© 1997 Washington Post Writers Group

REGIONAL STRATEGISTS AND CDCs:
TIME TO START WORKING TOGETHER

By Neal R. Peirce

All too often, they’ve been like ships passing in the night.

On the one hand are the high-flying regional economic strategists, often people in business-government alliances, figuring how a metropolitan region can develop its niches and make its way in the highly competitive global economy. Their newest game: cultivating promising economic clusters, from computer chips to autos to pharmaceuticals.

And then there are the community development corporations (CDCs) and their allies, looking for ways to create stability and coax jobs into neighborhoods long plagued by deep and persistent poverty.

The regional strategists generally figure: “The poor are someone else’s business, certainly not ours.”

Just as unthinkingly, the community-based organizations have reasoned: “Our hands are full trying to create housing and fight poverty in our own neighborhoods. Leave the regional game to those powerful big guys; they don’t give a hoot about our people anyway.”

Now comes “Growing Together,” a powerful analysis by a socially-attuned, multi-racial Los Angeles-based academic team that argues both attitudes are dangerous cop-outs.

With Hayes Foundation funding, the team examined Los Angeles’ economy and the painfully slow progress of many low-income minorities since the bruising 1992 riots. Then, for comparison, it did an economic study of 73 other regions, giving San Jose (Silicon Valley), Boston and Charlotte special attention.

The study’s conclusions, says project director Manuel Pastor, chair of Latin American Studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, can be boiled down to two critical points:

(1) A region does better when it pays attention to its poor. Across the U.S., the team’s research shows, reductions in center city poverty lead to more rapid income increases for all a region’s people. The conclusion: “Doing good and doing well go hand in hand.”

Los Angeles, indeed, is held up as the model of how not to act. It frittered away the goodwill of the 1984 Olympics, tolerating widening divisions by race, income, geography. The fruit: inner city decay, racial tension, eventually the disturbances of 1992, scaring investors away. L.A. even failed to get an empowerment zone under federal legislation prompted by its own riots.

Even in Los Angeles’ strong immigrant-driven economic recovery of the mid-1990s, neither Mayor Richard Riordan’s New Economy Project nor the Southern California Association of Governments’ regional plan have dealt in a directed, consistent way with job opportunities for low-income minorities. Many Hispanics, and especially African-Americans, are left trailing in the dust.

The Boston region, by contrast, tried hard, especially in the booming ‘80s, to “link” the poor, through such strategies as giving poor neighborhood residents the first shot at jobs on major projects. Charlotte has a model “City Within a City” program to focus municipal efforts on poor areas. San Jose has developed a strong culture of regional business collaboration, slowly but surely starting to include poor communities in its advanced business clustering plans.

The superior performance of all three shows, says Pastor, that American regions can do better. All boats can rise together.

(2) CDCs and their allies will do better if they pay attention to the new economic game in America.

Today’s real economy operates regionally. Since we lack regional governments, informal governance structures that include business, local officials and even universities, are working to stimulate local economies. Yet when those decisions are made, the neighborhoods are rarely represented.

An allied problem, says Pastor: many city poor people actually live cheek-by-jowl with job-rich areas. But they don’t get jobs there? Why?

Of course there’s still discrimination; no one claims prejudice is dead. But it’s also true that neighborhood people are often unconnected to the word-of-mouth networks about job openings.

Pastor and his colleagues -- Eugene Grigsby of the University of California-Los Angeles, Peter Dreier and Marta Lopez-Garza of Occidental College -- argue that CDCs and other neighborhood-building organizations need to focus on scoping out job opportunities, helping their residents hook into the personal job-referral networks, no matter where the jobs may be in the larger region.

CDCs and neighborhood-level leaders, the team found, know well enough that L.A.’s top economic growth clusters are in foreign trade, health, entertainment and electronics. But they know little about emerging regional economic initiatives, new suburban job pools or prospects for sustainable employment; they’re just not at the table when new plans are laid. Their potential input and their creative ideas just aren’t heard.

For a region that works for everyone, that’s intolerable. Given the proven potential of global and regional economic shifts to ravage inner city neighborhoods, their leaders simply must be informed and be ready to find new alliances and take action. Demanding a seat at the regional decision-making tables isn’t some kind of esoteric or diversionary idea; it’s become indispensable.