The Housing Puzzle - Ford Foundation

Another WayBY SUZANNE CHARLÉLeaders of aglobal civilsociety chartan alternativeto globalization.SUZANNE CHARLÉPorto Alegre, Brazil—The delegates, 100,000 from around theworld, shook this southern Brazilian city from its summerreverie. The third World Social Forum, held in the last week ofJanuary, brought together the landless from Brazil; economistsfrom major universities and think tanks; trade unionists fromKorea and Argentina; peace activists from Palestine and Israel;feminists from Italy, Mexico and Chile; and environmentalistsfrom California and Java. They came to discuss the prevailingglobal economic and social order and to devise ways to changeit for the better. Their message: not only is another world possible,it is imperative to create it.When Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva flew in toaddress the gathering, the symbolism couldn’t have been clearer:The former metal worker and labor leader was on his way toDavos, Switzerland, to address the World Economic Forum—agathering of corporate and governmental elites held each January.As the sun set, he spoke passionately of the need to addresshunger,redistribution of wealth and the inequities of global trade.“It’s no accident that the terms of the debate about globalizationhave changed,” says Michael Edwards, author of FuturePositive, International Cooperation in the 21st Century and directorof the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society unit.“There’s an inescapable public debate about the role of corporationsand the distribution of globalization’s benefits, and Ithink that’s largely due to the W.S.F. crew.”In fact, this third gathering of the World Social Forum markeda coming of age. “The first year, the World Social Forum wasmainly anti-Davos,” says Liz Leeds, a program officer in theSuzanne Charlé is a freelance writer based in New York City.Ford Foundation’s office in Rio de Janeiro. “Now it offers alternativesto globalization.”That is what Oded Grajew and Francisco Whitaker had inmind three years ago when they discussed the possibility of settingup a gathering to parallel the Davos meeting. At the time,the World Economic Forum was capturing headlines in newspapersaround the world while protesters heckled behind barbedwire. Grajew is the founder of the Abrinq Foundation for Children’sRights and the Ethos Institute for Business and SocialResponsibility; Whitaker is coordinator of the Justice and PeaceCommission of the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil.The two conceived of another kind of meeting—one wherecitizens could focus on serious alternatives to the global economicmodel. Or, as Grajew says, to stop screaming about whatthey were against and start working toward what they were for.Grajew and Whitaker formed a broad-based organizing committee.It chose Porto Alegre, an industrial port of 1.2 millionin the south of Brazil, as a site because of its socially progressivereputation. (See p. 10.)Organizers expected 500 participants for the first forum in2001 and 20,000 came. This year the event attracted more than100,000 from 156 countries along with some 4,000 accreditedjournalists. (Support from the Ford Foundation enabled manyof its grantees, including those mentioned in this article, toattend the World Social Forum.) At the “Youth Camp”—asprawling city of pup tents that housed some 25,000—studentsfrom Rio, the Hague and other cities slept side by side withfarming families and indigenous leaders who had traveled, somefor as long as three days, from the forests, plains and mountainsof Latin America. In hotels like the Deville and the Plaza8 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

Paul Bradley (right) is vicepresident of the New HampshireCommunity Loan Fund,which has organized trailer parkco-ops and works to improvefinancing and legal protectionfor manufactured housing.Left Dottie Hillock and herhusband are longtime residentsof the South ParrishRoad manufactured housingco-op in New Hampshire.She was named communityvolunteer of the year in 2002.goes awry. Nearly 80 percent of the units are financed more likecars than houses, with personal loans carrying ruinous interestand, often, costly add-ons. Half sit on rented land, so residentshave all the burdens of home ownership—maintenance, insurance,utilities and more—but less than the full benefits. Parkowners can and do raise rents, allow infrastructure to decayand evict people at will. Used homes seldom resell for what theycost, keeping owners from building equity, which is the main waymost U.S. families create wealth.For all these reasons, peoplelike Jim King, executive directorof the nonprofit Federation ofHomePHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVEN RUBINAppalachian Housing Enterprises,wishes manufacturedhomes would disappear. “They perpetuate systemic poverty,”he says. Others argue for reform. “Manufactured housing is notgoing away. For some it’s the only choice,” says Paul Bradley, ofthe New Hampshire Community Loan Fund (N.H.C.L.F.).“Why not capitalize on the strengths and try to minimize theweaknesses?” N.H.C.L.F., more than any other nonprofit groupin the country, has organized park co-ops, lobbied for legal protections,and offered better financing. At least in tiny New Hampshire,a state with 460 manufactured home parks, theseapproaches have worked.The New Hampshire Community Loan Fund has since 1983channeled low-cost capital from donors and investors, such asreligious organizations, to day-care centers, job-creation projectsand low-income housing. Its main ally on manufacturedhousing is the feisty state Manufactured Homeowners and TenantsAssociation (MOTA). In the 1970’s, MOTA waged a successfulcampaign for legislation banning some of the worstlandlord abuses. Nevertheless, many residents felt threatened asout-of-state investors started buying up parks and jacking uprents or threatening to redevelop them into subdivisions or shoppingmalls. In 1984 a 13-unit park in the town of Meredith wasput on the market, and the residents decided to take control oftheir lives by buying it themselves and running it as a cooperative.“At the time, it seemed like a risky idea,” says Brian Tufts, vicepresidentof Laconia Savings Bank. “It was hard to believe theycould put together a working organization.” When banks turnedthem down, N.H.C.L.F. offered financial expertise and a lowcostloan, and the residents made a deal with the owners to buythe park for $38,000. To the amazement of even some N.H.C.L.F.staffers, the plan worked; given access to capital and consultinghelp, residents paid down their debt and fixed broken-downinfrastructure by converting their $25 weekly rents into a communalmaintenance fee. Today residents own the park debtfree—andthe rent is still $25 a week. Within a couple of yearsother parks sought similar help from N.H.C.L.F. Seeing thepotential, N.H.C.L.F. and MOTA lobbied successfully in 1988for a state law requiring park owners to give residents 60 days’notice of any pending sale and allow them to negotiate an equivalentoffer. This was short of a right of first refusal but enoughfor major leverage. Fifty-seven parks have now become co-ops,with more in the pipeline. “God bless the Loan Fund,” says LoisParis, president of MOTA. “We’re pulling away from the lowclass,poor, stupid image. People see we can pay our way just likeany other homeowners.”The co-ops are white-collar businesses run by blue-collarpeople, who tend to be janitors, truck drivers and factory hands.Even a small park may go for around $1 million; in January2002, the 148-unit Pine Ridge Estates near Concord went co-opfor $4.1 million. The figures work because rents generally willalready cover debt service on such sums—and leave a profit. Notone co-op has folded or defaulted on $55 million in loans over19 years. The banks have turned around; they now compete tolend up to 80 percent of a park’s value, and N.H.C.L.F. generallyfronts another 20 percent or more—leveraging that allowsa resident to buy in for an initial fee of just $500 to $1,000.N.H.C.L.F. also helps co-ops apply for funds from federallybacked Community Development Block Grants; many havereceived $300,000 or more to fix long-neglected roads, waterlines or other infrastructure. N.H.C.L.F. provides continuedaccounting and dispute-resolution training for new co-op officers.With a manufactured-housing staff expanded to 11 people,it sends in troubleshooters to mediate when boards eruptinto squabbles, or financial crises develop. “One of the greatparts of this is seeing leaders emerge among people who oftendon’t get a chance,” says Paul Bradley.Dottie Hillock is one. Winchester is one of the state’s pooresttowns; the park where she lives was owned by a localentrepreneur until 1992, when he announced he was sellingout. Dominated by retirees, the park is set among 20 acres of treesand not as poor as two others in town—but the water systemFord Foundation Report Spring 2003 13

‘Personally, I love my mobile home,and I love my park’ says Robb.‘Here you have to get to know yourneighbor, because we’re all on thesame team.’was spitting brown muck, and people feared what the nextowner would, or wouldn’t, do. At a raucous outdoor meetingwith Bradley, a lot of residents were against a co-op—they didnot want the burden of management or an initiation fee. But “anythinking person could see it would be a great thing,” says EleanorWalters, then a 20-year resident. Hillock, known as quiet and shy,thought so too, and she and a few others assembled a groupthat started the South Parrish Road Cooperative with $995,000in loans. Nearly $20,000 of that came interest-free from a halfdozenresidents who had money stashed away. “They saw it wasA Family’s Home,A Family’s WealthTBY GEORGE MCCARTHY AND KATHRYN GWATKINhe affordable housing puzzle continues to torment communitiesand government agencies all over the world,from the dynamited high rises, stressed economies andrapidly changing neighborhoods of cities in the UnitedStates to teeming shantytowns that ring the urban centersof Asia, Africa and Latin America. Typically the issues reflectfailures of public policy and free markets.More often than not, however, failure harbors seeds of success,as it forces learning, rethinking and new approaches. Thatcreates an obvious, and increasingly urgent, role for nonprofitorganizations committed to progressive social change.In recent years, the Ford Foundation, in step with otherresearchers, policy experts and practitioners, has emphasized theidea of asset building, along with income maintenance, as a wayto alleviate poverty. The shift is premised on the idea that buildingpersonal wealth can generate durable changes in people’s livesand enhance their upward mobility. Housing policy and marketsare central to any asset-building strategy. Family wealth mayGeorge McCarthy is a Ford Foundation program officer and Kathryn Gwatkinis a program associate. Both work in the Economic Development unit.good for the park and good for everybody,” Hillocksays. They were paid back first, and within a year.Hillock, who has occupied various board positions,started writing grant applications for money to fix thewater system, sending in what she calls “visual aids”including a jar of the water and a pair of Walter’swhite socks that had been washed in it. They got agrant. For money to turn one empty unit into a meetinghouse, Hillock led the charge at bake sales, turningout pies by the dozens. When one town selectmanreferred to park dwellers as “trailer people,” theyganged up at election time with the two other Winchesterparks and replaced him with Mike Starr, a SouthParrish resident. The co-op enacted rules requiring that peoplemow their lawns and do other regular maintenance. EleanorWalters was taken aback when a committee showed up at herdoor and told her to take down a rotting picket fence, but shecomplied. After all, as a senior resident, she now got to live ona street newly renamed “Walters Lane” on the county map.The two other parks went co-op around the same time but havefaced a tougher climb. On the other side of town, 27 single-wideswere long ago crammed into five acres originally named VillagePark. Erin Robb, a single Winchester native who works in a ball-depend directly on home ownership, and decent affordable housing,whether owned or rented, remains essential to stable familylife, productive employment and steady career development.Articles in this special report on housing examine the workof foundation grantees and others as they confront the complexitiesof policy and market failure, learn from them andsearch for new responses.During the 1980’s and 90’s, Chicago’s massive, high rise publichousing projects—built through partnerships between governmentand private developers in the 1950’s and 60’s, fell victimto inadequate funding for maintenance and management. Theirdeterioration set in motion a selection process, driving out familieswith other options and providing opportunities for some toconsolidate illicit activities because they preferred the anonymityprovided by the dilapidated hulks. Soon the projects becamenotorious as the “natural” result of “concentrations of poverty.”In response, local officials, with national approval and funding,decided to disperse the poor, blow up the buildings andreplace them with lower density, mixed-income developments.Was that the right response? As Chicago struggles forward withits housing plans, foundation-supported researchers are examiningthe experiences of public housing tenants in close detail,seeking answers to crucial questions: Did the decline of the oldprojects really result from concentrations of poverty? And willmixed-income settlement really lead to upward mobility forthe poor? The fate of future billions in public spending, as well14 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

Rick Keller and Paul Bradley of N.H.C.L.F. review a site plan fora new manufactured housing co-op in Barrington, N.H.Opposite Erin Robb with her dog in New Beginning Cooperative,established in 1991 when residents bought out the formerVillage Park with help from N.H.C.L.F.bearing factory, says it was “your typical trailer park” when shebought a repossessed unit in 1989. Unlike South Parrish, it wasdominated by poor, young families, and considerably less stable.“The police were here all the time—there were drunks fighting,wife-beatings, ambulance calls for slashed wrists,” Robb says.“We had one family that had dogs, ferrets, rabbits and snakes. Myyard was all gravel and garbage, most of the roads were dirt.Under my living room window there was an exposed septic tankcovered with plywood. Somebody had a barbecue on it. Nopride.” It was what she could afford, so she moved in.When N.H.C.L.F. helped residents buy Village Park in 1991,things changed, including the name: it became New BeginningCooperative, “because we were making a new beginning,” saysRobb. The town helped get a $137,000 block grant to pave roads,install fire hydrants, bury exposed electric lines and replace a oneinchcopper water main that had been serving all 27 families.Money from raffles and residents’ labor carved out a playgroundon one abandoned lot. Robb, like others, restored her unit withnew plumbing, paint and landscaping. The drunks, wife-beaters,deadbeats and people who did not like following new ruleswere evicted, moved out or conformed. “Personally, I love mymobile home, and I love my park” says Robb, who signed on astreasurer. “Here you have to get to know your neighbor, becausewe’re all on the same team.”But New Beginning is currently on a downswing, in part‘Manufactured housing is not goingaway. For some it’s the only choice,’says Bradley. ‘Why not capitalize onthe strengths and try to minimizethe weaknesses?’because of the soft economy. Some people have lost their jobsand not paid their lot fees for months; a lender foreclosed on onefamily’s unit, and they had to abandon it. Luckier ones havesaved enough to buy a few acres of their own and moved theirunits out, the dream of many, and no one has taken their places.This recently left three empty lots, plus five others with rent inarrears—a heavy bleed on co-op reserves, which have neverbeen very large. “It’s hard; I can’t fault anyone for not paying,as the residents involved, may depend on the answers.Halfway around the world in Vietnam, meanwhile, housingofficials seek ways to help cities cope with millions of landlessand unemployed peasant families who migrate to burgeoningcities for the slim chance of jobs and better lives for their children.Local responses to the new arrivals tend to perpetuatetheir misery, denying them any public services. The authoritiesbelieve that if they provide food, medical assistance and housing,they will attract 10 new migrants for each one they help. Afoundation-supported project in one community challengesthat conventional wisdom, recruiting the homeless themselvesto serve as outreach workers and fielding them in mobile teamsto provide services on the streets. In addition to alleviatingmuch immediate suffering, the project yields invaluable insightinto the actual lives of the migrants in ways that might point tolong-term solutions.Migration of another sort stresses old urban neighborhoodsin a number of U.S. cities, as affluent newcomers purchase desirableold houses and renovate them for upscale living. Whilethis “gentrification” improves the looks and real estate values ofa neighborhood, it may also affect its human character and stability,as rising prices and taxes drive out less affluent longtimeresidents. Foundation-supported groups provide such residentswith legal and other help as well as studying the gentrificationprocess in detail, looking for ways to balance the legitimateinterests of all involved.Residents of rural communities, meanwhile, find themselvestrying to build homesteads and amass some wealth throughthe purchase of manufactured housing—an affordable alternativeto more mainstream, “site-built” homes. While they maybe physically more comfortable than the streets of Ho Chi MinhCity or the high-rise public housing of Chicago, these dwellingsstill offer limited security. Half the families in such units ownthe home but rent the land on which it sits. Many pay exorbitantrents for poorly developed lots that offer bad plumbingand failing septic systems. And though they might not see theirhousing ignored or blown up by public officials, they may be displacedby landowners on short notice, unable to move their“mobile” homes because they are too old to be re-sited. Thesedisplaced families may be forced to sell their homes for scrapvalue and join the legions of the homeless or underhoused inneed of public help. Foundation grantees are studying this phenomenonas well—it is growing at an alarming rate—andhelping some manufactured-home communities gain controlof their land by forming cooperatives.The work supported by the foundation generates a body ofresearch and experience that becomes a basis for nuanced newapproaches. It also opens space for critical questions. When ishomelessness not a housing problem? What is a well functioninghousing market and how can one be achieved? The keys tosolving the housing puzzle lie in a continuing quest for practicalinsight and a humane idea of how people should live. ■Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 15

ut I can’t pay other people’s rent,” says Barbara Robertson,who took over as treasurer after Erin Robb decided she couldn’ttake the stress.Morale, and even compliance with the hours of work thateach family is supposed to contribute on a regular basis forthings like snow shoveling, have plummeted, says John CorlissIII, who also quit as chairman. But “the idea of a co-op is stillgood,” he says. “Everything goes in cycles. You have to persevere.”Things could be worse: the Elm Street Cooperative, closer tothe town center, is falling behind on its taxes; the communalmailboxes are rusting away, and there are several abandonedlookingunits surrounded by junk. “Now, that’s a trailer park,”says Mike Starr.Could New Hampshire be a model for other states? No othershave done so much. Nearly all other manufactured housingco-ops are in Florida and California, and proportionatelyfewer people live in them. “The New Hampshire Loan Fund isunique,” says Jerry Rioux, a manager at the Watsonville, Calif.,Redevelopment and Housing Department who has helpedform a number of co-ops. And N.H.C.L.F. has continued toThe American Dream, On WheelsPostwar student housing atIndiana University.The original “trailers” first appeared in the United Statesin the1920’s, when vacationers and migrant workers builtthem as sleepers to haul behind their cars. They becamemore widespread and permanent during World War II,when workers hastily relocated near defense plants. Theytruly boomed in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when baby-boomfamilies demanded homes that could be set up anywhere, quicklyand cheaply. It was then that “mobile homes” became a multibillion-dollarindustry;they grewlonger and wider,gained washingmachines, centralheating, long-termutility hookups—and got less andless mobile. However,they were stillbuilt as flimsythrowaways, meantto last maybe 10years, often madeof highly flammableand/or toxic materialsand lackinggood ventilation orinsulation. In 1974 Congress stepped in, ordering sweeping regulationsfrom the Department of Housing and Urban Development.The HUD code, which took effect in 1976, overrides localand state building codes with standards meant to assure reasonablesafety and durability. Today, heavier construction, factoryinspections and standard equipment like smoke detectorshave made manufactured housing stronger and safer; the HarvardUniversity Center for Joint Housing Studies estimates the lifespan of new manufactured homes at 58 years.Even so, the continued expansion of manufactured housingis driven largely by inequities in wealth. Dwellers’ medianhousehold income is $28,000 (conventional homeowners’ is$52,000); one-third make less than $20,000, and only 10percent have college degrees. On the other hand, an increasingnumber of manufactured homes are now bought by retireesor middle-income families priced out of site-built homes. Sizekeeps growing; the average new single-wide manufacturedhome measures 1,500 square feet. In the past they were confinedmostly to rural areas, where little affordable rental housingis built; now they are creeping into suburbs and cities,says Michael Collins, an analyst at the Neighborhood ReinvestmentCorporation and co-author of a recent report. The2000 census shows they are particularly popular in the Southeastand Southwest, where, in some states, manufacturedhomes make up 15 percent to 20 percent of the housing stock.Yet the homes still expose people to wind, fire and water, inpart because a third of them were built before the HUD code.When manufacturedhomes catchfire, residents aretwice as likely todie, according to a2001 report by theNational Fire ProtectionAssociation.Hurricane Andrew,in 1992, wreckedabout one third ofthe site-built homesin Florida’s southernDade County—but nearly 100percent of themobile ones. Twoyears later HUDupped wind-resistance standardsin the most hurricanepronecoastal areas—but notin other windy regions, including inland areas where tornadoesvisit frequently. A Brief History of Deaths From Tornadoes inthe United States, published in 2001 by National Oceanic andAtmospheric Administration scientists, reports manufacturedhomeresidents are 20 times more likely to die in tornadoesthan site-built residents; even newer manufactured homes oftenare not well tied down, and they simply fly away. Eleven-year-oldQuentin Woody of Mossy Grove, Tenn., was one of the luckyones; in November 2002 a tornado sucked him from the showerof his family’s manufactured house and dropped him 900 feetaway, cut up but all right; parts of the house traveled a half-mile.In all areas of the country, manufactured homes tend to beplaced on the cheapest, lowest-lying real estate, exposing themto floods.Nonlethal problems are common, too. A December 2002Consumers Union study reports that components like roofing16 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003BETTMANN/CORBIS

