Taryn Gress, MSSA – Strategic Director of the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities (NIMC) at Case Western Reserve University

Debbie Wilber, MPA – Assistant Director and a Research Associate at the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities (NIMC) at Case Western Reserve University

Dear Colleagues:

Greetings, and I hope that you and yours are healthy and safe – and can stay that way.

As part of being careful to stay safe, the “Friday Lunch,” a CWRU tradition since 1989, continues on Zoom. We work to present experts from campus and sometimes beyond to discuss important issues for the university, local community, nation or the international stage.

This Week’s Program

This week we look close to home. Case Western Reserve University is surrounded by neighborhoods that face a lot of challenges. How can they be improved – and especially, how can they be improved in ways that help the people living there now?

Last Friday, the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority and a group of partners broke ground on the first stage of a redevelopment project in the Buckeye/Woodhill neighborhood. Initiated with a $35 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to CMHA and the City of Cleveland, with further funding from the city and other sources, the project is intended to create more than 600 new apartments and townhouses in a neighborhood quite close to campus. Just drive up the hill on Fairhill from the corner of 107th and Carnegie, and the neighborhood is south of the reservoir that you pass to your right. You can enter it by turning right and heading south on 116th Street, or you could instead have driven south on 105th from Carnegie.

The project includes demolishing and replacing the 487 units on the current Woodhill Homes site. That project, first built over 80 years ago, badly needs repairs. For example, only 27% of units have working shower heads. But like many modern public housing and community development projects, this one is designed to do better than previous projects.

One basic goal is to “deconcentrate poverty,” based on observations that “segregating low-income households in densely built, strictly defined areas can negatively affect people’s mental and physical health and their access to jobs and high quality education.” So the plan is to replace the single Woodhill Homes complex with six smaller developments. Friday’s groundbreaking was for 120 units on a former public school site near the corner of Buckeye and Woodhill, across from the RTA rapid transit station there.

“Deconcentrating poverty” also requires some residents who are not horribly poor, so the plan includes a modest number (45) of market-rate units. It might be helped by providing green space, which will be especially true at the old Woodhill Homes site. But something more than spreading poor people around is needed: people caught in cycles of generational poverty often need some sort of services to break the cycle. For example, the plan includes a new health clinic and early childhood education center. These approaches are part of the research and advocacy portfolio of CWRU’s National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities, which helped broker the partnerships and coordinate the grant application.

It all sounds like a good thing, but there are some logical questions. They range from “why us?” – what made our application successful in a highly competitive grant competition – to “will it work?” It’s easy to see why replacing the old Woodhill Homes is a good idea, but is “deconcentrating” poverty – a clear standard for the grant – something that actually works? There is controversy about the extent of possible benefits. Similarly, providing services along with housing seems like a reasonable idea. In fact, it was one of the key concepts of the Hope VI program that the late MSASS Dean Art Naparstek helped develop in the early 1990s. But the record of success from Hope VI is rather mixed, at best.

So there is a lot to talk about, including our own university’s efforts to improve the neighborhoods nearby, what is happening on University Circle’s borders, and what to expect from the serious effort in Buckeye-Woodhill. Please join us as two of the leaders of this effort talk about their work and the challenge.

Signing In

This semester’s discussions will begin at 12:30 p.m., the usual time. The meeting will be set up as from Noon to 2:00 p.m., so people are not all signing in at the same time and to allow for the discussion to run a bit long. Each week we will send out this newsletter with information about the topic. It will also include a link to register (for free) for the discussion. Every Monday the same information will be posted on our website: fridaylunch.case.edu.

If you register, you will automatically receive from the Zoom system the link to join the meeting. This week’s link for registration is:

https://cwru.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMkc-uhrTMqGtVvIrVxMxiKFyu5nHkQXonZ

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Please e-mail padg@case.edu if you have questions about how the Zoom version of the Friday Lunch will work or any other suggestions. Or call at 216 368-2426 and we’ll try to get back to you. We are very pleased to be partnering this semester with the Siegal Lifelong Learning Program to share information about the discussions.

Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,

Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies

About Our Guests

Taryn Gress, MSSA is the Strategic Director of the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities (NIMC) at Case Western Reserve University. She provides strategic direction of the impact research center and has led NIMC research on three Scans of the Field studies, a study of 259 HOPE VI sites, a scan of Canadian mixed-income developments and provided project management on numerous other research and consulting projects on mixed-income communities. Gress led NIMC’s strategic support of the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority’s mixed-income planning effort in the Woodhill Homes public housing site in Cleveland, Ohio, supported the development of the People Plan for the implementation application, and is leading project management on the evaluation of the federal initiative Choice Neighborhoods and a study of bias in inclusionary housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gress provided project support of the design of the evaluation of Purpose Built Communities comprehensive community initiative through a subcontract with MDRC that is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Gress came to NIMC from The Civic Commons, a community and civic engagement organization serving Northeast Ohio. She has also worked with Cleveland community-based nonprofits Slavic Village Development, America SCORES Cleveland, and The Ohio State University Extension in Cuyahoga County. Gress holds a Bachelor of Arts from the College of Wooster and a Master of Science in Social Administration from Case Western Reserve University.

Debbie Wilber, MPA is the Assistant Director and a Research Associate at the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. Wilber led the strategic support of the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority’s effort to successfully secure a $35 million Choice Neighborhoods Initiative grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the Woodhill Homes public housing site in Cleveland, Ohio. She has over 18 years of experience in program development, organizational development, fundraising, communications, and strategic partnerships focused on low-income families. She previously worked as Director of Special Projects, Director of Development, and Community Partnerships Director for Hamilton Families, an organization focused on ending family homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area. Early in her career, she spent five years as a construction project manager, including renovating a mixed-income housing community in San Francisco. She has a Masters in Public Affairs from University of California, Berkeley and an undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Northwestern University.

Schedule of Friday Lunch Upcoming Topics and Speakers:

November 12: Can India Survive as a Secular Democracy? With Ananya DasGupta, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History.

November 19: Hospital Boom and Busts. With J.B. Silvers, Ph.D., Associate Dean of Finance and Professor of Banking and Finance.

December 3: President Biden’s Trade Policy: Continuity and Change. With Juscelino Colares, J.D., Schott-van den Eynden Professor of Business Law.