WPT Archives: 1960s

Angela Fitzgerald

All right, well, thank you all so much for joining us tonight for our showing of "City

Within A City

When Pretty Soon Runs Out". My name is Angela Fitzgerald and I'm the host of PBS's Wisconsin's "Wisconsin Life" and the creator and host of our new series, "Why Race Matters". I'm here tonight with an illustrious panel of experts and community members who have a lot to say about the film we just saw, as well as the implications for present day housing disparities within Milwaukee. To get us started, I would like the panelists to introduce themselves and to share their initial reactions, reactions to the film and how it connects to their work. So, who would like to get started?

Robert S. Smith

I think I'll start.

Angela Fitzgerald

All right, take it away, Rob. I'm Rob Smith. I direct the Center for Urban Research, Teaching, and Outreach at Marquette University. I'm an associate professor in the history department. And you know, my own interests align very specifically with the themes here in this video. You know, it really gets at the heart of, the centrality of, and the importance of decent housing, affordable housing, and home ownership to basic fundamental understandings of human rights and human dignity, and the failures of government in protecting this core principle. You know, a decent home, a decent place to live is the foundation for so much of our future. You can't maintain a job if you don't have it. You can't get a job if you don't have a decent home or a home that you can even put an address on, right. You can't then take care of your family. You can't think about moving forward in life. Economically, homeownership has been the core entity that we've used to determine generational wealth, you know. So, it really gets at the heart of those questions around human dignity. But then, you know, this question of urban renewal is critical because it's expanding across the country. In the 60s and 70s, right at the moment where we're assuming that we're making progress in racial equality and, you know, you know, urban renewal, is decades in the making in so many cities. And I don't want to go on too long because I want to certainly make sure we get other folks' comments in, but there's one thought that haunts me on this question of urban renewal. A gentleman I used to work with down in Charlotte, North Carolina, Mr. Ross, once said, "There are three destructive moments "in

African-American history

slavery, Jim Crow, and urban renewal." The urban renewal needs to be placed alongside these really horrendous histories that have been a part of the Black experience in this country. And we see that play out here in this video, in particular, in disastrous ways, and it lingers on for generations. It really reshaped cities and then also reshapes the contours and the fabrics and the cultural experiences of so many Black communities across the country. This is a national phenomenon, much like residential segregation. You can't go to any city and not see and witness the devastating impacts of urban renewal on Black communities. And I'll stop there and share more later.

Angela Fitzgerald

Thank you for uplifting those points, Rob. All right, who would like to go next?

Marc Levine

I guess I can.

Angela Fitzgerald

Go for it, Marc. I'm Marc Levine. I'm a professor emeritus of history, economic development, and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, and the founding director of the Center for Economic Development, which conducts research on a lot of the issues that were actually portrayed in the film. And what just grabs me with that powerful and poignant film is how dire things were as they were portrayed in the film and how dire they are today, and how in very few ways has Milwaukee really made progress in terms of racial justice and eradicating racial inequality from the period that was portrayed in the film. Yes, we're a little bit less segregated than we were then, but just a little bit. And Milwaukee remains the most segregated metropolitan area and the most segregated city in the country. I just finished a big report on, a big study on the state of Black Milwaukee comparing conditions for Blacks in Milwaukee to conditions in the largest 50 metropolitan areas across the country today, as well as looking back over the last 50 years. And what that study showed was how Milwaukee ranks on so many indicators, either last or next to last or in the bottom five. And how on so many of those indicators, things haven't really improved at all since 1967, since 1970, in those 50 years. And if I could just share a couple a little visuals, which I think might underscore some of that... Let me see if I can get to it. It comes up. Are people seeing those? So, this shows the yellow area in there. It's just a little bit to the west of the inner core that was portrayed in the film. It's sort of the western edge of Milwaukee's inner city, kind of with the inner core and Metcalf Park being the two, the two key neighborhoods around it. You can see the area where the freeway was to go through that they talked about in that film, the freeway that destroyed so much housing. And this is what's basically happened to that neighborhood. And this will give you a sense of how things have not only not gotten better, How things have not only not changed, but have actually gotten worse on so many indicators. This is household income in this corridor, the 27th and North Avenue corridor in Milwaukee between 1960 and today. So basically, the last 60 years, really, you can see the household income has declined by a half from about $45,000 to $20,000 in this, in this corridor. Unsurprisingly, poverty has doubled. It actually almost tripled by 1990. And it's now almost 50%. Almost half the residents in this neighborhood live below the poverty line. No improvement, and in fact, demonstrably worse. Housing vacancy, which was talked about, obviously, in the film, has become a scourge in the neighborhood. From only 4% of the housing units in the neighborhood vacant in 1960. Today, one quarter of them are vacant. And when you have boarded-up housing, when you have vacant and unoccupied housing, that's a recipe for neighborhood decline. Employment has disappeared. Jobs have disappeared. Work has disappeared. In 1960, almost three quarters of the men in this neighborhood held a job, which was fairly close to the white rate, I might add, in the city. Today, less than a third do. One-third of working-age men in this neighborhood are actually holding a job. The jobs that existed in the past in manufacturing have disappeared. Almost half the jobs in the 1960s in this neighborhood were in manufacturing. Today, only 10% are. And they've been replaced, to the extent that people have gotten jobs, by poor service sector jobs so that, in these neighborhoods, one-fifth of those who are employed are living below the poverty line. They're earning poverty-level wages. And finally, incarceration, mass incarceration has become a scourge of this neighborhood. For males born in this neighborhood in the late 70s and early 80s, when we look into 2010, you can see the census tracts in this neighborhood, and somewhere between 20 and 30% of the males in each one of these census tracts were incarcerated. So, we've got conditions that are obviously deteriorated, conditions that remain dire, and we really need to rethink how we do economic policy in this community so that we can finally attack those problems. Wow, thank you for that, Marc. And I feel like we're going to circle back to several points that you made in a second when we talk about parallels between the film's date and today. Before we get into that, last, but certainly not least...

