Good News

In fact, the effort was forged from what the clergy and church volunteers had learned from the local drug kingpins whom they were struggling to save from addiction, violence, jail, death--and damnation.   Reverend Eugene F. Rivers, III, the Pentecostal minister of the Azusa Christian Community church who spearheaded the effort and whose own humble inner-city row house was twice sprayed with bullets, recalls one searing insight: "Nearing exhaustion, we asked this one major local dealer, ‘Man, why did we lose you? Why are we losing other kids now?' He stares us in the eye and says, ‘I'm there, you're not. When the kids go to school, I'm there, you're not. When the boy goes for a loaf of bread or wants a pair of sneakers or just somebody older to talk to or feel safe and strong around, I'm there, you're not. I'm there, you're not; I win, you lose.'"

Helped from the start by Boston's Catholic Church and several local synagogues, the black inner-city ministers' community-saving effort won wider support in 1992 after a group of gang members burst in on the funeral service of a boy killed in a drive-by shooting and stabbed another child in front of the shocked congregation. In the words of the Reverend Jeffrey Brown, a Baptist pastor who has worked closely with Rivers, "That horrible event was the proverbial wake-up call, not only to other local churches and people of the faith, but to the political and other powers that be."

Soon the local press and lots of state and local politicians began to acknowledge the ministers work. In turn, local police and probation officials who had been highly dubious of partnering with the preachers started working hand-in-hand with the clergy on a wide variety of anti-gang policing, juvenile probation monitoring, and crime prevention initiatives.

One much-publicized result: Boston has not had a gun-related youth homicide since July 1995, and everyone from the city's mayor to its in-the-trenches probation officers acknowledges that it could not and would not have happened without Rivers, Brown, and the other clergy and church volunteers. "With the churches," one veteran Boston police officer recently told a group of Philadelphia clergy, "with cooperation, we can turn our neighborhoods around. Without them, without cooperation, we can't."

Beyond Boston

Rivers and Brown, together with Reverend Kevin Cosby of Louisville, Kentucky, and Reverend Harold Dean Trulear of Philadelphia, have formed a national "leadership foundation" that seeks to bolster ongoing faith-based inner-city youth and community development activities and mobilize at least 1,000 inner-city churches around a Boston-style effort in the 40 most blighted neighborhoods of the nation s 25 largest cities, all by the year 2006. In May, the Institute for Civil Society, a new New England-based philanthropy, gave the effort a three-year $750,000 seed grant. "In Louisville," says Cosby, "we've held organizing meetings and had 2,500 people show up, ready to go." Likewise, reports Trulear, "more than a thousand churches in metropolitan New York alone are doing some type of youth and community outreach ministry, and several new and revitalized networks of churches are doing the same in metropolitan Philadelphia."

Already, Rivers and Brown have taken part in what appear to be promising initial mobilization efforts in over a half-dozen cities from Chicago to Tampa. Meanwhile, over the past year or so, their efforts have attracted favorable interest from national journalists, corporate leaders, politicians, academics, and others, including influential Boston area individuals and institutions that, as Rivers and Brown emphasize to the clergy who are beginning to organize in other cities, "didn't want to be connected with the churches, didn't ‘do God,' didn't return our phone calls, and literally wouldn't give us the time of day a few years ago even though we were in their own inner-city backyards."

That's the good news. Now, however, for the bad--or, more precisely, the complicating--news, first with respect to the Boston story and next with respect to the overarching reality that not even an army of well-led, well-supported churches and faith-based programs could save the nation's most severely at-risk children, revitalize blighted neighborhoods, and resurrect the civil society of inner-city America without the active human and financial support of suburban churches, secular civil institutions, profit-making corporations, and, last but not least, government at all levels.

