Watch What Crappens - Feed Drop: Real Good Podcast: Why Community and Economy go Hand-In-Hand with Brett Theodos

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

In our second episode of Season 4, we delve into the science of community development with Brett Theodos, Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute. Brett researches neighborhoods and places, and tries to understand what makes neighborhoods work for the people that inhabit them. In this episode, Brett and our hosts discuss the vital relationship between economic development and community building.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Get ready for a double load of Queen of Hearts. It's me, Jujubee, and I return to guide sexy singles through some ronchy blind dates. Cameras off. Voice only. Launching during Pride, Queen of Hearts takes Miami by storm, with Daeders' Cupby from Tampa Bayes, Just Chaz, and Brittany Brave to name a few.

Follow Queen of Hearts on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. We're gonna do something a little different today in the feed. We wanted to share an episode of a podcast called Real Good. Their first episode dropped into podcast feed in the summer of 2020. You remember that summer? Not great. Yeah, the world has changed a lot since then, but their mission has remained the same. Every season, every episode, they strive to show you that while the world is in

an imperfect place, there are people out there trying to make it better. Their first season just launched last week in fact. you that while the world is an imperfect place, there are people out there trying to make it better. Their poor season just launched last week in fact. You're about to hear an episode from that season now. If you like what you heard, go listen and subscribe to Real Good, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Real Good by US Bank, a podcast about helpers. We've segregated ourselves, sometimes by design, sometimes by policy, sometimes not by intent, but still to that effect.

And so we all live in a place. We go home and we sleep there. Have many of us now work there as well. But we have drawn little boxes about where we socialize, where we recreate, where we worship, where we pay property tax, where we send our kids to school, and sometimes those are very firm and fixed lines and that you can literally see them on a map when they differ. I'm Faith Saley. Welcome back to another season of Real Good.

Our first episode dropped into your podcast feeds in the summer of 2020. The world has changed immeasurably since then, but our mission has remained the same. Every season, every episode, we've strived to show you that, while our world is an imperfect place, there are people out there trying to make it better. Today's guest is Brett Theodos, senior fellow at the Urban Institute. We talk a lot on this podcast about systemic oppression. At this point, most equality conscious white Americans know to call out the entrenched nature of racial inequality.

Systemic racism is practically a buzz word. So is gentrification. But sometimes, name dropping these phrases feels like it has a lot more to do with saving face than inviting real reflection. So what does systemic oppression really mean? Especially when it comes to the structures closest to our lives, our neighborhoods and communities, public transportation,

or where our children go to school. Well, there's an entire field of behind-the-scenes social research dedicated to understanding neighborhoods through an economic and demographic lens. It's what Brett does. His findings actually describe what systemic oppression looks like and how it can be addressed through economic and social policy reforms.

The real challenge for folks like him, getting people in power to listen. Brett, it's so nice to have you here. Thank you for joining me. Happy to be here. Not to put any pressure on you. Brett, it's so nice to have you here. Thank you for joining me. Happy to be here. Not to put any pressure on you, Brett, but this is our fourth season of Real Good. And I think you are the first white man we've talked to.

Don't screw this up, okay? I'll do my best. So, align from your bio, you're a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. You also serve as director of the Institute's Community Economic Development Hub, which is a mouthful. So if, I don't know if you have kids, but if one of your kids' friends asks you what you do, what would you say? I study neighborhoods and places and try to understand what makes them work for the

people who live there. That is such a cool description. And even the way you just said it made me feel like you should be talking to like a puppet on Sesame Street. It sounds like such a basic and important thing to do. The other way I describe it as remember in high school or college when you wrote that report that's basically what I do for a living. I write reports for people so I do school for job. You do school for job but what I really want to get to in our conversation today is how you take that data

and all the report writing and actually interact with people and change places and lives. So before we get there, I want to know how you came to do what you do. Where did you grow up? What kind of neighborhood did you grow up in? So I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. That sounds bucolic. Yeah, where Frank Lloyd Wright did many of his homes. Fun quote, Ernest Hemingway said, who grew up in Oak Park, described it as a city of broad boulevards and narrow mines. But that was the 1800s. It's one of the nations. Did that hold true for you at all?

