The Ford Foundation will spend $200-million over the next five years to help the country’s metropolitan areas take a more coordinated, effective approach to promoting economic opportunity.
City by Dave Tamburo
Press release:
The new effort seeks to ensure that cities and suburbs work together in responding to needs such as affordable housing, transportation, and job creation.
“The notion that suburbs can thrive while city centers atrophy has proved damaging to our nation,” Ford’s president, Luis A. Ubiñas, said in a statement. “Metropolitan areas that manage to interweave urban and suburban development, everything from transportation to arts and culture, attract more people and more investment.”
The announcement is the third big grant commitment by a foundation or a corporation in the last week. Wal-Mart and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation recently announced new initiatives, a sign that the economic recovery may be emboldening grant makers.
Ford hopes its new approach will help communities move away from competing for government and private money toward working together on regional initiatives. While the foundation has long supported urban revitalization, it says the new money will help identify successful policy innovations and enable other metropolitan areas to adapt them.
For example, the foundation plans to support public-transportation projects that connect people with jobs, including the M1 light-rail project in Detroit and the construction of 25 “transit villages” along San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system. The grants will help create low-cost housing in New Orleans and San Francisco through approaches such as “shared equity” homeownership. In that approach, families that get a public subsidy to buy a home agree to share the equity they earn with the government, which then makes that money available to another family.
In cities such as Detroit and Flint, Mich., the foundation will support the creation of regional “land bank authorities” that put properties that have been foreclosed to productive use.
Advocacy Efforts
As part of the effort, Ford will bring grantees together with policy makers and try to win more money and attention for problems facing metropolitan areas. The goal is to connect local communities with broader city and regional projects.
“When we look at metro regions and see pockets of serious unemployment but also pockets of employment opportunity, and disjointed transit systems that fail to connect people to the services they need and the jobs they seek, it’s clear that a different approach is needed,” said Pablo J. Farías, vice president of Ford’s Economic Opportunity and Assets program. “We need metropolitan regions to embrace a shared economic destiny.”
The foundation will support efforts to expand affordable housing, build and enhance public transportation systems, and extend the use of regional land banks to address the problems of abandoned urban neighborhoods. Additionally, Ford, which has long supported various community development efforts, will now direct any money it grants for urban revitalization toward building integrated urban-suburban regions. “Metropolitan areas that manage to interweave urban and suburban development, everything from transportation to arts and culture, attract more people and more investment.”
“We want to break down the walls that separate leaders who should be working together,” said George McCarthy, director of Metropolitan Opportunity at Ford. “We aim to unite policymakers and innovators from across the fields of transportation, housing and land use. When investments in these major systems are planned with an understanding of how they intersect and impact the lives of all people in a region, the result can be transformative.”
Ford will make strategic investments in key metropolitan areas to expand the most promising initiatives and develop models for other regions throughout the nation. Examples of such early investments include support for:
- Transformative public transportation projects that connect residents to jobs and other opportunities, including the M1 rail in Detroit, the redevelopment of the Claiborne corridor in New Orleans, and the construction of 25 transit villages along BART in San Francisco’s Bay Area.
- Innovative initiatives to create a stock of permanently affordable housing—in communities including New Orleans and the Bay Area. Through such market-based approaches as “shared equity” homeownership, families receiving a public subsidy to buy a home agree to share the equity they earn with government, which then makes those funds available to another family. These projects are targeted to neighborhoods that are rich with economic opportunity, ensuring that residents will have access to, for example, regional employment centers, quality schools and effective public transportation.
- Programs in metropolitan Detroit; Flint, Mich.; New Orleans; and other areas to create regional land bank authorities, which enable communities to revitalize blighted areas and increase quality housing opportunities. This includes funding for the Center for Community Progress, a new national resource center for communities that provides training and technical assistance for any metropolitan region that wants to develop its own land bank authority.
The foundation will serve as a national convener and advocate for innovation—bringing people together from across the country to share ideas and inform the national policy dialogue by demonstrating what is working on the ground. It will also work to bring more partners and funding to these longstanding metropolitan issues, including not just philanthropic dollars but government and private sector funds, as well. Ford is supporting the Living Cities collaborative of financial and philanthropic institutions to lead a broad national effort to advance innovation, build systemic capacity in cities, and get new players and resources to the table.
“Our goal is to bring the best pragmatic ideas from all sectors to this effort to promote an integrated agenda that strengthens the regional public and private systems that generate opportunity,” Ubiñas said.
This new work builds on five decades of Ford Foundation experience in community development and draws on lessons learned from that work. Ford has historically supported neighborhood-by-neighborhood development efforts that helped to build quality communities by coordinating the flow of public and private capital through its pioneering support of Community Development Corporations. Today, the foundation is advancing this work by working to link neighborhoods and their residents to broader city and metropolitan prosperity.
“When we look at metro regions and see pockets of serious unemployment but also pockets of employment opportunity, and disjointed transit systems that fail to connect people to the services they need and the jobs they seek, it’s clear that a different approach is needed,” said Pablo J. Farías, vice president of Ford’s Economic Opportunity and Assets program. “We can reduce poverty and unemployment and raise the quality of life for city and suburb dwellers alike while making cities more competitive and sustainable. To achieve this, we need metropolitan regions to embrace a shared economic destiny. That’s what this initiative is all about.”
