Investing in Co-Ops Builds "Stairway out of Poverty" Oscar Perry Abello

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Cover: A man walks past a blighted building in the Penn-North neighborhood of Baltimore. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) Table of Contents

4 Introduction Ariella Cohen

5 Building Businesses Rooted in Social Justice Movements Oscar Perry Abello

8 Why Your Commercial District Needs an Anti-Poverty Strategy Matt Bergheiser

10 Black Lives Matter Policy Agenda Looks a Lot Like a Playbook for Inclusive Cities Johnny Magdaleno

13 Rochester Mayor: Investing in Co-ops Builds "Stairway Out of Poverty" Oscar Perry Abello

16 Will Urban Renewal Ever End? Erick Trickey

24 Cities Can Help to Shape an Equal Opportunity Maker Movement Oscar Perry Abello

3 NEXTCITY.ORG Introduction

In a speech last month in Detroit, Donald Trump promised to “offer a new future” to the Motor City. Detroit, he said, “will come roaring back.” It may have been the truest thing the Republican presidential nominee has said in weeks. Economic growth is happening in Detroit, and in many of the other cities that will be visited along the campaign this fall. And as both Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton told Michigan audiences, a key to this resurgence is getting Americans back to work. That we can all agree on. But figuring out how to go from talking about jobs to creating them — that’s the tricky part and where Next City comes in.

Every day, our reporters tell the stories of how urban economies are rebuilding themselves to be stronger and more opportunity-rich. We’ve collected six of these stories here to illuminate how communities are lifting themselves through equitable business models, new collaborations and inclusive policymaking. These are ideas that deserve a voice this election season, so please share this ebook and elevate the dialogue.

Ariella Cohen Editor-in-Chief

4 NEXTCITY.ORG Worker-owners at CERO Cooperative in Boston discuss branding and marketing. (Credit: Lor Holmes via Vimeo)

Building Businesses Rooted in Social Justice Movements

OSCAR PERRY ABELLO | JULY 6, 2016

urvivors of solitary confinement taught Aaron Tanaka about the importance of political movements and organizing. S Tanaka was born and raised in the Bay Area. He still vividly remembers going from a predominantly white elementary school to middle school in Richmond, a racially diverse, working-class city north of Berkeley. It was the first time he had to walk through metal detectors into school, his first real exposure to a criminal justice system that has disproportionately targeted people of color in the U.S. “My classmates were seen not really as investments, but more as threats,” Tanaka recalls. Tanaka says he was the only kid from his grade who went to Boston for college; he attended Harvard. Freshman year, he tutored at a juvenile detention center. Something about the experience left him unsatisfied. He later interned with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which advocates for prison reform, including an end to solitary confinement. There, he worked with Jamie Bisonnette Lewey and Kazi Toure, the latter of whom spent seven years in prison, four of them in solitary. “Being at AFSC I began to understand how solitary confinement is essential in preventing prisoner organizing, and as a result acts as an essential linchpin in maintaining the broader criminal justice infrastructure,” Tanaka says. “I went from approaching economic and criminal justice inequality, from a service position, towards eventually thinking about it more structurally, from a political community organizing standpoint.” Tanaka’s vision, as the founder of the new Center for Economic Democracy (CED): to build a model for supporting businesses rooted in community-based social justice movements of low-income people, especially people of color. “I felt that there was a huge values alignment between progressive investors and the cooperative business sector

5 NEXTCITY.ORG with the grassroots organizing and movement-building sector, but the language and the theory of change were very different and these groups were fairly siloed,” says Tanaka. Tanaka, who was recently named to the 2016 class of Echoing Green Fellows, has previously experienced the frustration of such silos, and what it’s like to break them down. After graduating from Harvard in 2004, he went on to co-found the Boston Workers Alliance (BWA), a network of low-income people and people of color that was instrumental in getting Massachusetts to become the second state to “ban the box” in 2010, removing barriers to employment for people with a criminal record. Most employers still found ways to discriminate against many citizens returning from prison, however, so BWA eventually created its own temp agency to get some experience for workers and maybe convince some of their temporary employers that they were reliable enough to hire permanently. That proved not to be enough either. Then, waiting in the airport on the way back to Boston from a conference in Memphis on race and environmental justice, Tanaka recalls he and several BWA members and organizers decided to start a worker-owned business. They went back to Boston, got started, made a lot of mistakes along the way (including a veggie oil truck spill), connected with a Latino workers’ group (BWA members are primarily black), and eventually formed CERO, a commercial com- posting company. Since its founding in 2012, CERO (which stands for Cooperative Energy, Recycling, and Organics) has diverted 1.3 million pounds of food waste from landfills, saving clients $84,425 in trash hauling fees and counting. But, more importantly, Tanaka says, CERO is a business rooted in the two worker groups’ movements and their shared vision for the future. Those roots include CERO’s investors. Faced with few other options as a worker-owned business, CERO worked with financing advisory firm Cutting Edge Capital to issue a direct public offering (DPO), raising $340,000 in startup capital from their community and those they had worked with as a political movement. “We were able to activate a network of people who don’t always think of themselves as investors or aren’t really in the sort of economic development space,” Tanaka says. “But because it was a grassroots effort that had won policy victories in the past, we had a level of credibility that they were able to lean on.” The experience of CERO has shaped Tanaka’s vision for CED. But instead of trying to build just one more business rooted in a social justice movement, CED aims to equip a community with the tools to create as many movement-rooted businesses as it needs. “What we’ve been doing over the last almost year is driving a community-based feasibility study to help launch what we’re calling the Ujima ecosystem,” says Tanaka. Ujima, one of the seven Kwanzaa principles, means collective work and responsibility. CED hopes this Boston Ujima Project can become a model for others to adapt. It’s a search for a democratic third way between top-down state economic planning and purely capitalist, laissez-faire economics. “The question became how do we start allowing communities to experience democratic planning at a local level, in a way that not only starts to build our democratic muscle memory, but is also directly benefiting communities from a position of job creation, ecological benefit, wealth development,” Tanaka says. Their first step is incubating a democratically governed organization that is going to be rooted in or anchored by working-class people and low-income people who are already part of grassroots organizations and labor unions in the Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain and Mattapan. “We want to connect with folks who already … see themselves as activists,” Tanaka explains. “We’re also layer- ing other types of members and including small businesses and cooperatives, nonprofit organizations and grassroots groups, funders and investors, and technical assistance providers, and that creates our core membership.” The first task of the organization will be to build a democratic investment fund that will pool capital from individuals, including from the community, using tools like DPOs or online crowdfunding, along with capital from interested impact investors and institutional investors. They’re also exploring how to work with a local bank to create a certificate of deposit (CD) program in which the deposited savings would get pooled into the fund. The CD program would be a tweak on a model from Equal Exchange, the worker-owned fair-trade company, which has such an arrangement with Boston-based Eastern Bank. “We’re kinda asking the question of could we create a similar product but instead of servicing one business, that actually could be a credit line that services a broader network of pre-qualified businesses from the neighborhoods,” Tanaka explains. Tentatively titled the Ujima Community Capital Fund, the group plans to have investment decisions flow through a participatory budgeting process. “Basically we said, well nobody is using participatory budgeting to think about how to do investment in our communities, but in fact that’s a major need, because we have a situation like many other places where you have many liquor stores and not enough grocery stores,” Tanaka says. “The process of democratizing the investment all of a sudden allows for folks who have very little control over where finances swing in their neighborhoods to now become agents in actually defining that.”