Back to Boston. For all the attention, praise, and publicity, Rivers, Brown, and the local church volunteers there are still wanting for new volunteers and still lacking in financial support. Explains Eva Thorne, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at M.I.T. who, together with other young black professionals, has worked with the Boston ministers for nearly a decade and who is preparing a church-anchored, multi-million dollar redevelopment plan for Dorchester:

"Everybody celebrates the success and says ‘amen,' but most people, especially most educated people, remain deeply conflicted about working on social and economic problems with and through churches. For some, it's an underlying suspicion that churched folks are stupid, and a more generalized hostility to religion and all things religious. For others, it's more a church-state thing, which mediates their thinking even where government isn't at issue in what we're trying to do. For many, it's even deeper than that. You know, ‘I'm not going out there with those drug addicts and violent kids! I'm not getting sweaty and giving up my free time. And I'm not giving money or other help to anyone who's fool enough to do it.' So there are those who are weirded out by your walk-among-the-poor religious motivation, those for whom it's too real and too strong. But, then, blocking you on the opposite side are those who think your religious motivation is, in effect, too weak or false, the ‘all inner-city preachers are pimps with collars' school. It's very frustrating."

As Rivers, Brown, and their street-smart minions reflect on the "24-7-365, fall asleep in our clothes" efforts it took to get a faith-friendly handle on local youth gangs and reduce juvenile gunplay in their neighborhoods, they feel daunted by the prospect of a dramatic increase in poor, young, fatherless, jobless black males. Local researchers project that the number of black male residents of the city between the ages of 14 and 24 will grow to over 30,000 by 2005, roughly a threefold increase over the number residing there in 1995. "Many of these children," warns Rivers, "are the 4- to 14-year-olds running around at night on our streets without any adult care or guidance. We're trying to reach their mothers, reconnect them with fathers or father figures, and take them on in a holistic way. But their social force is growing at least as fast as ours, coming up as they are the first children born in the wake of the crack cocaine crisis and the welfare cutoffs."

In response, the ministers are redoubling their work on an ambitious pilot project, called "Operation 2006," that seeks to involve clergy and church volunteers in the lives of every one of the city's most severely at-risk youngsters, providing counseling and community service employment for their parents or legal guardians, and offering the children everything from after-school safe havens and decent meals to adult-supervised recreation programs and community-based juvenile probation ombudsmen. "We hope churches in Philadelphia and other cities," remarks Trulear, "will work to do the same, but our churches cannot even begin to do it alone."

No, they can't.

Faith Factors

It's true that most of the best recent empirical research suggests that inner-city churches, especially black congregations, are leveraging several times their weight in community service. For example, a 1990 study of more than 2,100 urban black congregations found that about 70 percent sponsored or participated directly in community outreach activities--staffing day-care facilities, offering substance-abuse prevention programs, administering food banks, building shelters, and more. A 1994 compendium of research on the subject referenced scores of studies showing that most urban black churches are involved in community efforts ranging from housing and health services to preschools and elementary education.

Eighty-five percent of black churches in Atlanta, according to one study, are engaged in some type of outreach program beyond religious services to their congregations. And a forthcoming, in-depth, multi-city survey commissioned by Partners for Sacred Places, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit interested mainly in the historic preservation of older urban churches, synagogues, and temples, will provide the most conclusive evidence yet that big-city churches anchor an incredible array of youth and community development efforts--efforts that would cost literally tens of millions to provide at public expense.

But as economists Linda Loury and Glenn Loury recently intimated in these pages, we remain a long way from a definitive body of research evidence on the actual extent and the efficacy of church-anchored and faith-based social programs.

Most of the preliminary evidence is indeed encouraging, including studies showing that churched young black urban males have brighter life prospects (lower rates of crime, drugs, and joblessness) than otherwise comparable unchurched youth; that faith-based programs in prisons have measurable rehabilitative effects; and more.

Still, the "faith factor" literature remains in its infancy, and, even with the recent surge of interest in the topic among leading social scientists and policy analysts, it will be some time before we can identify the conditions, if any, under which given types of church-centered programs work, or specify how, if at all, faith-based efforts can be taken to scale in ways that cut crime, reduce poverty, banish illiteracy, or yield other positive, predictable, and desirable social consequences.

Church Anchors

As this research goes forward and as ministers like Rivers rally support to their noble cause, it will be crucial for all concerned to understand inner-city churches as part of what Lester Salamon terms "the civil society sector."

