Reclaiming Your Community: You Don't Have to Move out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One

by Majora Carter

Low-status communities have never had a shortage of successful people emerging from those communities; we have had a shortage of them staying there. The monoculture of inequality persists in low-status communities because of a talent-retention deficit.

What if we designed low-status communities to encourage the talent born and raised there to remain, similar to the way companies try to retain their talent? What would that look like?

researchers at the Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School showed that large philanthropic organizations gave nearly 99 percent of their US climate funding to White-led groups with just 1.3 percent going to Black, Indigenous, and other people of color–led environmental justice groups that were doing the most to fight climate change within their own communities.4

gentrification doesn’t happen when you start to see doggie day cares and cute coffee shops appear in communities of color. It happens when we tell ourselves that there is no value in our own communities and act accordingly.

When the nonprofit industrial complex is working well in low-status communities, activists, government agencies, and philanthropists robotically sing the same dirge, heralding their preferred default development attributes that have been sung for decades. Here’s what it looks like: Low-income rental housing, usually with space reserved for a community center. A plethora of programs for poor people allegedly designed to help move them out of poverty. Such programs are proposed and executed by various nonprofit actors (the ones from outside the community are consistently funded at levels much higher than local activists’) or city agencies and supported by philanthropic or public funds. A static poverty rate. Although the rate doesn’t budge, more of the same type of programs are spawned year after year.

I find it galling how the philanthropic sector has systematically avoided using its vast capital reserves to enable wealth creation in the real estate development of low-status communities. And its ironic given that many of the major foundations built their endowments on real estate development profits—on top of a legacy of racial exclusion in that very sector. As the saying goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”