Framing

An Urban Renewal comes out of a legacy of community organizing and activism to reimagine and strategize around the future of Black communities. We see the clear need for a vision that invests in urban neighborhoods as the path to economic and social sustainability for not only those who live in them, but the U.S as a whole.

Though the United States looks on the surface like an extremely wealthy and prosperous country, it has deep challenges as a nation. It has had a prolonged housing crisis, one that connects back to the era of Urban Renewal where safe, healthy and affordable housing was out of the reach of millions at the beginning of the Great Society political program. In the decades since the federal government made key investments to undo the damage done to poor urban communities by redlining, the country has forgotten both how to build and maintain good cities, but has discredited the value of its pursuit. To want to live in a big city rather than a tree-lined suburb is seen as counterculture to America.

For those of us who found themselves excluded from or unenticed by the dream of suburban life, this reality leaves us yearning for better. We wamt better cities with better services, better safety, better housing and better leadership. An Urban Renewal is a place for us to share strategy and knowledge on what is working in our communities and what is not. We are the people that we’ve been waiting for.

Principles

Developing Leadership.

We get to a better future by taking responsibility to deliver the things we want to see. Leadership is in all of us, and it must be curated in the right conditions to grow and thrive. Our communities have no shortage of leaders, but we live in circumstances that underdevelop our ability to learn how to lead and how to assess leadership. Effective leaders get things done but also mold their successors.

Centrality of Narrative.

The overarching stories of the communities we live in and love were written decades ago and have proven to be hard to replace. Often long after the deeper truths to them change – crime, poverty, disinvestment, social inequality – they remain rationales to how people think of them. We must engage in the work to shift those frames of thinking about the places and the people who live in them in order to have the type of impact we want to see. We can’t change our past, but we can be clearer on our perspectives on how we got to where we are, where we can go and how we get there.

Experimentation as Practice.

There is no roadmap to the type of wealth, prosperity and cohesion that our communities deserve. We can get there by creating laboratories for small experiments where we can test and observe ideas and reflect on the results and what can be learned. The conditions of these experiments will never be quite perfect, nor will they be able to be replicated in other places and times but we develop the collective imagination by inviting our people to dream, plan and build with us.

Importance of Sustainability.

It is the hallmark of [American] capitalism to exploit for profit. We recognize the immense damage that our national lifestyle has done to the environment more broadly and our communties specifically. To transform the places we love, the ability to redevelop and reimagine rather than to through away is crucial. We live in a world with finite resources, such as land, which has both a value for exchange for other commodities but also for personal use. Building a future sustainably means intentionally passing on assets and human capital that will root those that come behind us in the places we’ve curated.