expand into other issues. Most of the state’s park residents stillpay rent to private owners, so N.H.C.L.F. and MOTA are pushingfor a law that would force landlords to show a need whenthey want to increase rents. Most residents, even those in coops,also still buy their homes with personal loans; N.H.C.L.F.is now getting ready to offer mortgage refinancing to individualsand families. Finally, the group has acquired 25 acres in thetown of Barrington and hired “green” architects to design a45-unit manufactured-home park from scratch, with state-ofthe-art septic systems, passive solar energy and plenty of opencommunal space. Homes will cost $75,000 to $100,000. It will,of course, be a co-op.The move to create new manufactured homes—not just makethe existing ones more livable—is bound to be controversial. “Iknow some people think the earth would be better off withoutthem,” says Bradley. But, says Richard Genz, an expert on manufacturedhomes with Housing Insight, a consulting firm: “It’s notfruitful to wish for it to go away. If the product wasn’t attractive,people would not buy it. It’s still a human shelter.” ■have improved since 1974—but 79 percent of buyers stillexperience some sort of problem. Ill-fitting doors and windowstop the list, at an unchanged rate of 40 percent; major plumbingtraumas occur 57 percent more than in site-built homes.Endless maintenance on cheap parts often offsets low initialprice, suggests Kevin Jewell, the Consumers Union report’sauthor. The Manufactured Housing Institute, official voice ofthe industry, asserts that most problems come from poor installation,not the homes themselves.Critics say that when something goes wrong, manufacturer,retailer and installer usually point fingers at each other, and consumersget nothing. In 2000 Congress passed the ManufacturedHousing Improvement Act, aimed at clarifying complaintprocedures, but rules are not due until 2005. In any case, HUDhas signed over enforcement in most states to third-party commissions—oftenpacked with industry representatives, housingadvocates assert. Only about 15 states havemanufactured-home owners’ groups, and they find it hard to fightback, because members have little money or time for lobbyingand don’t get much sympathy from lawmakers, according toClarence Cook, president of the fledgling Manufactured HomeownersAssociation of America.Perhaps the biggest downside of the industry is not the housesthemselves but the way they are bought and sold. Conventionalhome mortgages come with 10 percent to 20 percent down, acredit check and an independent appraisal to make sure theproperty is worth the price; owners usually can sell at a profitafter a few years. Manufactured-home financing exists in a weirdparallel universe. Many states won’t title the homes as mortgageablereal estate unless they are on a permanent foundationon the owner’s own land, and many are not; 16 states will notclassify them as real estate at all. In any case, most buyers lackthe credit rating or down payment for a mortgage. They typicallytake out a high-cost personal loan secured by the home andgoverned by few banking rules or even common sense. A recentsurvey in New Hampshire found owners of manufactured homespaying a median interest of 11.8 percent, at a time when mortgageson site-built homes were going for about 6.5 percent.Poorly educated consumers taken in by an instant-occupancy,low-monthly-payment, no-money-down pitch also often fall forhigh-priced add-ons: “origination fees,” insurance premiums,extended appliance warranties, even life-insurance policies—all tacked on to the principal. Like cars, manufactured homesoften depreciate instead of appreciating (although another recentConsumers Union study suggests they can appreciate if theyare on the owner’s land—the factor that may be key to risingsite-built prices as well.) In sum, many owners of manufacturedhomes owe more than the house is worth; five or 10 years laterthey may still have zero—or less than zero—equity.The results are staggering foreclosure rates topping 20 percentand, with the recent bad economy, an implosion of themanufactured-housing industry itself. In December 2002, thetop lender, Conseco, declared the third largest bankruptcy everin U.S. history after losing $4 billion in the last two years. Eventhe M.H.I. acknowledges that things can’t go on like this; theforeclosures are flooding the market and have cut sales morethan one-third from their peak of $15.6 billion in 1998. “Wefoolishly sold homes at prices and finance terms that didn’tgive the homeowner a fair chance to build wealth,” admitsChris Stinebert, president of the institute. The group is nowtentatively joining housing advocates to push for mortgagefinancing. Some states have lately passed new lending andtitling laws, aided by the fact that more buyers—now twothirds—areplacing the homes on their own land. In 2002Texas required a mortgage for homes put on a site owned bythe buyer. The North Carolina Low Income Housing Coalition alsostarted organizing a push for comprehensive reforms. Butbanks, and secondary buyers and insurers of mortgages suchas Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Administration, havebeen slow to support the idea. Don Bradley, principal economistof Freddie Mac, which buys mortgages from banks, says thisis slowly changing; in 2001 his institution bought 18,000 mortgageson manufactured homes placed on buyers’ land, and itis now allowing them for homes on lots with long-term leases.Unfortunately, half still sit on rented lots. In these “mobilehomeparks,” dwellers pay $150 to $550 per month in rent—plus electricity, heat, water, sewerage, insurance and, in manystates like New Hampshire, real estate taxes on the structureitself. Traditionally, many parks have been run by mom-and-popowners with a dozen or so tenants in an old hayfield; now,many of these dependable cash producers are being gobbledup for high prices by distant corporations. Companies are alsoerecting their own giant communities with 500 or more units.Residents generally lack even the scanty rights of apartmenttenants, but unlike apartment dwellers, cannot just move awayif they don’t like it; relocating a “mobile” home costs $1,500to $5,000, and most parks won’t take one more than 10 yearsold. Lately, many parks are becoming more valuable for mallsor subdivisions, and owners are giving residents notice to evacuate.Some states have lengthened the required notice, buteven so, some people must simply walk away. “After six monthsit’s all bulldozed, and your American dream is gone,” saysClarence Cook. —K.K.Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 17

The Problem withPublic HousingIs ChicagoSolving It?BY RON FEEMSTERChicago—The view along SouthState Street on the city’s South Sidehas changed dramatically over the lastseveral years. Only a few worn towersremain from what was once a four-milelongphalanx of grim, dangerous, highrisepublic housing projects. Yet theremaining stretch of concrete rubbleand bulldozed land is the beginningof a new kind of public housing.The Chicago Housing Authority is in the midst of one of themost ambitious housing experiments in the nation’s history.Over the next seven years, most of the city’s public housing projects—whichbegan as affordable oases for working families inthe 1950’s but disintegrated into vertical slums by the 1980’s—will be torn down and replaced by low-rise developments wherepublic housing tenants will live next door to middle- and upperincomeresidents. The redevelopment, funded with $1.6 billionfrom the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development,calls for the demolition of 53 high-rise buildings; 37 havealready been razed. Officially known as the Plan for Transformation,it will alter Chicago’s housing landscape at least as drasticallyas the urban renewal projects of the 1950’s and 1960’s.But can this program transform the lives of thousands offormer tenants? That question hangs as heavily over the city’sblasted projects as the despair that haunted their graffiti-scarredcorridors and courtyards. It has also energized the city’s housingactivists and attracted the interest of housing policy expertsand academic researchers far and wide. The Chicago experimentforces renewed attention to the fundamental conundrumthat has tormented housing policy for years: Are safe, stableRon Feemster is a freelance writer based in New York City.18 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

PATRICIA EVANSMARTIN DIXONneighborhoods more the product of attractive buildings, functioninghouseholds or well-integrated community life? Or—most likely—do they result from some delicate balance of allthree? And how to find that balance?The aim of the C.H.A. plan is to end the isolation of the city’spoor and to help them achieve a quality of urban life that eludedthem in the projects. “Our goal is to give residents of publichousing the kind of life that every citizen of Chicago wants anddeserves,” says Terry Peterson, chief executive of the ChicagoHousing Authority. “We want to end the stigma of certainaddresses, such as South State Street, and turn these areas intocommunities where you can’t tell the difference between market-ratehousing, affordable housing and C.H.A. apartments.”Even critics of the Plan for Transformation speak of Peterson,a former alderman who was appointed to lead the agencyin 2000 by Mayor Richard M. Daley, as someone genuinely committedto a new kind of housing for the city’s poor. With hisyoung and talented team of C.H.A. executives, Peterson is out toremake the city. And indeed, the new mixed-income developmentsstand in breathtaking contrast to the projects they arereplacing. North Town Village, for example, a leafy cluster oftown houses and duplexes and small apartment buildings, liesin the shadow of Cabrini-Green, a dense thicket of high-risesOpposite The ChicagoHousing Authority is demolishing53 high-rise buildings,including those at StatewayGardens, as part of its plan totransform Chicago’s troubledpublic housing.Above Chicago’s publichousing projects were oncea gateway to homeownershipand the middle class, but bythe 1980’s they had becomeisolated islands of despair.whose name means drugs andcrime in every language spokenin Chicago.Not everyone is buying intothe dream. More than oneskeptic has referred to themammoth reclamation projectas “gentrification byanother name.” Many of thenew developments, to be builton the site of the old projects,are in desirable locations. TheRobert Taylor Homes—socrime-ridden that they becameTheHousing Puzzlenational symbols of social decay—are just a 15-minute train ridefrom Chicago’s Loop and a mile or so from Lake Michigan.From the open-air hallways that double as balconies at nearbyStateway Gardens, residents could look down at the IllinoisInstitute of Technology, with its Mies van der Rohe architecture,and west across the expressway to Comiskey Park, wherethe Chicago White Sox play. The Henry Horner Homes are justdown the street from the United Center, home of the ChicagoBulls. Cabrini-Green is surrounded by some of the hottest realestate on the north side of Chicago.In any case, no matter how successful the new communitiesare, they will offer too few public housing units to accommodatethe tenants displaced by demolition. At the Robert TaylorHomes site, for example, the total number of apartments willbe reduced by nearly half, from 4,321 units to 2,400, including600 units that will be built on city-owned properties scatteredthroughout the surrounding neighborhood. But only about800 of those new apartments will be reserved for C.H.A. tenants.The remaining 1,600 will be divided evenly between market-ratebuyers and middle-income residents eligible for subsidies.Most public housing residents will never return to their formerneighborhoods. Instead, they are being relocated in theprivate housing market with federal housing vouchers, commonlycalled Section 8 vouchers. Under the Section 8 program,tenants are placed in privately owned apartments, paying rentaccording to their ability; the voucher guarantees a supplementso that the landlord receives rent at the market rate for the area.The number of vouchers available in the city, which held steadyat about 15,000 from 1995 until 1999, will more than double.Although giving former public housing residents an opportunityto move into more affluent and integrated neighborhoodsis among the explicit goals of the relocation effort, it is one theC.H.A. has had trouble achieving. So far, Chicago’s poorest andmost segregated neighborhoods have absorbed the bulk of newSection 8 tenants from the projects.According to Thomas Sullivan, a former U.S. Attorney who,at the request of the C.H.A. and the tenants’ association, servedas independent monitor of the relocation process, the housingauthority is contractually obligated to help residents locateapartments in the more affluent or racially diverse neighborhoodsknown as “opportunity areas.” (These are defined, in arelocation rights contract with tenants, as census tracts withless than 24 percent of families below poverty level, or no morethan 30 percent African-American population.) But the twoagencies hired to place residents in new apartments relied on theirrelationships with a limited stable of landlords willing to takeSection 8 tenants.“Almost all of the rental units were in financially depressed,racially segregated areas,”Sullivan wrote in a January 2003 reportto the C.H.A. “The vertical ghettos from which the families arebeing moved are being replaced with horizontal ghettos locatedin well-defined, highly segregated neighborhoods on the westand south sides of Chicago.”In January, the C.H.A. and Terry Peterson were named asdefendants in a civil rights lawsuit filed on behalf of C.H.A. residentsby the National Center on Poverty Law, Chicago Committeefor Civil Rights Under Law, and Business and ProfessionalFord Foundation Report Spring 2003 19

Tenants’ needs change radically during the relocationprocess. Even if they are not uprooted involuntarily,they may need new services nine or even 18 monthsafter leaving a public housing project.People for the Public Interest. The groups claim in their classactionlawsuit that the C.H.A. violated the federal Fair HousingAct as well as the C.H.A.’s contractual obligations to tenantswhen it moved 78 percent of all involuntarily displaced familiesto census tracts that are more than 95 percent African-American.Relying on a newly updated study by Paul Fischer,a professorat Lake Forest College, the suit also claims that moving 80 percentof families to census tracts with more than 16.6 percent ofthe population living in poverty violates the same law.Under pressure from its critics and the lawsuit, the C.H.A. hasbegun negotiating contracts with at least five new placementagencies, according to Meghan Harte, the C.H.A.’s managingdirector for resident services. Until now, placement agencieswere paid the same rate whether they showed apartments inopportunity areas or not. Under the new contracts, they willbe required to show every tenant at least one apartment in amiddle-class neighborhood in order to collect their fee.“Our program is about choice,” Harte says. “We create anincentive [for agencies] to show people apartments in opportunityareas. We provide choices. The rest is up to the families.”Providing choices is expensive, notes Howard Stanback, chiefexecutive of the Leadership Council for Metropolitan OpenCommunities, which has a contract to place a relatively smallnumber of tenants only in opportunity areas. It costs moneyto educate public housing families about their options, to establishrelationships with landlords in integrated neighborhoods,and, occasionally, to have lawyers inform landlords of relevantThe Way HomeThe Ford Foundation supports research, policy analysisand programs that advance social integration andeconomic mobility for low-income people. The nation’smost visible attempt to reduce the concentration of urbanpoverty is under way in Chicago. As massive public housingprojects are demolished, residents are being movedto mixed-income developments and to apartments inthe private rental market. To inform local, regional andnational policymakers about the experiences of publichousing residents in these new settings, the foundation issupporting research and interviews by Sudhir Venkateshat Columbia University and Susan J. Popkin at the UrbanInstitute. The foundation is also assisting the efforts ofWe The People Media, publisher of Residents’ Journal,to develop research and advocacy programs on behalf ofChicago’s public housing residents. At the national level,the foundation supports two forums—one of developersand the other of researchers. Both are formulating principlesto identify successful mixed-income housing developments.The developer forum is directed by Paul Brophy ofBrophy and Reilly, L.L.C. and Ed Marchant of the John F.Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.The Urban Institute leads the researcher forum.federal laws. Stanback estimatesthat the LeadershipCouncil overspent its C.H.A.contract by about $260 perfamily, or nearly 8 percent.Some families are compelled to move a second time, andeven a third, when their apartments fail follow-up Section 8inspections. “These landlords get the apartments through theinspection so the people can move in,” explains Beauty Turner,a reporter for the Residents’ Journal, a bimonthly newspaperwritten by and for public housing residents. “But when theinspector comes back, the apartment fails and they have to startthe process all over again.”Turner is also a researcher for Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologyprofessor at Columbia University in New York and author ofAmerican Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto, a portraitof the Robert Taylor Homes, published in 2000. Venkatesh hasstudied the project since 1990, when he was a graduate student insociology at the University of Chicago. For most of that time,Turner lived at Robert Taylor,where she was the project’s residentactivist. She campaigned for better services from the C.H.A. andmore police protection. Sometimes, she went looking for lawyersto represent a youngster falsely accused of a crime. “People trustme,” she says. “They know I helped people when I lived there, sothey’re still talking to me today.”Venkatesh and Turner have closely followed residents outinto the private market, charting their struggles and occasionaltriumphs as they adjust to new neighborhoods and try to replacethe informal networks of friends and relatives they counted onfor all kinds of help in the projects. Among their most importantdiscoveries: Tenants’ needs change radically during therelocation process. Even if they are not uprooted involuntarily,they may need new services—or become newly receptive toservices—nine or even 18 months after leaving a public housingproject. For example, nine months after leaving Robert Taylor,73 percent of residents reported criminal or legal problemsthat threatened their eligibility for subsidized housing. The difficultiesincluded children or other relatives returning from jail,illegally earned money in the household, sexual harassment,domestic violence and problems with local gangs. Many reportedlandlord problems. Some were simple misunderstandings oftenants’ rights and responsibilities. But a few tenants fell victimto demands for extra “rent” when landlords discoveredadditional persons living with a family.Many of these difficulties, serious as they were, had to bebrushed aside during the earliest phases of resettlement, whenresidents struggled to furnish new apartments, find essentialservices and introduce their children to new schools and routines.By the same token, many residents had to confront criminaland legal issues before they could decide whether theywanted to remain in the private market or return to publichousing, a process that typically began 18 to 24 months after theyleft the Robert Taylor Homes.Some families fare much better in the private market than others.Perhaps one in four—usually those with smaller familiesand a nearby relative who offers help with day care—need littlehelp at all. But some families require much more intensivehelp, Venkatesh suggests, than the C.H.A. and its vendor agenciesare prepared to offer now.20 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