Danell Cross

Hi, everybody, I'm Danell Cross, the director over in Metcalf Park Community Bridges. My initial reactions... First of all, it was just a hit to my heart to watch that and to know that not much has changed. And so, our community is a very low-income community. Our housing stock has been obliterated. Houses being torn down with no thought to how long it would take to rebuild. And so, we have vacant lots from 20 years ago. We have vacant lots that were brought down during the time that they were thinking about doing a highway and nothing has ever come back. And so my initial thoughts about this, this failed-- to tell you the truth-- is that I looked at the power dynamics. That's what I saw, the power dynamics. The powerful people in, in public service, the power of the landlords and the powerlessness of the people. I thought about how did they create this plan without taking into account the people that would be displaced. Why were they trying to work on it from the back end and not the front end? And what really hit me is that they were never considered. Was no value placed on these families. The other thing that really stuck out for me was the fact that large families and still today, large families are really victimized by predatory landlords. It's almost like a, "Take what you can get. You know you can't go anywhere else." And so, I was really concerned-- I'm concerned that that was happening then and it's still happening now. So, it really was the power dynamics and the fact that the people who were going to be affected was not included when this plan was being designed and was not respected when mistakes was made.

sighs

Danell Cross

I think that's all I got right now, y'all.

Angela Fitzgerald

Well, thank you so much for your perspective, as well, Danell. And we're seeing your questions coming in, so please feel free to drop your questions and comments in the comments section and we'll be sure to uplift as many as we can get to. We may not be able to get to all of them, but please feel free to share those with us. So, our first question for the night, a viewer asks, "Do you agree that the advocates of violence "are the ones sitting behind desks "and denying Black people their God-given rights even today?" Any thoughts? You know, if-- I think-- If I understand that question correctly, I think it's important for us to understand violence in more sophisticated and complicated terms. And our Office of Violence Prevention is encouraging us to do so in very brilliant ways with its Blueprint for Peace. We talk a lot about violence in terms of what happens between individuals, understandably, you know, but what about a government that destroys homes and communities? You know, or, as we've seen in our debates today, you know, the questions associated with elevating property rights over human rights and human loss. And so, it is very important for us to think about violence in much more sophisticated ways. This, this is violence that's being perpetrated against entire families and entire generations and entire communities. You know, this is major league violence in ways that the individual acts of violence don't even compare to. You know, when we, when we think about structural violence, this is some of the most egregious forms of it right here. And so, we-- If I'm understanding that question right, as the viewer asks, we do need to think about violence in far more complicated, in structural ways. And if we start to think about it in that way, then we then have to turn our finger and point into the direction of folks who are actually committers-- the folks who are committing these, these broad scale acts of violence that have disastrous impacts on generations of families.

M. Levine

Angela, if I could just add on to that...