In the January/February issue of Society, Salamon challenged the conventional view of civil society as a diverse set of nonmarket, nongovernmental institutions--"savings associations, church choirs, sports clubs, charities, and philanthropic foundations"--whose unique mission is to create "networks of civic engagement that produce and enforce communal values and notions of trust so necessary for cooperation and civil life." This view, he argued, "overlooks the extent to which the ‘civil society sector' relies on other sectors to survive."

Drawing an impressive array of data on the civil society sector in the United States and other democracies, Salamon puts a huge empirical question mark over the idea that as "the state expands, it therefore renders voluntary organizations functionally irrelevant, thereby contributing to the decline and undermining the spirit of community which they sustain." Instead of the "zero sum, conflictual image of the relationship between the civil society sector and the state," the data he examined painted a more complicated picture of "three more or less distinct sectors--government, business, and nonprofit--that nevertheless find ways to work together in responding to public needs." So conceived, he reasoned, "the term ‘civil society' would not apply to a particular sector, but to a relationship among the sectors, one in which a high level of cooperation and mutual support prevailed."

Some conservative champions of faith-based efforts seem to suppose that it is only liberal welfare state apologists and spokespersons for big, largely government-funded religious charities who are cautioning that churches and other civil institutions cannot fill the financial and social services gaps left by government withdrawal from low-income cash and in-kind assistance for the poor. They're as wrong as they are wrong-headed.

As former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett and Senator Daniel Coats (R-IN) argued publicly in 1995, "the retreat of government does not always, at least not immediately, result in the rebirth of civil society." Or, in Rivers's words, "Without public support and back-up, financial and logistical, there's no way churches or other community folk can turn the tide. But if we learn how to work together, then there's no limit to what can be accomplished before it's too late."

Spiritual Capital

Amen. It is also important to think critically about faith communities in relation to broader debates about the state of civil society and to ask how much of urban America s ostensibly dwindling stock of social capital is, as it were, "spiritual capital."

In several articles published in the mid-1990s, beginning with the much-noted "Bowling Alone," political scientist Robert Putnam highlighted evidence of "a broad and continuing erosion of civic engagement that began a quarter century ago." Fewer and fewer Americans, he argued, were voting, joining the PTA, going to church, or participating in other civic associations and group activities.

Putnam's thesis about the decline of social capital has been criticized on many different grounds, and the scholarly scrap over civil society is far from over. One thing, however, is indisputable. While more Americans are now bowling alone, scores of millions of Americans are still praying together and volunteering through their churches.

Outstanding survey research produced by George Gallup, Jr., plainly documents that most Americans believe in God, belong to a church or synagogue, and acknowledge that religion is very important in their lives. Moreover, more than 60 percent of all Americans, and more than 80 percent of black Americans, believe that religion can answer all or most social problems.

Churches are the country's single biggest source of volunteers, way ahead of workplaces, schools or colleges, fraternal groups, and other civil institutions. As Gallup has summarized the evidence, "Churches and other religious bodies are the major supporters of voluntary services for neighborhoods and communities. Members of a church or synagogue...tend to be much more involved in charitable activity, particularly through organized groups, than nonmembers. Almost half of the church members did unpaid volunteer work in a given year, compared to only a third of nonmembers."

Charitable Choice

Finally, it is vital to remain focused on how churched volunteers and the rest of the civil society sector respond to today's ever more highly devolved federal welfare regime.

Section 104 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (a.k.a. the welfare law) encourages states to engage faith-based organizations as providers of welfare services funded by Washington--job search programs, maternity homes for expectant unmarried minors, drug-treatment programs, and much more. Under this so-called charitable choice provision, religious providers that accept government funds have the right to maintain their religious character--displaying religious art, using religious criteria in personnel decisions, and limiting the range of government audits by placing federal funds into separate budgets.

At this point, it remains unclear how, whether, or to what extent churches will take advantage of the charitable choice provision, and, if so, with what consequences. In fact, we may never know. Even before the welfare law was enacted, scores of national and state research projects were planned to monitor the impact of welfare devolution. But almost no attention is being paid to the implementation of the charitable choice provision.

In a 1995 lecture, Nobel economist Robert W. Fogel argued that the United States is now in the midst of a "Fourth Great Awakening," a "new religious revival fueled by a revulsion with the corruptions of contemporary society," and effecting a "political realignment" evidenced by the legislative handiwork of the Republican-led 104th Congress.

