Majora Carter: “Economic Diversity Will Save Our Communities”

Just as I suspected, Majora Carter’s speech and presentation at Worcester State University this morning was awe-inspiring, motivating, exciting, and rejuvenating.  She was at WSU as part of their Courageous Conversations series and she presented on her life and work in the South Bronx.

I first learned of Majora’s work when she founded and led the Sustainable South Bronx in the early 2000’s.  They did amazing revitalization and environmental justice work in a community that was as rough as they come – high levels of poverty, asthma, violence, obesity, and on and on.  SSBx was fighting to have fewer trucks coming through their neighborhoods, for greenways, green-collar jobs, urban farms and rooftop gardens, and more.  I had the privilege of visiting SSBx in 2005 while working for the Merck Family Fund, one of the foundations that supported their work.   I was in awe then, and I’m in even more awe of Majora’s work now (Yes, I’m going to call her “Majora” instead of “Carter”.  She’s one of those people that makes you feel like you know her, even when you don’t).

Her message this morning was that the revitalization of our post-industrial cities (like the Bronx, and like Worcester) has to do with land-use, real-estate, and our assumptions.  “My approach, at its core, involves creating new opportunities for wealth to flow into our communities  – through mixed-income housing as well as mixed-use commercial development.   My previous experience in green-job and infrastructure developments of the previous decade, demonstrated that meaningful, long-term job creation is the most efficient and effective form of social service.”  And when Majora talks about these investments in our communities, she’s also talking about who is doing the work – and that’s the community members themselves.  We don’t need to attract new workers to our communities, but train the folks that already live here in green technologies, in jobs with dignity and good pay that contribute to breaking the cycles of poverty that we often assume are “just the way it is”.

“Poor people like nice things, too,” Majora said as she talked about gentrification.  We don’t need to let our options be either maintaining low-income communities as a status quo OR gentrification that pushes all low-income families and individuals out of the newly rejuvenated community.  Our communities need to be economically diverse in order to be sustainable.  When we have doctors co-existing with janitors we have a much more balanced sense of self and sense of community.  Youth who grow up in a family that had little formal education still get to interact with people who have extensive education, and thus they can see more possibilities.

And these communities can be pleasant to live in – full of parks, bike paths, farmers’ markets, cafes, retail, etc.  The method they’re using in the Bronx is by working to create it in one small part of the community, the “hinge” she called it, so that it can spur greater investment throughout the city.   Can our City Square be that for Worcester?  Or the Theater District Master Plan?  Perhaps, if we all stay engaged in the process and hold the City and developers to this vision!