What Kind of Empowerment?
Engaging citizens and neighborhood associations in city hall initiatives is the art of municipal citizenship. Troubled neighborhoods suffer from a shortage of authority and control for two main reasons. On the one hand, overextended government has claimed too much power for itself over neighborhood affairs, while on the other, neighborhoods, like muscles, atrophy when neglected and grow weaker over against a strong public administration. The first problem grows larger every day as public officials make one decision after another without consulting residents. The second problem results in a dearth of motivation and a lack of influence at the street level. The question is thus: how does government return proper authority to — how does it empower — neighborhoods and thereby start building the long-neglected civic muscle tissue?
The term empowerment is one of those words that has found usage in just about every corner in society. It appears in the titles of myriad books, articles, conferences, and seminars. While the word has sometimes been superficially used to talk about a variety of self-improvement tactics, it generally means, as the name implies, getting more power into the hands of people who are disenfranchised in some way. In particular the word has been used frequently in the public policy community to denote a way to provide help to distressed communities.
Shortly before I took office, the leadership of a transitional neighborhood summoned me to a meeting. They presented a study from Ball State University’s department of architecture that proposed the redevelopment of an important intersection, Forty-Second Street and College Avenue. I thought this corner had enormous importance in stabilizing what had become a troubled neighborhood. A few decades earlier, I attended movies in the neighborhood as a young adult and lived nearby while working summers during law school. The intersection now stood virtually abandoned, threatening stable neighborhoods around it. It was a very visible sign that hope and progress no longer meant anything in the area.
The proposal suggested substantial public and private investment in the area, coupled with significant private sector involvement. The millions of dollars in investments would be focused close to the epicenter of the crack epidemic in the area, and thus raising the money and guaranteeing the necessary safety seemed remote at best. A major disturbance in the area a few years after the ambitious study was published, but before the development work was finished, turned the streets into a war zone and demonstrated how much work was needed to forge a real partnership. Yet, eight years later, three of the four corners at the intersection featured new investments. Crime – especially violent crime – had substantially decreased, and hope existed in the area for the first time in a while. This was an achievement not of increases in public and private spending, however, but of a neighborhood empowered to tackle crime head-on through a strong relationship with city hall, law enforcement, and business. Neighbors demanded, and then supported, stronger law enforcement, the formation of an advisory committee for the precinct, bike patrols, and an effective process whereby they could report crack houses.
We called our comprehensive approach to strengthening neighborhoods the Neighborhood Empowerment Initiative. Its goal was to end the long-standing tradition – found in almost any large city – of making neighborhoods dependent on city government and its programs, and
begin a new tradition in which city hall acts as a supporter of the self determination and enterprise resident in each neighborhood. So what does “empowerment” mean, and how does it work? The public policy community so frequently uses the word to indicate help for troubled urban populations that it has come to have a variety of meanings. It is worth surveying a few of them and making clear what we meant by empowerment in Indianapolis.
Political Activist Empowerment
The basic tenet of this model is that the capture of political power is equal to empowerment. In his book, The Politics of Empowerment, which chronicles how widely the concept of empowerment is used today, political science professor Robert Weissberg describes our kind of empowerment this way: “Empowerment means coercing reluctant officials into bestowing benefits under their decree or capturing command centers outright.”[1] Progressive politics in the early twentieth century set the stage for this kind of empowerment in which well-funded national groups seek direct political influence in Washington. As Weissberg notes, however, what drives movements such as these is ”the unexpressed belief that only government – principally Washington – can supply sought ends,” and he skeptically adds, “That political action is the wellspring of progress is, of course, arguable.”[2]
Of course, national special-interest efforts affect local redevelopment when the national organizations representing CDCs or public housing lobby for authority. Sometimes these efforts complement local efforts, as when community-development interest groups lobby for tax credits that help create a stronger market for low-income housing providers. At other times, the national groups interfere, such as when public-housing authorities lobbied Congress to prevent home, or local, rule, and insisted instead that the Department of Housing and Urban Development protect its nationally driven and centralized way of doing business.