Angela Fitzgerald

Oh, please do. What-- when I hear that, that question, it takes me back to-- which shows how old I am, I guess== a statement by Robert Kennedy, right around the time that this film was made-- I believe it was 1967-- when America's cities were burning each summer with violence, with racial unrest, and with uprisings. And it was a big law and order movement. We've got to crack down. And Kennedy said we also need to talk about the violence of institutions. We need to talk about the violence of poverty. We need to talk about the violence of indifference in exactly the way that Rob was talking about this broader structural sense of violence. He was saying, yes, of course, we need to talk about the violence of crime and the violence of civil unrest in cities. But we need to talk about the larger context of violence on the powerless, as Danell was talking about. And I think that's a-- That's a very important way of framing it.

Danell Cross

And I really, I--

Angela Fitzgerald

Absolutely.

Danell Cross

I'm sorry, Angela, but I really think that people don't think about the reaction to that type of violence, what it does to a person. When I listen to that man talk about the fact that if you just drink a little bit sometimes it might make it look better to you. And so, these acts of violence are... almost where you can feel it, and when I think about the woman saying that is causing problems in their family between her and her husband, and now we see that we have so many households of single parents. Thinking about these acts of violence and what it does to destroy families, but also community. When your community is your safety net, your community is the people who look out for your kids when they out playing. For these families to be dispersed all throughout the city, losing that connection to other people is something to think about. That is violent. That is violent.

Angela Fitzgerald

Thank you so much to each of you for your thoughts on that question. You raise some excellent points about reimagining the term violence, as well as who we most easily attach that term to versus those who do not get that, that attachment. Another viewer asks, "What are your thoughts on the move to replace large, multiunit low-income apartment complexes with mixed income builds?" Any thoughts about how that connects to this larger concern around housing disparities?

Danell Cross

Well, I'd like to answer that question. For Metcalf Park, one of the things that we are concerned about is these are taking away some of the history of the community with these now new large-scale buildings. And then, also, the fact that a lot of the ones that we've seen don't have green space. And so, for our community, we want mixed income communities, not mixed income buildings, but mixed income communities. So, I-- I believe that it's important, especially for the Black community, to have people that have different connections and different resources because we've always-- We used to have that where people could connect to other people that didn't have those connections to jobs and other opportunities. So, I really believe in mixed income communities, but I wouldn't say that we are, you know, herding in this... these new big giant buildings with no green space and we're not-- In Metcalf Park, we're just not in agreement with that.

Angela Fitzgerald

All right, so Metcalf Park is all about green space communities, not just buildings. Sorry to cut you off, Rob, what are your thoughts?

Robert Smith

Well, you know, so many of our responses on the part of government have been renegotiated out of any real effectiveness. And a lot of that is because at some point in the policymaking process, as we move to some sort of action, voices from the community oftentimes get either dismissed or muted in significant ways such that the outcomes tend to escape what the community is oftentimes demanding is necessary for the key issues to be addressed in any significant way. And so, you know, we've seen multiple responses to housing injustice. And at the very same time, we thought we've also seen some of those responses end up being the direct progeny of urban renewal with condominiums and upscale homes being a part of that process, far more than securing the kind of economic diversity that the Danell talks about. You know, the language of so many of these so-called improvement plans, they sound good, but in their application and then ultimately in the outcome, those that are in most need are oftentimes marginalized even further in that process. So, we have to keep in mind that there's been a whole range of demands, articulations about what will be fair and what will be just. And even in that process, oftentimes government is unresponsive in the way that it either promised to be or the way that communities have demanded that they be. And so, the particular approach often sounds good, but it oftentimes gets renegotiated out of effectiveness.

Marc Levine

You know, I would just add to all that we need to recognize that the private market, and to some extent, government participation in this process has never, has never generated a sufficient number of housing units for low income folks in cities. I mean, urban renewal certainly didn't do it. Many of the incentive programs, the tax incentive programs to developers that we have, housing hasn't done it. And one of the things to remember, not so much about urban renewal, which I think as Rob hinting at in some ways, was actually used in some ways as a gentrification program in cities, as opposed to really a program to aid poor people. But public housing, which was referenced in the viewer's question, which was built in many cities, including Milwaukee in the 40s, 50s, and even into the early 60s, and many of them were high-rise, horrible units. Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, Cabrini Green in Chicago. I mean, these are all notorious places that were concentrations of poverty and horrific. Everyone recognizes that they were not great. And yet, every single one of them had massive waiting lists to get in. Why do they have massive waiting lists to get it? Because there wasn't a sufficient amount of housing on the market for low income people. And so what the failure of public housing has told us, and one could argue, certainly, the failure of high rise public housing and the concentration of the poor is a design issue, and it's better to have lower-rise mixed-income units. But the larger question is, in a community that my charts earlier showed has such a high level of poverty and has such declining income, how are you going to create enough housing units for the poorer folks can have access to adequate housing? And that's inevitably going to involve a massive governmental commitment. And that's where we need to go.