Sue Popkin, a researcher for the Urban Institute, points outthat just one in eight C.H.A. residents surveyed had a driver’slicense in 2002, while only one in five had access to a car that runs.Many also don’t have telephones. Simply arranging for peopleto meet or otherwise receive information about housing placementoptions becomes a huge challenge.Tom Sullivan, the C.H.A. independent monitor, argues thathelping families negotiate the first years out of the projects is noact of charity. It is part of the larger process of rebuilding publichousing. “If we want residents to return to mixed developments,”he says, “we need to keep track of them, to continue tooffer them services. We need to help them succeed in the privaterental market. If they don’t make it there, they will not havea chance in the mixed-income developments.”Following are stories of residents that demonstrate the individualissues that may confirm or confound the policy planners’best ambitions.Denise Jones: “How you live, not where you live.”A 29-year-old mother of four, Denise Jones now enjoys afour-room unit in the seven-acre North Town Village development.When her Cabrini-Green building was closed fordemolition in 2000, she moved with her children, now aged 4to 14, to an integrated neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side,where she found work at an auto-parts factory. At Cabrini-Green, she had worked for a few months on a carpentry crewthat was rehabilitating units there. Two years ago, when sheheard that a North Town Village construction crew was hiring,she landed a job as a dry-wall finisher. Then she startedangling for an apartment.“I went to them,” says Jones, who is out of work at themoment. “I knew that I would be on the list sooner or later. Ijust wanted to be sure that North Town Village knew me.” Justover a year ago, she and her family moved into a graceful redbrick building down the street from a traffic circle planted withchrysanthemums. She says life is good at North Town Village,but she won’t say it was bad at Cabrini-Green.“It’s how you live, not where you live,”says Jones. “Some peopleclean up after themselves. Some don’t. The problem isn’tthe buildings at Cabrini. It’s the people who live in them.”In that assessment, she agrees with Peter Holsten, the developerof the C.H.A. and middle-income units at North Town Village.“You need to put residents through some reasonablescreening process before they move in,” says Holsten, who convincedthe C.H.A. to let him use site-specific criteria for publichousing tenants that effectively raise a higher barrier toentry for North Town Village than the C.H.A. as a whole. Tenantsmust show at least a limited work history to be eligiblefor North Town Village as well as pass other background checks.But Holsten also hired a full-time social services coordinatorto offer assistance to residents. Screening alone, he acknowledges,is not enough.One aspect of life in her new home has been a disappointmentfor Denise Jones. Mixed-income housing has not led to muchinteraction between C.H.A. tenants and the other 70 percentof North Town Village residents, who are supposed to providethe social leavening to raise public housing residents’ fortunes.Despite Holsten’s attempts to hold mixers and other commonsocial events, Jones socializes with other ex-Cabrini tenants,not with the market-rate owners. “I don’t like it,” she says. “Wespeak when we see each other on the street, but I don’t know anyof them. I don’t even know their names.”Jacqueline Askew: Return to serenity.Before moving to a small duplex on the far south side ofChicago, Jacqueline Askew had lived at Stateway Gardens for 47years. In the beginning, the housing project was a serene andordered community, where children played on swing sets andflower beds dotted the lawns. By the end, bullets ricochetedthrough her second floor apartment as drug gangs fought forcontrol of her building.“I had a beautiful life there,” remembers Askew, 51, whomoved into a snug duplex with her mother and 22-year-oldautistic son in September. “When I was young, there was just somuch going on. Entertainment for the young people. You couldgo to sewing classes and cooking classes. There was a gym. It wasa beautiful place to be.”Stateway, like most of Chicago’s housing projects, was a mixedincomedevelopment then. Half a century ago, the poor livedalongside working people who saw the projects as a steppingstone to a home of their own. The housing authority and the residents’council made rules, and tenants who broke them werefined, Askew remembers. Littering the lawns or leaving trashin the hallways cost $5 or more.It was a time of opportunity for teenagers. Askew and herthree brothers sang at YMCAs, nightclubs and ballrooms. “JackieAskew and the Family Affair”never made it big, but the youngstersdidn’t feel a need to escape the projects either. StatewayGardens was a safe haven. Askew recalls summer nights playingbongo drums and dancing “under the building”in the open-airlobbies where drug gangs later fought.By 1975, when Jackie had the first of her three children, theprojects had begun to change. Budget deficits forced reductionsin the maintenance staff. Scavengers made off with the swing sets.Built as beacons of hope, the projects became symbols of despair.Askew went back and forth from jobs to public aid until 1980,when Mario, one of her newborn twins, was diagnosed withautism. Since then she has been the full-time caretaker of a boywith a growing body and the mind of a two-year-old.She became grateful for little blessings, such as days whenthe elevator worked and she didn’t have to wrestle Mario upand down stairs to go to school. When her first building wasdemolished two years ago, the C.H.A. moved Askew and herson to a second-floor apartment in another building in StatewayGardens. The trip downstairs was shorter, but drug gangswaged war at night from the open-air hallway outside her door.“They would shoot at the gang in the other building,”Askewexplains. “And then bullets would come through my windowswhen the other building shot back.” She couldn’t take Marioout of the apartment, and when she had to go out herself, shewould take the bulb out of his lamp to be sure he couldn’t lighthimself up as a target.Their new home, Askew says, is what she wanted: A roomfor her son and a separate apartment for her mother, who livedupstairs from her at Stateway Gardens and helps her with Mario.She has planted flowers in the little fenced-in yard, and sometimesin the evening she sits behind her open screen door, listeningto the night grow quiet. ■Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 21

Urban GentryWhat happensBY NEIL CARLSONTHIS SPREAD: HAZEL HANKINIn the 1990’s, gentrification became one of the most hotly contested issues in the urbanUnited States. Although city planners and housing experts quibble over a precise definition, people who have recentlylived in major U.S. cities know gentrification when they see it. A handful of middle-class (usually white) professionals moveinto a run-down part of town (usually a community of color) where the housing stock is sound but property values and rentsare low. Houses are renovated and gardens restored. As more outsiders move in, rents and property values creep up, andlongtime residents are squeezed out. Meanwhile, established businesses close and new ones open up—coffee shops, cafes andspecialty stores catering to the neighborhood’s wealthier new residents.The extent of gentrification and its implications for urban communities are poorly understood. On one hand, rising propertyvalues can bring new wealth to longtime homeowners in poor neighborhoods. Fairly or not, new money often bringsbetter services from city government—police, sanitation, schools—which may benefit all residents. On the other hand,there’s often a tipping point, the moment at which the soul of the neighborhood is irredeemably changed. The old residentsare displaced and the urban gentry remain ensconced in a neighborhood of newly expensive homes and swanky stores.“When you have a neighborhood that is flat on its back—places that have been radically depopulated or are just wastedby abandonment, arson, crime—the people who live there welcome a group of people who will invest and live in theirneighborhood,” says Alexander von Hoffman, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.“The problem is once the process begins, it is not always possible to keep it in balance.”How then to strike that balance? How to protect the interests of current residents while making way for new residents?How to support neighborhood reinvestment without condoning displacement and profiteering? There are no easy answersto these questions, but a pair of community-based organizations—the Fifth Avenue Committee in Brooklyn, N.Y., andPODER in Austin, Tex.—have developed some innovative ways to deal with gentrification.22 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

when a neighborhood starts to sell its soul?TheHousing PuzzleBrooklyn: The community factorThe threat of gentrification has loomed over the Fifth AvenueCommittee since the community development corporationwas founded 25 years ago. In the late 1970’s, the neighborhoodaround Fifth Avenue in Park Slope was reeling from widespreadabandonment and blight, with more than 200 vacant buildingsand 150 vacant lots within a mile of FAC’s offices. Still,says Brad Lander, FAC’s executive director, the neighborhood’sproximity to Prospect Park, historic brownstones and wellbuiltapartment houses made it ripe for gentrification, “whichis why we frame our work as neighborhood improvementfor everyone.”Since the 1970’s, Park Slope has been a racially and economicallymixed neighborhood, a place where stockbrokers livealongside poor working families. It’s a delicate balance, and twoof the strategies FAC uses to maintain the equilibrium are housingdevelopment and community organizing. They are the yinand the yang of affordable housing in Park Slope.Since its inception, FAC has developed more than 600 unitsof affordable housing, a combination of rental units and owneroccupiedhousing. The group typically acts as the project manager,hiring contractors and cobbling together funding frompublic and private sources. The lion’s share of FAC’s funding forhousing construction and rehabilitation comes from city andstate housing funds and some federal Low Income Housing TaxCredits. As deficits rise, however, capital is becoming scarce.Most of these units are for residents who earn half or less ofthe area’s median income. According to Susan Friedland, FAC’sdirector of housing development, the challenge posed by gentrificationis partly “a condition of the market and the neighborhood’shousing stock.”Most apartments are mid-sized—oneandtwo-bedrooms—with very few low-cost studio units forseniors or single people with low incomes. Although large immigrantfamilies moved into Park Slope throughout the 1980’s and1990’s, Friedland says the existing housing stock was poorlysuited to the newcomers’ needs. “To find a three- or four-bedroomin Park Slope is next to impossible,” she says. As a resultthe large families crowd into much smaller quarters. It is notuncommon, Friedland says, to see four generations of one familysqueezed into a two-bedroom apartment because childrenand grandchildren can’t afford to move out.Although FAC’s construction has tried to fill some of thesegaps,600 units is a drop in the bucket.As the stock market boomedthroughout the 1990’s, the real estate market went through theroof, pushing rents throughout Park Slope to unprecedented levels.A 2001 report by the New York City Rent Guidelines Boardfound that from 1990 to 1999,rents in New York City jumped anywherefrom 37 percent to 48 percent, depending on what kind ofbuilding the apartment was in. In many of the city’s hot neighborhoods,like Park Slope, increases were often much higher,especially if the building was not rent stabilized.Neil Carlson is a freelance writer based in New York City.Many of Park Slope’s apartments are in small buildings, whichare not subject to the city’s rent control laws, and as the rentalmarket has heated up evictions have increased. In the early1990’s, there was a trickle—one or two per year; a few yearslater, organizers say, that trickle had become a flood. Longtimeresidents, the elderly, working poor families and disabled peoplewere being pushed out. With them went Park Slope’s senseof community and its diversity.Displacement reached a high water mark in 1999, when alandlord tried to evict two elderly sisters from the apartmentsthey had lived in for years. Thesisters appealed to BenjaminDulchin, FAC’s director oforganizing. Since the apartmentsweren’t subject to rentcontrol, the landlord was freeto triple the rent. “We thought,‘This stinks. There has to besomething we can do,’”Dulchin says.A few weeks later, Dulchintook a bus load of Park Sloperesidents to the landlord’sMaria Morales owns a co-opapartment in a building sponsoredby the Fifth Avenue Committeein Brooklyn, N.Y. It istrying to preserve diversity inthe Park Slope neighborhood.Opposite Old and newbusinesses coexist onFifth Avenue in Park Slope.A French bistro, Moutarde,right, is a recent additionand a sign of gentrification.house in Long Island and staged a protest on his front lawn.“It’s humiliating to have Carmen Soto, this little woman who’sfour-feet eight, standing on your lawn with her walker,”Dulchinsays. Faced with a yard full of outraged little old ladies, theowner cut a deal. If the sisters gave up one of the apartments andmoved in together, the landlord would keep their rent the same.The protest was something of an epiphany for Dulchin andFAC. “We realized that the market is, and always has been, mediatedby community. The real question wasn’t why are there somany evictions; it was why aren’t there more?” As they studiedthe question, they realized that small-scale landlords frequentlytook less than top-dollar for their units simply because theydidn’t want to evict longtime tenants. When evictions did occurFord Foundation Report Spring 2003 23

it was typically because there was a change inthe owner’s circumstances: death of the originalowner, an illness, a need for college tuition,or sale of the house to new owners.If conscience made the market pliable, whycouldn’t FAC marshal social pressure to makeit even more accommodating? Later in 1999,FAC declared 105 square blocks of Park Slopea “Displacement Free Zone,” and chargedDulchin with enforcement. Dulchin’s staff putup flyers and sent out mailings, promulgatinga sort of tenant’s Magna Carta in the hopethat more landlords would think twice aboutevicting a low-income tenant.Whenever they receive a request for help,Dulchin says, the first step is to try to negotiatea compromise. Failing that, the DisplacementFree Zone turns the case over to SouthBrooklyn Legal Services, which tries to slowup the eviction in court. “The law’s on the landlord’sside.” Dulchin says. “But we can make itexpensive and time-consuming.” With ownerstied up in court, Dulchin and his staff try to figure out howthe landlord might be persuaded, whether by a private conversationwith a church leader or by a public protest.In most cases, tenants and landlords are able to negotiate afair settlement. Despite their sometimes unorthodox tactics,Dulchin and his fellow organizers try to keep their campaignslighthearted. They held a street festival in front of one landlord’shome, complete with carnival games, and a barbeque infront of another. “It’s not anti-landlord. The focus here is on theneighborhood and the community,” Dulchin says.PODER: Smart growth for whom?To Sylvia Herrera and Susana Almanza, co-founders of PeopleOrganized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources (PODER),based in Austin, Tex., the incipient gentrification of East Austinhas been touched off by three forces: a hot housing market, thecity’s historic preservation policy, and the region’s “smart growth”initiative. As evidence, Herrera and Almanza pile into a blueChrysler for a tour of the neighborhood’s imperiled Mexicanoand African-American communities.PODER began in 1991 as an environmental justice group thatfought pollution from a fuel storage “tank farm”and litter froman overflowing recycling center. Victories in those battles, however,made the neighborhood more desirable. As gentrificationbegan, PODER turned to mitigating its negative fallout.Herrera’s tour begins with a bit of history. As she eases ontoInterstate 35, she notes that the on-ramp was where a group ofMexicano residents once staged a protest against the city’s urbanrenewal projects in the 1970’s. The Mexicano families that livedin a barrio on the edge of downtown, on both sides of the Interstate,were displaced to make way for “renewal” projects thatnever materialized. “They called it urban renewal,”Herrera says.“We called it urban removal.”Thirty years later, the area is hometo Town Lake Park, a vast green space popular with outdoorenthusiasts, and a clutch of hotels. Unless the residents of EastAustin can stem the current tide, she says, they will face a similarfate.HAZEL HANKINHerrera drives past the cornerof 7th and San Marcos, theheart of Guadalupe, a neighborhoodof small, quaint bungalows.Most have well-keptyards, but many could use acoat of paint. For the most partthey are affordable, decent,small homes—which is preciselywhy the rates of homeownership here are so high. Ithas been one of the only placesBrad Lander, executivedirector of the Fifth AvenueCommittee, with MarthaMarquez and KimberlyMarshall, his co-workers.Opposite Susana Almanza,left, executive director ofPODER, and Sylvia Herrera,PODER’s health coordinator,with East Austin residents.Fuel storage tanks are inthe background.in Austin where a low-income family can own a home.Yet that affordability is disappearing rapidly. The neighborhood’sproximity to downtown and its access to the Interstatemake Guadalupe attractive to a new generation of professionals,many of whom work for one of the many technology companiesin Austin. Today, the two-bedroom homes in East Austinare marketed aggressively to affluent, largely Anglo, home buyersas “cozy bungalows”—and longtime residents are beingsqueezed out.PODER has responded to this pressure with careful research,determined policy advocacy and extensive community organizing.Herrera and Almanza spent much of last year cullinghousing data and tax records, documenting with empirical evidencewhat residents had been seeing with their own eyes foryears. “If you’ve got the facts,” Herrera says, “the facts speak forthemselves. If you don’t do your research, you’re lost.”PODER’s analysis of census data uncovered a sharp spike inhome values throughout East Austin. In 1990, 80 percent of thehouses in one particular census tract were valued at less than$50,000, with just 0.5 percent valued at between $150,000 and$199,000. By 2000, the figure for houses under $50,000 hadfallen to 48 percent, and 4 percent were valued between $150,000and $199,000.For the working poor of Austin, a jump in a home’s valuecan mean the difference between keeping and losing it because24 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

For the working poor ofAustin, a jump in a home’svalue can mean the differencebetween keeping andlosing it because they cannotafford higher property taxes.they cannot afford higher property taxes. Texas, along with sixother states, has no personal income tax, which means that staterevenues come largely from sales, excise and property taxes—all of which weigh heavily on low-income people. Accordingto PODER’s analysis of Travis County tax foreclosure records(from August 2000 to June 2001), 66 percent of all Austin propertieslisted for foreclosure were in East Austin. The year before,the figure was 72 percent.PODER also found that the city’s historic preservation policieshave compounded housing cost inflation in East Austin.When the city designates a property as a “historic home” theowner receives a lifetime property tax exemption. (The city’sHistoric Landmark Commission may designate properties basedon any number of criteria, including the historic relevance ofprevious occupants or the home’s architectural significance.)As historic properties get snapped up and renovated by newresidents throughout East Austin, the values of adjacent homesjump up as well, often to the point where the low-income homeownerscan’t afford to live there because of the property taxburden. Meanwhile, the owners of historic homes, mostly whiteprofessionals, enjoy a lifetime property tax exemption.“We have to recognize that we need to preserve houses notjust for houses’ sake, but that we’re preserving the culture ofthe people who live there,” Almanza says.And then there is the matter of land use. Over the past decade,Austin has been a hotbed of the “smart-growth”movement aimedat slowing urban sprawl and protecting environmentally sensitiveareas. As a part of Austin’s smart-growth strategy, a largeswath of West Austin was designated a drinking-water protectionzone and its development sharply curtailed. City officialsThe Fifth Avenue Committee and PODER are 2002 winners of theLeadership for a Changing World Award, sponsored by the FordFoundation with the Advocacy Institute and the Robert F. WagnerSchool of Public Service at New York University. The award recognizesindividuals and leadership teams successfully addressing tough socialproblems in communities across the United States.directed development into “desired developmentzones” in East Austin.However well intended the smart-growth processmight be, plans that limit the land available for developmentmay increase the value of existing real estate.That is precisely what is happening in East Austin.“As the city has grown, there’s no place to grow butEast Austin—as if people weren’t already there,”Almanza says.Last year, PODER mobilized a coalition of communitygroups and neighborhood resident associationsto demand a 90-day moratorium on historiczoning so the city could reassess the policy’s impact on gentrification.The city agreed and appointed a task force to study theissue. Working with city planners and housing experts, the panelpresented its findings to the city council last year.The task force did not endorse PODER’s principal recommendation,that the city do away with preservation tax incentives,arguing that the incentives actually prevented gentrificationby limiting large-scale construction. But the report did agreewith some of PODER’s other recommendations, includingstronger rent control and a freeze on property taxes in rapidlygentrifying neighborhoods.It remains to be seen what the city council will decide whenthe matter comes before it later this spring. PODER and itscommunity allies will be pushing the city to do away with anyform of tax exemption for historic properties, arguing thatpreservation and tax exemptions are two different issues, andthat the city could meet its preservation goals with stricter regulationson historic property.As with many policy debates, the one over gentrification inEast Austin is a struggle over incentives and regulations, carrotsand sticks. Instead of offering well-heeled professionalsincentives to renovate historic homes, PODER wants the city touse its resources to protect the people already there. “If you’regoing to have [historic home] zoning, you have to create somethingto help residents not under that exemption,”Herrera says.As the campaign for city council moves into full swing laterthis year, PODER intends to make East Austin’s gentrificationa central issue. In addition to rent control and tax freezes, PODERand its allies will be pushing for other solutions not included inthe housing task force’s report: a community land trust, a regionalhousing fund and more money for housing rehabilitation.What it comes down to, Almanza says, is a question of equityand fairness. “We’re making sure that communities of colorhave the right to share urban space—that we don’t run out thepoor and the working poor.” ■JANICE RUBINFord Foundation Report Spring 2003 25

TheHousing PuzzleThe American Dream:Making It Real When it was released last year, The Stateof the Nation’s Housing 2002, published byHarvard University’s Joint Center for HousingStudies, confirmed what real estate brokers hadlong suspected: Rising home prices, and theresulting surge in household wealth, hadencouraged consumers to keep spendingeven in a bad economy.Also widely reported was the news that homeownershipamong lower-income people, especially among minoritygroups and immigrants, climbed dramatically over the pastdecade. This is significant, says the report, because homeequity provides families with the resources to finance theirchildren’s education and save for retirement.But the report also points to some disturbing trends: increasing numbers of people purchase manufacturedhomes, which provide little long-term equity (see figure 1); renters and prospective homeowners (see figure 2) arepriced out of the market because incomes don’t rise as fastas housing costs; homeowners who have received alternative mortgages(see figure 3), usually at high cost, are defaulting in recordnumbers; and a growing number of low-income renters and buyersspend more than 30 percent of their income for housing orlive in structurally inadequate homes.To counter some of the negative trends, the report recommends,among other things, that policy makers keep interestrates low and promote the production of affordable housing,both to buy and to rent. The State of the Nation’s Housing2002 can be downloaded at www. jchs.harvard.edu.—Elizabeth ColemanFigure 1.Manufactured Housing Has Lifted Homeownership,Especially in the South5%Share of growth in homeownership 1993-199917%78%30%8%62%All new homeowners7.6 MillionNew homeowners in the South3.3 MillionManufactured Home Single-Family Detached OtherSource: Joint Center tabulations of 1993 and 1999 American Housing Surveys.26 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