It's one of the nation's few stably racially diverse places in the country, actually. And so I grew up in an elementary school that was pretty mixed raciallyially, and socioeconomically. And then I moved, and I went to an ex-servant community that was almost all white. Hold on, I have to ask, what does ex-servant mean? Because I grew up in the suburbs, and now I live in Manhattan, so city and suburbs, what is ex-servant? So there's like the old suburbs, which is like Oak Park, where like I could sit on my front stoop and see what was then called. I'm stating myself the Sears Tower,

and I was two houses away from the L train. So that's suburb, but like Chicago's literally to the north end to the east surrounding in part. So old. And then some people call these very new suburbs used to be farmland. And in the last 10 or 20 years, became these big homes on big lots, X-urban. So the storage of suburban sprawl. Got it. Sprawl.

OK, so you moved to where? So we moved an hour and a half away to sprawling exerbia and it became and it was an almost all-white context. Some Latino folks, some Asian folks, but very largely white. And it was a culture shock. It was a totally different paradigm. Nobody walked anywhere. Everyone was conservative. Every lot was on an acre or more. How old are you? And I was mentoring at junior high.

So still, you know, young enough. But you registered it. You looked around and you were like, oh, everybody is white. I went from looking at the Sears Tower to looking at the house across the street. No joke. And so I don't know from a young age I was normed in diversity is actually normal. Even though in so much of America, it's not. But all that to say, I was formed and shaped initially in that context

and so what became very odd to me is a feeling that we've all segregated and moved in different parts. And so that I think in some ways has formed my identity and the reason I ask the questions that I asked just trying to understand why we organized our society in this way and if we don't like it, what can we do about it? How did that, I mean, I have kids. And I wonder how people's passions emerge and get named. Like at what point as a young person,

did you understand public policy as something to study and neighborhood formation as something to deconstruct? I've asked myself that question too, and I think with some hindsight we can begin to see the path that was laid that we have followed. Of course, for many of us, it wasn't by design or intent, but with hindsight we can get glimpses of it. For some reason, I don't know. I've always loved the news. And so, from age 12 until today, I have read the newspaper every day of my life. I read three newspapers a day. I just, I don't know. my wife makes fun of me that this is how I relax.

I'm going to go out and limb. I'm going to go out and limb. Yeah, and I'm just going to go out and limb and guess, are you an NPR listener as well? I do enjoy some NPR. Right. I think you might be my people. Because even though I live in the midst of a city and notice how things go away and things get built up and for blocks away. There's a development project that still hasn't been, you know, fixed and renovated for

10 years because of the socioeconomic class of its inhabitants. I never thought about this as a avocation or a passion until my kids, a babysitter gave my kids a picture book about Jane Jacobs who if listeners don't know, was a famous like herb, she was called an urbanist, right? An activist who encouraged people to study and think about how communities get made. Yes, and she had a profound impact on society and And the way we think about cities, and in some ways, the opposite way of developing from a more Robert Moses style, Tothdown, Demolish, Bill, Big Plan kind of hers

is a much more, for lack of a better word, local, indigenous, authentic, small, bubbling up, organic, community built, and designed and owned approach. Both of which are actually trying to build connections in community, but in different ways. So when you got to college, did you, was there something called public policy that you could study? What was your educational focus? I'm old enough. Now there are. There are degrees in public policy for

undergrads. They didn't have that where I went to school. So without knowing it again, I kind of made my own way. I majored in both political science and economics because in some ways public policy is the in between of those two things and I couldn't have told you it. But I think I literally saw an ad on a bulletin board, like a push pin bulletin board, because that's how we rolled back then. And I don't know why, but I was just like, I'm going to apply to public policy school. So I did for a master's degree and I went and did it. And I even when I started I really didn't have a good handle on what it was. I knew I wasn't actually that

interested in politics, but I was very interested in the role of government as it can be a force for good in people's lives. And it seems that in your daily life, in your work at the Urban Institute, you really hone in on social and economic issues from the perspective of communities, though, rather than sort of wide-scale legislation that a government, even a local government might enact. Is that right? It's right. Yeah, and it's, I recognize the value of education, policy, and health policy, writ large, fully validate how influential those approaches have been social security has transformed America, the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance. The list goes on. Those are really impactful tools. But for better or worse,