6 NEXTCITY.ORG At every step of the way, CED will work with partners that have experience with the different parts of the ecosystem, like Cutting Edge Capital or the Participatory Budgeting Project. “Most of the things we’re trying to do, somebody has already done successfully,” Tanaka says. “Our role is to layer these or to structure these within a democratic infrastructure and then weave them together so that they’re mutually reinforcing.” Tanaka anticipates the Boston Ujima Project will launch in earnest this fall.

OSCAR IS A NEXT CITY 2015-2016 EQUITABLE CITIES FELLOW. A NEW YORK CITY-BASED JOURNALIST WITH A BACKGROUND IN GLOBAL DEVELOP- MENT AND SOCIAL ENTERPRISE, HE HAS WRITTEN ABOUT IMPACT INVESTING, MICROFINANCE, FAIR TRADE, ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND MORE FOR PUBLICATIONS SUCH AS FAST COMPANY AND NEXTBILLION.NET. HE HAS A B.A. IN ECONOMICS FROM VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY.

7 NEXTCITY.ORG Anchor institutions University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia are both important partners for the University City District. (Photo by Ajaxean)

Why Your Commercial District Needs an Anti- Poverty Strategy

MATT BERGHEISER | OP-ED | FEBRUARY 4, 2016

ould a platform established decades ago to shape the physical well-being of urban centers offer an answer to the challenge of economic disconnection in city neighborhoods? C When business improvement districts (BIDs) first emerged in the U.S., property owners in one commercial area, or along a certain corridor, came together to put their collective cash (gathered through a tax) toward shared services like street cleaning and marketing. As cities have become popular again and commercial districts have matured, some BIDs have become indispensable investors in the public realm, creating and stewarding public squares and civic commons across the nation. The success of New York’s Bryant Park, for example, can be attributed to the focus, long- term planning and funding of the Bryant Park Corporation BID. Today’s BIDs are now ready for another important shift: They are perfectly positioned to create inclusive opportunity for local residents. The next phase, which we might call BID 3.0, hinges on partnerships with the largest employers and property owners in a given city. At University City District in Philadelphia, we’ve leveraged strong relationships with employer partners to create an extensive job training effort embedded in our BID. In about a square mile in University City, a neighborhood with several anchor institutions including University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, we have 76,000 jobs and $5 billion in recent real estate investment. Yet in the five zip codes abutting our district, 81,000 people live in poverty; unemployment stands at 15 percent; only 21 percent of adults over the age of 25 hold a college degree. A traditional job training program attempting to mitigate this disparity between growth and opportunity might struggle to gain traction with major regional employers. And workforce programs simply do not succeed without strong employer partners designing the training programs and committing to hiring graduates. BIDs, which are like mini-cham- bers of commerce, are already a place where private sector leaders come together.

8 NEXTCITY.ORG Five years ago, we at UCD looked at the challenges and opportunities in our neighborhood, and began to ask ourselves a few important questions: • What if we could connect people in the community to jobs at our institutions and do so on some scale? • What if we could work with folks living just blocks away from an anchor employer, and bridge the skills gap that makes this distance seem unconquerable? • And what if we could show that this wasn’t charity, simultaneously helping our institutional partners solve real business needs by stemming entry-level turnover and building long-term skills that enable advancement and growth? Working with our anchor institutions, we created the West Philadelphia Skills Initiative, which connects unemployed neighborhood residents with major employers seeking talent. Our approach involves deep collaboration with employers to identify and articulate their needs, recruit prospective hires, create skill-building curricula, and develop regular interactions between job candidates and hiring managers. The Skills Initiative’s impact on people struggling to connect to today’s economy is palpable. Since our 2011 launch, we’ve placed 91 percent of Skills Initiative graduates, who had been unemployed an average of 366 days before coming through our doors. We’ve prepared them for life-changing jobs with our partner institutions — lab technicians, desktop support professionals, inpatient clerks, medical assistants — that pay an average starting wage of $13.60 an hour. Employers have benefited too. Those hiring our entry-level cohorts cut turnover by half. Quality of care and cus- tomer experience in the community’s hospitals have measurably improved. UCD is one of those employers, training and employing formerly incarcerated neighborhood residents to tend our public spaces. In this sense, the Skills Initiative enhances our economic development agenda, creating capacity to steward the civic realm, and saving us significant outsourcing costs in the process. If BIDs want to create livable and vital cities and neighborhoods, then an all-in strategy to leverage relationships for inclusive opportunity seems essential. Think of district improvement work as layers of infrastructure, some literal, some figurative. The foundation is a clean, safe and attractive neighborhood. On top of that, BIDs can shape commercial infrastructure that helps a community attract retail and business tenants and foster vibrancy at the ground level; the civic infrastructure that activates dormant public spaces through placemaking efforts; and the entrepreneurial infrastructure that draws innovators who transform the intellectual discoveries at our institutions into commercial ventures (and future tenants!). Now imagine a new capstone to this vision: opportunity infrastructure. BIDs can galvanize powerful employer partnerships to ensure that urban growth maximizes, and is maximized by, the undeniable and often underutilized talent in a given place. Marrying workforce development to a BID redefines what it means to invest in a place. As a national conversation about equity and inclusion unfolds, this strategy transcends what is often presented as a false dilemma between downtown investments and neighborhood equity. In Philadelphia, for example, 46 percent of our jobs are clustered on just 3 percent of our land in the city’s central core. Given this, the joint strategy of managing a place to drive commercial growth and managing relationships to connect people to jobs seems paramount. BIDs were formed because place management doesn’t happen on its own. Likewise, we have to be intentional about creating a 21st-century opportunity infrastructure that prepares people for jobs. By focusing on the interplay between the opportunities of economic growth and the problems of poverty, BIDs can leverage downtown prosperity to make the middle-class dream a reality for those mired in poverty, and give new meaning to our mission of creating vital cities. 