Danell Cross

Well, I'm-- I think that when you talk about what's affordable, the way that the metrics work might be affordable to somebody, but it's not-- most of the time, it's not affordable to the poorest people. And so, we have some quote unquote, affordable housing in Metcalf Park. And would you believe the rent is $1,200 a month? and that's affordable? Because the metrics they are using are not the incomes that's in our community. And I think that the strategies that you-- that you, you put together for a whole state might not work for the people here. And so, I think they really need to start narrowing in on what works for communities, for the people who live here. And I think they need to narrow in on how do we create a plan that's inclusive of the thoughts and the direction of that community? And I think that's what's missing, that the people that they are saying that they are serving are not at the table. They're not able to inform the decisions. I've lived in projects in Chicago. I've lived in scattered sites in Milwaukee. I can help you inform a plan, but are you gonna talk to me? One of the things in them films that we saw is that those people were angry, and they had a right to be. And so, they had to keep controlling their conversation and the people would try to control them. So, they were never really able to have a real conversation. And so, I think that people have to get out of their comfort zone and start talking to people. And really designing something that fits that community and the people who live there. Shift the power dynamics.

A. Fitzgerald

Yes, you all are saying-- dropping such great gems, I hope that our listeners are picking up everything that you're putting down. And Danell, I hope that at some point tonight, we'll be able to get more from you in terms of expanding on engagement strategies that our audience may be interested in implementing, because they may be like, "You're right. "The power dynamics are such that the voices of those being "impacted are not necessarily not even just being heard, "but aren't leading the charge for what's happening in terms of decision making." So, I'll put a pin in that, though, because we have more questions coming in the chat. And so-- Oh, go ahead.

Robert Smith

I have a question actually for Marc or Danell because they may know. I don't remember the 90s. There was a whole push around HOPE VI grants. You know, and that effort never came to any meaningful fruition for folks in poverty or folks even who may not have, who may have been on the poverty line in some ways as a reflection. You know, that moment was not long ago, and yet, that was 30 or 40 years after what we were viewing here in the film. So even more recently, we have continued failures from programs that have been touted as being the answer in so many ways.

M. Levine

Well, if I could--

A. Fitzgerald

Go ahead, Marc.

Marc Levine

Just real quickly, I mean, HOPE VI, without going into the deep history of, the deep weeds on it. You know, I think did some good things, right? It did, it did clear out some of the worst of the high rises and did rebuild some of that, but not enough to replace the units that actually got destroyed, right? So, you're actually losing housing units through the whole thing. And then, of course, later on, HOPE VI arrives at a certain moment where there's a certain government in place, and then, another government comes in, another administration, with not any kind of commitment really to the social provision of housing. And so you lose some of the-- some of the resources for that. But some of the elements of it, obviously, I think, did make some, some serious and positive changes. But I think your larger point, which is obviously the one I've been pushing, is that we nonetheless continue to have this failure of housing policy across the board. I'm sorry... Danell, go ahead.

Danell Cross

Oh, no, I'm satisfied with that answer. Thanks, Marc.

Angela Fitzgerald

All right, so thank you both for responding to Rob's question. I see, Rob, you added to the chat, so thank you. You put it in the proper, the proper place. So, our next question that we had in our, from our audience related to reparations. So, are there any discussions that you all are aware of about reparations for those families whose homes were destroyed?

Danell Cross

I am not. I think "reparations" is such a scary word for some people. I truly believe that what I think when you talk about reparations, when it's related to people of color, is like a word that we-- that people are saying, "Don't-- just don't say." But I believe that for this city to move forward, that they need to have some accountability. I know when I first started this job, people kept saying, "Well, we got to hold the community accountable." But when I start turning that word around and say, "No, we the community needs to hold you accountable," everybody wanted to shy away. I believe that when we look at those folks and the harm that happened to them, yes, it needs to be some accountability. Yes, it needs to be some reparations. And I think that people just shy away from that conversation.

Angela Fitzgerald

All right, thank you very much.

Robert Smith

Let me, let me echo some of that that Danell mentioned. You know, what we're talking about are socio-economic decisions that can be easily traced and quantified.

Danell Cross

Mm-hmm.

