NJ Spotlight, Sept. 22, 2014

By Scott Gurian

According to these reports, now’s the time to act to prevent sea-level rise — and worse

Earlier this summer, the Christie administration took steps to formally withdraw from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multistate compact aimed at reducing carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade program. Gov. Chris Christie has previously called the initiative ineffective, “gimmicky” and “a failure,” and he’s said it amounts to nothing more than an unnecessary tax on utility customers. His efforts to withdraw were sharply criticized by environmental groups, who’ve filed a lawsuit forcing the state to go back and accept public comments before officially abandoning the program. Senate

Democrats have taken moves to block the state’s effort to withdraw.

Christie’s public statements on climate change have been mixed over the years. Back in 2010, he told a crowd he was skeptical that humans were responsible for global warming and that “more science” was needed to convince him. The following year, he acknowledged that “climate change is real,” that it was impacting New Jersey, and that “human activity plays a role in these changes."

But then, asked about the potential role of climate change following Sandy, the governor called it an “esoteric discussion,” claimed it’s above his pay grade, and attacked a questioner for being a member of what he called the liberal media.

Environmentalists have also pointed out that discussion of sea-level rise, climate change, and global warming are conspicuously absent from many official state documents pertaining to the Sandy recovery.

Among scientists, however, there’s little doubt about the risks New Jersey faces in the coming decade. From the “don’t say we didn’t warn you” department, here’s a list of 10 significant studies and research papers detailing some of those threats.

1. U.S. National Climate Assessment

Released last spring, this federal report warning about the future effects of climate change across the country includes a section focusing on the expected impacts on New Jersey and the northeastern part of the country. Among the specific concerns it highlights are the region’s aging infrastructure, which could be stressed by continuing severe weather and droughts. The report notes that heat waves in the state are expected to increase in frequency, intensity and duration. In addition, it says that sea level-rise along the coast is expected to exceed the global average due to local land subsidence.

2. Resilience. Preparing NJ for Climate Change: Policy Considerations from the NJ Climate Adaptation Alliance

This paper prepared by a group of policymakers, academics, NGOs, and business leaders from across the state identifies a number of vulnerabilities and issues nearly 50 recommendations for making the state more resilient to climate change in six key areas: agriculture, coastal communities, built infrastructure, natural resources, public health, and water resources. The report calls on New Jersey to incorporate consideration of future climate predictions into long-term planning, budgeting, and decision-making, and it recommends that the state once again pursue opportunities to participate in multistate initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (like RGGI).

3. New Jersey and the Surging Sea

Climate Central’s analysis finds that close to 300,000 New Jersey residents live less than five feet above the high-tide line, and are thus at particular risk of rising sea levels. What’s more, a quarter of these people live in just three zip codes in Atlantic City, Hoboken, and Wildwood.

The study notes that the annual chance of extreme coastal floods in Northern New Jersey has risen by 50 percent over the past hundred years and could reach historically unprecedented levels by the end of this century.

4. Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States

Much of the research for this report — whose cochairs include former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson — was led by Rutgers climate scientist Bob Kopp. Though it provides an assessment of the threats to the entire country, the section focusing on the Northeast does include some sobering predictions for New Jersey. By the year 2100, it says, the state could see dozens of days each year with temperatures soaring above 95 degrees. And those increasingly hot summers could have big impacts on electricity demand, mortality, and labor productivity

5. Assessing the Costs of Climate Change in New Jersey

Among the likely victims of climate change cited in this 2008 paper from the National Conference of State Legislatures and the University of Maryland’s Center for Integrative Environmental Research is New Jersey’s tourism industry, which will be affected by more severe storms, beach erosion, and the threat of regular flooding. By the end of the century, the study notes, Atlantic City is predicted to flood to the current 100-year flood level every one to two years on average. The change in weather patterns could also prove costly to the state’s transportation infrastructure, shipping ports, and agriculture industry.

6. Economic Vulnerability to Climate Change in Coastal New Jersey

This research study authored by a group of Rutgers and CUNY professors drew on interviews conducted with stakeholders in Ocean County both before and after Sandy to highlight a series of economic stresses caused by changing weather patterns. The study brought several unexpected vulnerabilities to light. For example, participants were surprised by how much damage the power grid sustained, and they found themselves unprepared for such long-term outages. In addition, prior to the storm, much of the concern was focused on how elderly and low-income residents would be impacted, but many middle-income homeowners found that they also lacked adequate insurance coverage or savings to repair their damages.

