This was originally posted to the Adams Morgan Listserv on July 17, 2018, as message #48958, groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/AdamsMorgan/conversations/messages/48958?guccounter=1
Because some of the most notable clashes of the Civil Rights Movement were made for TV, we’ve come to associate bias and racism with dramatic moments of human confrontation. Therefore, we tend to miss the more subtle and systematic (institutional) racism and bias which are embedded in our public policies such as Graham-Donatelli. Probably because of this many in our city who would normally work against racism, don’t recognize it at work and therefore we fine ourselves neutralized. Even worse, pushing for policies that are at their core racially biased as a solution which mitigates and even reverses racial bias, pure confusion.
Thursday’s City Council Public Roundtable on Barry Farm New Communities was a masterful move by CM Anita Bonds, Chairperson of the Committee on Housing & Neighborhood Revitalization, to put this confusion on full display.
I would suggest everyone who cares about racial justice, fair and quality economic development in this city read the Barry Farm legal ruling <www.dccourts.gov/sites/default/files/2018-04/15-AA-1000.pdf> and watch Thursday’s hearing <dc.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=4628>. Together they are a premier on the Graham-Donatelli model and how institutional bias and racism, its exploitation, is embedded in our public policies. And how befuddled our elected officials seem to be.
What helped me to get some clarity on this challenge of institutional bias and racism embedded our public policy, is the Smithsonian Exhibit on Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello <americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/slavery-at-monticello>. Monticello was a mixed income, multi-racial community(s) with plenty of affordable housing and jobs, fine dining, a great library and so on. That even in the luxurious home of the main author of the Declaration of Independence and in the mist of a large multi-racial family, the gravity of institutional racism can prevail no matter the number of affordable units, grand ideas written on paper. Something else is required to have justice and fairness. Equity rooted in a true since of humanity.
Although Monticello was a mixed income community, the laws, customs, economy and other prevailing institutions prevented some of it’s residents from achieving their full humanity, the ability to control, plan and prepare for their future and those of their future generations. Nor could they own land or property, except by special permission of others. This inability and unfair obstacles to preparing a future and owning land a core tenant of institutional racism. This is what red-lining polices were all about and unfortunately a fundamental design element for Barry Farm and other New Communities Initiative (NCI) sites and the Graham-Donatelli Model.
At its core, the Barry Farm court ruled that Barry Farm residents had the right under DC law and policy to exercise their full rights to control, plan and prepare a better future for their families under NCI, possibly even owning a piece of the future. Rather than comply or explain why these rights should not be honored, the Housing Authority and the Mayor (DMPED) chose to withdraw their development plans and accelerate the displacement of residents from the site in a method contrary, scorched earth, to NCI’s own principles. In spite of this denial by government agencies of rights affirmed by the courts, one Council Member, Robert White, still urged the resident of Barry Farms to compromise these rights.
I have to say to my surprise, Ward 1’s Council Member Nadeau seemed to align herself with Angie Rogers NCI’s director and co-author of the plan to deny Barry Farm residents of the court affirmed rights. And further proffered the Park Morton NCI process as a model for Barry Farm. This proffer was at best lazy. Although, the Barry Farm case was focused on Barry Farm’s zoning PUD, the court ruling affirmed rights to all residents affect by NCI. This mean’s NCI has been engaging the residents of Park Morton and others without informing the residents of their “FULL RIGHTS” and opportunities. One of these rights we know now from the Council Hearing are TOPA like rights. If anything, Park Morton planning should also be revisited with residents fulling understanding their rights affirmed by the Barry Farm court case.
The institutional racism and bias embedded in the Graham-Donatell Model a model which underlies NCI is structurally designed like Monticello ensure some profit from squeezing out the ability of low and moderate income families to exercise their full humanity by controlling, planning and preparing for their future. One of these opportunity to participate in ownership. Another, which I will deal with in later is housing unit size and amenity structure. Highland Park Phase II is text book on how a public-private partnership like NCI can be used by the private partnership to structurally squeeze “future opportunities” for low and moderate income families out of a publicly funded project with the help of our government, institutional racism/bias and our quiet acquiescence.
We can do better.
William
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Subject: Ward 1’s Graham-Donatelli Model
I had been optimistic that with the 2014 election of CM Nadeau. My hope had been that a Ward 1 free from many of the entanglements of pay-to-play Ward 1 would now be to chart a development path away from the Graham-Donatelli Neighborhood Model toward a more Equitable and Inclusive Community Development Model. Alas it seems, the gravity of Graham-Donatelli maybe too strong.