MATT BERGHEISER IS THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF UNIVERSITY CITY DISTRICT IN PHILADELPHIA.

9 NEXTCITY.ORG

Black Lives Matter protestors march south on Broad Street during a protest in Philadelphia during the second day of the Democratic National Convention. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Black Lives Matter Policy Agenda Looks a Lot Like a Playbook for Inclusive Cities

JOHNNY MAGDALENO | AUGUST 5, 2016

henever Patrick Mason passes south through the city of Detroit and crosses over the Detroit River, he feels like he’s stepping onto another planet. Windsor, Ontario, is less than 2 miles away from Michigan’s largest Wurban center, but he says no two cities in the world are further apart. “You don’t see that massive inequality [in Windsor],” says Mason, who heads the board of directors at the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI). “You don’t see the issues. You don’t see the equivalent of the large urban ghettos block after block after block.” Both cities have a historical dependence on automobile manufacturing, and both scrambled to remedy the employment impacts when that industry shifted its focus out of North America. But as Detroit borrowed billions of dollars from banks to cover its laundry list of debts, Windsor survived last decade’s economic downturn in part by diversifying into other industries, maintaining some of the highest tax rates in Ontario and reinvesting those benefits into the city so that it’d keep residents and attract new businesses. (It’s worth noting that Detroit has nearly three times the population of Windsor.) To Mason, that private-over-public approach isn’t just a Detroit problem — it’s an American problem. And it’s something that’s been simmering discontent among black communities for far longer than reactive headlines on police killings and protests would suggest. On Monday, Aug. 1, NESRI and dozens of other organizations, working beneath the Movement for Black Lives (MFBL), debuted a six-piece platform that outlines what the United States should do to address the well-documented disparities faced by black communities in health, employment, education, criminal justice and housing. Despite the coalition’s name, its agenda is built with tenets that have long been extolled by economists and think tanks as tools for more inclusive cities.

10 NEXTCITY.ORG The platform holds just as much promise for Detroit, which is seen as the pinnacle of black disempowerment by MFBL groups, as it does for New York, Chicago, San Francisco and all other U.S. urban areas where disinvestment in low-income neighborhoods has kept residents pinned to the bottom tier of the economy. “When you go down and look at the policy platforms here, a broad range of people are going to benefit — African- Americans, Latinos, lower- to lower-middle-income whites,” says Mason. “If there’s a bias, it’s a bias towards people who’ve been locked out of economic growth and the political process.” When it comes to jobs, MFBL suggests that the state and federal halls of power put $2 trillion to $4 trillion toward government jobs programs aimed at reaching out to groups who’ve been kept at a distance from gainful employment: previously incarcerated, disabled, queer, working-class, cash poor and other marginalized members of the black community. Mason and Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, both say those programs could focus on infrastructure — a field with an abundance of job opportunities that’s only going to expand in coming years. New hires will be needed to repair bridges and buildings, to wire fiber-optic networks throughout areas with low internet penetra- tion, and for urban renewal works in cities throughout the country. Current data underscore that forecast. Nationwide, the United States will need to invest $3.6 trillion to repair current infrastructure by 2020, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. In Detroit alone, an estimated $8 billion worth of investments is heading to the city behind a new light rail and the Canadian-financed Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, which will create an estimated 25,000 jobs. Now it’s just a matter of making sure the black population in Detroit gets the training necessary to qualify for those projects and connect to other bridge-related opportunities. The city is dotted with vocational training programs, and groups like Opportunity Detroit provide a channel between job seekers and local employers, but making sure low-income and unemployed communities are some of the first to get access to new opportunities as they pop up will “have a dramatic effect on raising the quality of life for everyone,” according to Mason. At the ground level, some cities will indeed benefit most if they start off by aiming efforts suggested in MFBL’s platform at black communities, says Richard Wallace of the Workers Center for Racial Justice (WCFRJ). To him, his hometown of Chicago is a prime example why. The south and west sides swarm with gang violence year after year, but those areas are also where 50 public schools were closed in 2013, many high-rise public housing complexes were torn down in the last decade, and hun- dreds of factories struggle to fill thousands of job openings each year, despite being in an urban core where approxi- mately half of all black men ages 20 to 24 are unemployed. Reducing Chicago’s unemployment numbers, as a result, means focusing on Chicago’s black unemployment issue, as black people make up the bulk of those who are out of jobs. “We’ll see people looking for jobs and they don’t even know the building next to them is a factory that’s hiring,” says Wallace. With MFBL’s proposals in mind, Chicago’s black youth could get a leg up on access to these jobs if the city or state of Illinois gave tax incentives to businesses that hired a benchmark number of black employees. That type of nuance — pairing unemployed populations and economic incentive in a way that’s mutually beneficial to both job seekers and industry — is why Mishel called these platforms “really important.” “Even if we have full employment nationwide, there are communities that are still going to be in recession,” he says. “That’s likely going to be the case for communities of color, which, if the country has 4 percent unemployment, might have something like 7 or 8 percent unemployment.” Mishel says he thinks it’s unlikely that cities will push out policies that filter out everyone else except for the black community, so what’s laid out in the initial agenda “will benefit the black community but it’ll also benefit some small cities and rural areas that are also white.” The other top component of MFBL’s economic justice platform with big implications for cities is its focus on tax revisions. It pushes for higher capital tax rates and lower labor tax rates, higher corporate taxes, taxing “bads” instead of “goods” (i.e. taxing corporate pollution instead of grocery store items), and removing the income cap for social security payroll taxes. If these suggestions became policy, urban areas in particular would see an end to corporate tax breaks in business zones, and property taxes that better align with property owners’ income levels. MFBL also backs the Ban the Box movement, an effort to get employers to remove questions about criminal history on job applications, which has already been enacted by more than 100 U.S. cities. And for part of its position on reparations, the movement asks for a universal basic income — an idea that’s attracted considerable attention and debate throughout North America and Europe — provided to all black individuals to prevent the risks of dropping into total poverty. The ideas and positions laid out in MFBL’s policy briefs aren’t revolutionary, but their implications for cities like Detroit and Chicago would put low-income communities in those cities on a path out of poverty. To Mason, that’s where

11 NEXTCITY.ORG this movement and its agenda really begins. “Now we have a platform that offers an enormous bed of solutions that moves beyond just saying we’re angry,” he says. “We’re not just angry — here are some really good policy ideas that deal with a broad range of problems.” 

JOHNNY MAGDALENO IS A NEXT CITY EQUITABLE CITIES FELLOW FOR 2016-2017. HE IS A JOURNALIST, WRITER AND PHOTOGRAPHER WHO FOCUSES ON HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUES. WHEN IT COMES TO CITIES, HE'S INTERESTED IN SOCIAL EQUITY, SUSTAINABILITY AND POLICIES THAT HELP OR HINDER DISADVANTAGED COMMUNITIES. HIS REPORTING AND WRITING HAVE BEEN FEATURED BY AL JAZEERA, THE GUARDIAN, NPR, HUFFINGTON POST LIVE, VICE, VICE NEWS, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, THE UNITED NATIONS, CITYLAB AND OTHERS.