7. State of the Climate: New Jersey 2013

The Rutgers Climate Institute notes in this report that the statewide average temperature in 2012 was the highest in 118 years of recordkeeping and that nine of the 10 warmest calendar years on record have occurred since 1990. At the same time, precipitation has increased, though much of this has come in the form of heavy downfalls and winter storms. Sea levels also continue to rise. These continuing trends will have detrimental impacts on public health, as allergy seasons expand, as well as on coastal fisheries, the report says.

8. Future Sea Level Rise and the New Jersey Coast: Assessing Potential Impacts and Opportunities

A 2005 Princeton University study that looked at flooding and coastal inundation over the next century recommended a gradual withdrawal of development from the most sensitive areas of the coast. The study also warns that sea-level rise could threaten the state’s water supply, since advancing salt water contaminates freshwater resources. In addition, the changing climate could spell trouble for natural wildlife habitats, including the homes of many threatened and endangered species.

9. Building Coastal Resilience: Using Scenario Planning to Address Uncertainty and Change

This report issued by the Regional Plan Association in the aftermath of Sandy considers four possible scenarios of how the future could unfold, based on how officials in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut metropolitan region respond to the threats of climate change. It also includes a thorough explanation of the various sorts of “coastal adaptation strategies” that can be employed, including dunes, bulkheads, levees, building elevation, floodproofing, and strategic retreat from the shoreline.

10. Meeting NJ’s 2020 Greenhouse Gas Limit: NJ’s Global Warming Response Act Recommendations Report

Unlike all the other reports and papers on this list, this one was actually written by the NJ Department of Environmental Protection itself, in 2009 under then-Governor Jon Corzine. It was released pursuant to a law state legislators had passed two years earlier that would have required New Jersey to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by the year 2020 and 80 percent below 2006 levels by the middle of the century.

“Not only does climate change threaten New Jersey’s shoreline and ecology, but the socioeconomic impacts of climate change stand to be profound and costly,” acting DEP Commissioner Mark Mauriello wrote in his cover letter to Corzine. But just a few weeks later, Christie became governor. He closed the DEP’s Office of Climate Change and Energy, eliminating funding for carrying out the Global Warming Response Act.

Copyright 2014 NJ Spotlight

NJ.com, Sept. 18, 2014

By Carla Astudillo

New Jersey was one of three states that saw both a jump in the number of people living in poverty and the poverty rate in 2013, according to new Census numbers.

The data released on Thursday shows that while the poverty rates in most states has plateaued, New Jersey’s poverty rate actually went up from 10.8 percent in 2012 to 11.4 percent in 2013.

The other two states that posted an increase were New Mexico and Washington.

The announcement comes two days after the Census released a separate report stating that the nationwide poverty rate declined slightly for the first time since 2006.

“It was a surprise to us, and a bit disturbing”, said Melville D. Miller president of Legal Services of New Jersey, who had predicted that the new Census numbers for New Jersey would either remain stagnant or decrease slightly because of decreasing unemployment rates.

Miller said the increase could be due to the fact that even previously unemployed people who have found work may still may remain at the poverty level.

“I resist making any sweeping generalizations,” he added. But, when combined with some of the other economic trends that he said he has observed such as declining wages, the new data is “worrisome.”

The actual number of people living in poverty increased from 934,943 in 2012 to 998,549 in 2013.

There were plenty of signs that poverty rate would increase, including an increase in food stamp participants and a spike in foreclosure rates, said Raymond Castro from New Jersey Policy Perspective.

“It may seem that the national economy is improving. Wall Street and major corporations are certainly doing better,” said Castro. “But, that’s just not trickling down to many New Jerseyans.”

Even as New Jersey’s poverty rate continue to increase, it still remains still well below the national average of 15.8 percent.

The Census also included county numbers which show Cumberland had the highest poverty rate in New Jersey at 20.6%, followed by Hudson (19.7%) and Salem counties (18.4%)

Mirroring the statewide trend, most counties also saw an increase in the number of people living in poverty and the poverty rate.