Robert Smith

You know, so, you know, the debate around reparations and slavery gets muddled into this argument. "Well, who gets what? And it's been a long time." We're not even talking about a generation ago for some of this stuff. You know, this is a couple of decades at most where we can actually chart who was treated fairly in this process and who was made whole in this process. And as we talk about urban renewal, highways oftentimes dominate the discourse, understandably, because they're so ravaging in the way that they dissect communities. But let's also keep in mind municipal buildings and municipal structures and sprawling downtown areas. You know, there are very clear examples of buildings, institutions, entities near downtown or part of downtowns across the country where we can see and have a very quantifiable understanding of the impact of the destruction that was held in manufacturing, manufacturing as a function of that municipal growth. And at the same time, you can also see in some communities immediately that property value flips. So, you have folks who are displaced. Sometimes you have homeowners who are not made whole, As we saw in the video. The man was offered a significant lower amount than what his home was. And in some cases, we see areas of our cities where the property value balloons almost immediately as those urban renewal projects come into fruition. And yet, there's still no effort to make those people whole. You know, so, so we can, we can have a very honest, clear, quantifiable conversation about who was mistreated and who was made whole and who was not. That, that actually, we could-- I could get a class to do that pretty easily, you know. So, the conversation can and should be had.

Danell Cross

Let me, let me say something, Marc. When you look at the process that happened with the destruction of the houses-- And I think about Metcalf Park. When I first started to do work in Metcalf Park and I lived there, I would walk past a block and I wouldn't even notice that a house was missing. It snuck up on us to where we have one block, where we had one vacant lot, and then, all of a sudden, it was only three houses left on the whole block. And so, it don't just take a highway. It just takes a decision that this community is not worth saving. So, we see in some communities if a house is vacant, that the City come in, they board it up, and they might even rehab that house and put it back on the market. But in Metcalf Park, that didn't happen. It just got tore down. And so, every homeowner in that neighborhood property values is going down because it's vacant lots everywhere. It's boarded up houses everywhere. And so, they are ripe for the picking of somebody coming in and swooping up their house for nothing because it's no value. So, then we have landlords there and they are not held accountable to keeping their property up. And they can still rent it. And then, bringing down the owners' property values. So, when you look at all of this stuff happening together, who should be held accountable for not holding landlords accountable? Who should be held accountable for tearing down all the houses in a block and leaving two, and dropping their property values? So, we can see how this is continuing to happen, even after the thought of a highway with no real reason that our community is starting to be what my community calls a "snaggletooth community."

Marc Levine

Let me just add a couple of points on reparations. I don't, I don't pretend to know the politics of it about the politics in terms of the feasibility. I think I was feeling actually somewhat optimistic over the summer as mobilization occurred over Black Lives Matter. There appeared to be a national kind of consciousness-raising, that a serious conversation about reparations might get into the political mainstream. Certainly, the great work of Ta-Nehisi Coates several years ago to raise the profile of that issue, I think was crucial. But this seemed to be a moment where some of his points might be taken more seriously by the powers that be. I don't know now given, given various divisions. But, you know, it seems so palpably clear that some serious discussion and some serious kind of architecture of something that looks like reparations and as Rob is saying, how far back we go and whether it's all descendants of slavery and whether it's linked to reconstruction, as Coates points out, and as many urban historians have pointed out, we can take it much more recently to government-sponsored discrimination against a class of people, African-Americans, through FHA policies, through redlining policies, government-sponsored segregation that essentially denied African-Americans the ability to accumulate the kind of assets that enable one to achieve economic well-being over the long run. We've all referenced the importance, obviously, in terms of that asset building of home ownership, and we know how federal and state policies and banking policies systematically precluded African-Americans from building that asset, such that if we look at a phrase which is au courant these days, the "racial wealth gap." An astonishing gap exists. We know that. But if we even drill down, a Black college graduate, a Black college graduate, on average, has lower net wealth than a white high school dropout. Think about that for a second. In a society that vaunts education, that education... "The more you learn, the more you earn." "Education is the key to upward mobility." That doesn't play out when the issue of race is involved. And the main reason for that is the historical legacy of all of these policies that precluded African-Americans from building that asset. Why do societies undertake policies of reparation... reparations? Because a community has been wronged by public policy in a direct way. Be it, something as horrific as the Holocaust, be it the internment of Japanese Americans, be it, I think, the Holocaust of slavery. We need to confront that issue. Interestingly, there are actually a couple of cities-- because as we know, the federal government isn't doing anything on this-- a couple of cities across the country are actually discussing and they don't have the resources to really do this in a meaningful way. But symbolically, it might be important. Providence, Rhode Island, which had many slaveholders, and Brown University was built through the slave trade. Providence is discussing a reparations policy. Durham, North Carolina, that's Duke University. And we know about Duke's implication of all this. They're discussing it, as well. So, that might be a way to get the ball rolling by having local governments begin to discuss it. But I'm really glad that the question was asked because I think it is something that needs to be on the table, especially--- especially when we put it in the context of what we saw in a film that portrayed things over 50 years ago and we see how things are today. Something radical like reparations needs to be done.