I just have always had a passion and an interest in how that plays out locally, how that affects on the ground. And I think perhaps having witnessed and observed that there is a spatial dimension to how we have ordered our life and our society and place matters. It affects kids, it affects adults. What do you mean by that? A spatial dimension, what does that mean? You get on a train and the color of the people on that train depending where you are on the line. You look at homes and you can start on one street

and if it's a long street, you can drive along it and you can observe the way the homes change and look. We've segregated ourselves sometimes by design, sometimes by policy, sometimes not by intent, but still to that effect. And so we all live in a place. We go home and we sleep there, have many of us now work there as well. But we have drawn little boxes about where we socialize, where we recreate, where we worship, where we pay property tax, where we send our kids to school.

And sometimes those are very firm and fixed lines and that you can literally see them on a map when they differ. And are you trying to call attention to that and notice that and codify those lines like a physicist would kind of decoding the way the world works or are you trying to change that? Are you seeing these things and trying to change them? The first in support of the latter. Okay, right, because you can't make

change until you say this is what's happening now, and this is why it happened. Sometimes I think of myself as a court jester. I did not see that coming. Go on. There's an important function that Court jesters played and they weren't just for entertainment actually. They also could be truth tellers to authorities and power in ways that they could receive. And so whether that's literally talking to Congress or administration officials or whether that's influencing the influencers in the media or in corporate circles or in philanthropies. It's endeavoring to say, again, over here, let's not forget, let's pay attention. And a lot of times, now even more so in the last couple of years, people are aware of the general contours of the

issues that we're dealing with. But sometimes the severity of the issues is not a present. Sometimes we all just need reminding and encouragement. And sometimes the issues are masked or hidden. And actually we need to help bring them to light. I just want to dig into this court gesture thing a little more. So do you feel like there's a sense of what you do where you, you know, you're not wearing the floppy hat with the bells on the end, but do you have to sort of sugar coat or make

palatable what you are seeing in order to influence people who might be able to change it for the better? You have to be strategic. So the goal is to help people understand what needs are and what can be done. Everybody's got constraints in every institution in terms of what they can do now, what they can do later, and what they can't do at all. So sometimes it's about agendas setting. Sometimes it's about awareness raising. Sometimes it's literally about, okay, let's make this change.

But yes, it's a journey. We're on a journey. I'd say at my best, I'm not just telling people what to do differently. I'm helping them, supporting them to come to the conclusions of what to do differently. I'm helping them, supporting them to come to the conclusions of what to do differently. And there's an element to which, too, I'm sitting in the middle. There are super smart, motivated, incredible people who are doing the work of community building, community investment, community development all across this country. And so part of what I'm doing is also documenting, translating and building up the evidence base about what's working.

So we've got the what's not working, but also we're lifting up what is working, and we're codifying that and sending that off to decision makers as well. Okay. I want to know what's not working. I want to know what is working and how you figure that out. I'm really interested in the ratio of how much of what you do is sort of at a desk with data and writing reports. And when you actually physically enter these places and talk to the people,

who live there? We are, that depends project by project. We are doing at the most fun, at the most rewarding, and I would say the most productive, we've got one part interview for one part data, and we're really able to mash these together and make a compelling story because there's something about people's experiences and perceptions that just leap off the page. There's also something undeniable and unassailable about a data point that you just can't say,

well, that's that person's opinion. So mashing these up, I find can really be a secret sauce in case making. There are some questions that just can really be a secret sauce in case making. There are some questions that just can't be answered well through data points or the reverse through interviews. So sometimes we lean more heavily into the one or the other, but we do dozens and dozens of interviews, not always in person, but sometimes.

