Baltimore has yet to enter into innovative or courageous community rebuilding. Its community development processes and outcomes continue to gentrify neighborhoods, craving a larger population of the so called ‘creative class’ to right itself. It’s intention is not focused deeply enough on remedying the social and economic situation of its distressed neighborhood. Yes it wants to ‘get rid of them’ but it wants to get rid of the people in them not figure out how to assure that people living in these abandoned neighborhoods are able to participate in the rebuilt areas, better yet own part of the development. And this is where Baltimore continues to lack innovation and courage.

The thing about innovation is that it seeks innovation from a particular lens of analysis. That is, the ‘bright’ people in Baltimore who are innovative have embedded in them a value system and an ideal of what should be improved and who deserves some beautiful and amazing neighborhood. So their creativity is driven by their subjective perception of what is needed for a particular group of people-the deserving group as they have been socialized to believe. They may not see the need for housing and economic equity, wealth and power redistribution, for low income black and brown people in a distressed neighborhood. They don’t value community input, and certainly not community participation or decision-making. Their innovation may seek to continue the same inequitable development that leads to gentrification, inequitable community change. Developers, designers, speculators, foundations, see that these neighborhoods can be redeveloped to continue the 2-digit profit margins of developers serving similarly situated business and residential tenants (ie. the wealth gap between blacks and whites did not pop up overnight, it’s been historically in the making, evident by a white family wealth being 10X that of a black family).  The government provides subsidies to enable this type of injustice: social, economic, and racial.

Community rebuilding innovation would be development that figured out how to assure that existing residents and businesses benefited similarly as the developers, new businesses and residents, foundations, and speculators. Something akin to the Market Creek Plaza Project in San Diego. This project, now more than 20 years old, was innovative and courageous, and continues to be so. It was innovative because the lens of analysis did not innovate from the value system of the gentrification model. It innovated from a perspective of ‘how can an existing community own the change in their community, and gain part of the asset resulting from that change/development’, just like the speculators, big developers, and outside investors. The recent published book, ‘Courageous Philanthropy: Going public in a closely held world’ by Jennifer Vanica describes this time consuming work of radical and innovative community change, its successes, and its challenges. Vanica describes the risks to assure that community equity, power and ownership were part of the redevelopment in this disinvested and majority of color San Diego neighborhood. The book describes step by step the process of nurturing trust, building community partnerships and decision-making, educating about financial literacy and investment, remarkable policy innovation to enable community investment, obstacles and more obstacles, success (evidenced by trust, equity), evaluation, and re-alignment. Community residents became co-owners of a shopping plaza: ‘they would plan, design, build, manage, and ultimately own-Market Street Plaza’. They became owners of the development, not by-standers at a meeting called halfway through the development, displaced, or unable to return. They put their hard-earned money into the investment pool after learning what investment meant and why it was worth taking some small saving and trusting in a community collective process that would rebuild their community -with their own money.  This rebuilding project was ‘civic learning and the capacity to own and manage change’ and showed that local community, with support, can ‘create the future they envision’.

This is courageous redevelopment because it challenges those with power to step from behind their pedestals and acknowledge that they don’t know everything and that everyone has value. It challenges the ingrained social norm of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘rich’ and ‘poor’. It challenges community to trust ‘outsiders’ and people with power who have historically and customarily taken their land for their own gain. It challenges marginalized communities to trust themselves, after receiving so many messages that they should not, and to trust each other.

This book should be a must-read for anyone saying they are interested in innovative and equitable community change with/for community power and benefit. Baltimore, and its philanthropic community, should not only invite these innovators to come give a talk or two, they should engage in the process of radical innovation in Baltimore community change. It’s been time to stop the same ole community development strategies we highlight as successful development. Like the recent ‘Reinventing our Cities’ conference that highlighted the Science and Technology Park at Johns Hopkins that displaced more than 750 low income black households. How many of those displaced families have returned to be part of the new community or own investment in the 88 acre Biotech Park? We can do better Baltimore, we must do better. It’s time to be innovative and courageous!

There are many take-homes in this book (tell your library to get it)…I leave you with 10 important themes:

What Endures-from the people who call it home:

1. greater community connectedness

2. embracing differences

3. greater youth-adult respect and partnership

4. control, clean-up, assembly, and entitlement of land

5. a safer, less toxic environment

6. greater commitment to collaborative leadership as a way of working

7. a strong sense of pride

8. a sense of belonging and personal validation

9. a more resilient spirit

10. life-long relationships.