A most sweeping and provocative big-think thesis, but one best pondered by preachers, politicians, pundits, public administrators, and policy analysts who first take care to see whether anyone greatly awakens to charitable choice, and, if so, how and with what results.

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By:Bruce Katz -- Director of the Brookings Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy and a senior fellow in the Brookings Economic Studies program.

OVER THE PAST SEVERAL DECADES, American cities have witnessed an explosive growth in the capacity and expertise of community development corporations, church- and community-based organizations, and community lending institutions. These groups--the front lines of the national discussion over "civil society," "community empowerment," and "social capital"--have made discernible progress in some of the most distressed communities in the country. They have produced and financed affordable homes and, to a lesser extent, invested in commercial enterprises and engaged in anti-crime, child care, job training, health care, and other activities.

Most remarkably, this progress has been made in the face of powerful economic and demographic forces--the rise in concentrated urban poverty and the ongoing exodus of middle-class families and low-skilled jobs to the metropolitan outskirts--that have destabilized the cities and neighborhoods in which community institutions operate. Left unchecked, these forces can eviscerate the contributions of community-based groups.

The larger trends shaping America's inner-city neighborhoods are not, contrary to conventional wisdom, the exclusive work of invisible market and consumer forces. They are also the result of government subsidies and policies. To ensure the continued success of community-based development groups, federal policies and private sector actors must do more than seed, reward, and enhance their efforts. They must help shape an economic context in which those efforts can succeed.

The Rise in Concentrated Urban Poverty

America's most disturbing demographic trend--rarely discussed during the welfare debate--has been the explosive growth in concentrated poverty, particularly minority poverty, in urban communities. According to the Clinton administration's 1997 "State of the Cities" report, the poverty rate in cities rose almost 50 percent, from 14.2 percent in 1970 to 20.6 percent in 1995.

Trends in inner-city neighborhoods have been even worse. According to Harvard's Paul Jargowsky, the number of people living in high-poverty neighborhoods just about doubled between 1970 and 1990. Some 8 million people, nearly a third of them children, now live in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of residents are poor.

These neighborhoods are especially likely to house minorities. Between 1970 and 1990, the number of African Americans living in high-poverty areas climbed from 2.4 million to 4.2 million. An incredible one-third of all African-American poor now live in such communities. Three out of four poor African Americans live in neighborhoods where more than 20 percent of the population is below the poverty line.

"The residential concentration of poverty," contends Minnesota State Representative Myron Orfield, "creates social repercussions far greater than the sum of its parts. Physical separation from jobs and middle-class role models...reinforces social isolation and weakens work skills. Poor individuals who live in concentrated poverty are far more likely to become pregnant as teenagers, to drop out of high school, and to remain jobless than their counterparts in socioeconomically mixed neighborhoods."

Neighborhoods with strong community development organizations have not escaped the growth in concentrated poverty. As David Rusk shows in his new book, Up the Down Escalator, average poverty rates increased from 23 percent to 25 percent in areas served by a sample group of "new" community development corporations (formed in the 1970s) and from 19 percent to 28 percent in areas served by a sample group of "old" CDCs (formed in the 1960s). Neighborhoods grew poorer not because low-income families moved in, but because so many middle-class households moved out.

The Changing Nature of Metropolitan Economics

In many respects the flip side of the rise in concentrated urban poverty is the surge in suburban and exurban sprawl. Metropolitan areas countrywide are seeing similar patterns of development--explosive sprawl where farmland and open space once reigned, matched by decline and abandonment in the central cities and older suburbs.

Between 1970 and 1990, for example, the population of the Chicago metropolitan area increased only 4 percent, but the land in the region used for urban purposes grew 35 percent. More than 450 square miles, twice the size of the city of Chicago, were converted from agricultural to urban use.

Even metropolitan areas that lost people gained land. The population of greater Pittsburgh fell 9 percent during 1970-90, but the land used for urban purposes grew 30 percent. Some 180 square miles of prime farmland in western Pennsylvania switched to urban use.