Whatever the case may be, empowerment considered solely as the capture of political power is simply too one-sided, even when positive things result. Interest has always been at the heart of politics, and it always will be. But empowerment focused only on capturing political centers of power only really empowers people to more effectively get what they want – and what people want is often only a short-term fix. Empowerment also has to equip people to engage in the kinds of practices and join in the kinds of partnerships that produce long-lasting change.
“Toquevillian” Empowerment
What I call Toquevillian empowerment is that kind of grassroots control that citizens exercise over what happens in their community and that the French journalist Alexis de Toqueville so greatly admired when he visited America in the 1830s. It insists strongly in the decentralization of core services to citizen control. It holds that choices affecting citizens’ lives need to be handed over to the authority of citizens and the mediating institutions they inhabit. To this end, it contends that empowering value-shaping organizations, families, neighborhood associations, and faith-based organizations helps translate their values into action. When this is successfully accomplished, problems in those residents’ communities begin to diminish and overall quality of life is improved.
This form of empowerment closely, but not completely, resembles what we attempted to carry out in Indianapolis. It was never our contention that citizen groups control every decision, nor that they be burdened with all imaginable service provision minutia. Citizens may not want or be prepared to undertake control of everything going on such as trash pickup, selection of companies to repair their roads, and so on. They neither may want nor be prepared to decide how the Local Department of Health should allocate all of its funds. What is most important is that they have the opportunity to give their input and know that public officials will listen when they speak.
Also, more citizen participation will not necessarily result in over all improved conditions. Without good information and timely assistance from government, residents of a community might only have their weariness to show for their efforts, while their streets might still be filthy, home to stray dogs, and unsafe for their children to cross. It is easy to grow nostalgic about the voluntary organizations of the past, but we cannot hoist expectations on today’s community-based organizations that they are not equipped to fulfill.
Any empowerment effort needs to take the Toquevillian element seriously, however. Weissberg, describing empowerment that seeks to make use of local mediating structures, writes, “It rests on proven methods – the task is to extend what is already there, not invent novelties.”[3] Families and community and faith-based organizations are already there. They are already at work in their communities, acting without regard to reward but with a concern for the citizens right in their midst. Without them, any empowerment effort is defeated at the start.
Economic Empowerment
Money is important. But it is not the first priority in starting an empowerment effort. Simply getting money into the hands of people disenfranchised from the economic mainstream has rarely proved effective on its own. Any public resources will always seem in too short supply to meet the demand, even in an age of surpluses. No matter how much funding is given to a government-sponsored activity, the administrators of that activity will likely say they need more money to be effective- particularly when the activity is addressing issues related to urban decay, crime, joblessness, and broken families.
A new consensus holds that financial stability and a sense of self worth are based on the habits, practices, and ways of life that promote work and enterprise. Welfare reform set the stage for economic liberty by freeing individuals from dependency and counterproductive incentives. But most people now agree that working poor families will only escape poverty if they, first, stay employed and, second, develop a vocational path. This requires connecting workforce-development initiatives to the community’s larger economic development plans. People cannot improve their job skills and develop vocations in a vacuum; they need to be connected to employment networks and need the support of the community around them.
This consensus has only partially caught on, however. The Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities instituted by the Empowerment Act of 1993 provide tax credits and other incentives to business in distressed communities. The act contains language about community involvement as a prerequisite for planning how a local zone will use its money, but the processes are often long, cumbersome, and filled with rancor. Neighborhood leaders are often encouraged to try to adapt to regulations rather than to what good business sense would require of them.
If the government would designate cities with significant pockets of poverty, or even certain areas within those cities, for tax advantages, then citizens and developers who are willing to risk capital could drive the recovery. The current system often drives neighborhood activists to spend an extraordinary amount of time chasing federal rules and money. Targeting communities with strict boundaries within a city creates dislocations within regional economies and, to date, has not demonstrably proved to be effective.