12 NEXTCITY.ORG “We’re saying to the neighborhoods, if we do this, if we remove as many institutional barriers as we can, will you take this stairway out of poverty we’ve also invested in,” says Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren, above, of the city's new Market Driven Community Cooperatives Initiative. (AP Photo/Mike Groll) Rochester Mayor: Investing in Co-ops Builds “Stairway Out of Poverty”

OSCAR PERRY ABELLO | APRIL 12, 2016

hat could you do with $1.7 billion in a city of around 200,000, where 33 percent of households live below the federal poverty line? W The city of Rochester, with Mayor Lovely Warren at the helm and supported by partners and allies across New York State and beyond, has hatched a plan to tap into at least that much to help level the economic playing field for Rochester’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. “It’s about being able to give employees an opportunity to have ownership and to build wealth within their own communities,” says Warren. The plan consists of supporting the creation or growth of cooperatively owned businesses located primarily in the city’s most distressed neighborhoods, collectively known as the Northern Crescent. “We liked the ability to improve neighborhoods by actively having employees build co-ops in a neighborhood that’s challenged, where people could actually walk to and from work, building wealth and keeping the money in the neighborhood,” Warren adds. The plan was inspired by and modeled directly after Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives. The $1.7 billion comes from Rochester’s universities, hospitals and other local anchor institutions, which collectively spend that amount on procuring goods and services. That represents a ready-made market for co-ops, accord-

13 NEXTCITY.ORG ing to the plan’s feasibility study. The city announced the beginning of the implementation phase of the plan in March. Cleveland-based Democracy Collaborative (which conducted the feasibility study and created the Evergreen model) will oversee and coordinate implementation for Rochester. “It’s a part of living the American dream to be able to take care of your family, be able to buy that house, be able to raise your family in a safe environment,” Warren says. “Being able to earn enough money to provide those opportunities for you and for generations to come is the reason why you go to work every day. Without being able to pass on those assets, or those values, we would suffer as a city and as a community.” Rochester has suffered greatly from the loss of jobs tied to former industrial giants Xerox, Eastman Kodak, and Bausch and Lomb. These three companies employed around 62,000 people directly in the 1980s (60 percent of the local workforce), with those employees providing a steady market base for many other local businesses. By 2012, the three employed just 6 percent of the Rochester metro workforce. In the Northern Crescent neighborhoods, median income is less than half that of the Rochester metropolitan area. More than 60 percent of residents live below the poverty line. The neighborhoods are also the principal destina- tions for men and women returning from prison, according to the feasibility study. In one neighborhood, known as 14621 (after its ZIP code), about a quarter of men between the ages of 20 and 49 are either on parole, probation, incarcerated or otherwise under the supervision of the criminal justice system. The Northern Crescent area is already a main focus of the Rochester- Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative (RMAPI), an effort convened by United Way of Greater Rochester and led by city, county and state officials to coordinate public and private resources to address the Rochester metro’s concentrated poverty in terms of affordable and quality education, healthcare, childcare and other social supports. Rochester’s co-op plan, known as the Market Driven Community Cooperatives Initiative, is meant to com- (Credit: Democracy Collaborative) plement RMAPI. “We’re saying to the neighborhoods, if we do this, if we remove as many institutional barriers as we can, will you take this stairway out of poverty we’ve also invested in,” Warren says. The plan outlines numerous workforce development programs, re-entry programs and other key support actors already in place in the targeted neighborhoods. The implementation schedule calls for the creation of a community-owned, cooperative business development corporation, to be known as the Market Driven Community Cooperatives Corporation (MDCCC). It will be set up as a 501(c)(3), and will begin its life under the auspices of Rochester’s Department of Neighborhood and Business Development. MDCCC will serve as a holding company to get the cooperatives up and running, formalize partnerships with anchor institutions, provide technical assistance to cooperatives, and seek investors and funding partners for a revolving loan fund to serve as a source of capital for new and existing cooperatives or existing businesses interested in converting into worker co-ops. The plan points to several local partners that could serve as investors or hosts of the revolving loan fund, such as Genesee Co-op Federal Credit Union and PathStone Enterprise Center. Similar to Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives, Rochester’s MDCCC will eventually fund its work out of prof- it-sharing agreements with the cooperatives it helps to form. Until that time, it will have to raise funds on its own from public and private sources.

14 NEXTCITY.ORG Warren floated the idea of funding MDCCC through a social impact bond arrangement: If the MDCCC could show that it saved the city money by reducing the number of individuals receiving taxpayer-funded social services, as a result of moving up the economic ladder through worker-ownership, that could represent huge long-term taxpayer savings, justifying repayment of a hypothetical social impact bond. “There’s different mechanisms that we want to use to try to support the program,” Warren adds. “The city is putting up the money at first because we think that’s an investment that is worthwhile to try something new.”

15 NEXTCITY.ORG Photography by Paul Gargagliano

Will Urban Renewal Ever End?

Boston was scarred by eminent domain 50 years ago. Now it’s debating whether to wind down City Hall’s urban renewal powers, or whether they can be used for progressive ends.

ERICK TRICKEY | AUGUST 1, 2016

im Campano was 18 when Boston tore his neighborhood down. The Jewish and Italian bakeries, the Polish church and the synagogues, the tenements and rowhouses — gone. Street corners bustling with teenagers, the JCampano family’s sunny sixth-floor apartment on Poplar Street — erased by a government that called the West End a slum. “Nobody believed they would do it, that they would take a whole neighborhood,” Campano recalls. “Then the cranes came in, and the bulldozers.” The first demolition hit like an earthquake: “The whole block was swinging back and forth.” In 1958, in one of the most infamous acts of America’s urban renewal era, the Boston Redevelopment Authority seized nearly all of the working-class West End, evicted its last 7,500 residents, and razed it all to make way for new middle-class apartments. “It felt like they took part of you when they took your neighborhood,” says Campano, who co-founded the West End Museum to commemorate his lost piece of Boston. Last September — 57 years later — came a historic postscript to the story. Brian Golden, the director of the BRA, spoke at the West End Museum’s opening of an exhibition on urban renewal. Before a crowd of 50, the head of the agency that demolished the old West End made amends. “The BRA of today does not condone the destruction of neighborhoods and the displacement of residents that happened in urban renewal’s wake,” Golden said. “And I want to offer my heartfelt apology on behalf of the agency to the families of the West End.” Campano, now 75, stood and acknowledged the historic moment. “That’s the first time I ever had a formal apology from the BRA,” he says. “I think they were sincere.” But Golden had another motivation besides facing history’s wrongs. His speech was part of an intense campaign

