The February book of the month is Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One by Majora Carter (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2022).
A real estate developer and planning consultant from the South Bronx, Majora Carter is a 2005 MacArthur Fellow and frequent TEDX speaker. I’ve heard Majora Carter speak in webinars and online summits, and when I saw that my local library had a copy of her book, I immediately put it on hold. She is smart, creative, bold, and has a refreshingly independent approach to neighborhood revitalization.
Because I came to this line of work as a second career on the cusp of middle age, I often feel like I am playing catch-up, so I read a lot to try and make up for my inexperience and fill the knowledge gaps. In doing so, I’ve encountered some tropes over and over again. These include descriptions of “silos” in urban planning and historical accounts of how systems were built to exclude entire groups of people, followed by admonitions to build bridges, collaborate, do outreach, and listen to voices that are typically unheard or dismissed. The thing is, there are only so many ways to say “Meet people where they are,” “Break down barriers,” and “Make sure everyone has a place at the table” before it all kind of runs together and starts to sound cliché. To be 100% clear, I am fully on board with engagement that is welcoming and inclusive, but it is much easier said than done.
When I started reading Reclaiming Your Community, I admit I was expecting more of the same. Happily, I was wrong. Maybe the cover blurbs from Lin-Manuel Miranda (“This is an exciting conversation worth joining!”) and Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis from Middle Church in NYC (“Majora’s openness about her mistakes and successes makes it easy to follow her light…”) should have tipped me off that this book is different.
And different it is! Reclaiming Your Community is not only enormously educational, it’s a fun read. While the book provides real information about community development from within, it’s more like a memoir than a manual. Majora Carter describes her childhood in the South Bronx, her relationship with her parents and neighbors, her desire to get as far away as possible, and her eventual return. She spent years spearheading a project to clean up the Bronx River, raising money and forming partnerships, which was the beginning of her career in community development.
...once an ecological wonder that only rivers can be, snaking along twenty-eight miles of landscape through the elegant geometry of twists and turns, it [the Bronx River] maintained its own health as it provided habitats for countless animals and plants until Robert Moses, New York State’s “master builder” and champion of cars, decided that he wanted to build a parkway. His plan was to straighten the river itself to provide an easier passage and nicer view for drivers. Ironically, he named the parkway after the river he thoughtlessly mangled. It was an engineering feat and an ecological tragedy. (p77)
She recounts the extraordinary honor of receiving a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005 followed shortly thereafter by the heartbreak of being let down again and again by philanthropists and potential funders, one of whom had the audacity to “request a full day of my time for free to tour their board after they turned me down flat for funding. The nerve.” (p63). She owns her intelligence and joy while not mincing words about the skepticism and discrimination she has had to navigate every day as a successful Black woman from a low-status community.
I think it is yet another one of the insidious byproducts of the effectiveness of the White supremacist message that is ingrained in American culture: Black folks are not meant to be trusted. Not with money. Not even with their own lives. And especially not if they are using their lives and money in service of others like them. (p69)
She is also funny.
I have no problem with strange bedfellows. I don’t believe people even have to like each other to do good work together. Unless you really are trying to date them, which I understand could complicate things. (p79)
Two things that stand out to me about what makes Majora Carter different are: 1) she challenges head-on the role of nonprofits in communities like her home of South Bronx, and; 2) she does not shy away from the tools of capitalism to achieve her goals.
Carter uses the term “low-status,” which she defines as:
“Low-status,” to me, simply illustrates the equality gap in a society without explicitly implicating racism, classism, or geography. These are places where inequality is assumed by those who live and by everyone on the outside looking in. (xiv)
Over and over, she makes the point that low-status communities want the same things as everyone else. They want, and deserve, nice things: fun places to go, a mix of housing options, nice restaurants, safe streets, green space. Instead, the kinds of real estate that are found in low-status communities are large subsidized housing developments and shelters (rather than a mix of housing options and owner-occupied housing), fast food chains (rather than diverse, locally-owned restaurants), health clinics and pharmacies (which treat lifestyle diseases), liquor stores (which encourage self-medicating), and predatory lending and check-cashing establishments (rather than banks).
Those types of places (pawn shops, check-cashing stores, fast food, pharmacies, health clinics, subsidized housing) are the architecture of low expectations. This landscape reminds people, and their dollars, that there is more to aspire to outside of where you are right now. (p159)
No wonder the kids with potential are encouraged to leave. No wonder she once measured her success by how far away she could get.
If our goal was to keep the talent from leaving, we would have a different social and economic landscape in American low-status communities. (p23)
Carter identifies ways that poverty is considered a cultural asset in low-status communities. The nonprofit industrial complex is complicit in maintaining poverty in communities like hers because they hold this view.
The [nonprofit industrial] complex benefits, grows, hires more of its friends, spends even more money to perpetuate itself, persuades universities to recognize nonprofit management majors, holds conferences in fun cities, and on and on. Yet nearly all of the problems it claims to address don’t get any better and most often get worse. It recognizes and validates only those that fit a profile of perpetual need. In this model, the lack of interest in supporting homegrown talent to facilitate change from within should come as no surprise. (p58)
In my observations, the nonprofit industrial complex has signaled that poverty is the more authentic state of being for people in low-status communities…In the world of nonprofits, low income is associated with neighborhood preservation because poverty is mistakenly equated with culture (emphasis added). (p133)
Instead, Majora Carter wants to build wealth in her community for the people already there rather than outside developers or people who might move in. She recognizes that the critical wealth gap is very much tied to who owns real estate, and her work in development is both unapologetically capitalist and in service of her community. This has attracted attention from neighbors who accuse her of gentrifying the neighborhood (she calls them her “fan club”), but she is committed.
The solutions [discussed above] may be considered controversial by some because they openly embrace the tools of capitalism without doctrine or quixotic ideals meant to replace capitalism. But they offer an alternative and viable approach to community development that centers the local community as the direct financial beneficiary. (p181)
I’m not surprised Majora Carter has faced more than her fair share of pushback from the community. Change is hard for a lot of people to accept. I find her creativity, resilience, and joy nothing short of inspiring. I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a good story and new ideas, no matter what kind of advocacy they do.
My greatest hope is that more of us from low-status communities see the value of giving our own hometowns a second look. We can make them into the communities of our dreams. I want to shed some light and love on them so that people can see the beauty of themselves and others reflected in their neighborhoods. (p195)
Susan Gaeddert is Community Programs Director at 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, where she runs Active Wisconsin, facilitates the Community Transportation Academy, and coordinates the Wisconsin Climate Table. Have you read any good books lately? Send your recommendation to: susan@1kfriends.org