To this end, Michael Porter has written that “a sustainable economic base can be created in inner cities only as it has been elsewhere created: through private, for-profit initiatives. A sound economic strategy must focus on the position of inner cities as part of regional economies, rather than treating inner cities as separate, independent economies; otherwise, economic activity there will not be sustainable.”[4] This statement is backed up by evidence showing that minority, and primarily African-American, businesses are more successful when they move to thriving suburban economies than when they remain in targeted “enclave” economies such as those created by empowerment zones.[5]
Pouring money into urban areas without tying them to the larger metropolitan economy through joint ventures, strategic alliances, and Subcontracting relationships will not change the position of those areas. And the people who live there ultimately lose out. While empowerment zones require the participation of local residents in the planning process, the participation is accomplished within the narrow confines of federal regulatory requirements and without much incentive to connect residents to larger employment and enterprise opportunities.
Economic empowerment is best thought of within the context of building social capital. Creating opportunities for residents of distressed communities is as much about helping them get connected to networks as anything – networks of employers, business partners, providers of financial capital, vocation-enhancing education, and supportive-services providers such as job training and other skills-development agencies. It is through networks that people learn the norms of the workplace and the expectations of business partners. The role of community-based organizations in this context is to help make the connections and provide whatever support is needed to help people discover a sense of purpose that guides vocational choices.
Municipal Citizenship as Classical Empowerment
No one has written about “classical empowerment.” I call it “classical” because it is not new but merely the application of some good, proven ideas. It combines the best elements of empowerment in the varying models mentioned previously. It stands on the shoulders of a long American tradition that prizes a shared sense of ownership for communities between government and private citizens, a dependence on values and virtue, and a market that is open to all.
In short, classical empowerment tries to develop the best possible relationship between neighborhood residents and government, the market, and nonprofit community organizations – the three main sectors of society.
Shared vision, not political power-seeking. Rather than promoting the political activist version of empowerment, we sought to create ways for public officials and private citizens to come together to solve problems that they both cared about. Political battles will always be with us, because there will always be strong differences of opinion on important matters. But any city has issues and opportunities that can be addressed more effectively through cooperation than power grabbing. There is no purely Democratic or purely Republican way to fix a crumbling sidewalk, just as there is no purely public or purely private solution to crime. These matters are dealt with best when a shared vision drives the agenda.
Value-shaping organizations, not just any organization. It is easy for Toquevillians to adopt a blind admiration for local and community based organizations. There is certainly a virtue to the small scale of neighborhood and other community institutions, but smallness by itself does not renew cities or solve problems. Value-shaping organizations, such as faith-based and other organizations that encourage good works among their members and in their communities are especially important agents of empowerment. Not only are they small and close to people in need, but they hold the community as a whole to higher standards. They see a job not merely as a source of income but also as a source of dignity. They demand not only that at-risk youth stay in school but also that they have mentors. They regard the children in their day-care center not merely as sources of revenue but as unique members of society worth investing in.
Economic opportunity, not just money. Money by itself never solves much of anything. It is what is done with money and what money encourages that counts. Any city that cares about its citizens who occupy the margins of opportunity owes it to them to build a strong citywide economy. Too often, there is an “us-them” fight in cities between the primary beneficiaries of a strong economy and those who are marginalized. Any attempt to build a strong citywide economy looks, justifiably, like nothing other than the rich trying to get richer. That is why it is imperative that a lot of creative energy is invested in network building between those on the margins and those in the mainstream. For most people, economic well-being comes from access to education, social networks where jobs are found, capital, and good advice. The same should go for the economically disenfranchised.
In summary, classical empowerment’s strength is that it is comprehensive enough to address a city’s complex needs. The trouble with political empowerment as a lone strategy is that it rests on the singular goal of capturing an existing political post or strongly influencing those that have political power. This may end up doing little for neighborhoods’ primary civic and economic needs, and it usually only fuels divisiveness. Purely democratic empowerment, such as the Toquevillian view, believes that citizens should be engaged in community issues no matter what, and whatever follows is the best thing-which we know is often not the case. Focusing solely on mediating institutions, with the hope that citizenship will be revived as a result, can be done wrongly. And the trouble with a purely economic view of empowerment is that it assumes that infusing money and jobs has to happen before any social capital can be built.