However, Stephanie Hoopes Halpin, Assistant Research Professor at Rutgers, said that even though Census county data tends to be pretty accurate with a reasonable margin of error, the numbers still need to be put into context, especially in counties with small populations such as Salem and Warren.

“I wouldn’t take them as absolute numbers,” Hoopes Halpin said. “But that it’s an indicator that there’s something worth of investigating.”

In addition, she added, the higher poverty rates in Atlantic and Cape May counties may be due to residents still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Sandy.

Hoopes Halpin also questioned the rates in light of how the government measures poverty across the country. The federal government uses the same benchmarks, developed more than 50 years ago, to measure poverty in every state. The cost of living is not only higher in New Jersey, but it also varies widely among New Jersey’s counties.

The actual number of people living in poverty in New Jersey, therefore, is likely higher than the Census reflects, said Hoopes Halpin. In a study conducted for Rutgers and United Way, Hoopes Halpin said she took into account the varied cost
of living expenses and showed that 38 percent of New Jersey households are struggling to meet basic needs.

“It’s so frustrating to have this archaic number used in the Census,” she said. “I worry that it hides a lot of hardship.”

2013 Poverty Rates in New Jersey

Atlantic County- 18%
Bergen County- 8.2%
Burlington County- 5.7%
Camden County- 15%
Cape May County- 9.4%
Cumberland County- 20.6%
Essex County- 17.8%
Gloucester County- 9.8%
Hudson County- 19.7%
Hunterdon County- 3.3%
Mercer County- 11.8%
Middlesex County- 9.5%
Monmouth County- 7.7%
Morris County- 4.3%
Ocean County- 10.2%
Passaic County-16.6%
Salem County- 18.4%
Somerset County- 5.3%
Sussex County- 5.8%
Union County- 11.5%
Warren County- 9.3%

The NAACP today released a brief (23 pg.) report explaining good energy policies compared to New Jersey’s official policies.  The report is easy to understand and provides information on policies that New Jersey should adopt.   Excellent work by NAACP’s Jacqui Patterson and her team.  Highly recommended.  Get your copy here:  http://goo.gl/15w9ad
 

Climate Progress, Sept. 15, 2014

By Emily Atkin

More carbon dioxide was emitted into our atmosphere between 2012 and 2013 than in any other year since 1984, putting humans on the fast track toward irreversible global warming, the United Nation’s weather agency said in a report released Tuesday.

The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin showed that the increase of atmospheric CO2 from 2012 to 2013 was 2.9 parts per million (ppm), the largest year-to-year increase in 30 years. Because of that growth, the average amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached 396 ppm — just 9 ppm away from an average level some scientists believe could cause enough sea level rise, drought, and severe weather to significantly harm human populations across the globe.

“The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin shows that, far from falling, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere actually increased last year at the fastest rate for nearly 30 years,” WMO Secretary General Michel Jarraud said in a statement. “We must reverse this trend by cutting emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases across the board. We are running out of time.”

International climate negotiations generally center around preventing global average temperatures to rise 2°C above preindustrial levels, a threshold that U.N. scientists say dangerously increases the risks of severe weather, sea level rise and extermination of species. Some scientists say the 2°C increase could happen if average carbon concentrations reach 405 ppm, while others say closer to 450 ppm. At our current average of 396 ppm, temperatures have already risen 0.8°C (1.4° Fahrenheit).

To solve the problem of climate change, scientists generally agree that concentrated carbon levels in the atmosphere need to stabilize at 350 ppm. That means taking carbon dioxide and other more concentrated greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide out of the atmosphere.

According to the WMO’s report, though, methane concentrations are also on the rise. Atmospheric methane reached a record high of about 1824 parts per billion (ppb) in 2013, the report said, due to increased emissions from humans. Most human-caused methane emissions come from natural gas production, followed closely by industrial agriculture.

Even though there have been large increases of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, however the report noted that the ocean has been absorbing more and more of it, causing widespread acidification of the sea. Comparing current data of the ocean’s acid content with paleo archives over the last 300 million years, the WMO called the sea’s current rate of souring “unprecedented.”

