Background You Need to Know
One key principle that the team at Neighborhood Economics has taken from our experience in building SOCAP, the impact investing and social enterprise conference we started and ran for a decade, is finding the valuable strangers and helping them become unlikely allies.
That principle is one reason SOCAP became the largest impact investing and social enterprise conference in the world – because all of the competing conferences were trying to gather the right people in the room. We made it our business to find the people who were not in the room, the groups not on the radar, who could become the unexpected allies and could help our core group achieve their goals.
We learned the language of and brought in international development agencies like America’s US AID and DIFID from the UK, and helped them learn how to understand the new players on the block: impact investors. They learned to co-invest to solve social problems around the world, and they worked to create economic justice.
Similarly, we supported the early efforts at gender-lens investing, working with the late Suzanne Biegel to both channel more money to women-led ventures and to help overcome the bias that kept women from getting funded like their male counterparts.
When we started Neighborhood Economics, it was to create a platform to channel money and attention to people that weren’t getting funding at SOCAP. For example, in 85% Black Jackson, Mississippi, at our most recent conference, the focus was largely on the racial wealth gap.
In San Antonio, which is 64% Hispanic, we are going to highlight innovations like that of Hello Just which is launching a fund to enable the mostly immigrant women in their savings circles to use philanthropic dollars to get down payments for homes, in order to fight displacement. That fund follows a model created by the Dearfield Fund for Black Wealth, funded by Gary Community Ventures, in Colorado.
That is an illustration of a fundamental element in our methodology; we are a national conference with a local focus. Our goal is to enable and shine a light on the replicable innovations that bring economic power to those who have typically been without it.
The Main Point
All of that is a long explication of our approach to get to the point of this story: the next group of valuable strangers we want to bring onto our platform is the new urbanists, represented by our new partner, Strong Towns, and their founder, Chuck Marohn.
With nearly 5,000 paying members around the country, Strong Towns are the people who advocate at City Hall in zoning and planning meetings for walkable neighborhoods. They advocate to stop highway expansions that destroy neighborhoods. They also typically have half a dozen members who work in city halls, in those departments that plan what the city will look like next.
Their website has more than a million views a year, and they publish newsletters and how-to guides. Marohn hosts their weekly podcasts; the latest one says Strong Towns is Jane Jacobs in action. Jacobs was the author and activist whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities pointed out how urban renewal was responsible for the death of neighborhoods.
The core issue of Strong Towns is not economic justice, but fair and transparent taxation as a way to create thriving communities their children will want to move back to. And researching transparent taxation has made them aware that poor neighborhoods are subsidizing rich neighborhoods when it comes to property taxes.
Rich neighborhoods are being taxed far below the value of their homes, while poor neighborhoods are being overtaxed. Strong Towns has discovered that this injustice is historic; it’s been going on systematically since just after the great depression, in the Black and brown neighborhoods that were denied the low-cost, government-backed mortgages and GI loans after World War II.
In one of their new interdisciplinary projects, Just Accounting for Health, their message is clear: “The property tax system is broken, and together we can fix it.” Their videos make their case really well, like this one, “How Our Property Tax System Robs The Poor to Pay For The Wealthy.”
This is not a white savior project. Rob Thomas and the Asheville Racial Justice Coalition are also founding members of Just Accounting, and the initiative is supported by Dogwood, the foundation created when the local hospital sold.
Here is why this partnership, why their inclusion in our conference platform designed to bring together all the people repairing local economies, is significant: they are the people who already know how to advocate for local change within the city system. They show up at the zoning and planning meetings and speak up at the hearings. Theologians Walter Brueggemann and Willie James Jennings have both said that, among the most significant actions for local justice, showing up as advocates for the poor makes a difference.
As Jennings says, the people who only take the bus don’t have the time to show up when the city decides at a planning meeting to cut the bus routes or when a developer wants to launch a project that will displace them.
The work of economic justice can best be accomplished when the privileged with access and influence speak up on behalf of those victimized by systemic injustice, joining the voices of community members who have been experiencing the injustice for years and are working to change it.
The privileged play the role of the connected storyteller in our taxonomy; they are comfortable in the corridors of power and money, can tell the community’s story in those rooms, and can open the doors to let the people experiencing the injustice be heard in ways that would not happen without their access.
Strong Towns members are in those meetings. And their resolve that they need to stop the property tax system from robbing the poor to pay for the wealthy is, therefore, really significant. We welcome the new urbanists of Strong Towns; there are 40 members in San Antonio and more in Austin and hundreds across Texas.
As you can see, partners are joining in this work, and their tools are replicable in your towns. Join us in San Antonio to gather tools and make connections, to join with unlikely allies to make a difference in your local economy.