And we work with data a lot. So the most fun projects have both, but some projects just one or the other. What are the big questions you ask? Right now, I'm asking questions like, where is money invested in two cities? For what purposes? From what sources? And to what ends. I'm asking questions like, how can we address and ameliorate some of the historic disparities that we see in different ownership categories? So for example, 16% of adults in this country

are Latino, but 6% of businesses owned are, and those businesses have 3, 4% of revenues. Black people represent 12, 13% of adults, 2% of businesses owned, 1% of business revenues. Those are staggering disparities. And so we're asking questions like, the status quo is not all that terrific. The black home ownership rate in this country today is on par where it stood 50 years ago before the passage of Fair Housing Act. And so we have seen tremendous strides in this country, but we also have tremendous ways to go where we have not yet gotten where we want to. And so asking questions about how do we get to

where we want to be? What models work? What's emerging? What can be done? So how do you translate those questions and your research into solutions with human impact? The good news is there is so much creativity out there and there is so much goodwill and there is so much creativity out there and there is so much goodwill and there is so

much initiative and there is so much philanthropic support. There's initiatives being done all over and there's some new exciting emerging ones and there's some old ones that work pretty well. And so it's less often that I am sitting in Washington, D.C. and coming up with the perfect solution, then I'm saying, look over there. They've really figured something out. And if you guys wanted to, you could adapt that to your context. Yeah, you're a little bit different.

And I know your institutional ecosystems different or your needs are different or what have you. But we could crowd that example in over here. And maybe we need to run a cohort We'll walk alongside you to get you up that learning curve or maybe we can write out a template So you can literally copy the how to or maybe we're gonna encourage a congress person to write that into a preference point So you'll be extra nudge along the way to try to take that approach. But however we get there, it's more about lifting up and welcoming in and incentivizing the good stuff.

So is your audience, or the people who are receiving the fruits of your research and your suggestions? Is it usually the institutions who want to fund? Is it lawmakers? Is it people in positions of what we conventionally think of as power, who can enact change? Or is your audience people within the communities whom you're trying to help and uplift?

Mostly, our audience is people who are making decisions and or advocating for them. So not just the decision makers, but also the advocates. So that might be community representatives, advocates, nonprofits, what have you that are saying here is what we need, practitioners in programs. Most often, folks in communities are busy living their lives. And don't have time to think about what federal policy change needs to be. A lot of it is also 12 steps removed or masked.

They can't see the exact way that it all shakes out, because it takes a lot of time to thread through all of these strings. So it's more often the representatives, the advocates, the practitioners, the funders, the policymakers. I have this image in my head though. Tell me if I'm wrong. Do you, are you, are you ever like in a community with a legal pad and a pencil asking people questions about how they live their lives and what their needs are? Yeah, we do residential interviews. I'm doing a lot of small business work right

now. And so we are interviewing small business owners and talk about busy, right? Like they are juggling so much on their plates. But yeah, we're talking to them about their experience with technical assistance, with lending, what have you. So different, different studies, different populations, but yes, absolutely. And how does it feel for you to be, are you a social scientist? Is it fair to call you that? Sure, yeah, yeah, I have a degree in public policy, exactly.

Okay, a social scientist, a white researcher, entering into communities that are often, it sounds like communities of color. What is that experience like for you? Yeah, it's lovely. People are eager to share. So I realized there's all sorts of barriers that exist in our society that are real.

But in my experience, people want to be heard. And if there's a pathway that they could not just be listened But in my experience, people want to be heard. And if there's a pathway that they could not just be listened to, but that that voice could inform somebody's decision, there's an eagerness, and dare I say sometimes, not always, but even a catharsis to being able to inform what you think the world needs to look like. So everybody's busy, I'm not saying everybody picks up my phone call when I make it, and certainly there is trust building that needs to happen, and some things are better in person, and some things are better in a must-mour sociological ethnographic.

I'm going to stay with you for a long time sort of way. That's not typically what I do though. I'd respect that work But a lot of times in my experience people want to share because they have views they have experiences and they want to get it out Yeah, and they maybe haven't been asked or asked respectfully Yeah, and it's incumbent upon us I'd say as. And here's where the field is growing and evolving, even in the 20 years or so that I've been in it. One, what can researchers do to share back their findings

and their learning? So it's not a one-directional experience. And there are strategies. We're doing data walks and we'll bring the data back to communities and put it up and get engagement with it. So that's part one. And part two, can more of the research field be made to look like the people that are collecting data about? So we're doing more work at urban and other people are as well about community participatory research approaches.