Major concerns with acidification include large-scale die-offs of calcifying organisms like coral, algae, mollusks, and plankton, and a general decrease in biodiversity.

“If global warming is not a strong enough reason to cut CO2 emissions, ocean acidification should be, since its effects are already being felt and will increase for many decades to come,” Wendy Watson-Wright, the executive secretary of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, said. “It is high time the ocean, as the primary driver of the planet’s climate and attenuator of climate change, becomes a central part of climate change discussions.”

As the WMO notes, the ocean currently soaks up about a quarter of human-caused CO2 emissions, which has reduced the amount of observed carbon in atmosphere. However, the WMO report says the ocean’s capacity for absorbing carbon is decreasing, which will eventually lead to a speed-up in atmospheric warming. Indeed, the ocean’s ability to hold carbon is only 70 percent of what it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. By the end of the twenty-first century, it could be reduced to 20 percent, the WMO said.

At the same time, the oceans are also soaking up a lot of the trapped heat that would otherwise be retained by the atmosphere. This has perpetuated the oft-debunked argument from climate deniers that the earth “hasn’t seen any warming for 17 years,” as evidenced by a supposed lack of increase in global average surface temperature. (At the same time, the heat content of the ocean is rapidly rising.)

The good news is, according to WMO, that action can still be taken to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and prevent catastrophic global warming through cooperative international policymaking. The WMO urged policymakers worldwide to use their report as a “scientific base for decision-making.”

“We have the knowledge and we have the tools for action to try keep temperature increases within 2°C to give our planet a chance and to give our children and grandchildren a future,” Jarraud said. “Pleading ignorance can no longer be an excuse for not acting.”

© 2005-2014 Center for American Progress Action Fund

NY Times, Sept. 7, 2014

By Charles M. Blow

Discussions of the relationship between blacks and the criminal justice system in this country too often grind to a halt as people slink down into their silos and arm themselves with their best rhetorical weapons — racial bias on one side and statistics in which minorities, particularly blacks, are overrepresented as criminals on the other.

What I find too often overlooked in this war of words is the intersection between the two positions, meaning the degree to which bias informs the statistics and vice versa.

The troubling association — in fact, overassociation — of blacks with criminality directly affects the way we think about both crime and blacks as a whole.

A damning report released by the Sentencing Project last week lays bare the bias and the interconnecting systemic structures that reinforce it and disproportionately affect African-Americans.

This is the kind of report that one really wants to publish in its totality, for its conclusion is such a powerful condemnation of the perversity of racial oppression. But alas, this being a newspaper column, that’s not possible. Still, allow me to present many of their findings:

• “Whites are more punitive than blacks and Hispanics even though they experience less crime.”

• “White Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color and associate people of color with criminality. For example, white respondents in a 2010 survey overestimated the actual share of burglaries, illegal drug sales and juvenile crime committed by African-Americans by 20 percent to 30 percent.”

• “White Americans who associate crime with blacks and Latinos are more likely to support punitive policies — including capital punishment and mandatory minimum sentencing — than whites with weaker racial associations of crime.”

This association of crime with blacks has been noted by others. Lisa Bloom, in her book “Suspicion Nation,” points out: “While whites can and do commit a great deal of minor and major crimes, the race as a whole is never tainted by those acts. But when blacks violate the law, all members of the race are considered suspect.”

She further says: “The standard assumption that criminals are black and blacks are criminals is so prevalent that in one study, 60 percent of viewers who viewed a crime story with no picture of the perpetrator falsely recalled seeing one, and of those, 70 percent believed he was African-American. When we think about crime, we ‘see black,’ even when it’s not present at all.”

As the Sentencing Project report makes clear, the entire government and media machinery is complicit in the distortion.

According to the report:

• “Whether acting on their own implicit biases or bowing to political exigency, policy makers have fused crime and race in their policy initiatives and statements. They have crafted harsh sentencing laws that impact all Americans and disproportionately incarcerate people of color.”

• “Many media outlets reinforce the public’s racial misconceptions about crime by presenting African-Americans and Latinos differently than whites — both quantitatively and qualitatively. Television news programs and newspapers overrepresent racial minorities as crime suspects and whites as crime victims.”