Figure 2.Priced Out of the Market60Inflation-adjusted percent change, 1997-200150403020100San BostonFranciscoNew York LosAngelesAtlantaWashingtonDallasChicago Seattle ClevelandHome PricesIncome GrowthSource: Freddie Mac Conventional Mortgage Home Price Index and Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional AccountsData, adjusted for inflation by CPI-UX. See also “Home Price Bubble Babble,” Housing Economics, April 2002.Figure 3.Separate and Unequal: Expanded Lending toLower-Income Borrowers Has Fostered a Dual MarketShare of growth in home purchasing lending, 1993-20003%25%12%37%1%15%81%26%Lower-income borrowersin lower-income neighborhoodsHigher-income borrowersin higher-income neighborhoodsConventional Prime Government-Backed Subprime Manufactured HomeNotes: Lower- (higher-) income borrowers have income of less than (at least) 80% of an area median in that year. Lower-(higher-) income neighborhoods have income of less than (at least) 80% of an area median as of 1990.Source: Joint Center for Housing Studies, “The 25th Anniversary of the Community Reinvestment Act: Access toCapital In an Evolving Financial Services System,” March 2002.Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 27

TheHousing PuzzleVietnamstruggleswith urbanmigration.Homeless inHo Chi Minh CityBY WENDY ERDHo Chi Minh City, Vietnam—Humor lights Vu’s eyes, whichis remarkable, considering the difficulties of his 47 years. NguyenVan Vu used to be a garbage picker in Vietnam’s Ho Chi MinhCity, sorting rubbish for resale. “People called me homeless,”he says, “but everywhere in the city was my home: the stadiumone day, under an awning where the rain didn’t touch me thenext.” Now Vu is a “peer educator” in a mobile team that offershealth education and care to the homeless and semi-homeless.He cruises the dark margins of Vietnam’s largest city looking forthose living on the streets.Vu is intimate with the city’s underside: the shadows wheredrug users loiter, the park strips and street corners where sexworkers with powdered faces and painted lips wait for clients.He frequents the tattered clutches of low-rent shelters for thesemi-homeless that sprout along clogged canals on the outskirtsof the city. Vu knows firsthand where people curl up forthe night in shelters fashioned from cardboard or plastic.He reaches out to those who live on the edge, vulnerable toharassment, malnutrition, sexual abuse, child labor, H.I.V./AIDSand other diseases. Most have migrated from Vietnam’s rural villages;others are immigrants from neighboring Cambodia. Manyare Vu’s old friends.Vu works for the District 6 Health Education and Care for theWendy Erd is a freelance writer based in Hanoi, Vietnam.Homeless project, which recruits those living on the streets andtrains them to work as peer educators. The project, implementedby District 6 Health Services, the Ho Chi Minh City AIDS Committeeand Médecins du Monde, also runs a day-care centerthat offers social services, medical examinations and referrals forthose with no other access to health care. It is one of Vietnam’sfirst projects in which localsecurity authorities havejoined with district officials,private groups and membersof the homeless communityitself to improve health conditionsfor the migrants ontheir doorsteps. One of theprogram’s special achievementsis the authorities’ growingrespect for peer educators,with their knowledge and abilityto reach members of theirown vulnerable community.District 6 is one of the oldestareas in Ho Chi Minh City.A river port, several large markets,a major bus station, apublic park, light and heavyTop left Nguyen Van Vu andhis mobile team cruise Ho ChiMinh City’s District 6 to bringhealth information and careto the homeless, most ofthem migrants.Top center Vu gives afamily leaflets on AIDS andtuberculosis.Top right Tran Thanh Long,a nurse, examines a woman ina boarding house that sheltersthe near-homeless.Opposite A garbage pickerin Ho Chi Minh City sortsthrough items to resell. It isthe only work she can find.PHOTOGRAPHS BY TRAN VIET DUC28 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

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industry, a historically Chinesecommercial area and an officiallyestimated population of280,000 people pack everyinch of its seven square kilometers.In addition, as manyas 78,000 unregistered residents,many of them migrantsfrom the Mekong Deltaprovinces, live in District 6.Street people whohave H.I.V. or AIDS are‘worse off than thehomeless,’ says onedoctor. ‘Sometimeseven their familiesabandon them.’Abone-thin woman squatson the sidewalk cradlingher baby. When askedher name, perhaps to secureher anonymity, she says it isDi, a name that means “go.”She is from Cambodia; her village,Sarieng, 200 kilometersaway, is flooded. She’s come tothe city to beg with one-yearoldSana, whose name means“far away.” After midnight sheand her sick daughter join aknot of fellow Khmer on themarket floor where more than100 people curl up together tosleep.Leading a mobile team of five whostream behind him on bikes and motorbikes,Vu spots Di and several otherKhmer women camped near Cho LonMarket. He signals the team members,who include an assistant doctor and severalpeer educators, one of whom acts asa Khmer interpreter, and they follow Vu’smotorbike onto the sidewalk. The formerlyhomeless team members know howto build trust before offering people healthinformation and medical treatment.The smell of rotting fruit and refuse rises from the gutter. Diholds a listless Sana. The team’s assistant doctor checks Sana’sfeverish forehead, fishes in his bag for medicine and snaps off severalpackets of pills. Di lost her day-care center card and all herpossessions when she fled from the police, who mount frequentcampaigns to turn migrants homeward in an attempt to maintaindistrict security. Against overwhelming odds, the police aremandated to register, temporarily, all who come to the city.Di’s mother-in-law, Vinh Giang, 81, squats beside her. Herdeep brown face is etched with age and her teeth are blackenedwith betel nut juice. Thach Thi Hien, one of the team who speaksKhmer, Cambodia’s national language, translates. A gratefulGiang recently went to the project’s day-care center, receivedmedicine, showered and washed her clothes. Giang takes Hien’shands and wishes her a life as long as her own.Vu recalls his first encounter with a doctor from the project,Dang Thi Nhat Vinh. As a medical doctor and the originalMédecins du Monde H.I.V./AIDS program manager for thehomeless project, Dr.Vinh combed the streets seeking peer edu-Thach Thi Hien, a migrant from Cambodiacators who works for the on the mobile District teams. 6 health “I thought team,she collects saw information me as poor. from I’m almost childrenilliterate,necessarybesides, to get them I didn’t access believe to health her,” says care. Vu.andHe Opposite threw Shacks the day-care and thatched center shanties card thatDr.Vinh are the last gave resort himof into thea semi-homelessstack of rubbishhe in Ho was Chi sorting. Minh City. Undaunted, she returnedthree weeks later and this time persuadedVu to come to An Hoa Day Care Center,first as a visitor, then as a paid gate guard.With Dr. Vinh’s urging, Vu later trainedto become a peer educator. “Everythingwas very strange to me,” Vu says. “I neverknew about offices with ceiling fans. Ididn’t know about H.I.V.”Five nights a week two mobile teams leave An Hoa Day CareCenter. Some pedal fiercely along on bicycles, others slowlycruise on their motorbikes, perusing the park edges, alleywaysand slum shelters. They supply clean needles to drug users inexchange for used ones and hand out condoms and health informationto sex workers and pimps.Hien, one of the program’s two translators whose fluency inboth Khmer and Vietnamese helps team members reach outto Cambodian immigrants, dropped out of school at 12 to helpsupport her large family, poor Khmer farmers in the coastalprovince of Tra Vinh. “I worked for four years in Ho Chi MinhCity as a housekeeper, but the owner wouldn’t give me permissionto go home when my mother was sick,”she says. “I hadto quit.” Now, many years later, she sends home a quarter ofher project’s monthly paycheck, $14, to her aging parents.Hien pedals up to a young, moon-faced girl who looksprovocative under a street lamp. From her bag Hien fishes outleaflets on tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases and30 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

H.I.V./AIDS, each with simple illustrations and text in bothVietnamese and Khmer. She hands the girl a stack of condoms,which are quickly pocketed. The girl confides that her husbandleft her and she’s taken up sex work to feed her son. Hien fieldsthe girl’s questions about infectious diseases: She is worriedabout the symptoms of a recent client. Hien gives the girl a freeclinic card before she slings her bag back on her bike. It bulgeswith a record book, soap, alcohol, bandages, birth control pills,clean needles, An Hoa Clinic information and maps.Most of them earn about $1 a day by selling lottery tickets onthe street. The mobile team referred several of the elderly toboarding houses where they can rent bunks in shared rooms.Nguyen Thi Tuyet, 70, migrated from Vinh Long provincewhere she once taught Vietnamese soldiers’ children during theAmerican war. Single, with no retirement pension, she begs onthe streets to help care for her 102-year-old mother. Mobileteams deliver hot meals to these isolated elderly, as well as tohandicapped adults and children and those living with AIDS onTran Thanh Long, a trained nurse, carries a traveling pharmacopoeiain his doctor’s bag. After rudimentary exams on thestreet, he doles out pills to cure a range of common ills—fromsore throats and inflammations to more complex infections.Dr. Nguyen Trong Duc, An Hoa Clinic’s staff doctor, says it isthese moments of contact, and the offer of free medicine, streetexams, condoms and needles, that allow for the most importantexchange: health education for a homeless population that is bothdifficult to reach and vulnerable.On weekdays homeless and semi-homeless migrants in their70’s and 80’s wait for health exams at An Hoa’s day-care center.Reaching OutThe Ford Foundation’s office in Hanoi helps fund the HoChi Minh City AIDS Committee, the Health Center of District6 and Médecins du Monde’s pilot sexual and reproductivehealth program for the homeless and semi-homeless. It isan approach that recognizes the strength of communityrelations and human potential. Related grants fund researchon migration at the Institute of Social Sciences in Ho ChiMinh City as well as programs in H.I.V./AIDS education thattarget migrant textile and construction workers. Theseefforts reach a mobile population at high risk of infection.Nha Be textile factory is the only factory in the city todeclare the first Monday of each month H.I.V./AIDS preventionand awareness day. Seventy peer educators shareinformation, stage theater performances and invite peoplewho are H.I.V. positive to the factory to share their experiences.Counseling, condoms and crucial health informationare available to more than 6,000 workers, 40 percent ofwhom are far from home. A similar outreach program for maleconstruction workers found that laborers were more willingto ask questions and seek help from peer educatorsthan from other health workers outside their community.the street. More than a year of nutritional meals has added 3 kilogramsto Tuyet’s still bird-thin frame. Homeless people withtuberculosis receive their meals at the center, where their dailymedications are monitored.Planning a program that offers social services to illegalmigrants has meant striking a delicate balance between the government’spolicy of discouraging in-migration and stabilizingthose on the streets. District 6’s project has only recently begunto help its clients obtain legal papers for education, job accessand vocational training. Already 40 children, previously on thestreet, now attend school.As the director at the District 6 Health Center, Dr. TranThanh Hung, believes that the more seriously ill migrants whoare referred from An Hoa’s clinic should be treated even if theyare not registered. “I take responsibility for admitting them tothe center.”The bridge that Dr. Hung builds by taking referrals from AnHoa’s clinic is one of the program’s greatest successes, accordingto Dr. Nguyen Quang Ngoc, field program director forMédecins du Monde in Hanoi. “The work of referral advocatesagainst discrimination, and that’s the biggest challenge thehomeless and semi-homeless face,” he says.Discrimination is compounded for the homeless who alsohave H.I.V. or AIDS. “They’re worse off than the homeless,”says Dr. Tran Luong Banh, head of the District 6 Standing Committeeon AIDS and a member of the project’s steering committee.“Sometimes even their families abandon them.”These days, Vu leads mobile team two. Each month the projectdeposits part of his salary into a savings plan as a hedgeagainst homelessness. There’s a roof over his family. Along withfellow peer educators, he works late nights with a humor thatbelies the risks. “I told my family I’ll work as hard as I can forthis project because of Dr. Vinh’s confidence in me,” he says.Hien has found that she has a talent in medicine. When askedto dream, she says she wishes she could become a health aide;she would finish the schooling she left early because of her fam-Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 31

ily’s poverty. “I’d help people in my village;they know so little about H.I.V. or AIDS,” shesays. “I would go back home to Tra Vinh.”The Urban-Rural BalanceVietnam’s largest cities, Hanoi and Ho ChiMinh City, are magnets for migrants fromother provinces. According to Vietnam’s 1999census on population and housing, nearly halfa million people migrated to Ho Chi MinhCity in the last half of the 1990’s. The Vietnamesegovernment expects that, along withrapid economic development, the percentageof people living in urban areas will grow byanother third by 2010. By 2020, perhaps 45percent of Vietnam’s people will live in urbanareas.Migration to the city isn’t new. FollowingVietnam’s liberation from the French in 1954,and the resulting political divisions, a wave of Catholics fromthe north resettled in Ho Chi Minh City, then known as Saigon.With the end of the American war and Vietnam’s reunificationin 1975, the city’s population temporarily shrank. Rice paddieswere war torn and there was scant food. As part of its New EconomicZones policy, the government resettled more than 800,000residents from the city to farm the countryside and put the landback into production. At thesame time, tens of thousandsmoved from the north as stateemployees to replace a massHealth care for migrants ischancy, but a District 6 clinictries to fill the gaps.exodus of those who had worked for the old regime.In 1986 Vietnam shifted from a centrally orchestrated, commandeconomy to a market-oriented economy. After it openedCastles and Shanties for theUpscale and Down and OutHouses in designer shades of ochre, lavender and mauveoverlook empty lots for sale in Binh Chanh. On the outerrim of Ho Chi Minh City, upwardly mobile commuters aregobbling up cheap real estate and turning a rural fringe ofland into architectural fantasies with art deco gates, grillsand rococo facades. Beyond a vacant field and past a stagnantcreek choked with refuse sprouts a warren of thatchedshanties. These are the homes of the semi-homeless. Someresidents dig the foundations, mix the cement, and haulbricks for the castles next door. The semi-homeless are a roofand a light bulb ahead of those on the streets.A room with a dirt floor and thatch walls rents for 150,000dong, or $10 a month. In this cross-provincial community,a central garden grows in neat rows. In one shack a TVblares. In another, a mother jostles twin babies on her hips.Each household has its own reasons for moving to the city.A Khmer woman from the coastal province of Tra Vinhpiles rau muong in heaps on the floor. She stands waistdeep in water to harvest the swampy vegetable that gracesmost Vietnamese tables. “We’re better off here. At home wehave no land and no way to earn money,” she says.Nguyen Van Vu, a peer educator from District 6 in Ho ChiMinh City, found Lan sleeping in a park, thin as a stick, andhelped her move under a roof. She has both H.I.V. and tuberculosis.A simple altar is nailed under a bare bulb aboveher bed.Hang is 11. She finished fourth grade before her familymigrated to the city. Without papers she can’t continueschool. She babysits the many migrant children who shareher predicament. Her mother, Huong, leans against a wovenwall of their temporary home. “I’d rather sort peanuts in theshade in Ho Chi Minh City than work for the same wages allday in the sun at home,” she says.The electricity goes out temporarily. Oil lamps and candlesflicker in the houses. The night sounds—a dog’s bark,a baby’s cry, an old man’s cough—filter through the permeablewalls. —W.E.32 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

Although the labor of rural migrants underpinsdevelopment, their numbers are stressing alreadyoverloaded health, education and housing systems.the door to development, foreign investment and private enterprisegrew exponentially. The poverty gap between Vietnam’srural and urban areas widened. Coverage for social servicesturned local as families were required to pay user fees for education,health care and child care, all services formerly coveredby cooperatives and state enterprises. New technologies andimproved agricultural strains required fewer hands in the riceFrom the Country to the CityMigration Patterns to Ho Chi Minh City RegionNumbers of migrants by regionof residence in 1994.Northern Mountains30,000THAILANDBangkokLAOSM e k o n gHanoiCAMBODIACHINARed River Delta90,000Phnom PenhNorth Central Coast91,000VIETNAMCentral Highlands9,000Southeast123,000Ho Chi Minh CityMekong Delta184,000Central Coast84,000Sfields. Slow rural development left scantoptions for earning income. The city beckoned.For more than 10 years migration hasswelled Ho Chi Minh City. Social scientistssuggest only half-jokingly that withcurrent trends, some day only childrenand old people will live in the central provinces: those of workingage will have left for the city. Now fishermen leave the stormsof the central coast for calmer southern waters. Young peopleseek opportunities and freedoms unavailable at home. Seasonalfloods and typhoons push villagers out of their homes. Or worse,typhoons and floods inundate the farmland of the very poor whosell out to start over. A common cry among the homeless is,“khong co dat,”I have no land. Some migrants returnhome at harvest, or when flood waters recede; othersstay.Government authorities struggle with a complexdilemma: how to maintain security and discouragethe influx of migrants—and at the same time carefor those in need. Send migrants back to their villages?Or try to improve their lives in the city? Current governmentpolicy aims to step up security and registrationefforts in the cities as well as to develop programsto alleviate rural poverty.It’s important to acknowledge that the migrantwork force contributes to Ho Chi Minh City’s 40percent share of Vietnam’s GDP, says Dr. NguyenTrong Hoa, a professor of urban planning at Ho ChiMinh City University of Architecture. Their laborbuilds houses, supplies vegetables, sells sweets andlottery tickets, polishes shoes and delivers warmfrench bread to doorsteps. Professor Hoa suggests amacro approach to solving migration problems in thelong term: provide more high-skill training for laborersto help them take advantage of the shift to hightechproduction. This would increase incomes andhelp to balance rural and urban development.Although the labor of rural migrants underpinsdevelopment, their numbers are stressing alreadyoverloaded health, education and housing systems.Given a highly mobile population, many believe theofficial numbers of immigrants are too low.“For census takers to claim accurate population figures,”jokes Professor Hoa, “they should take theircounts the second day of Tet, Vietnam’s Lunar NewYear, after most migrants have returned to their villagesto celebrate. If 200,000 go home for Tet, 300,000will return, stuck like glue to their relatives.”Without money or papers, doors remain closedto these newcomers. ■S O U T HC H I N ASource: 1999, General Statistic Office, Vietnam.S E AFord Foundation Report Spring 2003 33

