Our Zip Code, Our Fate
While keeping our eyes on global threats such as the ongoing pandemic and climate change, we should also think about how our lives are shaped by events closer to home—things happening within half a mile of where we live.
That’s part of the message bubbling up from conversations at Boston College and the Carroll School of Management, turning light on often-unnoticed connections between personal fate and family zip code. The discussions began this fall with a visit to Chestnut Hill by leaders of a pioneering nonprofit organization, Purpose Built Communities, which seeks to reverse the fortunes of distressed urban communities.
“We consider ourselves neighborhoodists,” said Carol Naughton, chief executive officer of the Atlanta-based organization, making the point about conditions within a half-mile that sway outcomes in life. She made the comment at a forum sponsored by the Joseph E. Corcoran Center for Real Estate and Urban Action and the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics (both housed at the Carroll School), presented as the annual Jane Jacobs Lecture.
Naughton was encapsulating a philosophy of community action that emphasizes what researchers call the “centrality of place” in altering people’s circumstances, affecting especially the urban poor. The action aims at turning around neighborhoods that, for example, have no grocery stores (they’re “food deserts”), or social gathering centers such as YMCAs. Founded in 2009, Purpose Built Communities is taking on the task together with local partners in 28 cities around the United States.
The forum on October 26 brought out several dozen brave souls (students and faculty) on the night of a powerful, early-season Nor’easter. Joining Naughton on a platform beneath the choir loft in Gasson Hall was Michelle Matthews, senior vice president of Purpose Built Communities, and moderator Paul Reville, a professor of the practice at Harvard who formerly served as secretary of education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Earlier that day, the organization’s representatives also engaged in an intimate “Social Impact & Lunch” conversation sponsored by the Winston Center, involving students who take courses in Managing for Social Impact and the Public Good, an interdisciplinary minor. “Everyone deserves to live in a thriving neighborhood,” said Matthews, tempering the lofty sentiment with an unsentimental analysis of the need to bring together multiple parties, not excluding real estate developers and wealthy donors. “Let’s be honest, we live in a capitalist society.”
In many places, the story behind these neighborhoods gets deeper and darker when surveying the history of racially discriminatory policies carried out by government, according to the organization and many other researchers. That history includes, among other low points, highways that ripped through predominantly Black urban neighborhoods, isolating and segregating once-vibrant communities; and federal policies that systematically excluded Black families from access to homeownership (and thus generational wealth).
At the same time, Naughton struck a hopeful note in Gasson Hall: “If those distressed neighborhoods were engineered into existence, we could reengineer them by providing opportunities for the people who live there today.” She ended the panel discussion with an appeal to the idealism of Boston College students as they look ahead to their careers as well as their service in the future. “You’ll do work to make a living and pay the bills,” Naughton told the Eagles, alluding to familiar roles in business and the professions. “But this is the work that you will tell your grandchildren about.”
Adapted from article by William Bole in the Carroll School News