Community Development at Scale: Harm Repair for Black Communities

Be sure to join Randolph Belle and others during February 4th's Harm Repair at Scale: Transportation Infrastructure and Equitable Development Projects to be a part of this conversation.

Reimagining a freeway and reclaiming 42 acres of prime new buildable land in Downtown Oakland. Repairing harm by leveraging the same infrastructure development that caused the harm in the first place. These are big visions with big rewards for the communities that have experienced a barrage of generational oppression. How can we be bold and innovative in our support for families with strategies grounded in cultural preservation and equitable community development? 

The East Bay Harm Repair Initiative (EBHRI) is advancing layered strategies along  a corridor connecting West Oakland, North Oakland and South Berkeley, which is a contiguous chain of historically Black neighborhoods linked by history and heritage. Beginning in the 1930s, racially oppressive policies redlined, and cordoned off the neighborhoods with freeways, transit lines and other institutionally sanctioned barriers. The corridor has three large scale transportation infrastructure projects planned that represent a generational opportunity for harm mitigation and repair including the CalTran Vision 980 project in West/North Oakland, and two BART stations including the Transit Oriented Development at the Ashby station.

These neighborhoods also represent overlapping city, county, state and federal legislative districts enabling collaborative policy and legislative solutions which could include housing preferences, tax increment financing districts and incentives to create more new and naturally occurring affordable housing units, embedded economic development policies, anti-speculation measures, and other assurances that future benefits inure to the benefit of legacy Black residents.

These projects offer the opportunity to go big, and be innovative, however this is often perceived to equate to, complex, difficult, expensive and unrealistic. The fact is that most of our institutions and agencies don’t do big, bold and innovative all that effectively, or aspire to solutions that necessarily rise to the magnitude of the problem. Oftentimes they play it safe, take the small wins where they can get them, and manage to manage the problems.

Innovation & Intervention

Our friends at DS4SI provide a framework for creating effective and just change in their book, Ideas Arrangements Effects: Systems Thinking and Social Justice, which states that ideas are embedded in social arrangements, which in turn produce effects. Everything is an arrangement–housing, government, finance, philanthropy… and some of those arrangements, by design, circumstance, comfort, or benefit of the arrangers, don’t work as well as they could. Oftentimes we do things because that’s the way things have always been done. It’s time to move towards embedding new ideas into institutional arrangements to achieve different, bigger, and better effects.

In light of recent events and near-term prospects, it’s evermore crucial we leverage the collective body. Together, we can ensure the best and highest use for strategies with limited resources. Community building, nurturing resident leadership, sustained mobilization, data driven interventions, accountability and disruption will be crucial in the upcoming years to the achievement of positive change and comprehensive community development.

Community trust building is the foundation of comprehensive and effective community development.  Legacy populations are deeply scarred and highly cynical due to the broken promises of urban renewal and redevelopment. Astute community planning and inclusive governance processes need to be grounded and sequenced with past harm and equitable reparative approaches first, in light of the dire current need for housing and neighborhood renewal.

Research based data narratives can serve to quantify real harm to impacted communities, both the acute harms that we see everyday transpiring over shorter periods, and the deeper, generational, interrelated, and cumulative harms that intensify over decades. These narratives can then help gauge the level of investment necessary to either manage, reverse, or eliminate the problem. Understanding that the lost value in real estate and generational wealth due to displacement from eminent domain is a simpler calculation than the value of a lost life due to health inequities, unequal application of the carceral system and the disparate life expectancy on one side of the red line or another, we can certainly deploy a defendable methodology that paints the picture– and the goal is to paint the broader picture of actual harm. Educational equity, food security, accessible housing, attainable jobs – it all goes into the calculus to overcome impacted community’s stubborn obstacles to fully thrive.

Redesigning Community Benefits

The EBHRI leverages innovation, prescriptive interventions, and market-based frameworks to address community based challenges and sustainably improve the overall social determinants of health in these neighborhoods, using an approach we call Community Benefits By Design. The objective is to identify solutions that move at the pace of business and not the traditional nonprofit paradigm. This, along with a revolution in government, institutional, and private investment, deployed collectively and undergirded by community voice, is the right combination to bring about change at scale. 

Community benefit agreements are largely transactional, and whichever “community” that steps up to the moment, scratches whatever they can out of the interaction for the limited constituency they serve with no rules of engagement– often with no support or knowledge of the inner workings of real estate development. There has got to be some order imposed in the process, and municipalities like Berkeley have stepped up to play a bigger role in the process. The Berkeley City Council passed a Certificate of Preference program that prioritizes legacy Black residents and their descendants who lived in redlined South Berkeley or were displaced by eminent domain from the construction of the BART system. This is an initiative spawned by the community and evidence that community building works.

So, there it is- clear as mud! We need to inject new, disruptive, bold and innovative ideas into our social arrangements, which comes with sustained engagement, mobilization, innovation and accountability.

Big, complex, difficult, yes- but straightforward and necessary at the same time. Real change won’t be clear, easy, or quick. 

Randolph Belle is the Executive Director of EVOAK, a program of the nonprofit cultural development organization SOA Village Housing, co-owner of RBA Creative, an art gallery, cultural space, and consultancy, and director at Creative Development Partners community development firm. He is the lead community engagement coordinator for Vision 980 in Oakland, which is a CalTrans-sponsored alternative study to reimagine the 980 freeway, and supports the Mayor’s Office in Berkeley on the Equity 4 Black Berkeley initiative, which will provide permanent and sustainable community benefits tied to the Ashby BART transit oriented development.