16 NEXTCITY.ORG to keep the special urban renewal powers that the powerful BRA has exercised in parts of Boston since the 1950s. Those powers, which were set to expire this spring, include a bundle of revitalization tools used in many other American cities. But they also include eminent domain, the same power to seize private property that a previous generation of city leaders abused. Boston officials argued that it’s a new day; that the city’s ugly history of eminent domain abuse is now decades in the past, and that today’s urban renewal can be a powerful tool to encourage and preserve affordable housing. Yet Golden and his boss, Mayor Marty Walsh, asked City Council to hand the BRA a blank check for another 10 years — and not in the most struggling parts of today’s Boston. Instead, the $50 million agency asked to retain its powers over most of the same neighborhoods the city declared blighted a half-century ago, including places transformed by Boston’s real estate boom, where home sale prices have soared far past $1 million. That request sparked an intense debate about the future of redevelopment in the booming city, home to one of the nation’s strongest urban economies. It’s a debate that is relevant to other cities, particularly those searching for tools to help ensure that the benefits of economic growth are felt in all quarters. Can urban renewal powers — infamous for harming neighborhoods and their most vulnerable residents — finally be used in a way that is fair for all communities? Or are they outdated, still prone to abuse, and likely to give powerful bureaucracies a way to perpetuate themselves? “Most of the legacy of urban renewal in Boston, at least in the public consciousness, is very negative,” says Boston City Council President Michelle Wu. “It’s a story of displacement and government overreach.” Though skeptical of urban renewal, Wu forged a compromise in March: The council gave the BRA six more years to use its special authority, but with new oversight that nudges it to wind it down. The biggest reason for the long ramp, says Wu, is to give the agency time to figure out how to roll back its powers in a way that preserves existing affordable housing agreements. “Will there be a day that an agency will ask to eliminate some of its powers?” Wu asks. “I hope the answer would be yes. But I know it will take significant outside pressure and oversight.” In other words, it takes extraordinary effort to rein in extraordinary power.

Progressive Intentions, Vast Authority Brian Golden works in a corner office on Boston City Hall’s top floor, nine stories up. From tall glass windows, he gazes down on Revolutionary-era Faneuil Hall, redeveloped in the 1970s as a BRA project, and across downtown to the Long Wharf, where ferries sail out to the Boston Harbor islands. On one wall, he’s put up a classic Boston poster from a reelection campaign for James Michael Curley, the city’s political boss of the early 20th century. “The Mayor of the Poor,” it reads. “Humane, Experienced Leadership.” It’s the perfect symbol of progressive intentions crossed with vast authority. As BRA director, Golden has the most powerful job in City Hall besides the mayor’s. The BRA, founded in 1957, isn’t just an urban renewal agency. It’s also Boston’s planning department and economic development corporation, and it approves or rejects all large-scale development proposals in the city. During Mayor Tom Menino’s 20-year reign, critics claimed Menino used the BRA to personally control what was and wasn’t built in the city. The agency used urban renewal to help luxury and nonprofit projects alike: a W Hotel downtown, the Whittier Street Health Center in lower-income Roxbury, and Kensington Place, a 27-story, mostly high-end apartment tower erected in Chinatown despite neighborhood opposition and in another unpopular move, used its power to raze a historic theater. Walsh, who succeeded Menino, ran for the job on a promise to reform the agency. Golden became director when Walsh took office in January 2014. Since then, he’s been on a mission to convince Bostonians that the agency is changing. “The destruction of people’s homes and neighborhoods is not something people got over easily, nor should they,” Golden says. “There’s no one at this agency who thinks the approaches taken in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s were appropriate. [And] the political reality of Boston in the 21st century would never permit that.” Golden’s September talk at the West End Museum was just one stop in a yearlong campaign to convince Boston not to let the BRA’s urban renewal powers expire. “In recent decades,” he argues, “this agency has used these tools in a far more nuanced manner, that has yielded far more good for the people of Boston than not.” Urban renewal zones, he notes, give the BRA more power to create affordable housing requirements on land it sells. That’s a key goal in Boston, where the poor, working class and middle class alike are in danger of getting priced out of the city. Those restrictions — land disposition agreements, or LDAs, for short — stay with the property, and the BRA can use them as leverage decades later. A housing nonprofit recently replaced its aging apartment complex in Boston’s Allston-Brighton neighborhood — a product of 1960s urban renewal — with a new apartment and condo development, thanks to a land swap the BRA helped negotiate with Harvard University. Golden says the BRA can even

17 NEXTCITY.ORG use urban renewal tools to extract funds from a luxury project to benefit an affordable housing project. For instance, affordable housing requirements attached to a high-end residential and office tower project near Boston’s North Station were used to help subsidize a middle-class housing development nearby. (In Boston, developers are so focused on building high-priced homes that city officials don’t just look for ways to encourage affordable housing for the poor, but also “workforce housing” — homes that people who work in the city can afford.) Golden says the BRA hardly ever uses eminent domain to take an occupied home or a place of business anymore: “It’s an extraordinary rarity.” Boston’s most notable recent takings, in 2011, were nothing like the West End. The city forced two businesses in Roxbury’s Dudley Square, a high-poverty neighborhood, to relocate to make room for a new Boston Public Schools headquarters, and a few blocks away, it wrested a neglected historic home from its owner to hand it over to a preservation group. More often, say Golden and his staff, the BRA uses eminent domain in even

A lone remaining rowhome is surrounded by high-rises on Lomasney Way in the West End neighborhood. The area saw mass urban renewal in the 1950s. smaller, surgical ways: for a temporary construction easement, to enlarge a sidewalk, to let a developer install an awning above a public right-of-way. The BRA has other special powers inside the city’s urban renewal zones that help solve the dilemmas of building new in an old city. It can more easily buy and sell land, assemble and combine parcels from different owners, and clear a property’s title — especially important in Boston, says Golden, where some parcels’ histories go back to the 1600s. Developers can do that on their own, but it’s more difficult. With urban renewal tools, Golden says, “we can make really significant problems go away.” The way Golden describes it, modern urban renewal in Boston sounds progressive — enlightened, even. But there’s a problem. The BRA only has these powers in places where, long ago, it found blight. So why don’t the powers move out of now-rich neighborhoods as the city changes? The answer is rather embarrassing for the BRA. It has lost track of those LDAs it created. It doesn’t even know how many there are — several hundred, maybe. Figuring it out will take intense dives into old paper documents. But many LDAs were set to expire along with the urban renewal zone they’re in, so ending the program in a zone would have consequences the BRA can’t explain. What’s more, “we could not easily identify everything we own,” says Golden. Even the BRA’s database of land it still owns has gaps. “Why have all these things been neglected?” Golden asks. “I don’t know. I wasn’t in a decision-making capacity.” (He joined the BRA in 2009 and got the top job five years later.) “But it’s crystal clear, the agency did not focus itself on the task of preparing for urban renewal after the expiration.”