A. Fitzgerald

Look like you want to say something, Danell. Go for it.

Danell Cross

No, I was just saying at least it ain't me in trouble, Marc.

Danell and Angela laugh

Angela Fitzgerald

Um, thank you. You all are definitely preaching tonight. Things coming up in the chat are amazing comments. Appreciate those. And you all made a good point. But we can't talk about reparations until we reach the place of acknowledging that harm has been done. If we don't arrive at that point, then reparations is like a long overdue conversation. Which is why, to your point, Marc, we're having the same dialog about a problem that has persisted for over 50 years. So, hopefully, we won't be here another 50 years from now, having the same exchange. Well, we won't be here. Whoever is younger than us, hopefully won't be in this place having the same conversation. Okay, we have a bunch of questions on deck. It sounds like we're going to try to get through them, as many as we can before the event ends tonight. But the next one in line was, ask you about incarceration rates, because you did bring that up, Marc, as a correlate to the disparities we've discussed relate to housing. So, what is being done about the high incarceration rates and overturning unfair judgments against people in prisons?

Marc Levine

I would just say, very quickly, not enough, We have, I think, as a society turned a little bit of a corner on this. There seems to be a bipartisan recognition, maybe for very different reasons. I say, maybe. Certainly, for different reasons, that mass incarceration is a scourge. From one side of the equation, it went too far and it's created all sorts of costs to society. From another side, it was-- it's obviously linked to injustice and all the issues that we've talked about. But certainly, criminal justice reform is an issue that, that there does appear to be some ability to have some kind of bipartisan consensus. We're getting a better understanding, certainly, of the costs of incarceration in terms of employment effects for ex-offenders, in terms of devastation of families and devastation of communities. And so, forcing us to revisit things like the war on drugs is obviously a way of dealing with some of the part of incarceration, not everything, because a lot of offenders are, in fact, in jail and in prison for violent offenses. So that implies we need to figure out another way of thinking about violence in our society and how to deal with that issue and how to rehabilitate people. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that the key to mass incarceration is prosecutorial discretion, that prosecutors pushing ridiculous sentences and long-term sentences, as opposed to kind of a negotiation process might be a way, way to it. So, I think there are some signs, actually. This is one area I'm mildly optimistic on... of some kind of forward thinking. And, in fact, the incarceration rate has come down in a number of communities, including Milwaukee, over the last decade, the African-American incarceration rate. But it comes with such a high base that we still have such a long way to go. But I think there is, at least, some start on that.

Angela Fitzgerald

Excellent, thank you for that, Marc. Danell or Rob, did you all want to add anything to that question?

Rob Smith

Go ahead, Danell. I was going to share something a little different, but related.

Danell Cross

Well, I was going to say the one good marker for us is that if nonviolent offenders were released due to COVID, then I would believe that something was changing. And I don't see that happening in the masses. So right now, I think we are still really in a bad, in a bad way as far as over-incarcerating, but also over-policing communities. And because it's, as far as I'm concerned, it's a money-making system. It creates jobs for other people. Because we know that it's not a diverse police, you know, policing staff, and then, it creates wealth for other people. It also creates wealth for other communities. So, people in jail, they are counted in census tracts in other communities so that it creates wealth for other communities. And so, that's a-- it's a business. And what community has to do is to start understanding that it's a business and also start to organize around the fact of the impact it's having on the community. So, in our community, when you take all of the of the men of a working, working age, most of the time is in their age of their most working age, then you have, in fact, impacted the wealth of that community. And I know that when I first started this work, I heard about a city that, a community that actually sued because of how it had affected their economy. And so that's some of the things the community has to learn how to push back at these systems that are harming our community in different ways.

But speaking their language

"harming our economy,"

chuckles

But speaking their language

"the economics of the community."