The exponential growth of suburban and exurban areas has two huge implications for community organizations working in urban neighborhoods. First, the suburbs are the principal job generators in the new economy. "In the early 1990s," according to the "State of the Cities" report, "87 percent of the new jobs in the lower paying and lower skilled service and retail trade sectors were created in the suburbs." Not surprisingly, jobless rates in central cities are generally one-third to one-half higher than those in nearby suburbs. Second, cities continue to lose middle-class families. Though only 11 of the 30 largest cities in 1970 have grown in the intervening years, all have seen heavy growth in the share of their population with low incomes.

The Push and Pull of Government Policies

Federal, state, and local government policies have all contributed to the growing spatial isolation of minority poverty that poses such a challenge to community-based institutions.

Government housing policies are a prime example. Until recently, the rules governing admission to public and assisted housing allowed the poorest households to jump to the top of the waiting lists. The result should have been predictable: the average income in public housing plummeted--from 33 percent of area median in 1980 to 17 percent ($6,500 for the average family) in 1994. Other rules made it hard for public housing agencies to tear down obsolete projects, even when it cost less to replace than to rehabilitate them. In many central cities, public housing became the locus of concentrated poverty in unsafe, indecent, and unsanitary conditions--the very opposite of what was intended.

Even the federal voucher program has fallen short of its goal of giving low-income families maximum choice in the private rental market. Most public housing agencies (which have a monopoly over voucher administration) treat vouchers as a "stepchild" program, rarely performing the landlord outreach or recipient counseling that spells success. In many metropolitan areas, as many as 10-15 public housing agencies pose bureaucratic obstacles to residents wishing to escape high-poverty areas. Suburban jurisdictions have erected their own barriers to mobility by favoring very low density settlements with little affordable rental housing. And racial hostility and discrimination, overt and covert, continue apace, as HUD found with suburban and congressional reaction to its Moving to Opportunity initiative. As the Urban Institute's Marge Turner has shown, despite housing vouchers' mobility potential, in some jurisdictions recipients are heavily concentrated in areas of high poverty.

Federal and state policies also continue to encourage exurban expansion--and with it the exodus of jobs and middle-class families from central cities and older suburbs. Among such policies are federal and state spending on transportation, water, sewer, and other infrastructure; federal tax subsidies for home ownership; state land use laws; state incentives to major employers to relocate and expand to "greenfields" far outside central cities and older suburbs; federal rules that prohibit or impede reinvestment in central city neighborhoods with high minority concentrations; federal decisions on the location of government facilities and the procurement of government services; and federal laws and regulations regarding the environment, telecommunications, and utilities.

In short, despite often remarkable achievements, it is clear that community institutions will never realize their full potential unless and until the federal and state governments revamp policies that undermine community action.

Restructure Federal Housing Policies

Washington has already begun to overhaul problematic housing policies. In fact, the Clinton administration has embarked on the most ambitious reform of public housing since the program's inception in the 1930s. In an effort that will change the physical face of public housing, the administration plans to demolish some 100,000 public housing units--about one-twelfth of the entire public housing stock--by the year 2000. Creative replacement efforts are under way in dozens of cities, with heavy emphasis on smaller-scale, economically integrated affordable housing developments.

The reforms will also alter the human face of public housing. At the administration's behest, Congress has temporarily repealed the rules favoring the poorest households. Public housing agencies are being encouraged to create "mixed income" developments through admission policies that include working families as well as efforts to help existing residents increase their own incomes.

The same reformist impulses are needed in the housing voucher program if it is to succeed in giving low-income residents the choice to live where they want. Governance of the program--which now resides in 3,400 bureaucracies operating in parochial jurisdictions--must be shifted to the metropolitan level, as has been done, at least partially, for transportation and the environment. Such a shift would generate savings for the cash-strapped federal government by ending the wasteful duplication of administrative overhead. But even more important, it would move more lower-income residents into housing of their choice by requiring metropolitan administrators to provide counseling to potential recipients, outreach aggressively to capable landlords, and work with suburban churches and other groups to help place willing residents. Public housing agencies (or consortia of such agencies) should be allowed to compete for administrative responsibilities along with regional nonprofit organizations.