18 NEXTCITY.ORG The BRA says it may take two years to finish a complete inventory — and until then, it can’t plan to shrink the city’s urban renewal zones. That stymied urban renewal’s critics on the city council, who had hoped to do just that. By acting as if urban renewal would go on forever, the bureaucracy succeeded in keeping its extraordinary powers. That’s made the agency’s many angry critics even angrier.

"It's All About How We Use It" Steve Fox strolls along a red-brick sidewalk in Rutland Square, next to a block-long procession of 5-story brick rowhouses, the signature architecture of Boston’s South End, their identical bowed fronts united into one unbroken wall. “This unit with the red doors, that’s a duplex,” Fox says. “It’s owned by one person who rents out the bottom unit.” The rowhouse’s value in Boston’s overheated real estate market: about $5 million. It wasn’t always this way. The South End, the country’s largest urban Victorian neighborhood, spent a century as a home to working-class immigrants and African-Americans, drawn there from the nearby Back Bay train station after migrating from the South. A plaque on one Rutland Square rowhouse honors a former owner: Butler R. Wilson, head of Boston’s NAACP branch from 1916 to 1936. Fox bought his home on the square 30 years ago, in the early, prospecting wave of gentrification, for $280,000. Now, he says, not only do bidding wars drive rowhouse sales into the millions, prospective tenants also outbid each other to snag rentals.

Residents from Villa Victoria try to beat the heat in Plaza Betances. Villa Victoria is an affordable housing complex built by a Puerto Rican activist group.

So the South End Forum, a coalition of small neighborhood groups, decided last year to ask the city council to end the BRA’s urban renewal powers there. “The entire South End is part of an urban renewal zone,” says Fox, the South End Forum’s president. “They never bothered to shrink it.” Urban renewal swept into the South End in the 1960s. The BRA seized blocks it deemed blighted and demolished rowhouses. Residents fought back. On West Newton Street stands a former church, now the Villa Victoria Center for the Arts. A mural shows a giant pair of hands lifting a sea of Hispanic faces up above the neighborhood’s past: an eviction notice, a building on fire, broken windows, and a banner that reads, “No nos mudaremos de la Parcela 19” — “We won’t move from Parcel 19.” Beyond the old church, Victorian brownstones give way to short, angular 1970s townhouses — Villa Victoria, the affordable housing complex built by the Puerto Rican activist group that resisted eviction. Here, the story of urban renewal gets complicated. Fox stands amid the complex and looks north and south at places the street grid was erased, evaluating the altered landscape with a historic preservationist’s lament. “Although this is a very vibrant and important community,” he says, “it could be just as vibrant if rules of the game had not been abused.”

19 NEXTCITY.ORG To Boston’s Puerto Rican community, Villa Victoria is a source of community pride, and their accounts of urban renewal tend to balance anger at eviction with frankness about the poor living conditions it replaced. Vanessa Calderón- Rosado, CEO of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, the nonprofit that runs Villa Victoria, says longtime residents talk of unsafe conditions and subpar heating in winter, while photos from the era show buildings boarded up and destroyed by arsonists. She says she doesn’t hear them wish their old, pre-urban renewal neighborhood had been preserved. “The elders in community were very happy with the outcome,” she says. In fact, Villa Victoria is named after their victory. Without urban renewal, she thinks there would be even less affordable housing in the South End today. “It’s all about how we use it,” Calderón-Rosado says, “and how we engage the community to take advantage of the tools we have available through urban renewal.” Unlike its South End neighbors, IBA supported extending Boston’s urban renewal powers. “Parts of the South End are primed for development,” she says. “There are strong opportunities for urban renewal to develop open spaces, affordable housing and moderate-income housing.” Elsewhere in the South End, lasting anger over historic eminent domain struggles still plays a role in people’s desire to abolish the neighborhood’s urban renewal zone. Yet Fox says the neighborhood doesn’t fear a repeat of the past. “If the BRA ever exercised its eminent domain powers, people would be at City Hall with pitchforks,” he says. “It’s just not going to happen.” Then why doesn’t the South End want urban renewal’s tools? “They give the BRA sole, exclusive authority to do exactly what they want to do,” argues Fox. “We as neighborhood people have no recourse.” The BRA’s five-member board can make zoning changes in urban renewal areas. That infuriates neighborhood groups, who see the BRA as an arrogant, too-powerful bureaucracy, less transparent than the city’s regular zoning boards, more sympathetic to developers. A 2015 audit of the BRA by McKinsey & Co. echoed many of their complaints, criticizing the agency for low transparency, a shortage of citywide planning, and an inconsistent and subjective project review process. So the BRA’s campaign for an urban renewal extension got a rough reception in the neighborhoods. “The BRA was referred to as the evil empire,” Fox says. “People said, ‘You can’t trust them.’ ‘They lie.’” The Alliance of Downtown Civic Organizations, which covers several booming central city neighborhoods with pockets of poverty, including the South End and North End, argued for abolishing urban renewal after a brief transition. Ford Cavallari sits in a Starbucks on bustling Atlantic Avenue, a block from the ocean. “Look around,” he says. “Urban blight? Find me some urban blight. I can’t find it.” Cavallari is president of the North End/Waterfront Residents’ Association, and parts of his side of town have been in an urban renewal zone for decades. The North End, a densely packed Italian enclave, is now a hot tourist attraction, its narrow streets crammed with visitors carrying boxes from the popular Mike’s Pastry. Urban renewal powers in Boston today are built on a fiction, says Cavallari. Legally, “urban blight begets urban renewal,” he says, but “most of the urban renewal zones are not blighted.” Meanwhile, he says, other neighborhoods are doing just fine without the special revitalization powers. New office towers have filled the Seaport District and sprung up in Allston-Brighton, while new housing has swept along South Boston’s Dorchester Avenue and East Boston’s shoreline. The BRA, as the city’s planning agency, still regulates development in those neighborhoods, but without using urban renewal’s special powers. “No urban renewal zone, and yet magically, stuff actually happens!” But while the downtown groups wish urban renewal would go away, other Bostonians want it to stay, even grow.

