When Cities Cede Public Sector Work To 3rd Parties

[M II A II R II K]

Welcome to Your New Government


July 9th, 2012

By Anna Clark

Read More: http://americancity.org/forefront/vi...new-government

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Home to key anchor institutions — including the Detroit Institute of Arts, Wayne State University and the Detroit Medical Center — the Midtown neighborhood sits just north of the city’s downtown and riverfront. Throughout the last five years, the neighborhood has seen a remarkable revival, with independent businesses veering from national trends to open their doors and restore life in previously dark storefronts. New residents are moving into rehabilitated housing, and community gardens are thriving in what had been vacant lots. Indeed, almost no Midtown businesses were lost during the economic recession — incredible, given that Detroit entered the recession at what might politely be called a disadvantage.

- Founded in 1976 by community activists rooted in the affordable housing movement of the 1960s, Midtown, Inc. evolved along with the city. In the last two decades, the scrappy non-profit’s tactical collaborations with major anchor institutions in Detroit — including City Hall — have elevated it from the antiestablishment fringe and into the establishment itself. While, historically, power in Detroit was synonymous with the auto industry and labor unions, both the decentralization and economic fluctuations of the car business has left space for Midtown, Inc. to make its mark on the city.

- These days, it provides landscaping on boulevard medians. It partners with Wayne State’s police department, which patrols the neighborhood beyond campus borders. It puts strings of lights in the trees along Woodward during the holidays. It is installing LED street lighting. And with its popular Live Midtown initiative, which offers financial incentives to employees of anchor institutions to buy or rent homes in the neighborhood, Midtown, Inc. is coming full circle, returning to the business of creating housing options. Even in a shrinking city with a high vacancy rate, Midtown’s apartments are 95 percent occupied.

- The advent of Whole Foods — a retailer that serves as a stabilizer and signifier of a particular sort of bourgeoisie arrival — is a bright feather in the cap of Midtown, Inc. President Sue Mosey. Robb credited her for convincing the company to commit to Detroit, as she helped put together the complex financial deal that is backing the new store. While there are many independent grocers and farmer’s markets in the city, Mosey acknowledges that Whole Foods is a game-changer, and not just because more Detroiters will have food choices that parallel those of their neighbors in tweedy Ann Arbor, which got its second Whole Foods in 2007. The store’s opening “not only meets the need for fresh produce, but it signals that something is going on here in Detroit,” said Mosey.

- With a remarkable ability to get things done in a city that has been on the brink of state emergency management, Midtown, Inc. has a reputation for being better at performing the role of government than government itself. But what are the stakes of ceding public sector work to non-profits? Some argue that if private organizations like this one aren’t making sure trash is picked up and the neighborhood is promoted as a positive place to invest, the jobs won’t get done — and neighborhood will languish. On the other hand, communities cede a certain amount of accountability when private hands, whether a community development corporation like Midtown, Inc. or a for-profit company, take charge of public services.

- Known as the Bedford-Stuyvesant Development and Service Corporation, it pioneered a new model for public-private community development that prioritized both local leadership and professional management. Kennedy, along with Republican Sen. Jacob Javits, laid the groundwork for community development corporations with a special amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. The new CDC was not only for Brooklyn’s sake; in his speech, Kennedy spotlighted a seven-point program that he said would serve as a standard-bearer for community development nationwide.

- “The program for the development of Bedford-Stuyvesant will combine the best of community action with the best of the private enterprise system,” Kennedy told a group of neighborhood residents assembled at local public school to hear about the initiative that he debuted alongside Javits and Mayor John Lindsay. “Neither by itself is enough, but in their combination lies our hope for the future.”

- “How do you build institutions when the neighborhood is a real liability?” That was the question Mosey said she faced when she was brought in as Midtown, Inc.’s community development director. (Three years later, she became executive director.) Her strategy was to focus on pivotal projects that she felt held the potential to improve the neighborhood while benefitting institutions and bringing lasting good to the city. First step: Getting the neighborhood placed on the National Register of Historic Places so redevelopment projects could qualify for federal tax credits. The move jump-started investment in a place that had been without it for years. “By the time I came, whole blocks had been removed with urban renewal, which made everything unstable,” Mosey said.

- One way to describe Midtown, Inc. is to say that it curates development. The non-profit supports carefully chosen projects expected to contribute to a coherent and creative community. It offers stable assistance and a wealth of resources throughout a sometimes-chaotic development process. Through partnerships with local funders and foundations, as well as key city departments, it has seeded at least 40 projects in Midtown — some of them new construction, but the majority historic rehabilitations. By instigating smaller, local development, Mosey said the community demonstrates that “there is a market here.”

- University Circle sits on the east side of Cleveland and, like Detroit’s Midtown, is home to key civic institutions, including Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Orchestra and the University Hospitals system. It is served by University Circle, Inc., a CDC that has come characterize itself as a “community service corporation” in order to better represent the scope of its programming. The roots of the non-profit corporation extend back more than half a century. It began as a development foundation in 1957 tasked by the Cleveland City Council with being a “service organization to all institutions.” Initially, the foundation functioned as a land bank to assist institutions in expansions. It soon came to develop collaborative services, providing parking, transportation, public safety programs and neighborhood landscaping in order to buoy the area’s cultural and medical centers.

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With deep relationships to Detroit’s major institutions and a $7.5 million budget in 2011, Midtown, Inc. is larger than most community development corporations.