And so it depends on the question and the population and the place and the design, but there's real potential as well to be facilitators of research for communities learning about themselves. I love the phrase data walks because one of my kids is such a city kid that he really feels uncomfortable if he's in the wilds more than in Central Park. And so I feel like I could, I feel like I could lure him on a not a nature walk, but a data walk. I might have a burgeoning public policy nut. You might. We take interns. So send your your your kid over and we would love to work with. He'll throw in some baseball stats for free. So you have, you mentioned you, you've been doing this, this work with the Urban Institute almost 20 years. I think it's 17, right? I wanted to

congratulate you. I looked up seven, the, the, the modern gift for a 17-year anniversary as furniture. So you might want to get a new standing desk or something. I'm building my deck so I could use some outdoor deck furniture. There you go, mauslet off. So in 17 years with the Urban Institute, how has your perspective on your work shifted? The world looks different, right? And yet it also doesn't. So, what do I mean?

So, you look at some spaces and banks used to be really big lenders of home loans. And all of a sudden, non-banks are doing a lot more lending of home mortgage lending. FinTechs, a lot of small business lending was done by banks, small and community and regional banks. And all of a sudden, the biggest small business lenders are PayPal and Amazon and Square and Stripe. And technology happens. And sometimes I can get a little static and myopic.

But the world does change. And yet, also, the outcomes that we're looking for don't always look different. So all that to say, things change and things don't. So in these two decades are the themes of the challenges and the problems the same? They are, they take on new flavors. Nobody used to worry about heat traps within cities

to the same degree that we are now, right? Climate change is happening. Disaster resilience, which wasn't as much of an emphasis before. Some things actually do get better. Yes, tell me about those, please. Okay, wait, no, I got to think hard. What's actually gotten better? Don't tell me something in 17 years that you're like, yeah, we've made real progress here.

I was asked to speak at the 25th anniversary of a part of the Treasury Department that does community development and investing, and it was an interesting experience because everybody went around the room saying, we've reached 25 years and nothing's really gotten better. We see the same challenges. And I said, I agree, but.

And my but is, I actually think we know pretty well what works. I think we have the tools in our toolkit to develop communities in the way that we need to. I think they're all miniaturized, like maybe not Lego, but those little like Home Depot or Lowe's build your own kit tools when we need the construction equipment that's going to be coming in. So they're not big enough. We're bringing a squirt gun to a raging inferno fire. But I think, as opposed to a generation ago,

we have a lot of the design, the infrastructure bill, to answer a lot of the questions and solve a lot of the problems that were interested. We just need them bigger. Okay, what are those tools? What have you identified? So it differs based on the problem we're trying to solve. And there's a lot of problems, and well, they're all related. They're all so different. So there are some places that home lending isn't happening because appraisals are too

low. And you need to spend $100,000 to buy a home and invest to make it livable to get it back up to shape but the home is only going to be worth 50 when you're done. And so we need a model for mortgage finance that isn't tied to the value of a home, it's tied to your cash flow and your ability to repay. So that's a problem in really under-invested places. Or land banks can help gather up properties that have their roofs falling in and demolish them and do a bait man and clean up the land and then sell them to a developer and get it repurposed

into new investment. That's a problem that disinvested places have. Overly invested places like where you live and where I live, they've got some of the opposite problems. And what they need to do is work really hard to preserve the land that they have, not try to turn it over for a dollar to a developer. And so they need solutions like community land trusts or other affordable housing

preservation tools and the same thing for small business to preserve the chance for business owners to be able to stay in a neighborhood as it appreciates around them. So, I'll let's say a little bit depending on what the question or the problem is, but we've got answers. Have you noticed changes either in communities or among leaders in your field in how we're thinking about things like gentrification? How do you feel about that? Is that a dirty word, gentrification?