A Means to Equitable Ends Laura Dziorny looks out at Boston Harbor from Charlestown, the neighborhood where the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought. She’s standing in the new Mayor Thomas M. Menino Park, on a shoreline boardwalk that encircles a playground. Behind her rises the glassy new Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Both were built on land the BRA acquired through urban renewal. “I run around here,” Dziorny says. “Having the path that goes all the way around now — it’s really nice.” Dziorny, an administrator for an educational nonprofit, lives in Charlestown, a historically working-class Irish neighborhood that’s now gentrifying. She wants to keep the neighborhood’s urban renewal zone and expand it. At several meetings the BRA held in Charlestown, she says, most residents said they felt the same way. BRA officials showed them a map of the area’s complex land ownership history, which included parcels owned by city, state and federal governments. “It was a patchwork,” she recalls. “You could see why development, especially along the water, would be so difficult.” She walks through the Charlestown Navy Yard, the historic military and shipyard district. A few blocks from the U.S.S. Constitution’s dock, among sleek new condos, stand two long-vacant buildings from the shipbuilding era: the imposing red Chain Forge building and the quarter-mile-long, 45-feet-wide Ropewalk building. The BRA intends to transfer the Chain Forge building to a hotel developer, and it plans to lease the Ropewalk building to an enterprising

20 NEXTCITY.ORG rehabber who plans to split the long, thin granite structure into 97 apartments. The BRA’s work in the Navy Yard was a big reason for the positive tenor at the Charlestown meetings, Dziorny says: “Everyone was satisfied about how it’s turned out.” Two miles up Bunker Hill Street, past Charlestown’s narrow lanes of historic homes, lies Sullivan Square, a bleak, bare highway traffic circle. Forlorn-looking warehouses and a long-shuttered restaurant dot side streets nearby. This is the area that Dziorny and other Charlestown residents want the BRA to add to the urban renewal zone. The Sullivan Square station on Boston’s Orange Line lies beyond the traffic circle. Dziorny, who doesn’t have a car, says getting there on foot is daunting. “Every time, I feel I’m taking my life into my hands,” she says. “It’s not lit. Cars are coming from four different direc- tions, and they’re not necessarily aware a person is going to be crossing.” State Rep. Russell Holmes works in Charlestown as a financial planner, but he lives in Mattapan, 8 miles away on Boston’s southern edge. He marvels at how Charlestown, “a neighborhood people avoided,” has become so popular that it’s hard for him to get in and out at rush hour. “I want to see something like what I’ve seen in Charlestown come to my neighborhood,” Holmes says. Mattapan, a majority African-American neighborhood, is trying to bounce back after decades of disinvestment.

A woman looks out on Boston from the Navy Yard in Charlestown.

Holmes not only testified before city council in support of the BRA’s urban renewal powers, he asked the agency to expand the program to Mattapan. The council order reauthorizing urban renewal asks the BRA to consider it. “Come up and down Blue Hill Avenue and I can show you plenty of blight!” Holmes says, referring to Mattapan’s main artery, a street tough enough that a 2001 crime film was named after it. Holmes knows urban renewal’s history in Boston, and he doesn’t want to displace the poor. Instead, he says, he wants to use the BRA’s land use and assembly powers to turn blighted areas into economic engines. “Do not turn off the spigot before I get some of the water,” he says. Boston’s ambivalence about urban renewal reflects a national trend. Alan Mallach, a senior fellow in metropolitan policy at the Brookings Institution, says a backlash against using eminent domain for economic development has swept many states since 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that governments can seize private property to sell to a private developer. Meanwhile, there’s less of it to fight. Large and sweeping urban renewal projects fell out of favor after federal funding of them ended in the 1970s, Mallach says. “Cities don’t do that anymore, except in special cases,” he says. (One exception is Baltimore, which is carrying out a massive demolition and redevelopment project near Johns Hopkins University’s medical center.)

21 NEXTCITY.ORG The BRA’s more subtle approach to urban renewal today — selling smaller parcels after reaching an agree- ment about what a developer will do with them — is a common strategy in other cities, Mallach says. “It’s much more common to use the powers they have — eminent domain or other tools — to help along developers trying to do something a municipality wants,” he explains. “Municipalities basically have little or no money for economic redevelopment.” Even the BRA’s slowness in redrawing its urban renewal maps is a common problem, according to Mallach. “A lot of these agencies get into an inertia, which is not good,” he says. “They should be constantly looking at where do the tools need to be used, and where not.” Other cities have kept old renewal zones in place to preserve land use agreements, but Mallach thinks that shouldn’t be an excuse to wield unnecessary power. “That’s a legal technicality,” he says. “It shouldn’t affect how they operate.” Norm Krumholz, a professor emeritus in urban affairs at Cleveland State University, says some cities do use their redevelopment powers as leverage to get developers to meet social needs. “It depends on the city,” he says. “If the BRA feels the need to negotiate [for] people at the low end of the scale, that’s what they’ll bargain for: low-income housing, investment in low-income communities, contributions for the transit agency — a whole range of things depending on what the bargaining authority thinks is in interest of its low income population.” But there are practical limits to what cities and neighborhood groups can demand: “The developers are never going to take a deal that’s never going to be profitable.” So a city’s bargaining power is limited by its marketability.

State Rep. Russell Holmes stands in front of a long-abandoned property in Mattapan, the site of a planned new train station on the commuter rail.

“Cities like Cleveland feel they can’t bargain hard,” says Krumholz. “They’re grateful for what investment takes place. For very good reason, they facilitate the investment.” But “in a city like Boston, a tight real estate market, [officials] should be bargaining hard for more low- and moderate-income housing.” Krumholz, a pioneer of equity planning, says there’s still a substantial risk that urban renewal powers can be abused. “You know the story of urban renewal: low-income people driven away from choice locations that developers selected for redevelopment. That’s still a possibility. Again, it depends on the willingness of the public agency — City Hall or the BRA — to go to the mat.” In Boston, much of the job of reconciling the past and future of urban renewal fell to Michelle Wu, a protégé of U.S. Sen Elizabeth Warren who became city council president in January, at the start of her second council term. Wu, 31, has taken heat from her progressive base for forging an alliance with an older, less activist faction on council. She found herself at the center of the urban renewal debate, bridging a divide between veteran councilors inclined to give the BRA what it wanted and younger progressives on council who wanted to limit the urban renewal extension to two years. “What bothered us the most,” Wu says, “was that the BRA was asking for a 10-year extension on exactly the same maps, the same area, and the same authority — without any recognition that the city has changed and the neighborhoods have changed a whole lot.” Wu helped negotiate the final compromise: a six-year extension with new council oversight, a plan to reexamine

22 NEXTCITY.ORG the program and pledges of more openness. “I still believe that any urban renewal authority needs to have close oversight and needs to have full transparency,” Wu says. “Government should only have authority that’s narrowly tailored to the need.” Does she believe urban renewal can be used for broadly beneficial ends? She answers with careful diplomacy: If there’s appropriate planning, with the community, on specific parcels such as a health center, neighborhoods welcome urban renewal. The BRA will meet with council every six months starting in September. The agenda will include progress reports on the land and LDA inventories, with priority given to the South End and Charlestown. Why isn’t there an inventory already? Wu’s smile hints that the young councilor has gotten an education in how bureaucracies hold onto power. “The BRA could not really answer that question,” she says, “except to say they should’ve and didn’t.” Did the agency not keep an inventory of its agreements because it expected urban renewal to go on forever? Quietly, but firmly, she answers, “Yes.” 