The Graham-Donatelli model is designed to leverage government subsidies and political connections to generate income, wealth and profits for a tiny few primarily through real estate deals. Deals which are designed exploit the historic and entrenched economic inequities often found between our city’s Black and White residents and other stakeholders. In other words the Graham-Donatelli model tends to exploit the economic vestiges of what used to be described as institutional bias or racism.
For good examples of the working of the Graham-Donatelli model review Highland Park on 14th St. or the Sanford/Citypartners deal in Congress Heights among others. So features of the Graham-Donatelli Model:
1. Usually a real estate development deal based on a so-called public-private partnership where the public subsidies a private real estate deal in exchange the deal producing a public good out of it’s profits. For those old enough to remember like the Reagan era Trickle Down Theory.
2. While initially, at least on paper, the “public good” included things like investing in job creation, equitable access to quality public spaces and parks, improved schools, true community policing, quality affordable housing, increase home-ownership rates, improved neighborhood amenities and etc.. One method to achieve this was to increase the city’s tax based by sustaining and increasing the number of middle and higher income families.
Under Graham-Donatelli the above would evolve to redefine the “public good” as increasing the number of high income earners living in the city. The original items used to defined the public good would be demoted as irrelevant except that they contribute to attracting high income residents or visitors to the city.
3. As well, under Graham-Donatelli the concept of neighborhood/community was revised to be redefined based on there proximity to transit. With a quality neighborhood/community being one that can cram as many income people as possible as close to transit as possible.
4. Given the shift in the meaning of neighborhood/community residents, small business owners, civic organizations were no longer qualified to envision, define and build their neighborhoods/communities as they were not experts in Transit Oriented Development (TOD). Those qualified to do so were professional planners (usually out of Harvard U), developers, banks and other financiers. In this scenario participatory politics and civic engagement is seen as an obstacle to achieving the public good which under Graham-Donatelli to cram the greatest number of units possible as close to transit as possible at the greatest profit possible. As such the roll of government shifted to achieve this new public good.
5. In practical terms in DC achieving this new “public good” would come to mean the displacement of low, moderate and even middle income families of color, especially Black families and their institutions from DC neighborhoods to make room for high income earners. Although we think of displacement in physical term it also means in social, cultural, economic, educational and even spiritual terms, For the most part, achieving this displacement has been taken on by our government as their roll in these public-private partnerships.
This is how today our government fines it’s as the arbiter of institutional bias and racism in the name of the public good. This was the issue underlining the debate which occurred in March over the amendments to the City’s 2006 Comp Plan by the Mayor. The 2006 Comp Plan his build into it some minor “checks” against institutional bias and racism embedded in it’s language and design. In a few lawsuits brought by citizens for various reasons, the Court of Appeals have in a series of ruling has said that the city via the zoning commission has error-ed in approving development projects which potentially go to far in exacerbating institutional bias and racism in the way in which TOD is being introduced into more and more neighborhoods. The amendment submitted were design to tweak the Comp Plan to negate these “checks” in the court’s eyes.
During the Comp Plan debate, two main arguments arose regarding these “checks”. One side argues via the Trickle Down Theory that the best way to achieve the public good is to weaken many of the “checks” in the Comp Plan, the more housing units built close the transit the greater the public good. The other side tends to argue that development should honor the current “checks” and in fact the current checks to need to be strengthen this is the path to the public good and there is little Trickle Down of Value to the public good.
This is where Ward 1, Graham-Donatelli and CM Nadeau come in. Ward 1 is one of those places where this debate as played out in reality as the home of the Graham-Donatelli model. In other words if we want to understand the issues around development, TOD and institutional bias and racism, study the story and results of development in Ward 1 over the last 15- 20 years or go.Why Ward 1, in the early 2000s Ward 1 was a demographic socio-economic microcosmic of the city at large. Understand Ward 1 and the evidence it provides and better understand the debate.
If we look at CM Nadeau’s policies toward development over the last year, she believes that Ward 1 is evidence that Graham-Donatelli, TOD and the Trickle Down Theory works, just needs a few tweaks here and there. I and some others believed that the evidence in Ward 1 suggests that Graham-Donatelli is fundamentally flawed (I believe corrupt). That the Comp Plan and policies overall need to shift significantly toward an equitable development model.
Therefore, I extend an open invitation to CM Nadeau, her fellow Council Members, folk from the Executive branch, and those on both sides of the Comp Plan to sit down with me and others take a close look at the evidence and walk the Ward 1 story and see what enlightenment it can provide, before voting on the Comp Plan or approving additional public land dispositions, supporting/approving PUDs and etc. As like, CM Nadeau many believe the Graham-Donatelli model works in and in fact is the Public Good. I say not so fast.
William
I don’t know it all, but I know Graham-Donatelli is not a model in the public good.