
Those of us who are saying that low income people of color (and low income people as well) were not adequately represented in the first go-round, this is the time to correct that mistake and work really hard at getting low income and people of color, renters, etc. involved. This is the time to say, "we need your input too, if this plan is to have equal benefits for you as well."
In neighborhoods like Near North, Central, Phillips and others, the cost of organizing will go up because, unlike 10 years ago, the demographics have changed markedly. Ten years ago we had virtually no Somalis and very few Latinos. Now we need translators and bi-lingual organizers.
I think a case can be made that the NRP should concentrate on efforts now in progress and on a much more thorough job of organizing so that the second phase can improve upon the first.
WM: Therein lies the crux of the matter. How do you level the playing field? What has to be in place so that the only people left without input are those who have turned you down flat on any number of occasions? That is one place where my neighborhood fell down big time. Too much of the demographic was left out of the organizing....I do think that the hurdle for NRP involvement is huge. There's no doubt that the time requirements needed to sit on any board - neighborhood, NRP, or elective office - are tougher on the poor, who are disproportionately minority.
WM: One of the reasons people vote is that they were raised in families where people voted. I was lucky that way. All my grandparents were immigrants, they knew the value of voting and instilled it in their children. The schools did as well. As did the church. And the political parties. I don't get the sense that civic responsibility and rights are drummed into kids heads on a regular basis these days. I left high school thinking that if one more person told me the point was to "render unto Caesar...." I was gonna explode. I remember Precinct Captains from political parties calling people on their failure to vote and those people being stuttery and embarrassed by being caught out.HOWEVER, this is a problem throughout society. The Minneapolis City Council, elected by the people, is disproportionately white. Voting is disproportionately white - but is voting (except in Florida) biased? I'd say not - there are no racist barriers to entry, no poll tax, no lack of registration drives, no unequal treatment whatever.
The point of the matter is that more than adequate initiatives to make sure that people become voters and involved in civic life have to be put in place. These folks cannot see that anything has ever improved their lot, so it will take extra effort to change that particular mind-set. To date, that extra effort has not been applied in some neighborhoods, whether it's all neighborhoods or just some neighborhoods, I cannot say.
WM: My question is not involved in quotas per se. However, if the initial organizing efforts for the NRP did not get to low income, low income people of color, renters, etc. then the fact that a neighborhood doesn't get within hailing distance of a quota is a big concern. When you realize that huge numbers of low income people of color (this does not include immigrant communities) will not open their doors or their ears to white people, then you need a different approach than white organizers. Freeport West did an organizing effort once in which African American organizers got together in people's homes with the home's residents inviting the group in to talk about their issues. They found out a lot more about issues facing people in the areas where they worked than the NRP organizers discovered (I speak only about my neighborhood). To me that's telling and clearly suggests that different sub-cultures are more comfortable and forth-coming in different settings. Ergo, big neighborhood meetings may not draw the people whose information you need to hear.I think in other contexts, Michael would oppose a quota system, since it denies individual initiative. Yet he appears to be advocating this here.
WM: Not speaking for Michael, but for myself, decision-making that approached the demographics of my neighborhood would be a good thing.t's your preferred system of decision-making, Michael? What would have all groups equally represented?
WM: I don't think the poll was a fair test. I think the test is whether or not the outcomes were equal to or superior to the investment to date--and I mean all the investment, including putting a dollar amount on each volunteers time. It might take a number cruncher like Carol Becker or someone to even attempt such a comparison.From the Star Tribune pre-election poll, 9/23/01, page 1a:"Voters were overwhelmingly supportive of continued funding for the Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP), with 77 percent saying it should be continued and only 15 percent saying the money could be better spent elsewhere."
WM: Remember that guy Tom ?, played Magnum P.I. on TV? I think he'd been on TV for five or six years before I connected the character to an actor named Selig or Selleck? Some people have their heads in altogether another direction and have no interest in being bothered with NRP or any similar program. The NRP is complex enough so that a casual acquaintance is not a fair test.Even though it appears that many residents think that they have heard of the NRP, I have not seen any evidence that people actually known or understand what the NRP does.
WizardMarks, Central _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
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