ERICK TRICKEY IS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST IN BOSTON. HE'S WRITTEN FOR SMITHSONIAN, POLITICO MAGAZINE, BOSTON MAGAZINE AND CLEVELAND MAGAZINE.

23 NEXTCITY.ORG Etsy’s headquarters in Brooklyn, right (Photo by Oscar Perry Abello)

Cities Can Help to Shape an Equal Opportunity Maker Movement

OSCAR PERRY ABELLO | FEBRUARY 23, 2016

magine you’re opening a restaurant, let’s say 20 years from now. You’ve got the financing, you’ve got the location. You’ll also need a lot of stuff: stoves, ovens, fridges, pots and pans, cooking utensils, tables, chairs, silverware, and Iglassware. To buy some of that, maybe not all of it, you pull up an app on your phone, where you can share a little bit about you and your restaurant concept. Then, in the same way you can call up an Uber ride in 2016, you issue a request for bespoke items that local small-scale manufacturers can fill within days (and hopefully receive fair compensation). That’s the promise hinted at in a report out today from National League of Cities (NLC), on how cities around the country are supporting the emergence and growth of the so-called maker movement. “The maker movement has such great potential to alter the fabric of business and manufacturing in cities,” says Brooks Rainwater, co-author of the report. “The city itself is the place where the maker movement lives, breathes and succeeds. What you have here is the ability to localize the manufacturing of goods for people in that local area.” An estimated 135 million adults in the U.S. are makers, according to sources cited in the report. But that figure is based on a broad definition of the maker movement, encompassing everyone from hobbyists, who are interested in the maker movement only for personal enjoyment, to technical entrepreneurs who seek to prototype products that can be brought to market for commercial production. “I would imagine the number of commercially oriented makers would be quite a bit smaller,” Rainwater says. How much smaller? In a survey of 4,000 Etsy sellers conducted in 2014 by Etsy itself, 76 percent of Etsy sellers considered their Etsy work to be a business; 30 percent focused on Etsy sales as their sole occupation. Etsy sellers aren’t necessarily representative of the entire maker movement, but Etsy’s founding in 2005 is on the NLC report’s time- line of key moments for the modern maker movement. Cities are taking notice of the economic development potential of the maker movement. “Over the years, we’ve seen city governments across the country support the Etsy sellers in their local economies

24 NEXTCITY.ORG in a myriad of ways,” an Etsy spokesperson writes via email. Last week, Etsy announced its first-ever Maker Cities Summit, slated for May 12-13 this year in Brooklyn. The summit aims to provide a space for the Etsy community to come together with representatives from their local governments and open the door for conversation and collaboration around local, sustainable economic development. “What we’re seeing from cities is that there’s a lot more focus on the business-building aspect of maker spaces and how that can impact cities,” Rainwater says. Rainwater highlights several examples of production-focused maker space settings, such as TechShop Detroit’s partnership with Ford, which rewards employees whose work has led to new Ford patented-technologies with a free membership to the national chain of small-scale co-manufacturing spaces. The Detroit location is a 33,000-square-foot facility next door to the Ford product development campus. At TechShop’s Arlington, Virginia, location, another partnership exists with DARPA, the Department of Defense research and development arm. “Those kinds of partnerships are where we’re starting to see some real movement happen from an economic development standpoint,” Rainwater adds. Some have called Mayor Bill Peduto the first Maker Mayor, and Pittsburgh is the first city mentioned in the NLC report. The once iconic city of Rust Belt decay and industrial decline found its way back by leaning on the combination of engineering prowess at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh with its manufacturing history. Google and Uber have both opened up shop in Pittsburgh as part of their battle to be the first to bring a self-driving car into mass production. Google’s Pittsburgh office shares a former Nabisco factory lot with TechShop Pittsburgh, in the city’s rapidly changing East Liberty neighborhood. “We definitely see Pittsburgh as a great model. We’re actually having our annual conference there in the fall, so we’re thinking about how that can showcase some of the great work they’re doing in the maker movement and broader innovation space,” Rainwater says. Of course, maker spaces like TechShop locations or the fourth floor of the Chattanooga Public Library, are just one component of the ecosystem for maker movement growth. “A lot of cities we looked at for the report were looking at this from a systemic standpoint,” Rainwater says. “They weren’t looking at just having a maker space in their city and that would be the solution. They’re looking at the full suite, from STEM education to financing and how it all comes together.” In Pittsburgh, maker-oriented incubator AlphaLab Gear (also located in East Liberty) is a microcosm of the maker movement. Its parent organization, InnovationWorks, is a state-sponsored seed-stage investor organization that has supported more than 175 companies since 1999, directly investing $62 million and counting, catalyzing over $1.5 billion in investment overall. Eighty venture capital firms from around the country have invested in InnovationWorks-seeded businesses. More than 85 percent of AlphaLab Gear alumni so far have received follow-on investments within eight weeks of completing the 40-week incubator program. AlphaLab Gear also runs a free eight-week summer program for students ages 16 to 18 on entrepreneurship and maker skills. It’s hard to say how big the maker movement could get in terms of how many jobs or local businesses it may eventually encompass. But that also means those who are supporting it now have the ability to shape it in a way that could be much more equitable than other sectors of the economy that have become entrenched in the past few decades (looking at you, tech). What the maker economy looks like now could indicate how its growth could shape the future overall economy. In Etsy’s 2014 survey, 86 percent of sellers were women, and 17 percent had a household income below $25,000. Forty- four percent reported using Etsy income for necessary household expenses. Sixty-one percent of Etsy sellers reported living in urban areas. “We’re hopeful that more and more cities will focus on equitable economic development, and to think about the equity factor as they’re going in the maker movement direction,” Rainwater says. Location is key, according to Rainwater. Putting maker spaces in public libraries could help shape maker spaces in a way that is broadly accessible, he says. Making sure such spaces are also easy to get to by public transportation is also essential to the equity part of the equation. “Now is the time for policymakers to take charge and make sure there’s a focus on the equity side of the coin, that it has to be a critical part of this movement,” Rainwater says. 

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