I wouldn't say it's a dirty word, it's a loaded word because people literally load a lot onto it. But it's a meaningful word. Two thoughts. One, most of the country is not suffering from gentrification. They're suffering from too little investment. So when we look at our country and where a lot of people live, that's not their felt reality. That said, where a lot of the power brokers, elite media, policymakers, hail from Philanthropies, are in communities that are grappling with it. So where it's a problem, it's a problem. And we have solution.

And how would you characterize a problem? Is it that, if you lean into the negative connotations of gentrification, is it the idea that people with more money who aren't sort of native to a neighborhood are moving in and kind of taking it over and pushing the people who have lived there, struggled there, and want to stay there out? People come down differently on this issue. Some people worry about that cultural displacement or even political displacement that you're talking about.

I think it's hard from where I sit to say it's wrong for a family that has lived somewhere a long time to have their home appreciate and decide, you know what, I'm going to cash out and go somewhere else and my kids are gonna benefit from that appreciation. It's a problem when neighborhoods of color don't appreciate. If they overly, rapidly appreciate, that can be a challenge if people are forced out. But having gotten equity also is a gift and a source of freedom for a family that

is looking for wealth. So these are tricky and thorny issues, but I'd just say what we need to do is set up a policy environment where people have the option to stay. So if that's circuit breakers and how rapidly property taxes increase, so that you're not priced out of your home on the basis of other people's home values rising, there are tools like that. And those can be effective in helping people stay in place. But the end of the day, and part of the challenge

that I think policymakers don't fully understand and I feel like liberals in particular suffer from this delusion is like thinking government is more powerful than it is. And like, the market is this huge mountain of capital, like mountains of capital, like moving in. When a neighborhood is getting attractive, like just mountains of capital, right?

And then we come with these nonprofit solutions or these government solutions and we offer like a million dollars or 10 million dollars. And like meanwhile, some of these buildings that are getting built are like 300 million dollars a pop. And so it's just our order of intervention buildings that are getting built are like $300 million a pop. So our order of intervention is often way smaller than what the market is doing and therefore what the need would be to preserve and to be able to have an option for people to stay

in place. You mentioned that you're really working with small businesses. Can you talk about that initiative? Yeah, it's like there's actually several different initiatives, but we're looking at how we help businesses grow and thrive, what the role of the federal government should be, because there's a lot of federal agencies, including the small business administration,

that's working to help businesses or should be working to help businesses. And COVID, I think, woke a lot of people up to small businesses are an important part of my life, even though I don't always remember that. And they're an important part of what makes a community a community. And yet they're actually more vulnerable than we thought. And so if we want a diverse and vibrant city, we want a diverse and vibrant set of small businesses. So how do you support them? Two main ways.

One kind of a wonky word, but I'll use it. Technical assistance or a better word coaching, but I'll use it technical assistance or better word coaching Training counseling support. You don't have a business plan. Let me help you your personal finances and your business finances are Co-mingled we need to separate those you need a business bank account and a personal bank account You need to pay yourself as a person from your businesses. Is that part of what the Urban Institute does like People actually go in and help very small business owners? We're the R&D group, right? So we're doing, you know, learning and documentation. So we evaluate programs that are doing

those kind of service supports. We're not the ones providing them. But we're working with them. Those are our kind of symbiotic partners that we help say, oh, this worked. Look at this intervention. It had this effect for this business over this time. And so that's one type of support, the counseling,

the coaching. The other support is money. So you need a loan. You need an equity investment. You need something to get started. You want to build out your restaurant? At least a couple hundred grand, maybe more. You got to have the seats. You want to build out your restaurant, at least a couple hundred grand, maybe more. You've got to have the seats, you've got to have the counters, you've

got to have the kitchen. Really every business, not every. Most every business requires a capital infusion along the way. If it's going to grow with any speed, otherwise it can be very slow growth. Government programs can start to help crowd in some money. So usually government, you know, so the market will serve, you know, a certain range, and the government might bump it out and say, I'm going to help de-risk your loan. I'm going to make it a little easier for you to make that loan. So I'm going to help you crowd in and do some more. I mean, maybe I'm romanticizing this, but when I see, you know, small businesses and

mom and pop businesses shut down in my neighborhood, it's like a little heartbreak every time. And is that why I mean, we're even talking about grassroots organizations and mission driven businesses. Do you think they lend a kind of heart and soul to a community? Is that why this kind of support matters so much? Couldn't agree more. And yet we have a surprisingly ambivalent public policy relation to them.