Running ‘Clean’BY PETER ROSS RANGESome say money is the mother’s milk of politics, butto many it has now also become the serpent’s venom.In 2000 total election spending in the United Statestopped $3 billion for the first time; money spent bycandidates in one Senate race (in New York) exceeded$90 million. Most of the money was generatedthrough traditional fund raising from privatesources—a system, reform advocates say, that is usually tied tospecial interests and wealthy individuals. “Today’s election systemfavors the one-half of one percent of people who can affordto contribute to it,” says Michael Caudell Feagan of the PiperFund, a group that promotes campaign finance reform.Efforts to reform the American system of campaign financePeter Ross Range is an editor and freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.have been under way for more than a decade. Best known, perhaps,is the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act—also called theMcCain-Feingold, Shays-Meehan legislation — passed byCongress in 2002. It was the first attempt to reform the role ofmoney in American politics at the federal level since passage ofthe Federal Campaign Finance Act in 1974. The new law raisesthe limit on individual contributions from $1,000 to $2,000 butcompletely bans so-called soft money in presidential and congressionalraces. Soft money is the flood of funds donated to partiesby individuals and special interest groups that partyorganizations have been allowed to spend indirectly to promotetheir candidates. Yet the new law is being challenged in the U.S.Supreme Court by a group of opponents led by U.S. SenatorMitch McConnell. The law’s real impact on election spendingwon’t be clear until 2004.34 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

In Maine and Arizona, campaign finance reform starts at the grass roots.AP/WIDEWORLDMeanwhile, unknown to most Americans—except those wholive in Arizona, Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts—anotherapproach to reform known as “clean elections” is already on thebooks. Clean-elections laws set up public financing systems thatseek to liberate candidates from the influence of special interests,and in some places they are having a dramatic effect.Maine pioneered the movement with a ballot initiative toadopt a clean-elections law in 1996. In the 2000 election, Mainersembraced the new system enthusiastically, with 134 statelegislative candidates opting to “run clean,” as they put it. In2002, 252 candidates ran under clean elections and today 55percent of legislators in Maine’s House of Representatives and77 percent in its Senate ran exclusively on public funding. Arizona’spoliticians have made similar extensive use of the process.Its new Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, narrowlydefeated her Republican rival after running with clean-electionsfunding last fall.“It’s really remarkable that a majority of the legislators inboth Arizona and Maine are people elected without any ties tospecial interests,” says Janet Groat, director of Northeast Action,a Boston-based coalition of electoral reform groups.In a clean-elections system, candidates forego traditionalfund raising in exchange for fixed amounts of public money.Candidates who refuse to accept campaign contributions therebyopt out of a system built on special interests that can range fromtobacco companies to anti-smoking lobbies, and from gun controlgroups to the National Rifle Association. Campaign fundraising that gives special interests outsized influence with lawmakers“is the dirty money system,” says Arizona RepublicanMarc Spitzer, a former state senator and now a member of thestate’s Corporation Commission, which oversees utilities andsecurities offerings. “It’s almost like the buying and selling ofindulgences in the 15th century.”In addition to removing the corrupting influence of specialinterest money from campaigns, advocates say that clean electionslevels the electoral playing field by removing nearly insurmountablefinancial barriers faced by people without personalwealth or access to traditional sources of campaign money. Ascosts of election campaigns spiral upward in a media-saturatedpolitical environment, the field of potential candidatesshrinks down to the independently wealthy and the well connected.Nationally, campaign expenditures have grown 700Above Janet Napolitano,newly elected governor ofArizona, ran under the state’sclean-elections law, whichprovides public funding forcandidates who forego traditionalfund raising dependenton special interests.percent since 1976. Severalstudies have documented that,increasingly, the winner of anelection at any level is associatedwith a single factor: whoraises the most money. Therace for funding rivals the racefor votes in what reform advocatescall “the wealth primary.”Often it is the only one that really counts. The roar of cashdrowns out all other voices.Besides distorting the democratic political process overall,the wealth primary tends to exclude minorities. That’s whysome advocates see clean elections as a civil rights measure aswell as an anti-corruption campaign. Where the poll tax oncediscouraged blacks from voting in the South, the wealth barriernow has the same effect across the country. “The current campaignfinance regime in the United States of America is simplya poll tax that is fashioned at Tiffany’s,” says Roger Wilkins, thejournalist and civil rights activist. “It is undeniable that it is a basiccivil rights issue.”“For decades, elections have been seen as a white man’s issue,”says Stephanie Wilson, director of the Fannie Lou Hamer Project.Despite gains in black voter registration, the effects ofmoney and connections remained powerful. “It was rich peopleoutspending other rich people,” Wilson says. Now, the cleanelectionsapproach, with its emphasis on public funding, shiftsthe playing field fundamentally toward equality. In 2001 theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored Peopleendorsed public funding for its importance to civil rights.Clean-elections systems typically ensure nearly equal amountsof campaign cash for each candidate, whether publicly fundedor not, through a system of matching funds. They also decreasethe price of admission to electoral politics; a candidate needonly collect a certain number of signatures and small contributions(typically five dollars) to qualify. With the financial barlowered, candidacies are more likely, even by people like DeborahSimpson, a single mother and restaurant waitress who isnow in the Maine legislature. This weakens the often overwhelmingpower of incumbency, and elections become morecontested. “We now have a lot more competitive races in Maine,”says Simpson, a Democrat. Dick Bennett, a Republican statesenator, agrees: “We were able to field some really terrific peoplein seats where, frankly, it would have been difficult to findgood candidates in the past. The clean-elections act allowedthem to be competitive.”Proponents also argue that clean elections boosts popularparticipation in the political process because candidates mustinteract with voters, not with a telephone, when raising theirqualifying money in small donations. The traditional process typicallyrequires candidates to spend many hours a day “dialingfor dollars”—phoning interest groups and wealthy contributorsfor donations. Under clean elections, they solicit fundsfrom individuals, face to face. “That was the part I enjoyedmost,” remembers John Patrick, a maintenance engineer inRumford, Me., who was elected to the state House of Representativesin 2002. “It brought me in contact with the people.”In addition, politicians who run clean-elections campaignsbecome far more accessible to voters than to lobbyists and otherspecial interest representatives who traditionally have com-Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 35

‘No matter how careful you are about who you acceptmoney from, you do feel ties to them. Now the onlyinterests I’m tied to are my constituents. And they feela lot more connected to me.’manded their attention during campaigns. “It’s returning democracyto the front porch,” says Doug Clopp of Maine Citizensfor Clean Elections. After they are elected, legislators can spendmore time with voters because they owe no favors to big contributors,Patrick says. “During the legislative session, I didn’thave nearly as many lobbyists chasing after me.”“In previous campaigns, I had to spend one-third to one-halfof my time raising dollars,” says David Petersen, Arizona’s treasurerand a conservative Republican. “Clean elections made mebecome more of a grass-roots candidate.” Leah Landrum, aDemocrat and a member of Arizona’s House of Representatives,ran twice using traditional fund-raising methods; she feels relievednot to have obligations to donors now that she’s a clean-electionscandidate. “No matter how careful you are about who youaccept money from, you do feel ties to them,” she says. “Nowthe only interests I’m tied to are my constituents. And they feela lot more connected to me. My constituent calls have tripled.”To qualify for support in Arizona’s governor’s race, a cleanelectionscandidate had to get five-dollar, signed donations from4,000 registered voters. To run for the state House of Representatives,a candidate had to get five-dollar donations fromMoney and PoliticsThe Ford Foundation’s support for the clean-electionsmovement is part of a larger Money and Politics initiativethat seeks to educate the public about campaign financereform and defend it in the courts. The initiative alsoaddresses minority voting rights and fair access to thepolitical process as it may be hindered by the existingcampaign finance system. Grantees include:■ The National Voting Rights Institute, whichserves as co-counsel in the Vermont clean-election lawcase, otherwise works for campaign finance reform atthe state level and builds coalitions between campaignfinance reform and civil rights groups;■ The National Institute on Money in StatePolitics, which collects and disseminates data aboutsources of funding for state political candidates;■ The National Civic League of Colorado’sNew Politics Program, which promotes public educationabout state-level campaign finance reform;■ The Brennan Center for Justice, which provideslegal assistance to defenders of campaign financereform;■ The Fannie Lou Hamer Project of GreaterBirmingham Ministries, the only campaignfinance reform group in the United States led bypeople of color.200 voters. Once the candidates certified their donations, theybecame eligible for public funding and didn’t have to raiseanother dime.The system is voluntary, however. Any candidate can pass upthe public funds and take the traditional route, raising moneyunder the old rules. In the Arizona gubernatorial race, for example,the Republican candidate, Matt Salmon, decided to generatehis campaign funds the old-fashioned way. He held fundraisers and accepted donations from corporations and individuals.He could also spend unlimited amounts of his own money.Having qualified for clean-elections support, Napolitanoreceived initial funding of $600,000 plus a state commitment tomatch money raised by her opponent in excess of that amountup to a total of $3.2 million. With fund raisers that on two occasionsfeatured President George W. Bush, Salmon raised $3.3 millionfor his race. As a result, Napolitano got her full $3.2 million,which enabled her campaign to mount a well-funded mediablitz near the end of the race. “I was very grateful when thePresident came to campaign for Matt,” candidate Napolitanojoked. “I said, ‘Let me sell tickets.’”Arizona’s 2002 election was its second under the clean-electionslaw. The number of candidates, statewide, who chose totake advantage of it doubled from 2000: 54 percent of all legislativecandidates and 70 percent of candidates for statewideoffices chose the clean-elections route. More impressive was theoutcome: seven of nine statewide offices are now held by peoplewho ran as clean-elections candidates (governor, secretaryof state, attorney general, treasurer, mine inspector and four ofthe five corporation commissioners who oversee utilities). Fiftyfourpercent of the legislature is made up of clean-electionswinners. The total outlay in public funds was $12.8 million,most of it raised through a 10-percent surcharge on all statefines, primarily traffic tickets.“Arizona’s success with clean elections makes it a great modelfor what other states can do, and it’s even a model for federal elections,”says Nick Nyhart, director of Public Campaign, a Washington-basedadvocacy group that promotes clean elections.Along with Maine and Arizona, Vermont and Massachusettsalso have clean-elections laws on their books. Vermont’s legislatureadopted the system in 1997, but only for its statewide candidates,governor and lieutenant governor. In 2000 the incumbentlieutenant governor, a Democrat, ran with clean-elections fundingand was re-elected. But in 2002, no one ran on public fundsbecause an additional provision in the Vermont clean-electionslaw has landed it in the courts. In an attempt to halt the spiralingcost of elections (which in turn drives up the role of specialinterest contributors), Vermont not only provided public fundingfor clean-elections candidates, but also mandated spendinglimits on all candidates, whether publicly funded or not. This isa controversial, radical step. Spending limits at the federal levelwere declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court inJOEL PAGE36 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

Deborah Simpson, a former waitress,was elected to Maine’s House ofRepresentatives with help from a publicfinancing system that removes financialbarriers hindering candidates withoutpersonal wealth or access to specialinterest money.the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo ruling. Although strong momentumis building to get that ruling reversed, it is still the law of theland, and the Vermont case is in limbo awaiting further rulings.Depending on their outcome, the Vermont case could end up havingas great an impact on the role of money in American politicsas the McCain-Feingold legislation.Massachusetts passed a clean-elections ballot initiative in1998. Since then, however, the law has been mired in hardballpolitics. Because one of the law’s primary purposes is to level theelectoral playing field, diminishing the power of incumbency,it triggers resistance among elected officials. In this case, theMassachusetts legislature, led by a powerful Democratic Housespeaker who opposes the law, refused to fund the clean-electionslaw even though it had been passed by referendum. Opponentssaid it was wrong to give public money to politicalcandidates—“welfare for politicians,” they called it—at a timewhen the state faces a $2.5 billion revenue shortfall.This led to a highly charged standoff between the legislators andclean-elections advocates. “The Massachusetts legislature waslike George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door, defying therule of law,” says John Bonifaz, director of the Boston-basedNational Voting Rights Institute. Bonifaz and others took the legislatureto court and last year won a ruling by the Supreme JudicialCourt that forced the state to auction off property to provideclean-elections funds. The property included sports utility vehiclesowned by the Lottery Commission and a piece of state land.The incident led to such shenanigans as legislators pushing theirdesks out into statehouse corridors as if they were to be auctionedoff; it was a political cartoonist’s dream and, not surprisingly,touched off a political firestorm.In addition, the only gubernatorial candidatewho chose to campaign underclean elections, Warren Tolman, angeredsome by running very negative ads againsthis opposition, prompting an outcry evenamong clean-elections supporters. Tolmanlost in the Democratic primary, butopponents of clean elections complainedthat his candidacy showed how publicmoney could be used for a bad purpose.All this hardened opposition among somelegislators, who plan to try to repeal theclean-elections law.Clean-elections activists in Massachusettsare already planning theirresponse. “We might try to mount a repealof the repeal with another ballot initiative,”says Joe O’Brien of MassachusettsVoters for Clean Elections. “Or we couldrevamp the law to focus only on legislativeraces and not include the governor’s race. That would significantlyreduce the expense.”Given the tangled politics of passing clean-elections laws,reform advocates in some states are pursuing a more incrementalagenda. In North Carolina, for example, a group calledDemocracy North Carolina succeeded in passing a clean-electionslaw that applies only to state judges, who must run foroffice in that state. Until now, North Carolina judgeship candidateshave raised their money the old-fashioned way, oftengetting funds from the state’s leading businesses, even thoughmany may have cases before their courts. “The voters understoodthat it’s weird to be getting money from the very people who willstand before the court for judgment,” says Bob Hall of DemocracyNorth Carolina. In 2004 North Carolina’s judgeship candidateswill, for the first time, have the option of running “clean.”The clean-elections movement recognizes that the politicsof campaign finance reform are bumpy and local. Ballot initiativesin Oregon and Missouri failed, each for particular reasonsinvolving both tactics and the general election climate. InNew Mexico, however, advocates are optimistic that a cleanelectionsbill for judgeships can be passed. Still, clean-electionsactivists are at work in almost every state to promote publicfunding, which they see as a bottom-up solution that can leadthe way nationally.The progress so far gives them hope that public money,unconnected to any special pleading, can eventually reduce theoutsized influence of private money in U. S. politics overall. Tothat extent, the campaign finance reform movement may havefound its lodestar. “What’s happened in a handful of statesshows that it’s workable,” Nick Nyhart says. ■Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 37

Scales of JusticeUnbalancedBY DARA MAYERS‘Bureaucraticself-analysis’seeks to reduceoveruse ofincarcerationfor minorityyouth in troublewith the law.Seattle, Wash.—James Bell, a staff attorney at the Youth LawCenter in San Francisco, recalls a “defining moment”of the late1990’s. He had been asked to host some Romanian diplomatsinterested in the workings of the local juvenile justice system. Oneday on their way to court in Oakland, one asked, “Are we goingto the white court today?” Bell was stunned. “I said, ‘We don’thave white courts and black courts here!’ I was offended!” Butthen he realized that “we had been visiting courts all week, andwe had seen only black and Latino faces.”Dara Mayers is a freelance writer based in New York City.The disproportionate treatment of minority youngsters—readily apparent that day to foreigners but easily taken forgranted in the United States—prompted Bell to think aboutpossible remedies. The program he eventually devised aims toreduce racial disparity and overuse of juvenile detention in general.It is based on a step-by-step examination of the processthat takes an offender from the scene of the crime to a detentioncenter. Bell set up a new organization, the Burns Institute,to test the program in King County (Seattle), Washington, andto encourage its use elsewhere. (The institute is named for W.Haywood Burns, a New York lawyer with a lifelong commit-38 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

ANDREW LICHTENSTEINment to the defense of minority prison inmates.) Today Bell’s“Burns Institute model” is being tried in Phoenix, San Francisco,Kansas City and four jurisdictions in Illinois.The three-phase program traces patterns of arrest, detentionbefore trial and final disposition in juvenile cases. The detailedanalysis, conducted by those who participate in the processthemselves, challenges conventional notions of racial disproportionality.“When you say, ‘It is caused by poverty.’ Or, ‘It iscaused by racism,’ you are sayingthe problem is intractable.And then you go home,” Bellsays. “But in fact, the juvenilejustice system is just a series ofdecisions that are made—andwe are examining them to seewhere they have a disproportionalimpact on kids of color,in ways that have nothing todo with public safety.”In Seattle,where the programbegan in 1999, one apparentpositive result is already evident:The number of youngsters indetention on an average nighthas dropped from 220 to 130.The 130 still includes a disproportionatenumber of African-American youths, but the program has also yielded promisingnew insights into the reasons for the disparity.The issue is important for practical as well as ethical reasons.Youngsters confined before their cases are adjudicated are morelikely to be sentenced to additional time behind bars than thosewho remain free. In addition to blighting young lives that mightbe salvaged, incarceration of juveniles can cost two to threetimes the already high cost for adults. Eventually, nearly allincarcerated youth get released after an experience that mayleave them inclined to commit new crimes.“Society won’t help us until they see a problem,” says Jamie,a 17-year-old girl in detention for a probation violation (herinitial charges were for taking a motor vehicle without permission).“They have no problem locking us up because that doesn’ttake time away from them. But reaching out and seeing whatwould stop crime, instead of postponing it, would take time.”Kwame, a 17-year-old in prison for possession of drugs, saysthat there are other ways to help kids than to put them in detention.“We need more options instead of doing jail time—weneed job training in schools, drug treatment, mental healthtreatment. We need things other than drugs that would makepeople feel good.”Disproportional minority confinement (D.M.C.) has beenon the national radar screen since 1989, when the Coalition forJuvenile Justice issued the report “A Delicate Balance” for thePresident, the U.S. Congress and the Administrator of the Officeof Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. The reportstated: “Minority youth are being incarcerated in public correctionalfacilities at rates three to four times those of whites.”In 1992 Congress amended the Juvenile Justice and DelinquencyPrevention Act to require states to assess whether the proportionof minority youth in confinement was greater than theproportion of minority youth in the general population. WhereD.M.C. existed, states were required to spend some of their federaljuvenile justice funds on efforts to reduce the overrepresentation.Few states came up with practical answers. According to astudy released by the Justice Policy Institute, minority youthsaccounted for 34 percent ofthe total youth population but63 percent of the 105,790 juvenilesin custody in 1997, fiveyears after the Congressionalmandate. Meanwhile, whitesrepresented 71 percent of theyoungsters arrested for crimesnationwide, but only 37 percentof detained or committedyouth. These numbersaffirm what Bell knew fromanecdote and experience: disproportionalitygrows asJames Bell, a staff attorneyat the Youth Law Center inSan Francisco, set up theBurns Institute model programto monitor patterns of arrestand detention in juvenilecases and their particulareffect on minorities.Left A Mexican-Americanteenager in prison. Minorityyouth are disproportionatelyincarcerated in the UnitedStates.MIRIAM SUSHMANyoung people of color arearrested and progress throughthe system.Higher detention rates arenot, according to many expertsin the field, based on the kindof offense committed. “Whenyou look at property offensesand drug offenses there is ahuge disparity,”says David Doi,executive director of the Washington,D.C.-based Coalitionfor Juvenile Justice. Jason Zeidenbergof the Justice PolicyInstitute supports Doi’s assertion.“The 1999 NationalHousehold Survey on DrugAbuse reports that white youthaged 12 to 17 are more than a third more likely to have solddrugs than African-American youth,” Zeidenberg says. “TheNational Institute on Drug Abuse’s survey of high school seniorsfrom 1998-1999 shows that white students use cocaine at seventimes the rate of African-American students, use crack cocaineat eight times the rate of African-American students, and useheroin at seven times the rate of African-American students.The same survey showed that nearly identical percentages ofwhite and African-American high school seniors use marijuana.”Researchers say these figures reflect more drug abuse amongwhites even though the survey does not control for studentswho are already incarcerated, who have dropped out of schoolor who haven’t reached their senior year.Nonetheless, Doi points out, African-American youth arethree times more likely to be arrested for drug offenses thanwhite youth. “And all indications are that the overrepresentationof minorities continues to increase,” Doi adds.Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 39