If empowerment is about improving civil society, it has to combine the best of these different views. Moreover, it has to carry them out simultaneously. In Indianapolis, we needed to make resources available to neighborhood associations at the same time that we were requiring them to take on more responsibility for enterprise and ingenuity. Leadership among city residents was developed at the same time that they were being asked to sit at the table with city officials to determine what was best for their neighborhoods. Their associations needed help getting organized to manage newfound responsibilities at the same time that public officials began making requests of them. All of these things needed to happen at the same time but without ever losing sight of the most important thing: successful empowerment depends on greater responsibility among city residents and greater outreach and inclusion of them by city officials at all levels of decision making.
Classical empowerment focuses on the goals of self-government, self-sufficiency, and high levels of citizen participation in the public process. It holds that power does indeed need to transfer to citizens where it is monopolized by government, but it does this without creating sharp “us-and-them” lines between city and citizen, bureaucrat and taxpayer, governor and governed. Its proper environment is the community as a whole, not one sector or another. Classical empowerment seeks to achieve an active balance between each individual’s good and the community’s good, and between private and public action.
Recovering a Robust Civil Society in Indianapolis
Confident in these assumptions, we launched the Neighborhood Empowerment Initiative in Indianapolis, which had municipal citizen ship as its goal. The initiative could easily be replicated, or improved on, in large and small cities across the nation. We were on the constant lookout for ways that we could help people gain more control over their neighborhoods and be given real authority over services and programs that affected them.
Four guiding maxims shaped all Neighborhood Empowerment Initiative activity. It is one thing to be able to articulate the basic principles of classical empowerment. It is easy to say that citizens need to be at the table when important decisions are being made. It is quite another to translate these principles into action. The following four maxims set the parameters for the way we structured the initiative, and they too are portable to other communities.
1. If we really believe that residents in possession of adequate information know what’s best for their community, we have to prove it through our outreach and ability to listen to them.
Years of top-down solutions and programs designed from within the high walls of city hall create habits that die hard. Some of these habits result from the monopolistic nature of the bureaucracy. Additionally, habits develop as professionals experience disappointment with neighborhood leadership that they thought was entirely avoidable.
The most important thing to be clone to change these habits is to force public officials into situations where they have to develop personal relationships with neighborhood leaders and residents. We noticed that once this was done, city officials enjoyed their work more thoroughly. Outreach to citizens does not mean that public officials have to check their knowledge and skills at the door and simply follow the people’s wishes. Residents need help knowing what their options are in each situation that involves government, how to proceed, and the best way to get the results they are looking for.
We undertook a massive physical infrastructure improvement program at the same time we began our empowerment initiative, and it included rebuilding all the playgrounds and parks. A gentleman from our parks office went to a neighborhood meeting with plans for the parks in a particular neighborhood, and the residents said, “We don’t want the playground there . And we want basketball, not baseball.” When he explained to me what had happened, I advised him to listen to the residents, and he went back to the residents and asked specifically what kind of park they wanted. They responded, “How should we know? We’re not park designers.”
Obviously, there was a rule for each party to play. The residents knew the issues facing their community and could explain how the park could best meet their needs once they understood what their options were. The key was to have the park official understand their concerns about their youth, their seniors, the kinds of activities that were missing in their neighborhood, and so on, and he could then work with them to design the best park for them. The park officials, however, had a budget for the entire city and had to remind residents to stay within what was possible. Planning has to start with the amount of money available and set priorities accordingly. Open-ended planning is frustrating and unfair to both sides.
This type of interactive process ran through stages. The first voices public professionals hear may be louder, less representative, and more narrowly focused than they would like. Residents, not unreasonably, are often driven by a specific land-use issue near their property. However, a constant effort to recognize and legitimize community leaders gives them the authority and willingness to fashion appropriate compromises. This outreach also must encourage citizens to participate and lead. They have to be allowed to make real decisions, including those involving the priority and allocation of public resources. They have to learn how to cre [line of text missing…] neighborhood, which is necessary to prevent inertia and produce the kinds of results that keep them engaged and wanting more. When city hall produces results in response to this leadership, it enhances the work of the leader and neighborhood and creates a reservoir of goodwill on which the leader can draw in mediating difficult challenges. As neighborhood leaders emerge, the results can be encouraging.