Robert Smith

And I just want to make sure to share that on this point, you know, there's a remarkable amount of work that folks locally, across the country have been doing around issues associated either with reforming the system or abolishing the system, wherever you land politically with that. And yet, on the horizon still, is this steadily emerging relationship between digital technology and the carceral state. So, we also have to be very concerned about the way algorithms are being used for questions associated with recidivism, predictive policing, GPS devices. And so, you know, the challenge with so much of the work around fighting for justice is we're oftentimes behind the curve. You know, so the reform curve of using digital technology to engage the criminalization apparatus, now we have to now get in front of that curve. We have to also start thinking very seriously about how to address the ways in which technology, capitalism, and incarcerality are all colliding in this particular moment, you know, because that's, that's our horizon. You know, that, that's an issue we have to start thinking about seriously. Even if we decarcerate, what does it mean? So, you know, tens upon tens of thousands of folks are under community supervision and also being controlled in other ways using technology. That's so critical for us right now.

Angela Fitzgerald

Thank you for those comments, Danell and Rob. Okay, so our next question is for Danell, specifically, and it's around your work at the Metcalf Parks Housing Initiative. Someone would like you to speak more about the work that you do and how that's had an impact in the community.

Danell Cross

Okay, so, the work that we've been doing for a little bit over a year is really engaging the community around a conversation about what they want to see around housing. And so one of the things that we heard was that even though people would like to buy homes because of the wealth gap-- and not, and not seeing that change too quickly-- how do we own homes when we are making low wages? And so, we started to look at different models around co-operative housing where we're purchasing and owning together. That's a model that we think will work in our community. And we have been able, working with the city, to get into a program called the Mary 2.0 where we will be purchasing six homes and rehabbing those homes and making sure that people have affordable places to rent, but also opportunities to own. And when we think about our community, in our low-income community, cooperative housing we believe is the way to go. But I think that for Metcalf Part, what makes, what would make us successful and what makes us successful is that we listen to the community. And so, when you listen to the community, they come up with the best ideas. And so, we implement what they have come up with. And so already we have people that's looking forward to moving in and we're able to design what they need. And so, like, we have one family that is an intergenerational family, is eight people in a one-bedroom apartment, and they're going to live together because they need to. One, for health reasons. And so, the house that we're looking at for them is made like what is it, a mother-in-law, a mother-in-law apartment, where they can live together but have privacy. And so, that's how you are able to do it when you work with the community. Knowing what their needs are and making that happen, not just putting something together and handing it to them and tell 'em, "Well, be grateful you got a place." But no, really being intentional about what we do.

Angela Fitzgerald

Thank you for that, Danell. And then, last, but not least, I apologize, audience, we are coming to a close, so we apologize we could not get to all of your questions, but I will share on how you can connect with the panelists after tonight. So, stay tuned for that. So, for our closing question, Nancy asks, it's hard to feel any sense of hope when it appears as though we've made no progress on safe, affordable housing for all people, regardless of race. Are there any lessons to be learned from other communities around the country who have dug themselves out of a hole as deep as Milwaukee now finds themselves? How do we move forward? So, I know some of you may have spoken to this, but any closing remarks or summaries that you would like to lend to Nancy's question?

Marc Levine

I guess I'd jump in quickly and know others will have probably better ideas on this, because I tend to be pessimistic in the sense that I don't think there's-- I mean, and I've obviously researched cities across the country on the status of racial inequality in them. And I don't think I could point to a single city where I would say, "Yeah, that's the place that really has done the job. That's a place of racial justice." I think there are places, as my recent study on the state of Black Milwaukee showed, that do better than we do, that their numbers look better, that the Black poverty rate is lower, that incomes are higher, that employment is better. But I can't point to sort of a range of policies in those communities where I would say, "You know what, "they were as bad shape as Milwaukee and they did policy X, policy Y, policy Z, and they turned the community around. I think what we do see is that some places seem to do a bit better because there is a better leadership and leadership consensus on the need to pursue policies of racial equity. Some communities, like Rob's Charlotte, for example, today, and Louisville, believe it or not-- which is pretty shocking off of its latest tragedy-- and even Baltimore are pursuing sort of racial equity frameworks to basically funnel all public policy through a racial equity lens and say, if we're going to spend money on this, that, or the other, how does that affect racial inequality in our community? And we have a little bit of that starting in Milwaukee, right? The Milwaukee County Board county government has established racism as a public health crisis and a racial equity lens for budgetary issues. Milwaukee, City of Milwaukee Common Council, similarly. But my notion of this is that it's much, much broader than that. That it encompasses the way we think of-- Well, maybe the best way to put it is-- I'll steal this from a think tank in New York. The Roosevelt Institute said we need to we need to rewrite the racial rules of our community. We have to examine all institutional arrangements, all public policies, all social norms, and think about how each one of them impacts racial justice in our community. When we think of things like should we subsidize a company for an economic development project?