Reform Federal Infrastructure Policies

In regions across the country, the costs of unfettered sprawl are bringing together diverse coalitions of central city and older suburban elected officials, downtown business leaders, environmentalists, farmland preservation advocates, and civic, religious, and community groups. These coalitions are forcing state and metropolitan consideration of an eclectic mix of solutions--labor mobility, residential mobility, regional tax equity and stability, land use reform, and targeted investment of government subsidies.

Minnesota, for example, has upgraded metropolitan governance in the Twin Cities area and has enacted laws to spread the cost of poverty through the Twin Cities region. Maryland has recently enacted Governor Glendening's "smart growth" legislative package, which steers billions of state road, sewer, and school monies away from farms and open spaces to existing areas targeted for concentrated growth. Colorado, Delaware, and other states are now considering versions of smart growth to curb sprawl in their own backyards.

Washington should be a partner, not just an observer, in these efforts. It should enhance moves toward state and metropolitan solutions that curb sprawl, promote smart growth, rebuild established communities, and redress inequities between rich and poor political jurisdictions. This year, for example, Congress should do three simple things to improve federal transportation law--the most strategic point for intervention.

First, Congress should preserve and strengthen, not scale back, the existing metropolitan role in transportation planning and spending. Metropolitan areas are where transportation, land use, economic development, and environmental issues come together in practical ways.

Second, Congress should strengthen the role of citizens and communities in transportation decisions. It should require state and metropolitan transportation entities to disclose their spending patterns by political jurisdiction, use computer mapping tools to illustrate the disparate patterns, and make such information widely available. Such "right to know" laws already govern housing, banking, and the environment.

Finally, Congress should reward states and regions that make smart growth a central part of their transportation mission. It could provide regulatory relief or supplemental funding, or it could make direct grants to state and metropolitan entities to integrate transportation and land use planning.

Regional Strategies for CDCs

Change cannot be limited, however, to government policies. Community-based groups themselves must expand their horizons and build on their affordable housing successes.

First, community institutions need to place their neighborhood strategies in a regional context, understanding how government policies interact with the larger economy and engaging, where appropriate, on metropolitan issues and decisionmaking. As California scholars Manual Pastor, Peter Dreier, and Gene Grigsby have recently noted, "Most community development groups have tended to favor a neighborhood focus because it fits their size, administrative capacity, and political base. The new challenges of persistent poverty, economic restructuring, and demographic transition," they note, "now require that communities reach out to a regional level of decisionmaking--and CDCs are probably the best placed vehicle in terms of expertise and credibility to lead this shift in policy paradigms."

Community institutions also need to help connect residents of their distressed neighborhoods to jobs in the metropolitan area. As Jeremy Nowak of the Delaware Valley Community Investment Fund has written, community groups must "shift their view of the neighborhoods they work in, seeing them primarily not as real estate and social service markets, but as labor markets." They need to learn "where people work, what their skills are, what the barriers to employment are, and which training programs or schools best link them to employers."

Some community development organizations are already expanding their focus to include workforce development and access to employment. Indianapolis, for example, is contracting with community development corporations to help move welfare recipients to jobs. The federal government can help replicate these successful efforts through reforms in employment training laws as well as additional resources for community-based welfare-to-work efforts. Community groups can also expand their ties with corporate benefactors to include workforce connections.

Only the Beginning

Community institutions are an essential building block of national urban and metropolitan policy. Yet their work is being consistently undermined by a series of government policies that push jobs and middle-class people out of central cities, leaving only the very poor behind.

Government efforts must do more, therefore, than directly support the activities of community institutions; that is community policy on the cheap. Government must help create the urban economic climate in which community-based efforts can succeed.

Although the brief checklist of reforms I have noted in government housing and infrastructure would help ease the concentration of urban poverty, spur reinvestment in older established communities, and connect low-income urban residents to jobs in the metropolitan economy, that checklist is hardly complete. As Michael Porter, of the Harvard Business School, has persuasively argued, low-income urban neighborhoods have their own competitive market advantages that must be understood and exploited. Educational reform, land use reform, public safety efforts, and home ownership initiatives also demand serious attention and action. Nevertheless, the checklist presents a useful and necessary starting point for a community policy that can match the heady rhetoric of our national debates with the harsh reality of our urban streets.

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