DAN LAMONTThe Burns model focuses on offenders in custody beforethey come to trial. Such detention is in itself a major risk factorfor recidivism, and reducing it for minority youth is considereda crucial step toward reducing disparity in both thejuvenile and the adult prison populations. Only 5 percent ofsuch detainees are charged with the serious violent crimes thatall agree justify detention. In the other 95 percent of cases, a largedegree of subjectivity enters into decisions to hold or release.“Most disproportionality can be attributed to the disparatetreatment kids of color receive in the system. There’s very littlerelationship between who is dangerous and who is locked up,”Bell says. “If you look at the system, you see that there are pointswhere kids of color are swooped into it, and white kids arebounced out, where there is Velcro sticking to us, and Teflon isletting them go. We want to see where those points are.”Disproportionate minority youth confinement generallyrefers to the overwhelming proportion of African-Americanand Latino youth behind bars; in King County, the numbersare worse than national figures, especially for African-Americans.Although about 9 percent of all youth in King County areAfrican-American, 25 percent of offenders referred to the prosecutoron new charges are African-American, 30 percent ofcases resulting in a conviction are for African-American youthand 33 percent of those ordered to detention are African-American.On any given day, 40 percent of youth in detention areAfrican-American.Under the Burns model, investigating the causes of Teflonversus Velcro takes place in three phases over three years. Thefirst step is the creation of a voluntary group representing everyelement of the juvenile justice system, which meets every sixweeks in an open forum. Bell says there are actually 180 decisionsmade from the moment of first police contact throughAaron Dixon, a longtimearrest, arraignment and finalcommunity activist, led thedisposition of a juvenile case,community mapping projectbut he has grouped them intoto assess the strengthsthree separate decision points.and weaknesses of youthEach of the participants isservices in three Seattleareaneighborhoods.required to keep exactingrecords of the decisions affectingyouth detention at each Top The Burns modelstep of the way, along with the program was first tried inreasons for the decisions. They King County, Washington.meet regularly to share data Here the county advisory boardand coordinate responses to discusses the program’swhat it reveals. The goal is to progress in the Seattle area.create a data-driven bureaucratic self-analysis.“I was interested in the project because District 10, which IALAN BERNER40 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

‘I’m surprised that people arereally willing to look at themselves.The cops sat down withthe prosecutors, the publicdefenders, community membersand opened their books—and the earth did not stoprotating!’represent, includes all the inner-city communities of Seattle,”saysLarry Gosset, a member of the King County Council. “A horrificand completely disproportionate number of youth andadults in our criminal justice system reside in my district.”Gossetand Bobbe J. Bridge, a superior court justice, helped to bringthe Burns model to King County. “The benefit of having theKing County sheriff, the Seattle police, the prosecutor, publicdefenders, superior court judges, elected officials and youth andcommunity-based organizations come together is that it createsan integrated system of change, where each stakeholder canplay a role,” Gosset says.The road to detention begins with an offender’s first contactwith police. Following the Burns model, the police supply dataon the race of offenders and times and places of arrest. “I’vebeen here 15 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” saysSusan Waild, who oversees the 50 juvenile probation officers inKing County. Given the traditional insularity of criminal justiceagencies, she says, “I’m surprised that people are really willingto look at themselves. I’ve been really impressed with thepolice. The cops sat down with the prosecutors, the publicdefenders, community members and opened their books—and the earth did not stop rotating!”In addition, community representatives and youth are dispatchedinto minority communities to conduct “communitymapping.” Led by Aaron Dixon, a former Black Panther andlongtime community activist, the mapping teams go into theCentral Area, Rainier Valley and West Seattle and determinethe neighborhoods’ strengths and weaknesses in youth services.“We surveyed each school in the community, each communitycenter and a wide array of community members. Then we surveyedyoung people to learn what they felt their communitiesneeded and came up with a composite of what goes into healthykids and healthy communities.”The community mappers found that existing programs didAlliance for YouthThe Ford Foundation supports the Youth Law Center throughBuilding Blocks for Youth, an alliance of children’s advocates,researchers, law enforcement professionals and communityorganizers that seeks to protect minority youth in thejustice system and promote rational and effective justicepolicies. This support reflects the foundation’s longstandingcommitment to helping to redress racial inequality andthe belief that safe, humane treatment of youthful criminaloffenders best suits the needs of both the youth involved andsociety as a whole.not welcome at-risk or gangrelatedyouth, and that theopportunities available in thecommunity were not of particularinterest to kids. “Nowwe know that in Seattle juvenilecrime spikes between 3p.m. and 9 p.m.,” Bell says. “Ifwe had a program to grab thatkid from school, take him toSheri Rials, former coordinatorof Youth in Action, is nowproject liaison for the Burnsmodel program.Top Cedric Barquet, 21, inand out of prison in his teens,is now enrolled in collegeand serves on the youthadvisory board of the Burnsmodel program.some kind of evening reporting center—where he can do homeworkand have dinner—I guarantee you that we would see disproportionalityreduced. Now there is nowhere for them to dothese things, and you’ll hear people say, ‘Well, they are betteroff in detention.’”“We are gathering information that has not been gatheredbefore,” Dixon says. “There have been 20 years of gangs, violenceand drugs—and we have not found a solution yet. TheBurns program gives us an apparatus to help us find solutionsthat can work.”The second phase of the program studies the decisions aboutwho will be released and who will be detained after arrest butbefore a case is adjudicated. In general, kids who are detainedprior to adjudication are much more likely to face incarcerationas part of their sentence. Decisions about detention before adjudicationare made by screeners, employees of the court who makethe initial decisions based on a Risk Assessment Instrument, orALAN BERNERALAN BERNERFord Foundation Report Spring 2003 41

‘Youth of color arebeing detained forreasons other thandanger to the community.Being detaineddoes not bode well fortheir futures.’R.A.I.,which varies from county to county.The R.A.I.includes both objective and subjectivefactors. Objective factors tend to beoffense driven — such as whether theaccused was carrying a weapon at the timeof arrest, had been detained in the last 30days or had failed to appear for past courthearings. Subjective factors include thescreener’s belief that the family is stableenough to provide supervision or that ajuvenile is a threat to community safety orto him or herself. The R.A.I. is used to determine a juvenile’s riskof returning to court or committing new offenses. “What wasfound in this phase was that the criteria used in Seattle for screeningkids for detention prior to adjudication was extremely subjective,”Bell says.While he does not call the R.A.I. racist, he says that the supposedlyneutral tool exhibits a strong “institutional bias” thatunfairly affects young people of color. “A screener’s interpretationof ‘family stability’ can determine whether a kid is heldor detained,” Bell says. “We’d like to reduce that kind of subjectivityin the decision-making process.” In addition to questioningthe R.A.I. and other aspects of the intake process, Burnsmodel analyses have scrutinized the practice of rearrestingyouths after they had been released, not on a new charge butbecause they violated a condition imposed at the time of release,such as participating in a social service program or showing upfor more court appearances.“That seems to be totally race neutral—a young person is toldthese are the rules you have to follow in order to stay out ofconfinement,” Bell says. “However, what we found in Phoenix,for example, is that the services required to comply with theconditions of probation, say anger management classes, were notaccessible by public transportation from communities wherethese kids lived.” In Santa Cruz it was virtually impossible formany young offenders to get to the courthouse via public transportation,so many were held because of “failure to appear,” orthe likelihood of that occurring. “That’s a technical violation,”Bell says. “Kids of color were not showing up in court for theirfirst hearing regarding such things as parking violations or truancy.”It turned out that calling offenders the night before toremind them that their hearing was scheduled for the next dayincreased the rate of appearance. The Santa Cruz courtsaddressed the problem by opening a courtroom specifically forjuveniles in the community where the vast majority of minoritykids lived. “The concern is that youth of color are beingdetained for reasons other than danger to the community,”saysLaura Inveen, a King County juvenile court judge. “Beingdetained does not bode well for their futures. Data suggest thatreferral to detention tends to play out in the rest of court proceedings.The more likely it is that a kid is detained the morelikely the youth will ultimately receive a sentence of detention.”The first two phases of the Burns model address the decisionsthat are made before the young person sees a judge. The thirdphase examines decisions of judges, prosecutors and publicdefenders that may contribute to disparity in detention. “Judgesfilled out forms on the bench saying this is what led me to holdthis kid and this is what led me to release,”Bell explains. “We arecurrently in the process of analyzing these data and asking questionslike: Do these things have anything todo with public safety? If not, and we weregoing to release kids, where would werelease them? This enables us to determinewhat resources we need if we are going torelease kids rather than detain them.”A major finding of the program is thatminority youngsters are often held indetention because judges believe that nocaring adults are available to supervisethem if released. “If a single mother worksa 12-hour day, she simply cannot show up for court to come andpick her kid up,”Bell says. “Kids should not be punished becausethey come from poor families, or have atypical family structures.”Bell believes this is why the project’s effects on disparity so farremain unrealized. Although the number of young people of allraces held in detention has dropped dramatically and the percentageof Asian youth has dropped by 6 percent, the percentageof African-American youth held has increased slightly sincethe Burns model began. Bell believes that judges won’t feel moreconfident about releasing youngsters pending trial withoutmore community programs that address their needs and promisesome sort of effective supervision. That, Bell says, is an issuefor the city’s politicians as well as its criminal justice agencies.“We learned from Seattle that we need more politicians onboard from the beginning who can start advocating for the programswe need,” Bell says. “In other communities we are buildingour governing body so that it includes more of these kindsof decision makers.”Many African-American youngsters are held in the KingCounty juvenile system because there is no one the court deemssuitable to release them to, and because services are lacking intheir communities. This does not surprise Cedric Barquet, 21,who has been in and out of both the juvenile and adult prisonsystems since he was in his teens. Barquet, who says that hisfamily fell apart when he was 11 and his father died, currentlyserves on the youth advisory board of the Burns model. Nowhe is enrolled in college, and he credits his rehabilitation to hisinvolvement in Youth in Action, a group that brought the voicesand opinions of young people to policy makers in King County,with a particular emphasis on juvenile justice. Youth in Actionrecently lost funding because of budget cuts that reflect changingpriorities. “A large portion of our money involving youth servicesis allocated for detention services,”says Sherry Rials, formercoordinator of Youth in Action, and currently project liaisonfor the Burns model. “This doesn’t leave a lot left over for prevention,recreation and support services for kids and their families.”Barquet’s involvement in the program, he says, completelyaltered the course of his life. “All I needed was somebody to stayon me,” Barquet says, “to keep pushing me to be positive, anddo positive.”Bell hopes that through the work of the Burns model moreyoung people will have opportunities like Barquet’s. “This iswhere we are ultimately going to go in lowering disproportionality.I am convinced that we are moving toward creatingalternative community agencies that are specifically for the purposeof taking these kids that the court would release and providingservices. Agencies are in the community, but we have toenergize them and introduce them to the court,” Bell says. ■42 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

For ChineseWomen, aLong MarchBY DINAH ENGThe long march toward women’s equality is at theheart of a project that documents women’s issues inChina, and, for those involved, the effort has becomea vehicle for greater cross-cultural understandingbetween Chinese women writers and their Westerncounterparts. The voices in Half the Sky: ChineseWomen Then and Now,an anthology of writings froma feminist perspective to be published by The FeministPress next year, speak of a culture where women havelong been subservient to men, and where many stillstruggle for validation today.The essays by Chinese women were assembled for publicationwith help from a Ford Foundation grant. The FeministPress, based in New York City, is a nonprofit, educational publisherof works that aim to restore and preserve the history andculture of women everywhere.“This grew out of the 1995 United Nations Fourth WorldConference on Women in Beijing,” says Shirley Mow, co-editorof the book with Tao Jie, professor of English literature at PekingUniversity, and Zheng Bijun, professor of history at the universityand former director of its Women’s Center. The editorsat The Feminist Press decided to produce an anthology of Chinesewomen’s writing, Mow says, because “a lot of what is writtenabout China is done by Americans or Westerners. We wantedto hear the voices of Chinese women.”Mow, an educational consultant based in the United States,and Florence Howe, founder and former publisher and directorof The Feminist Press, worked with the Women’s Center atPeking University to find scholars, activists and governmentofficials who would be interested in submitting essays for ananthology. Mow and Howe traveled to Beijing last summer toconduct a writers’ workshop with the Chinese writers and foundDinah Eng writes a nationally syndicated column, “Bridges,” for GannettNews Service.it to be an eye-opening experience.“We’re beginning to learn how to work together,” Mow says.“The Chinese women have a different stylistic approach in theirwriting, coming slowly to the main question and revisiting theline of thought several times. We tried to convey that Westernersare used to reading a direct approach.“But we work to respect and honor each other’s views, andthis is paying off. They asked if we could simultaneously publishthe book in Chinese, which we’ll probably do. A lot of theseissues have not come to the forefront before. The women inChina always thought the government protected their rights,but as China becomes more globalized and privatized, they arerealizing women are not always protected.”The book examines the history of women in China, culturalimages of women in literature, opera and mass media, issues ofeducation, marriage and family, and the role of women in politicsand the workplace.The essays, a combination of personal reflections and academicresearch, give a comprehensive look at the cultural, economicand political factors that have shaped women’s lives inthe world’s most populous country. Some of the chapters arewritten in English. Others are English translations. Following arethree excerpts from the book.Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 43

LIBRARY, CHINESE ACADEMY OF ARTSThe Changes In Chinese Women’sSocial Status As Seen ThroughPeking Opera(1790-1937)By Yufu HuangPeking opera, like other art forms, is derived from and has beendeeply rooted in social life since its inception. Virtually every significantsocial change and major social custom in Chinese historyhas been portrayed on the Peking opera stage. Dominantsocial values and gender roles have also been espoused in itsstories. For example, gender stereotypes dating from feudalChina—such as the view that menare superior to and stronger thanwomen—were fully displayedin this ancient art form.An examination of changesoccurring within the Pekingopera between 1790 and1937 provides a rare glimpseof the transformation offemale roles, both on and offthe stage. This can be seen inthree aspects:First, the importance offemale roles in Peking operarepertoire increased. Maleroles were the major roles inPeking opera from its inception.By the early 20th century, however,their importance in the plays wasdecreasing, in great part due to thecontributions of Wang Yaoqing,the famous actor. By portrayingfemale characters, Yaoqing greatlyaltered the accepted singingmodes, performance styles andappearance of female characters,thereby improving the status offemale roles in the repertoire.Second, since the beginningof the 20th century, women’simages have been more positivein comparison with thefemale characters of Pekingopera’s early days. Nowwomen were shown to bebeautiful and affectionate,sensible and wise, withsupreme talent and learning(Xishi in “A Story of Xishi”)A male actor in costumefor a female role in thePeking Opera productionof “Concubine Mei.”or highly skilled in the military arts (Hongxian in “HongxianSteals the Box”). Also, many new plays protested against themaltreatment and persecution of women (“The Jade HairClasp”). In addition, for the first time in the history of Pekingopera, women’s search for love was depicted as something beautifulinstead of licentious (“Face and Peach”).The third, andmost striking change in women’s images in the Peking opera, wasthat there were more and more roles for women with natural,unbound feet.* As a prevalent social custom practiced for almosta thousand years in China, foot binding was shown on the operastage by actors wearing qiao, a set of props worn on the feet tolook like the bound feet of Chinese women.By the early 1900’s, some actors playing female roles soughtto abandon qiao in their performance. This is not only a significantreform in the ancient art of Peking opera, but also anindication that Chinese society was moving toward an eventualban of the practice of footbinding.—Yufu Huang, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow anddirector of the department of research at the Center forDocumentation and Information of the Chinese Academyof Social Sciences.Gender Inequalityin Educationin Rural ChinaBy Danke LiIn the early 1990’s, the Women’s Studies Center of the BeijingUniversity, together with researchers from education andresearch institutes in three impoverished northwestern provinces(Ninxia, Gansu and Qinghai), conducted a large-scale projectstudying girls’ education in poor rural regions. The result wasthe publication of an oral history on female education as toldby rural girls, teachers and parents. The following story is toldby a girl:“My name is Gao Caiqin and I am seventeen. My family livesin the Gao Village in Xiangnan township, Tongwei county ofGansu province. There are four children in our family, and Iam the third one. I dropped out of school when I was in thesecond year of middle school. I will never forget what happenedin the few days after the Chinese New Year in 1994. In the afternoonof the sixth day of the new year, I finished my winter breakhomework and began to make homework exercise books forthe coming term. My father walked toward me and asked: ‘Whatare you doing?’ ‘Making homework books for next term,’ I said.My father then said: ‘Who said that you are going to school? Idon’t have money to send you to school anymore.’ I was soshocked I was dumbstruck. My mother got very upset and quarreledwith my father and then left for her brother’s house. Withonly my brother and me left at the house, my father scolded usangrily. He gave my brother the registration money and paid no* Foot binding, a Chinese custom begun in the T’ang Dynasty (618B.C.-906A.D.),was outlawed in 1911. Unnaturally tiny feet were a female beauty ideal accomplishedby binding young girls’ feet for several years in order to completelystop foot growth. Foot binding usually crippled its subjects for life.44 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