We need to think about

A, Who's going to get those jobs? Is that going to affect racial equity in the community? And B, is that subsidy better than perhaps freeing up half a billion dollars to eliminate lead pipe poisoning in predominantly African-American areas of the city of Milwaukee, which will affect inequality and injustice in the future, and as a simple matter of human rights. We don't think in those terms. And I think we need to really rethink how we how we approach economic development that way. And again, I can't say any community has done that. So, I can't give Nancy the, "Yeah, let's look at Boston or let's look at Seattle." But I think there are elements in all of those cities, and I won't go on anymore on this that I think we can borrow from those and begin to create a better day for Milwaukee.

Angela Fitzgerald

Thank you for that, Marc.

Robert Smith

You know, I want to-- I just want to add, I want to telescope out just a little bit. I'm not able to provide specific examples, but I do want to talk regionally. Every city that Marc referenced is really a Southern city, you know, and so there is something particularly suffocating about the Rust Belt of the Midwest. You know, if we look at employment and occupational trends, Southern cities outpace Midwestern and Northern cities on a whole range of indicators. And there may be some specific reasons around that related to, you know, civil rights activism, labor activism, which is odd, if you can imagine that, because the South had been so opposed to organized labor. But of course, here in the Midwest, organized labor has been and was completely resistant to Black inclusion on so many fronts. And the history behind that suggests that by the time there was inclusion, the core of our industries and the regions had begun to dry up significantly. There obviously are larger numbers of African-Americans across Southern states and also historically-Black colleges and universities might be playing a role in some of that, too. But I do think it's important for us, as we see every day-- I mean, we could probably each name a dozen or more folks who we know who've moved from Milwaukee or Detroit or Chicago to Dallas, Charlotte, Atlanta, Jackson, Mississippi. You know, we could just name Southern city after Southern city and their emerging suburban regions where, where droves of folks, not only African-Americans, are moving to these regions. So, there's some-- There's a riddle there somewhere. And I don't think it's just the good weather, you know?

laughs

Robert Smith

Because that humidity and heat is something to deal with, too, you know.

Angela Fitzgerald

Thank you, Rob. Danell, any thoughts?

Danell Cross

Well, we looked at different models, some for cooperative housing in Chicago. One of them named, I believe, Genesis. And those models of co-operative housing, one of the things that really surprised me was that one of the housing co-ops was in was a group of Black women that was living in a rat-infested building and the building was going to be sold and they worked together to create this co-op. And now, this bus-- building is in a neighborhood that has since changed, it has been gentrified, but that co-op is sitting right in the middle with all of these amenities, the yoga studio across the street, as the community changed. But they still can afford to live there. So, that's one of the things that really made me think that we need to look at co-operative models, because we know that when communities start to change and start to thrive, most of the people who have been a part of that change get pushed out. And so, Metcalf Park is trying to make sure that as our community changes, that we are able to stay in place. So, what did they say, "the kids and the roots?" Stay put. We want to stay put, you know,

laughs warmly

Danell Cross

and we are going to. So that's why we are taking it upon ourselves to figure out what to do for ourselves. One of the things that I do want to say is that our alderman of the 15th District, Russell Stamper, has met with us over and over and over again. I sent him a video to look at about the Dudley Street Initiative. That was a cooperative and a land trust model and just constantly having conversation with him about it. And this month, it was put to the budget for the city to leverage funding, starting off with $1.5 million, I believe, to help to create community land trust and to support communities with technical assistance. That's a really big win. But it takes time, it takes relationship, it takes conversation, and it takes a value for the people who live in these communities.

Angela Fitzgerald

Awesome, so thank you so much to our panelists and to our audience for joining us for tonight's film. For more information about the film, for more information about our panelists, and for additional resources that can help to address the racial and socioeconomic disparities that we discussed in our state and that were highlighted today, please visit PBS Wisconsin's Anti-Racism and Racial Justice resources page. It has a pretty long URL. So instead, I'm going to direct you to the orange, kind of, colored button on the top left of your screen that will take you directly to that resource page. You can bookmark it and refer back to it, as it will be added to over time. And if there were questions that we did not get to tonight or things that come up afterwards-- you're like, "Man, there have been great for me to ask the panelists,"-- don't despair, just email [email protected] and we'll work hard to get your questions addressed after tonight's viewing. So that's Engage E-N-G-A-G-E at PBS Wisconsin dot org. So, thank you so much again and I hope you all have a great night! Bye!