Because they're for profits. And so in my experience, and maybe taking a little bit of a cynical tone to this, we want to help them, but we don't want to help them too much. Because at some point, they're private enterprises. And it's a legitimate question what the role of government is in supporting private enterprise and we don't want to play favorites. That said, the smaller the small business we're talking about, potentially the more vulnerable, economically, they are the more community embedded they are, the more we're talking about

low and moderate income people that are trying to make their lives go. And so I think there really is a space for government to step in productively and help small, small businesses, new small businesses, community embedded small businesses to grow and thrive. How do you measure the support that you provide those organizations? One criticism I'd have is that the field often measures widgets, units delivered, doses delivered. So, shots in the arm, how many trainings, butts and seats, how many trainings did you give to how many people? That has its place. But what I really care about is what difference did that make in the lives

and of those businesses and those business owners. And in the community that surrounds it, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So ultimately the community that surrounds it, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So ultimately we're interested in revenues, employment, did the business stay in business. And we know, for example, the research literature tells us that entrepreneurs of color hire employees

to a higher degree of color than white entrepreneurs have. So there are follow-on downstream benefits to this kind of support. What makes a kind of successful marriage between supporting a community and businesses that already exist in an area and fostering new economic advancement? It's a hard question. And one that I actually have been offering up to policymakers as they design their programs. If you want there to be fewer disparities in business ownership by race, or there's really acute ones by gender, even by age, you're going to have to start a bunch of small businesses, small, small businesses. But a lot of them are not going

to grow. And so therefore they're not all going to create a lot of wealth in community. So maybe we could have a lot of micro enterprise, micro business supports that help us start a lot of small businesses. On the other hand, if we really want to address some of the deeper wealth issues, we need businesses that grow and grow quickly. And so that might mean investing in industries like advanced tech and manufacturing and IT that have more growth potential, but there's some trade-off, right? That may be less of the community embedded business that we want.

So we often come up with mushy policies that pretend to do everything for everybody and therefore don't do a great job. But sometimes we got to get a little more specific about our goal. Are we trying to invest in businesses that have rapid growth potential and therefore get some of the wealth generation? Are we trying to invest in more very micro businesses that are community embedded, both are good, right? But we need to pick sometimes. And so is it part of the Urban Institute to ask those questions and then help places who want to invest, like a US bank?

It figure out the answers? Yeah, and it is. And that's part of the fun part of what I get to do. And then it's also our job to put on our glasses and get out our magnifying glass. And say how to work sounds like a beautiful design on paper. And you enroll all these people to Rific. Now I'm actually going to go check their bank accounts and see how much money they have two years later. And if it's more than they would have had before they had joined your program because I'm going to compare them against these other businesses

that didn't get the help. And yay, look, there's a big difference success. Or no, I'm sorry, there's no effect. And there's no difference despite how great it sounded. great it sounded. From where you sit and do your research, how closely acquainted are you with individual and anecdotal stories of communities? Because the Urban Institute I presume is studying environments all over America. Is that right? It is. Do you personally get to, in the world, okay? Do you personally, as a senior fellow, get to sort of have a favorite story or a business whose journey you get to follow? I love the idea of staying with something long enough to do that.