BETTMANN/CORBISattention to me. Then I realized it was true that my father wouldnot let me go to school any more. Tears started to run out of myeyes. I tried many ways to go back to school. I tried to persuademy father to go out of town to work so that my mother wouldbe in charge of our household decisions and would let me returnto school. I also mobilized my grandmother and other relativesto persuade my father to let me return to school. However, allmy efforts failed.“I continue to question why we girls cannot be like the boysand go to school and study. If you ask me what I want to do inthe future, I can tell you that a person with some educationalways has her own idea. I don’t want to just spend my life doingfarm work. I want to learn some practical skills and do some professionalwork. Of course, I have a big wish—if opportunityallows, I want to go back to school.”—Danke Li, Ph.D., is currently an assistant professor ofhistory at Fairfield University in the United States.The Long March Womenand the ChineseWomen’s MovementDr. Yen Young, one of the women whoparticipated in the Long March.By Lily Xiao Hong LeeIn October 1934, 30 women began the monumental journeyfrom Ruijin, Jiangxi province, that eventually came to be knownas the Long March. Although there is no accurate figure on thetotal number of women who took part in the different stages ofthe Long March, it was probably in excess of a thousand. Whydid all these women embark on such an arduous odyssey—one that had so tested the endurance of men? There must havebeen as many reasons as there were women. However, it seemsto me that there isone thing linkingall of them: a consciousnessthatwomen were beingoppressed, and thatMarxism offeredthem somethingbetter. This hopefor a better life, Ibelieve, is whatmotivated thesewomen to becomeinvolved with theChinese CommunistParty. Becausethe Long Marchwomen had shownunbending loyaltyto the party andhad been effective in political work, they were the ones entrustedwith organizing women after the Long March ended in NorthernShaanxi and throughout China once the C.C.P. took overthe country.About two months before the mainstream Red ArmyPRIVATE COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARYmarched out of Jiangxi, a regimenthad been sent to doreconnaissance for the maingroup. This was the Red SixthRegiment, headed by RenBishi and Xiao Ke. FiveThe Long March, October1934. Communist troopstraveled 8,000 miles fromsouthern Hunan province tojoin another communist forceon the Tibetan border.women marched with this regiment, including Li Zhen, and RenBishi’s wife, Chen Congying. Chen Congying had been engagedto Ren Bishi when they were both very young. After Ren Bishibegan underground party work in Shanghai, he recruited Chenas his trusted messenger. After two Shanghai members defected,Chen was arrested and went to jail with her three-month-oldbaby. She was rescued from Guomindang prison, and finallyjoined her husband in Jiangxi. During the Long March, shewas head of the confidential documents bureau and hid onher person the secret code used to communicate with otherRed Army outfits.The Women’s Anti-Japanese Vanguard Regiment was createdfrom the independent women’s regiment. When it crossedthe Yellow River in late 1936, this regiment became isolatedfrom the main Red Army and was then virtually annihilated byMuslim warlords, the Ma brothers, and their cavalry. The womenfought desperately, first in Linze, then in Nijia Yingzi, and finallynear Shiwo beside Qilian Mountain, until their ammunitionran out. Then they fought with sticks, stones, and finally withtheir bare hands. Ultimately, all were wounded, killed or captured.Many of the captured women were raped and horrificallykilled. One source wrote: “The cold and steep peaks ofQilian Mountain stood in the stiff wind like iron men. Theywitnessed the cruelest and most poignant scene in the historyof the Workers and Peasants Red Army. The battle song writtenin blood by the Women’s Independent Regiment will foreverecho in the mountains of the Qilian Range.” ■—Lily Xiao Hong Lee lectures on Chinese literature at theChinese Department of the University of Sydney, Australia, andis the author of numerous books and papers on Chinese women.Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 45

Russia’sPhoto TroveBY LINDA CORMANAlthough a 1944 photograph by Russian photographer EvgeniKhaldey (1916-1997) is in black and white, it clearly portrays abrilliant blue sky over sunbathers sprawled amid the rubble of aSevastopol building bombed during World War II. The stunning depictionof resilience and hope amid devastation is one of more than70,000 photographs taken between 1860 and the present in Russiaand the former Soviet Republics. The Moscow House of Photographyis in the process of rescuing them from a variety of threats.Many photos and their negatives are in danger of disintegrating because ofnormal aging, at times aggravated by faulty processing and careless storage.With a grant from the Ford Foundation, the House of Photography has setup facilities to digitize photos from both its own and other collections toensure their long-term survival.The House of Photography is the first museum of its kind in Russia. When itwas started under government auspices in 1996, it aimed to build a collectionfrom public and private archives that had been closed to the public for decadesand that had been depleted for reasons ranging from political purging to simplyfreeing up space. Since its inception, the House of Photography has alsobeen competing with foreign collectors interested in taking Russian photoshome with them.The museum is digitizing all 70,000 photographs in its own collection aswell as many from other state and private holdings. The museum’s archivesinclude photos from czarist Russia, such as those by Maksim Dmitriev (1858-1948), up to and including work by Igor Mukhin (see his photo of motorcyclistsopposite). Some of the museum’s collection may be viewed now on itsWeb site, www.mdf.ru. Also, many of the digitized photos will be included ona new Web site, expected to go online next year, which will provide a visualchronicle of more than a century of Russian history.Linda Corman is a freelance writer based in New York.Sunbathers amid rubblefrom bombardment ofSevastopol.Evgeni Khaldey(1916-1997)Watery landscape in whatis now the autonomousrepublic of Karelia.Alexander Rodchenko(1891-1956)Girl tries on shoes atgovernment departmentstore in Moscow.Anonymous.Archives of GUMBrowsing for books at anoutdoor market in Moscow.Dmitri Baltermants(1912-1990)Motorcyclists congregateon a Moscow Street.Igor Mukhin(1961-4646 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

19441933199919601950Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 47

FilmsRisingFortunesBY SUSAN SACCOCCIA Mountain ranges ring the two townsat the northwestern tip of Massachusetts.One is postcard-perfect Williamstown,the home of Williams College, a reveredtheater festival and renowned art museums.Five miles east is blue-collar NorthAdams, until recently known for itsboarded-up storefronts and post-industrialpall.But rising out of the abandoned, 19thcenturybrick factory complex in NorthAdams is the Massachusetts Museum ofContemporary Art (MASS MoCA), thelargest museum of contemporary art inAmerica, established in 1999. And thetown’s prospects and spirit are rising withit. This transformation is the subject ofthe film “Downside UP,” by Nancy Kelly,a North Adams native and an award-winningfilmmaker.North Adams’s fortunes suffered asevere blow in 1985 when Sprague ElectricCompany, a family-owned businessthat for decades had employed half theadults in town, sold the company to anout-of-state corporation that movedassembly-line work overseas and closedthe plant. The resulting unemploymentwas crushing.Nancy Kelly grew up in a family thathad worked for Sprague for two generations.But so bleak were the town’sprospects that even before Sprague closed,the family moved away. For years, Kellywas ashamed to admit she was fromNorth Adams, which she regarded as asymbol of hopelessness.Back for a visit in 1998, she saw signs ofchange and began exploring this newNorth Adams and chronicling it for herfilm. Her guides were local leaders, familymembers and the town’s newest residents—artistsand entrepreneurs.In the film one meets John Barrett, theSusan Saccoccia is a writer based in Cambridge,Mass.city’s no-nonsense, can-do mayor since1984, an enthusiastic convert to the ideaof combining art and commerce to revivedowntown. A believer in locally ownedbusinesses, he takes a dim view of absenteelandlords. But he also sees great potentialin linking up with Williamstown andLenox, center of the Berkshire culturalbelt, which draws more than two millionvisitors a year. Lenox is a 45-minute drivesouth of North Adams.The film also introduces ThomasKrens, who first proposed converting theold Sprague plant, a complex of 28 buildingsspread over 13 acres, into a contemporaryart center when he directed theWilliams College Museum of Art duringthe 1980’s.“Culture is a business, and it does generatevalue,” says Krens, now director ofthe Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,which built a landmark museum,An art museumspawns an inn,restaurants, galleriesand 850 new jobs.designed by Frank Gehry, in Bilbao, Spain.That museum helped to transform thefading industrial city.Can a mercurial phenomenon likecontemporary art replace manufacturingas the town’s economic engine? Andif so, how would that transform the town?“Downside UP,” traces a precariousprocess that has succeeded against theodds. Financing, of course, was one of thefirst obstacles, but after years of on-andoffcourtship, the Massachusetts legislatureapproved a $35 million matching grantto North Adams for the arts project in1988. The funds were not certified by thegovernor until 1995, which allowed constructionon the project to begin.In its two-year first phase the projectrenovated 300,000 square feet of the factorycomplex, 20 percent of it slated forThe entrance to MASS MoCA features“Tree Logic,” an airborne row of treeshanging upside down.rent-producing commercial use, therest for the contemporary art museum.MASS MoCA opened on May 30, 1999,drawing 10,000 people into galleries thesize of football fields. Where electroniccomponents were once assembled, visitorsfound giant installations such as TimHawkinson’s “Überorgan,” a billowing,bladder-like structure that honks anddrones to inner rhythms.After touring the museum, Ginny,Nancy Kelly’s mother confesses, “I hatedit.” But an installation outside themuseum’s entrance intrigued her. “TreeLogic,” by Natalie Jeremijenko, shows arow of maple seedlings suspended in airupside down. (The film takes its title fromthe airborne installation.) “I’d like to seeit in another year,”Ginny Kelly says, “to seewhat the trees do.”Cavernous quarters suit artists like EricRudd, a sculptor who moved to NorthAdams from Washington, D.C. in 1988.He shows off his 15,000 square foot loft,teeming with large sculptures. AmongRudd’s works is “Eagle Street Beach,”which he created by carpeting the town’smain street with sand. While their smilingparents watch, hundreds of childrenfrolic on “the beach.”“Sand castles on Eagle Street, upsidedowntrees, honking bladders,”says Kelly.“These kids are going to grow up with acompletely different memory of NorthAdams than I have.”Huge spaces and low rents also attractbusiness entrepreneurs. Foundersof Internet companies and graphic©2000 NICHOLAS WHITMAN.NWPHOTO.COM48 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

MICHAEL LAVIN FLOWER/IMPACT PRODUCTIONS“Seeing the Path of the Wind,” byStacy Levy, was part of MASS MoCA’sUnnatural Science exhibit in 2000.designers who rent MASS MoCA officespace are bringing “a new mode of fabrication”to the former industrial complex,says Joseph Thompson, foundingdirector of MASS MoCA. Artists andentre-preneurs are like-minded neighbors,Thompson says. “They’re both inthe business of making reality rather thanaccepting reality.”For example, the film shows a row ofabandoned houses known as “the worstblock on the worst street in North Adams,”where a Williams College graduate is creatinga luxury inn called Porches.In Kelly’s film, the villains are the absenteelandlords, speculators who keep storefrontsboarded up, hoping for the highestpossible sale or rental price. “They’re sittingon the property,”says Mayor Barrett,as the camera lingers over vacant displaywindows of once-thriving stores. “Theywon’t give back to the community thathas been very good to them.”“Downside UP”concludes in the summerof 2001, two years after the openingof MASS MoCA. Attendance is up at themuseum, which hosted 110,000 visitorsin 2001.From the time MASS MoCA opened,North Adams has gained 850 jobs andgenerated $29 million a year in new-businessspending. Downtown occupancyreached 70 percent in 2001, up from 30percent in 1996.But the nation’s economic nosedive hasaffected North Adams too. The Internetstart-ups there have downsized, some cutting50 percent of their staffs.Still, they have survived, and new ventureshave begun: an art store, a row ofgalleries, a theater and up-market apartments;burgeoning new restaurantsare adding truffles and ribs to the downtowndiet.‘The arts can help groups to define theircommunity assets and create an identity asa community. This self-awareness canstabilize the community.’Kelly’s mother observes that theupside-down maple seedlings are alsosurviving. “They’ve grown,” says GinnyKelly. “The leaves came, fell and thencame back.” The trees evoke the reversalof spirit in North Adams, a town rebornby art and enterprise.“When and if this place is completelyturned around and everything is filled uphere,” says Kelly’s Uncle Bud, “it will betime to turn the trees around.”“Downside UP”was broadcast nationallyin February on PBS (www.pbs.org).Contact New Day Films at orders@newday.comto purchase or rent the film. ■Art as a Catalyst ofCommunity DevelopmentThe Ford Foundation sponsored anationwide screening tour of the documentary“Downside UP”in the fall of2002. Organized by the Center forIndependent Documentary anddirected by Nancy Kelly, producer anddirector of “Downside UP,” the tourencouraged community groups fromseven states to explore the potentialrole of arts and culture in communitydevelopment.During the 12-month tour,the teamshowed the film to each participatinggroup along with local arts and civicleaders. The screening was followed bya two-day tour of North Adams andMASS MoCA. Later the groups met atthe Ford Foundation to develop a fundingmodel to support the use of art asa catalyst for economic growth benefitingan entire community.“The arts can help groups definetheir community assets and create anidentity as a community,”says MiguelGarcia, a program officer with theFord Foundation’s Community andResource Development unit. “Thisself-awareness can stabilize the communityand help decision makersdetermine the right steps to create publicspace that promotes social integrationand economic mobility.”Contact the Center for IndependentDocumentary at www.listeningtour.org for assistance in setting up publicscreenings.Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 49

FilmsMurder inMississippiBY KENYA DILDAY Had Emmett Till lived, he would turn62 this year. He was brutally murdered in1955, however, and that is how the UnitedStates remembers him. In the film, “TheMurder of Emmett Till,” Stanley Nelson,the director and producer, uses the perspectiveof nearly 50 years to show whatEmmett Till’s story meant to the developmentof human and civil rights in theUnited States.On August 20, 1955, less than a monthafter Emmett’s 14th birthday, his mother,Mamie Till, took him to Chicago’s 63rdstreet station where he boarded a train toMississippi. His granduncle, MosesWright, was a cotton farmer in the Deltaand Emmett planned to spend the rest ofthe summer playing with his cousins andhelping harvest the cotton. By August28th, Emmett was dead.Roy Bryant, a white man who owneda grocery store, and his stepbrother, J.W.Milam, were tried and acquitted of murderingEmmett but later recounted detailsof the crime to Look Magazine for a paymentof $4,000. Some say that others yetto be identified or prosecuted were alsoinvolved. Bryant and Milam said youngEmmett had whistled at Bryant’s wife,Carolyn, who was tending the store inMoney, Miss.The murder of a black boy was notunusual at that time in Mississippi. MamieTill’s refusal to let Emmett’s death passquietly is what made his case an internationalstory. Only 33 when Emmett died,Mamie Till had his body brought back toChicago, where she held an open-casketfuneral and notified the press so that theworld could see what had been done toher son. Fifty thousand people passedthrough the church in Chicago to viewEmmett’s body.The film, written by Marcia Smith,highlights the two photos of Emmett mostKenya Dilday is a writer based in New York City.publicized after his murder. One shows around-faced boy wearing a tie and a smile.The other shows the bloated, mutilatedcorpse that was pulled from the TallahatchieRiver. The photos shocked thenation, especially African-Americans.Muhammed Ali, who was 13 and living inKentucky at the time of Emmett’s murder,recalls standing with a group of boys andlooking at the two drastically differentimages of Emmett. He says he “felt a deepkinship to him.” Julian Bond, presidentof the N.A.A.C.P., was 15 years old whenEmmett was killed. He says, “I recallbelieving that this could easily happen tome—for no reason at all.”“The Murder of Emmett Till” beginsby showing the constraints on interracialinteractions in Mississippi in the 1950’s.Against a backdrop of “whites only”signs,David Lee Jordan, a black Mississippianborn in the 1930’s, describes a time whenblack men stepped off the curb if a whitewomen was passing and when black peoplewere afraid of the punishment thatwould follow if they looked whites in theeye. Betty Pearson, a white woman whoIn 1955 the EmmettTill trial was coveredby news media from asfar away as Europeand Japan.lived in the Money area where Emmettwas killed, describes how as a young girlshe threw her arms around a blackemployee after the death of her father;the man quickly shrugged off her embracefor fear of repercussions.Two black men, Moses Wright andWillie Reed, stood up in court and testifiedagainst two white men in front of theall-white jury even though they knew that,as a consequence, they would have to leaveMississippi forever. Wright went from thecourtroom to the train station leaving hiscar and his fields with ripe bolls of cotton.He never returned to Mississippi. Shortlyafter testifying, Reed was hospitalized forCORBIS /BETTMANN; INSET, MAMIE TILL MOBLEYPeople swarm the entrance to RobertsTemple Church during Emmett Till’sfuneral service in 1955. Inset:Emmett and Mamie Till.a nervous breakdown in Chicago. Bryantand Milam were acquitted on both murderand kidnapping charges.In 1955 the Emmett Till trial was coveredby news media from as far away asEurope and Japan. The impunity withwhich white assailants dispensed theirperverted idea of justice shocked the worldand galvanized the civil rights movementin the United States. One hundred daysafter Emmett Till’s death, Rosa Parksrefused to give up her seat on a bus andthe Montgomery bus boycott began.Nelson brings the film to the 21st centurynot only by retelling the story ofEmmett Till, but also by interviewingthose who were directly affected. The contrastbetween clips from 1955 and contemporaryinterviews illustrate thatAmerica still has a long way to go inachieving racial harmony.Clarence Strider Jr., the son of the sheriffwho policed the courtroom during thetrial and spewed racial epithets at blackreporters, was one of the people whopulled Emmett’s body from the river. Inan interview on film, Strider Jr., now in hislate 60’s, speaks proudly of the way whiteMississippians stood their ground. “Peopleare used to doing things normalaround here,”Strider says. “They thought50 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

ut they didn’t.”In March 2002 in Chicago, Mamie TillMobley spent three hours recounting hermemories of that time for the filmmakers.She died this past January, a few weeksbefore “The Murder of Emmett Till” firstaired on PBS. After Emmett died, Ms. TillMobley attended college and graduateschool and became a schoolteacher. Sheremarried but never had another child.Her passion in life was to ensure that thelegacy of Emmett Till would be lasting andpowerful. Winner of the documentary“Juror’s Prize” at the 2003 Sundance Festival,“The Murder of Emmett Till”and itsaccompanying Web site, www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/, are important stepstoward accomplishing her goal. ■ One summer night in 1998, in thequiet East Texas town of Jasper, threeATown in Blackand WhiteBY DANA HUGHESyoung white men who had planned todrink beer and pick up women insteadpicked up James Byrd Jr., an African-American man, chained him to the backof a pickup truck and dragged him to hisdeath. The murder seemed especiallyshocking, since Jasper is hardly a stereotypicalSouthern town. The schools, businessesand local government are integrated.The mayor is black and equalnumbers of blacks and whites serve onthe city council. But deep-seated tensionlies beneath the surface.Marco Williams and Whitney Dowsought to capture that complexity in theirdocumentary, “The Two Towns of Jasper,”which they filmed during the year of theByrd murder trials. Dow, who is white,used an all-white crew to interview thewhite residents and Williams, who isblack, used an all-black crew to interviewthe black residents. The resulting footagereveals a stark contrast between the wayeach race perceived Byrd’s murder andrace relations in Jasper overall.Several scenes take place at Bubbas inTraining, a breakfast club where whiteresidents socialize and discuss currentissues. One conversation becomes heatedwhen it turns to the Byrd murder andupcoming trial. Some resent the attentionthat Byrd, who they say had a reputationfor heavy drinking and gambling,‘At issue here isthis racial killing, nothis moral character,’says Byrd’s sister.‘It’s the way he died.’is getting. “I don’t agree with the way hedied,” says one. “But still I want thedefense to come out and tell who JamesByrd Jr. was and what he was.” Anotheradds, “I don’t think he ought to be put upas a role model for our children.” Theblack residents of Jasper, on the otherhand, see the killing of Byrd as an attackon their entire community, not only onone man. “At issue here is this racialkilling, not his moral character,” saysByrd’s sister. “It’s the way he died.”“The Two Towns of Jasper” shows thedesire for racial healing in the community.The town’s district attorney and chiefof police, both white, are determined tosee the accused men convicted of murder,and all three are. Guy James Gray, theprosecutor, says that solving the case wasfairly easy because the defendants did notDANNY BRIGHT DANNY BRIGHTMarco Williams (top) and Whitney Dow(bottom) used segregated crews tointerview citizens in Jasper, Tex., in theaftermath of the murder of James ByrdJr., an African-American man.expect “a vigorous search for the killer ofa black man.” Says Gray, “They had it intheir heads that the law here was like itwas 50 years ago.” After the first defendantis convicted and receives the deathpenalty, the belief that justice was servedis widespread.Joint prayer and worship services arealso shown in the film and it is a greatsymbol of healing when a fence separatingblack and white residents is torn downin the Jasper cemetery. Father Ron Fosageof Saint Michael’s Catholic Church, whourged the removal of the fence, says thatthe Byrd murder shocked everyone intodealing honestly with the racial situation.“The black community and white communityhave made a very real effort tospeak to one another and to be concernedmore than we ever have before,” he adds.An extensive outreach campaign isplanned for “The Two Towns of Jasper.”A town hall meeting in Jasper about racein America was hosted by Ted Koppel inJanuary. Additional information on theByrd murder, the film and the town hallmeeting are available on www.pbs.org/pov/pov2002/twotownsofjasper/. ■None of these shifts in thought andbehavior is universally accepted or per-Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 51