We invited many other neighborhoods to organize themselves and come forward with issues they wanted us to deal with. Clara Warner, president of a near-north side neighborhood association, gathered others association presidents for a citywide meeting on the increasingly bad drug problem we were experiencing. They wanted a new policing relationship, with explicit participation by both the community and police. Thus they met regularly until they had completed a “Memorandum of Understanding” in which they outlined their roles and the roles of the police, the prosecutor’s office, the health department, and my office.
After helpful negotiations during which residents came to understand police resources and police better understood neighborhood frustrations, all parties signed the memorandum. It became a guiding document for the city’s overall approach to eradicating crime. The subsequent drop in crime produced a victory for all partners, which in itself was the kind of victory that strengthens a city and motivates even more positive action.
Neighborhood leaders eventually participated in interviews for new officers or even a new chief. Olgen Williams, director of the very active Christamore House, a community center, and former president of the near-west side neighborhood association (featured in the case study at the end of this book), has said, “Our neighborhood controls our destiny. We got to interview the new police chief, and ensure that he was community policing-minded. When we were having repeated problems outside a local liquor store, the city helped us learn how to remonstrate against a new liquor store permit. We collected crime statistics. We testified. We closed that liquor store. We’ve been taught how to work together. We don’t fool with politics. We just know what we need.”
2. Neighborhood participation does not automatically work by inviting citizens to the decision-making table. It requires training, resources, partnerships, and accountability that help community leaders adequately convert their knowledge and concern about the area into results.
This maxim has to do with building the atrophied muscle tissueI mentioned earlier. In order to provide the help that neighborhoods needed to build leadership, several things were needed. First, these local organizations needed some requisite size and capacity. Wu undertook supporting them aggressively without co-opting their role as community leaders free to express their grievances to us. We helped them recruit funds from foundations rather than simply accept grants from us. We helped United Way fund a training academy and made sure the board was made up of neighborhood association leaders. A variety of resources were broken into small amounts that nevertheless allowed the community organizations to stimulate activity and create results. We accomplished this in various ways, from public art grant programs to $5,000 beautification grants funded from fees on developers seeking tax abatements.
The city helped solve the highest profile neighborhood problems by responding to the indigenous leadership. They told us which were the worst sidewalks and streets, identified areas where beautification would be most recognized, and pointed out the abandoned buildings most in need of demolition. Neighborhood advisory groups prioritized complaints for city crews.
Residents also needed training in effective leadership skills. I watched as one of the country’s premier CDCs ran into troubles when its activities began outpacing the depth and breadth of its management. It got itself engaged in too much too fast, and the management did not have the ability to order the organization strategically. The hardest-hit neighborhoods face the most complicated problems, and they usually do so not only with scarce financial resources but also with a shallow leadership pool. This requires a lot of intentional assistance by those in a position to help.
With local funders and the United Way, we created a training academy called the Neighborhood Resource Center. This center, controlled by a board of local officials, teaches essential skills to neighborhood organizations and leaders, and it provides residents with ongoing workshops, technical assistance, and a variety of other useful opportunities.
We also brought Robert Woodson and several of his colleagues from the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise to conduct workshops for citizens in which they could learn how to build sustainable grass roots organizations. This was valuable from two standpoints. For one thing, the actual knowledge transfer was valuable. Neighborhood leaders learned a lot that they could turn around and apply in their communities. But just as important was the inspiration that came from hearing Woodson talk about how empowerment was possible—that it was a reality within their reach, and that they owed it to themselves to throw themselves into action.
On another front, a housing intermediary, the Indianapolis Neighborhood Housing Partnership (INHP), helped leverage tens of millions of dollars into homeownership and worked closely with our CDCs. Its leaders had grown increasingly concerned about the capabilities of the fourteen CDCs in its network to keep up with the complicated demands placed on them from all sides. The increase in housing production greatly lagged the increase in public dollars invested. This presented us with a predictable clash between those in city hall demanding the kind of performance that should follow the responsible use of public dollars and those in the neighborhoods demanding more autonomy and authority. This prompted a two-pronged response from the city. We ratcheted up performance demands by making future funding dependent on the previous year’s results. INHP also sponsored a million-dollar training effort to bring the uneven skill levels of the CDCs up to the level necessary to serve their neighborhoods well. Higher expectations combined with better preparation to set new standards.