It's not typically how our work is structured. Sometimes it comes in other ways, right? So I am a board commissioner for our public housing authority in the county where I live and I'm on the board of a community land trust in DC. And so we get to know properties and we get to follow their lifecycle and see redevelopment as it hits the street in communities and look at what used to be there and look at this building that was at risk of being lost

and flipped to being really high priced, but we were able to preserve it as a low-income housing cooperative. So we get to see those things in some of those ways, but yeah, most of our research work is kind of taken snapshots and moving on. Last year, US Bank partnered with the Urban Institute to kick off new measures to address the wealth gap faced by black Americans. I would love to hear about this project from you. When you work with

large corporations that seek to contribute to improving systemic economic inequality, what are the roadblocks that you see these big companies face? that you see these big companies face. There are many, and they're varied, and they're industry-specific. The biggest one, which isn't true only for corporations, but is true for philanthropy too, and is true for government as well, is really getting sufficiently specific on what you're trying to achieve. And that sounds easy to say, but given that there are so many challenges and they take so many forms and they often can be so interrelated, it is a good question

of where you enter in and where you try to make a change. And the image I try to use is, you know, if you've got a bathtub and you dump a thimbleful or even a cup full of boiling water in that tub, you're not going to change its temperature. But if you've got a pot and you dump a gallon of boiling water in that pot, you're going to change the temperature of that pot. And so part of it is being sufficiently humble and focused and also sufficiently robust in our strategies that we actually make a difference where we say we're making a difference and that we actually really invest enough to go deep enough to go big enough and to go focused and specific

enough to make change. And so that's where a lot of public and private and philanthropic initiatives fall down is actually trying to do too much So it's how narrowly and sort of how surgically they want to help they they Does US bank seek guidance from you to say we want to help? This is the amount of money we can invest in this direction you tell us where to put it and with whom? That would be fun. My commission wasn't quite that, but that sounds like fun. I have played that role for others.

Our role with US Bank was more around measurement and evaluation, which can inform strategy design just like you were talking about. But it was more asking questions like, how will we know if we succeed it? So we have goals around minority contracting. What's a good goal? How do we know? Are there industry benchmarks? How much should we be striving to contract from minorities? Or we have goals around employee retention or advancement. That's pretty easy to quantify. We could check that out and see how you're doing.

And did you have you? Do you have those answers? Right here. What we did is we came up with the metrics and the comparators of how you would know. And the work that is on the plate, they're on the runway for US Bank, is now to really begin that measurement evaluation and learning. Ideally, not just to say we did great pet ourselves on the back, but also really to say, earnestly, this strategy

worked, we're going to double down. This one, it wasn't giving us what we wanted, and so we need to retool it and come at that differently. Is it fair to say that there's a new corporate interest and equality, and not just from US Bank? Is there a growing awareness and desire to really help? Together with colleagues, we have identified at least $25 billion of commitments emerging after George Floyd's murder, also in light of the COVID pandemic that are targeting community development and race equity goals.

Those appear to be sincere and legitimate in most cases. We've done a bunch of interviews with corporations. There are questions on where do you go from here and does the energy sustain itself or is this a passing phase? And we move on to the next thing, which is a legitimate crisis. Maybe that's the environment. What have you? So, yes, I think we did have a real aerobust and an expanded commitment to this space.

And then the question is gonna be, does that continue? Do you know, Brett, that a conversation with you involves tons of questions? Like I ask you questions, and then you have demonstrated to me that your life and your passion is full of questions and response. You are always asking questions, right? Even as you're collecting data, you have to ask more questions. It's so fun to try to make sense of this world. It's beautiful, beautiful, lovely, and maddening all at the same time. How does it feel to be contributing to, presumably, long-term change when the effects may not

be visible even within your lifetime? It's humbling. It's humbling. And I remember I got good advice before I had my firstborn and I was stressing about what if this kid, what's he going to turn out like and what's it going to look like? I was sexually talking to a pastor about this and he said, you don't have control. You have influence, but you don't have control. Use it wisely. And so all I can offer up is a

humble little thing and hopefully some measure of influence produces some measure of good, but ultimately I'm not in control and I'm not determining any outcome for any process, but hopefully we'll have seen the world through to a little better spot. Thank you for what you do. Keep being the jester who's working with data. It's a gift. It's a passion. It's a joy and a frustration at times when things don't move, but we're keeping

at it. Brett, it's so nice to have you here. Thank you for joining me. So good to be with you. Thanks for listening to another episode of Real Good. If you like what you heard, subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts. We'll see you soon. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest

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