EssayA Domestic Revolutionwith Global ReachBY SUSAN V. BERRESFORD It has to count as an important revolution of the 20thcentury: societies around the globe reexamined the social andeconomic roles of men and women and began accepting abroader understanding of options for masculine and feminineidentities. This revolution accompanied, and was reinforced by,innovations in contraception that increased sexual freedomand the ability of women and men to make decisions abouttheir personal lives. And all this happened alongside bigadvances in the acceptance of human rights values and men’sand women’s rising expectations for decent and safe lives.Susan V. Berresford is president of the FordFoundation.None of these shifts in thought andbehavior is universally accepted or perfectedin reality, but thanks to modernmedia and global mobilizations, they havetaken hold in the minds and daily livesof millions. For many people, they fosterrenewed hope that unfairness can be challengedand human suffering preventedin communities, at work, in school and athome.Such worldwide changes have directlyaffected the Ford Foundation’s work andstructure. Population programs begun inthe 1950’s supported the study of demography,contraception research and familyplanningservices. By the 1970’s we concludedthat while numbers certainly matter,narrowly conceived “populationcontrol” did not adequately reflect thegrowing aspirations of men and women;new gender roles and protecting humanrights were a far better foundation forreducing poverty and promoting development.Our programs therefore soughtto translate the then new concept ofreproductive health into community servicesand advocacy for men and womenwhile broadening women’s and girl’s participationin education, earning and decisionmaking.In the 1980’s, as the H.I.V./AIDS crisisunfolded, we added support for pioneeringcommunity groups working to preventthe disease, provide care for itsvictims and reduce the stigma associatedwith it in many places. Most recently, inthe 1990’s, we added a new program onhuman sexuality, seeking to build newknowledge about sexuality and healthyhuman development, to promote relatedchanges in youth services and family supportprograms, and to clarify basic rightsto safety and service for gays, lesbians andothers who do not conform to traditionalgender identities.Approaching the full array of issues Ihave described led us to a new programconfiguration within the foundation. Itno longer seemed sensible to keep the variousmature programs together in oneoffice. Instead, we moved work on reproductivehealth and sexuality into all threeof the foundation’s large programs. Now,Ford’s work on reproductive and sexualrights, H.I.V./AIDS and the movementfor reproductive health is located withinthe Peace and Social Justice program’sHuman Rights office. Grants to advanceknowledge about sexual development inorder to inform public opinion and publicpolicy are located in our Knowledge,Creativity and Freedom program’s officeconcerned with academic research, workon religion’s social role and work on genderand minority studies. And grants inour Asset Building and CommunityDevelopment program focus on youthdevelopment, including responsible sexualbehavior. With these grants no longergrouped in one office, leaders and practitionersin the field should find their workreinforced by links with colleagues inother fields.Many involved in this work would agreethat one of the greatest achievements of thegender, human rights and reproductiverights revolutions was simply to bring thetopic of sexuality out in the open where itcould be discussed seriously. Sexuality haslong been the subject of taboos, mythsand personal as well as political sensitivitiesthat have stymied progress in addressingrelated social problems. For example,for many decades, family-planning serviceswere delivered with scant if any attentionpaid to clients’ expression of ideasand cultural beliefs about sexuality. Thus,many of these service programs missed52 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

sistence rates. And we have too oftenregarded as a private matter the violencethat family members visit upon eachother—sometimes as a result of sexualdysfunction or conflicting ideas aboutroles of men and women—often then perpetuatingthat form of violence throughyet another generation. A number of foundationgrantees have played importantroles in opening discourse about thesematters, conducting policy-relatedresearch, and helping men and womencope in their own lives and families.In India and China, the foundation hassupported services that allow men andwomen to get answers to questions aboutsexuality and health over the telephone; inNigeria, grantees help to develop radioand video soap operas that engage communitiesin instructive tales about sexualethics and disease prevention; with foundationsupport, Islamic scholars inIndonesia are studying the Koran’s teachingson relations between the sexes andwriting about expanded roles for women.In the United States, our grantees arestudying the relation of traditional andchanging gender roles to the dynamic evolutionof religious thought and practice;they are also researching the attitudes ofyoung teens toward what they perceive astheir peers’ expectations regarding sexualbehavior. Grantees in the United Statesare also taking measures to stem the violenceand discrimination too frequentlyencountered by people who don’t conformto traditional gender roles, and providingexpert resources to assist religiousprofessionals to whom victims of sexualFoundation granteeshave helped openpublic discourse aboutfamily violence,changing gender rolesand sexuality, helpingmen and women copein their own livesand families.abuse often turn first for counsel.Underlying these activities is a convictionthat issues related to reproductivehealth, human sexuality, gender identitiesand relationships involve seriousmoral matters of public as well as privatesignificance. Different attitudes about themoral questions involved and the sensitivitieswe all recognize should not makeLocal performers in Bihar, India, promote“Taru,” a radio drama addressing healthand sexuality.us shy away from exploring them fromvarious perspectives. On the contrary, inthe diverse communities that exist in mostnations of the earth today, exploration,discussion and respectful debate will helpbuild understanding and foster progress.Across the Ford Foundation, this workrepresents a continuing major commitmentof staff funding and other resources.We see multiple opportunities to supportpioneering men and women building onthe revolutions in thought and practicefrom the last century. From time to timethey may be involved in controversy, butwe feel sure that the ultimate value of thiswork justifies such risks. Foundation supportcan help people around the worldcreate welcoming and supportive communitiesthat reduce human sufferingand damage, and it can help us understandchanging cultural norms as they arereshaped by social movements and freshideas. It is work in which we think theFord Foundation’s role can be distinctiveand pathbreaking. ■ In the mid-1990’s, educators and com-DEVENDRA SHARMA/PCI LIBRARYFord Foundation Report Spring 2003 53

MakingGrantsNew Democracy,New Campus in Namibia In the mid-1990’s, educators and communityleaders in Namibia began planningfor a new campus of the nationaluniversity in the north-central region,which is home to the Ovambo people andnearly half of Namibia’s total population.This southern African country hadachieved independence and establisheda democratic government only a few yearsbefore, and the idea for the new campusgrew, in part, out of a need to address thenorthern region’s uncertain socioeconomicoutlook. Influential members ofthe community had been pressing thegovernment for policy changes to promoteeconomic development and to stopthe migration of people to Windhoek, thecapital of Namibia.The proposal to create a new campusbecame an opportunity for Namibians toexplore ways that private citizens, communityorganizations and the governmentmight collaborate in a free society. DavidChiel, then a Ford Foundation assistantrepresentative based in Windhoek, recognizedan opportunity to encourage a widerange of civic participation. Anticipatingthat the proposed campus might face challengessimilar to those experienced by theparticipants in the Ford Foundation’sRural Community College Initiative inthe United States, Chiel arranged for agroup of Namibian educators and communityleaders to visit several of the U.S.colleges.The following article is adapted from avideo produced by GrantCraft, a foundationproject that collects practical wisdomfor grant makers from foundationsaround the world (see box, page 55). Thevideo, produced by Junko Chano, a visitingscholar from the Sasakawa PeaceFoundation in Japan, is available atwww.grantcraft.org.The video features several people whowere instrumental in planning the NorthernCampus of the University of Namibia.They include: Eliakim Prince Shiimi, atthe time a member of the Northern CampusAdvisory Council and director ofChem Paint; Haaveshe Nekongo-Nielsen,director of the Northern Campus; BrianHarlech-Jones, at the time a professor atthe university; and Bernadette MojewkwuMukutu, regional coordinator for culturaland lifelong learning at the university.David Chiel: It was clear that the northernpart of Namibia was underserved;there were very few vibrant civil societyorganizations there. Yet there were realopportunities to do programming in thenorth, not only because of the size of thenorthern population, but because of thepotential to have a demonstrable effectelsewhere in the country. And it madesense to focus our programming in a specific,geographic area. Moreover, it wasclear that community members wereinterested in improving education. Itstruck me that the university would be agood entry point.The OpportunityChiel: I went to the site in the norththat the university was negotiating to buyto be its future campus. While I was thereuniversity officials invited me to a meetingof the northern advisory committee.There were about 15 or 20 people at themeeting and I was immediately struck bythe energy in the room—the buzz. Peoplewere very, very animated. Over thenext two-and-a-half hours I witnessed anincredible interest, commitment and focuson creating a university in the north.Eliakim Prince Shiimi: Overall, we weredeprived of education. For the most part,our children had to travel to other regionsto get an education. Therefore, we decidedwe must do something to bring the universityhere to the north.Chiel: I was looking for some key institutionsand partners to work with. Havingattended a meeting of citizens anduniversity officials, I began to think thatI could work with them to establish a newcampus. But I had some questions. Did itmake sense to work through a public institutionlike the university when my ultimategoal was to strengthen civil society?I benefited from talking to a colleaguebased in Johannesburg who had someexperience in higher education, and heconfirmed what my instincts were tellingme. We both felt that if we could supportthe process of communities becomingmuch more actively engaged, there was abetter chance that the government wouldtake them seriously. We also thought thatthey might come up with ideas and interestingapproaches that hadn’t been apparentuntil then.From Namibia to MontanaChiel: I also spoke with two foundationcolleagues who had been instrumentalin the Rural Community CollegeInitiative in the United States, which seeksto expand educational opportunities inrural areas and foster economic development.To get some ideas, they suggestedI visit some of those colleges as well asMDC, Inc., an organization in ChapelHill, North Carolina, that provides technicalassistance and logistical support to54 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

Haaveshe Nekongo-Nielsen, left, directorof the Northern Campus of the Universityof Namibia, at an event with facultyand community members who workedtogether to establish the new campusin Oshakati.Community College in southern Virginia—oneof the 24 community collegesthat make up the U.S. initiative. It was eyeopening to hear the Danville staff articulatetheir problems and to see what they’vedone with their college and how the communityis now so deeply involved in it. Itwas really very exciting! I realized thatsome of the problems I was hearing innorthern Namibia were comparable toproblems Danville Community Collegewas trying to address; it convinced methat it would be worthwhile to bring afew Namibians to the states to witnesswhat R.C.C.I. had achieved.The Namibians raised some legitimateconcerns. “While those people might bedoing wonderful work in the UnitedStates, what does that have to do withNamibia?” they asked. I told themthat no strings would be attached andthat we could just go to see what we see.There would be no expectation to doanything further with the U.S. educatorsor to adopt a U.S. approach. They agreedto a two-week trip to the U.S. with sixparticipants.The tour included stops at communitycolleges in Kentucky, New Mexico,North Carolina, Mississippi, Montanaand Texas. Folks from the University ofNamibia and from the northern Namibiancommunity were in close quarters fortwo weeks. Sometimes we joked about it,but the bonding was critical; both sideswere seeing things, asking questions, havingfun, while they endured long planerides, train rides, bus rides.Haaveshe Nekongo-Nielsen: New Mexicois like Namibia physically because it’smountainous and dry. It’s also similar inthat both places have different kinds ofpeople trying to live together. We drygreen vegetables in order to keep themPHOTOGRAPHS BY CURRENT/RUTLEDGEfor a long time, and they are doing thesame thing, but they have modernizedthe process by packaging them. It justshows that you can take a tradition anddevelop it so that it can benefit the communityin new ways.Brian Harlech-Jones: Because NewMexico is a big state with a populationsimilar in size to Namibia’s, their experiencesare very relevant to ours. I was ableto talk with the people there in a meaningfulway about what they have experiencedwith technology and distanceeducation. I found this very useful.Bernadette Mojewkwu Mukutu: Wewent to Fort Peck Community College inMontana. People were making earringsfrom beads and there were also woodcarvings.Now our people could see howto start the process of making people realizethat their cultures are very importantin their lives.Chiel: What validated the trip for mewas that the Namibians wanted to talkamong themselves about what they werelearning, to think about the experience.At the end of a long day we would find ahotel conference room to talk about whatwe had learned so far and what seemed tobe appropriate for Namibia. This madeus think about what the campus inAbout GrantCraftGood grant making isn’t just a matterof being an expert in a field ofinterest. There’s a craft to making effectivegrants — with tools and skillsdeveloped over many years, by manypeople, in many kinds of grant programs.As a project of the Ford Foundation,GrantCraft collects thisexperience in a series of brief guidesand videos, featuring the firsthand,practical wisdom of a wide range ofpracticing grant makers. Everythingis available on a Web site:www.grantcraft.org.Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003 55

MakingGrantsNamibia might look like, what it mightoffer. In other words, our discussions wereputting flesh on the bones of some prettyvague notions that had been developingThe proposal to createa new campus becamean opportunity forNamibians to exploreways that privatecitizens, communityorganizations and thegovernment mightcollaborate in afree society.or circulating up until then. It reallyexceeded my expectations. What they alsosaw, which was my ulterior motive, washow these community colleges were invigoratingthe community. They began tosee that the answer somehow lay withpeople in the community getting togetherand trying to thrash out problems, drawingon financial and other resources.Mukutu: We saw that, to these communitycolleges, the most important thingwas not only to focus on academic programsbut also to focus on the needs of thecommunity. If the community is involvedthey can say, “This is ours and we werepart of the decision-making process.”Chiel: When we returned to Namibia,a couple of very positive things happened.A relationship had been establishedbetween the folks who had gone on thistrip and representatives of the rural collegesand MDC. This was, as in the film“Casablanca,” “the beginning of a beautifulfriendship.” Still, I was concernedabout the lack of sufficient planning.MDC has a model, a strategic planningprocess that it goes through with the communitycolleges that are part of the RuralCommunity College Initiative. I suggestedto the people at the University of Namibiaand in the northern community that theymight want to start on a form or adaptationof such a process. After visitingthe United States, they saw the value indoing that.Harlech-Jones: We met people whowere sensitive, interested, sympathetic,knowledgeable and experienced, peoplewho could come to our situation withknowledge and talk with us as partnersin a dialogue.Chiel: The process that MDC has developedin the United States takes place overa long period of time, involving a seriesof meetings. There are prescribed stepsthat take place in sequence. The Universityof Namibia was keen to accelerate the processbut MDC counseled, “No, go slow;let’s do this right. We can’t just rush.”Therewere real debates about this and such otherthings as who would be in charge? whowould be the lead facilitators? how closelywould the university and the northernEducators from the University of Namibiain a textile shop at Laredo CommunityCollege in Texas. The visitors observedefforts to revitalize the surrounding area,a goal of their new campus in Namibia.From left: Annette Taylor of MDC, Inc.,which hosted the trip, HaavesheNekongo-Nielsen, Brian Harlech-Jonesand a college instructor.campus follow the pattern that MDC haddeveloped? There were some tough conversationsand international telephonecalls but I think there was a healthy tension,a very creative tension.Today the northern campus, which isjust off the main street in Oshakati, a busycommercial strip, is a place of tremendousactivity. On any given day you mightsee not only students registering forcourses and attending them but also peoplemeeting for one reason or another orattending a brown-bag lunch series of lectures.Or there might be a cultural eventgoing on. The campus has become a wonderfulmicrocosm of civil society. ■56 Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003

A World of Change,A World of IdeasThe Ford Foundation Report’s writerstravel the globe in search of the storiesbehind the grants.FFR has access to people who are findingsolutions to urgent social problems. It reportson them in depth for the benefit of educators,grant makers, legislators, policy experts andanyone else joined in the quest for practicalresponses to compelling human needs.Recent FFR articles:JobsThe Worker Gap:A Talk with David Ellwood“How are we going to run our economy?”HealthAIDS:How Brazil Turned the TideCan others emulate its success?EducationA Pearl of a SchoolOyster Elementary has a lot to teach its students—and education reformers everywhere.Human RightsSeeing is BelievingWitness gives human rights groups a voice throughthe power of video.Democratic ReformAfter Terror, a Role for WomenFrom village street to presidential palace, the ManoRiver network is laying the groundwork for democracy.ArtsShakespeare in the Land of CottonA Southern community renews its affinityfor live theater.A role for ‘clean’ money in politicsKinder, gentler globalizationChinese women speak for themselvesSPRING 2003Trailer Parks’ TransformationWhen Chicago’s Projects Come DownHomeless in Ho Chi Minh City‘Saved’ Neighborhoods, Displaced Families■ Subscriptions are free of charge.■ Write to: Publications, Ford Foundation,320 East 43rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10017.■ Or visit us on the Web at: www.fordfound.org

ContentsFFR Ford Foundation Report Spring 2003, Volume 34, No. 28 Another WayLeaders of a global civil society chart analternative to globalization.By Suzanne CharléThe Housing Puzzle12 Home Sweet(Manufactured) HomeFor many, ‘trailers’ are the only option.By Kevin Krajick18 The Problem with Public HousingIs Chicago solving it?By Ron Feemster22 Urban GentryWhat happens when a neighborhood startsto sell its soul?By Neil Carlson26 The State of the Nation’s HousingData from Harvard’s Joint Center forHousing Studies.28 Homeless in Ho Chi Minh CityVietnam struggles with urban migration.By Wendy Erd34 Running ‘Clean’In Maine and Arizona, campaign finance reformstarts at the grass roots.By Peter Ross Range38 Scales of Justice Unbalanced‘Bureaucratic self-analysis’ seeks to reduce overuseof incarceration for minority youth in trouble withthe law.By Dara Mayers43 For Chinese Women,A Long MarchEssays tracking the struggle for equality.By Dinah EngDepartments2 Briefly NotedIn New York, a Fresh Look at VietnamPing Chong’s ‘Undesirable Elements’The Myth of RaceWeb Watch: Beyond GentrificationPuppets on a MissionCoffee with a Conscience46 Photo SpreadRussia’s Photo Trove48 Film ReviewsRising FortunesMurder in MississippiA Town in Black and White52 EssayA Domestic Revolution witha Global Reach54 Making GrantsNew Democracy, New Campusin NamibiaSeattle reduces overuse of youthdetention. Page 38.MIRIAM SUSHMANThe Ford Foundation320 East 43rd StreetNew York, N.Y. 10017www.fordfound.orgNONPROFIT ORG.U.S. POSTAGEPAIDPERMIT NO. 1813