In addition to training, the neighborhood groups and many CDCs simply lacked the necessary bodies to do the work. The city helped raise foundation dollars, with the lead taken by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which provided a coordinator for each neighborhood. The critical factor in making coordinators successful was that they worked for the neighborhood and not the city. At the beginning, the neighborhoods were not ready to think strategically, and some of the plans they outlined did not seem to get at the heart of the problems they were facing. While we honored their plans, the coordinators and other consultants would work with the residents to help them understand what was realistic, what was not, and what kinds of help they could count on receiving from the city. The coordinators were a daily bridge between the formerly disparate worlds of neighborhood and city hall.
3. Measure and demand performance.
It is necessary for a city administration to demand performance when it funds a community effort. Too often, the importance of nurturing leaders and developing political capital dissuades city officials from blowing the whistle on failure. This process is unfair to the leaders and their communities. Clear accountability for results, not the micromanagement of inputs, will encourage tangible outcomes in a community and produce more respect for the leaders. In any city there are great variations in capacities among neighborhood organizations, CDCs, and faith-based groups. Sending a signal that performance matters will likely attract groups that already care about results and help avert future failures.
A performance culture needs to maintain a balance between two things: realistic expectations and high standards. We saw some CDCs spend twice as much as an average homebuilder constructing a house and doing so at a slower pace and with less quality. No single standard in a case like this, such as being faster or cheaper than average, is as important as having a coherent process in place for measuring and rewarding performance. A CDC or neighborhood group may not have the human or financial resources to improve much beyond where it currently performs. If this problem is not directly confronted, then expectations need to be set accordingly.
Frequently, however, the available resources in an organization clearly demand higher performance. We saw some spectacular failures among CDCs that became increasingly ambitious while lacking the ability to fulfill their goals. They would spend a significant amount of money on staff and overhead while producing only a few houses every year. It is not at all unreasonable, we learned, to establish ambitious productivity standards while respecting the inherent limitations of community development groups. What is important is that everyone knows the standards in the beginning, that a process is set up to monitor progress, and that early warning procedures are established so that deviations from the standards can be detected and fixed as early as possible.
I committed the city to a high standard of responsiveness early on when I told the neighborhoods, “You decide what you want to do, and I’ll get the bureaucracy out of the way.” Bureaucrats needed to have performance goals that were congruent with the goals of the people they were trying to help, and they needed to be held responsible for what happened in specific neighborhoods. It is difficult to come up with a universal template for performance in urban revitalization efforts. What is more important than the template used is the way that the promises between the city and the neighborhoods are communicated and upheld. If building trust by keeping promises is the first priority, and if breaking trust is penalized, the best performance standards make themselves known.
4. Government should take an appropriate supportive role. It must provide security and other core public goods, supply sufficient funding for parks, roads, and “gap” financing to help with housing and economic development.
Public investment in core services is important for attracting private investment to an ailing community. It is also symbolically important as a statement of confidence in the area. We learned that our investments in troubled neighborhoods provided hope to homeowners and businesses that their investments would pay off in the future. They would begin to believe that their property values would go up again, and this motivation alone would begin to generate new kinds of care for personal property. Neighborhood revitalization and innovation cannot be disconnected from future economic consequences, and government has an obligation to make sure that this connection stays strong or is repaired where it is lacking. Government professionals need to be able to justify public investments in terms of the additional investment they are likely to attract, and then use this information to help neighborhood leaders make the best decisions for their community.
This usually requires activity on multiple fronts. As we began a massive infrastructure project that replaced sewers and sidewalks, we started coordinated enforcement projects that actively used residents in the effort to pressure the city and the courts to do a better job removing negative influences from their neighborhoods. Code-compliance committees in various neighborhoods brought together multiple agencies to assist residents in identifying and eliminating code violations, for instance. These important, citizen-driven groups made neighborhoods more attractive to businesses and encouraged private personal investment in property improvements.
