I’ve been working on a book with Rosa Lee. Our working title is This Shit Works — And Why It Matters.
One of my tasks has been compiling case studies of economic justice solutions, projects like
- Buy Back the Block, which enables average people in poor neighborhoods to become owners of commercial real estate in their own communities;
- ways to make deeply affordable housing more accessible;
- ways to invest in local businesses owned by low- and moderate-income people; and
- ways to subvert redlining and other forms of systemic racism.
Through Neighborhood Economics conferences, we gather the people who care about using these replicable solutions. The tools have a track record of creating economic power in the neighborhoods in every city where people die, on average, ten years younger than in the wealthier zip codes just miles away.
The conference helps these innovations propagate. We connect people so the work can spread.
But something has been bothering me.
If these solutions work, why do they produce phase shifts in some places and stall out in others?
Our editorial colleague Kyle Oliver suggested anchoring the book in our earlier work, The Field Guide to Transformation, which outlines the ecosystem of changemakers required to orchestrate change in local economic systems:
System Entrepreneur – Sometimes known as the community quarterback, this catalytic leader is a code-switcher who can talk to capital and power but also listen deeply to community. It’s hard to fund these folks. For example, they don’t own or build the housing, but they make it possible for housing to happen.
Relational Infrastructure Builders – These community pillars send the invites, take the notes, sit in the endless meetings. This is work that gender expectations have often directed to women, so they are sometimes called mother hens. Without their essential work of building trust slowly over time, coalitions fall apart.
Finance Wizard: Someone who actually builds the new capital vehicle or customizes an existing platform to enable new capital to clear up the blockage in the system. The capital created is the hardest to get but the most potentially catalytic in the system
Connected Evangelist — These operators can help open doors for new initiatives. They are comfortable in the Rotary Clubs and boardrooms. They translate the vision into language the powerful understand. Sometimes they can make a bigger ask than the community safely can.
The Prophet — Often coming from a background in social justice advocacy or religious leadership, the prophet helps keep the moral center intact when the horse trading commences.
Anchor Institutions — Hospitals, churches, universities large and hopefully stable operations that aren’t going anywhere and have a vested interest in a thriving community.
But when I overlaid those two lenses (the toolbox and the ecosystem), I realized we were missing a key piece of understanding:
The local ecosystem determines whether the tool-based initiatives can work, or at least flourish.
It all came together for me when I watched a presentation to our local housing task force here in Buncombe County, North Carolina. Hudson Vaughan of the North Carolina Housing Coalition described their work that resulted in a $5 million tax savings in Orange County and a $1 million impact in Durham in historically Black neighborhoods. A state-wide group, this campaign was their first attempt to go deep and local and it worked amazingly well.
Across the country and in nearly every county, poor neighborhoods subsidize the property taxes of rich neighborhoods. In the local places where they worked, Hudson played the role of the system entrepreneur, coordinating more than 300 property reassessments from all sorts of groups while an activist coalition kept the heat on and made tax justice the top issue in the spring county commissioners race.
Property taxes generate roughly $500 billion annually—the single largest revenue source for local governments— and a nationwide analysis found them inequitable in most counties and cities across the country. A property in the bottom 10% by value pays an effective tax rate more than double that of a property in the top 10%. That’s not a local anomaly. It’s structural. Properties in neighborhoods that are 90–100% Black experience assessment levels more than 1.5 times the county average.
As the University of Chicago’s Christopher Berry, who led the nationwide study, put it, “People wouldn’t tolerate this if the system were easier to understand, like the income tax. Because the way property taxes are calculated is murky to many people, the problem has gone unnoticed for a very long time.” To see the problem in your own community, enter your locale in this online tool. But as we’ll see, noticing is not enough.
I’d first learned of this systemic injustice through the analysis and brilliant visual depictions of Asheville’s Joe Minicozzi of Urban3. He is what we call in our Field Guide taxonomy a Finance Wizard, who comes up with a solution that creates economic justice when it’s applied locally. He teamed up with the local chapter of the nonprofit Strong Towns to assemble key data. They produced a compelling narrative about how residents of Shiloh, a historically Black neighborhood displaced to build Biltmore Forest, have been overtaxed by more than $1 million over 20 years. Meanwhile Biltmore Forest was undertaxed by more than $4 million over the same time. It was enough money to pay the salaries of approximately 150 public school teachers, and it was just … gone.
The data was brilliant. The visualizations were shocking. But nothing changed.
Why? Because having the genius who understands the problems and solutions is not enough. Even adding the layer of compelling messaging is not enough. When you need to change public rules, you need organized, interracial, interfaith, activist power. Vaughan’s work, and that of his partners, had it. They also flipped a county commissioner’s race; with an outsider advocating tax justice beating an incumbent who ran against anything that would raise taxes among the affluent when new assessments required them to pay their fair share.
When they brought in Minnicozi to San Antonio to try to shift the unfair system after he presented at the Neighborhood Economics conference there, the situation seemed promising at first. Local community foundations engaged big time. The Spurs NBA team hosted a public meeting. Banks said they’d work toward consensus. But nothing changed. The strategy of trying to get the establishment to uproot a long standing unfair practice that benefitted affluent neighborhoods at the expense of poor neighborhoods has stalled and appears to be dead.
Recall that in Orange County, North Carolina, it was a multiracial interfaith coalition who took on tax fairness. They made it a central election issue. They had all the bases covered from an ecosystem perspective. That’s organized power aligned with moral authority.
There was also a massive move toward tax justice in Chicago, but that time around Minicozi had hired a tax assessor from another city who knew how to penetrate and infiltrate all the levels of government, from the top down through the desks in the bureaucracy where the actual property assessments are made. The result of that patient, multi-year initiative was $1.9 billion in unfair taxes borne by poor people lifted under the new system.
So the breakthrough is this: The book can’t just be about tools. Initiatives that lean too heavily on the technical and financial innovation alone are unlikely to break through. We have to do the forensic ecosystem analysis of conditions under which tools produce the phase shifts we’re looking for.
Stories are not enough. The establishment can’t do it, or won’t. A patient strategy of changing from within, linked to a reformer with a goal can do it (see: Chicago), but that’s not simple. But a grassroots initiative, linked to a multiracial, interfaith set of activists, with someone playing the role of the system entrepreneur to coalesce all the initiatives, can get it done.
So for the case studies in our new book, we’ll be asking:
- What solution were leaders building around?
- Which ecosystem roles were present? Which were missing?
- Did the effort require market action, rule changes, or both?
- Was organized power aligned with technical expertise?
- What triggered, or prevented, the shift?
These innovations are modular. They stack. But whether they work in a place depends not just on financial innovation and scaling but on ecosystem alignment.
Neighborhood Economics is not just about spreading tools. It’s seeding quarterbacks, connecting mother hens, introducing prophets to evangelists, aligning data with organized power.
Transformation in local economic justice is possible, but only when the invisible architecture of change can be built out and coordinated.
This forensic ecosystem analysis is now the spine of the book. We’ll keep you posted on what we’re learning.