Baltimore

The reasons the students questions were so hard is because we really have no satisfactory answers in current public policy.  The largest federal supports continue to go towards home ownership through mortgage interest deductions on federal income taxes without any specific targeting for especially poor families.  Furthermore the current tightened credit markets and the fight to prevent foreclosures have dampened the boosterism around home ownership as a real asset building strategy for the poor.  As the students pressed the issue, it was obvious to me how vacuous the answers are that are provided by current policy and programs.  A student from Cameroon also kept reminding me about my skepticism in the book about using debt to reduce poverty, so among my careful readers I had to be very accountable.

We need to directly confront the ideological and political objections to direct income transfers that are standing in the way of programs that would create actual family savings with incentives to increase and build protected accounts to marshal and expand financial security and create additional inducements that modify and direct behavior in such ways that expand assets.  Simply put:  we need to give money, encourage savings, and create accounts that can be used for the emergencies that devastate   citizen wealth as well as the education, investment, further savings, and homeownership that can be leveraged to create citizen wealth and intergenerational wealth with permanent impacts for the family and the community.

Unfortunately all of the existing programs that move in this direction for the poor are small and precious and really only amounting to small change in the total expenditures designed to dent poverty.  All of this is more pilot than program.  We talk savings, but we are unwilling to create the hedge for the poor that a real bank account and savings book would do for people.

Professor Steve Soifer was engaged by the question and sent me several emails late into the night reminding me of the power of compound interest based on incremental payments over decades in adding up to real assets over time.  Somehow we have to give people the leg up to either save incrementally or allow the government to create accounts for families or children to create real wealth.  Let’s spend some time doing the “organizing math” to figure out what it would take to create citizen wealth this  way.

Thanks to the Community Organizing class at UMSSW for doing the hard work with me!

Silver Springs

These are not the narrow, crooked name changing city streets I have learned in a hundred cities, but long six-lane avenues as large as interstates without the high speed limits.  Driving by an area in Silver Springs there was a small park on the left as we motored by and in the early morning one could see Latino soccer players changing shoes at their trunks before going to work.

My friend commented that building the park with a soccer field had been controversial because neighbors in a huge apartment complex on the right thought there would be too much noise and whatnot.  Must have been the whatnot that worried them, because counting the lanes someone would have had to hear the excitement of a scored goal across almost eight lanes of road bulging with vehicles moving at a fast clip in both directions from a field that was set off the road so far that it could not be seen from the street.  For the complex to even consider using the park at all would have been an exercise in courage and reckless abandonment or a walk of almost a mile to circumnavigate the traffic.

My point about the suburbs is not an effort to raise the old canards about their monotony or homogeneity, because I have no idea what it would be like to live there.  My orientation if from an organizer’s perspective in trying to really learn the nuances of the geography and how it works for the people there in the process of unraveling the keys to the mystery.  The longer one looks the more one finds that many of these endless apartment complexes represent the only semi-affordable housing for miles around which has pushed some many people out there.  Gradually one realizes from various signposts that one is driving through miles of housing dominated by Latinos as I learn to spot the food trucks parked behind the stores and see the scores of day laborers around an abandoned gas station and the other sign posts.  With every trip up here I recognize more easily when I have passed into a Salvadoran area versus a Mexican or African American or mixed community.

We might scoff at the sprawl that has created these trackless expanses, but there are a lot of our people out here desperate to build organizations and with real opportunities to win.  I’ve learned that much now, even if I still have no idea where one town or county starts and the other one ends.  A map will tell me that eventually, but open ears and eyes are all that can teach me the real terrain.