Often government can help by providing the expertise that allows local residents to turn their concerns into results. For years in Indianapolis, community leaders complained about the awful effect of neighborhood liquor stores. One retail chain in particular did not maintain its stores. It permitted loud loitering and generated several other regulatory complaints. Yet, the residents had long been unable to turn their anxiety into a successful legal strategy against the well-financed legal team on the other side. We assigned an energetic police department civilian as a liaison and paid an attorney to help. The newly energized neighborhoods suddenly became more successful. They gathered evidence, documented their concerns, and argued their case in licensing hearings. The tide rapidly turned. Once the first store closed, others cleaned up their act, and the offending owner sold the remaining locations.
Similarly; a group of residents in another area chose to target houses that had been illegally subdivided into overly dense, often drug infested, units. Their vigilance in their neighborhood and their organization of information and observations, coupled with persistent advocacy, created a substantial change in city policy and attention to similar cases. City, and private work crews became responsive to citizen priority lists of lots and abandoned houses that needed cleanup or demolition.
In another highly visible area, rundown commercial sites led to a special project. We established a Commercial Facade Design and Building Rebate Program that provided grants up to $10,000 to business owners who would complete exterior renovations on their property. In five years, we made more than $750,000 grants in order to help very visible, but decaying, corners motivate a spirit of change around them by improving their facades. The rehabilitation of an old theater in a transitional neighborhood immediately brought other investments. An older, small, African-American newspaper completely redid the front of its building and stood shining in the middle of an area that gradually followed suit by eliminating signs of decay and making a variety of improvements. In order to build an economic base in a depressed neighborhood, that neighborhood has to become a business-friendly place. In the final analysis, only an energetic citizen base that takes on projects with a clear vision of the neighborhood’s potential can ultimately make the neighborhood friendly to enterprise. Government’s job is to help make the supportive investments without which the citizen base cannot complete its objectives.
These guiding principles formed the platform on which all our other efforts stood. Civil society was one of our organizing principles from the beginning, but by itself, “civil society” can be a vacuous expression. Our approach to recovering a strong civil society in Indianapolis was principally built on the premise that high standards of responsibility are both desirable and better for people. A strong municipality requires citizens, not merely just taxpayers and recipients of public services. The root of municipal, munus, means “duty” in Latin. Municipal citizens understand that the health of a city rests upon the degree to which they actuate their duty to the city and each other.
In the process, we have learned two very important lessons. First, our approach has helped us to see a broader, older conception of the word public. When citizens and government officials are working together in a way that empowers, we move beyond the overly simple distinction between “public” and “private.” For municipal citizenship, ”public” no longer simply means anything that is paid for with tax dollars and run by bureaucrats. It is bigger than that. It includes the common good of citizens as well. In our city, when government officials and private citizens worked together on common projects, the term “public sector” seemed a little artificial. There are obviously clear lines between what is the government’s jurisdiction and what is not, but when citizens are empowered, they begin to view the community as a whole as a “public square” over which they have some control and influence.
Second, active and empowered municipal citizens are the best guarantee against social pathologies and the economic cost that surrounds them. They enforce codes of conduct in their neighborhoods that were previously absent, whether that means breaking up groups of young people gathered on high-crime corners late at night or making absentee
landlords accountable by forming code-compliance committees. They ensure a collective knowledge that is greater than that of government workers. They usually provide more carefully crafted solutions to problems than when government officials solve problems on their own. And when they generate pride in what they have become and attract attention, they are magnets for an abundance of opportunities. We learned that businesses, colleges, and effective nonprofit organizations are eager to partner with successful community groups. Success breeds future success as social networks grow stronger and wider, and the wider community begins to think of the neighborhood not in terms of its costs but its value.
Endnotes
[1]Robert Weissberg, The Politics of Empowerment (Westport, Conn.: Prneger, 1999), 51.
[2] lbid.
[3] lbid., 83.
[4] Michael Porter, "New Strategies for Inner-City Economic nevelopment," Economic lJevelopment Quarterly 11, no. 1 ( 1997), 12.
[5] See, for instance, Scott Cummings, "African-American Entrepreneurship in the Suburbs: Protected Markets and Enclave Business Development," Journal of the American Planning Association 1, no. 1 (1999).