• “Disparities in police stops, in prosecutorial charging, and in bail and sentencing decisions reveal that implicit racial bias has penetrated all corners of the criminal justice system.”

The effects of these perceptions and policies have been absolutely devastating for society in general and black people in particular. According to the report:

• “By increasing support for punitive policies, racial perceptions of crime have made sentencing more severe for all Americans. The United States now has the world’s highest imprisonment rate, with one in nine prisoners serving life sentences. Racial perceptions of crime, combined with other factors, have led to the disparate punishment of people of color. Although blacks and Latinos together comprise just 30 percent of the general population, they account for 58 percent of the prison population.”

• “By increasing the scale of criminal sanctions and disproportionately directing penalties toward people of color, racial perceptions of crime have been counterproductive for public safety. Racial minorities’ perceptions of unfairness in the criminal justice system have dampened cooperation with police work and impeded criminal trials. In 2013, over two-thirds of African-Americans saw the criminal justice system as biased against blacks, in contrast to one-quarter of whites. Crime policies that disproportionately target people of color can increase crime rates by concentrating the effects of criminal labeling and collateral consequences on racial minorities and by fostering a sense of legal immunity among whites.”

There is no way in this country to discuss crime statistics without including in that discussion the myriad ways in which those statistics are informed and influenced by the systemic effects of racial distortion.

Individual behavior is not the only component of the numbers; bias is the other.

© 2014 The New York Times Company

NJ.com, Sept. 14, 2014

By Stephen Stirling

Every day, Kim Ticehurst walks a financial tightrope.

A single mother in Montclair, Ticehurst lost her job in the construction industry in January. At 50, she has decades of experience in project management, planning, organization and design, but the scores of resumés she has submitted have been met with no response.

“It’s a horrible feeling,” she said last week. “You definitely confront times when you’re like ‘how do I get through this day?’”

She has pieced together employment, working part-time in childcare while she tries to get her new home-organization business off the ground. For the first time in months, she’s feeling optimistic.

But she knows the littlest of things, from a toothache to a car accident, could turn her life upside-down.

“There are things like that that are piling up and I know right now they are just going to sit in that pile,” Ticehurst said, pointing to a stack of papers on her desk. “I am feeling optimistic, but it’s hard when you have kids (this) young. (My daughter) wants to go to Disney. It’s just not in the budget. That’s a wild fantasy at this point.”

A new study conducted by the United Way of Northern New Jersey shows an alarming number of New Jersey residents are in Ticehurst’s position. Data compiled by the group show that 38 percent of New Jersey households are struggling to meet basic needs. These households are just scraping by, one lost job or medical emergency away from potential fiscal ruin.

The report, called ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed), paints a stark picture of how widespread financial hardship like Ticehurst’s is in New Jersey.

While 11 percent of state residents fall below the Federal Poverty Line, which stands at an annual income of $22,811 for a family of four, the report found that when adjusted for cost of living the same family needs nearly triple that — $61,200 – just to meet a basic survival budget.

In one of the wealthiest states in the country, 1.2 million households fall below this threshold. And while the state’s economy has shown signs of recovery in the wake of the Great Recession, the number of households struggling by the United Way measure increased by about 24 percent from 2007 to 2012, the most recent data available.

“I had expected things would have improved since the recession, to be honest,” said Stephanie Hoopes Halpin, the author of the report and director of the New Jersey DataBank at Rutgers University. “I think what strikes me most is how vulnerable these people are. You look at Superstorm Sandy, for example. You had tons of people who didn’t even take on any water during the storm, but had their savings wiped out just by not working for two weeks. You have to think about the fact that there are individual emergencies like that every day that don’t get national headlines.”

For Ticehurst, a recent tooth infection turned into a weeks-long ordeal.

A MediCaid recipient, Ticehurst was only able to reschedule an appointment for a needed root canal several weeks from the time the pain in her mouth began. While she waited, attending to her day-to-day responsibilities, the pain worsened.

"It became unbearable," she said. "Finally, when it became an emergency situation, I was able to get it taken care of. Unfortunately, by that point, the tooth had to be removed, which is another issue I have to deal with."

She acknowledged that under better conditions, it likely could have been taken care of quickly. Instead, due to fiscal constraints, it became an unavoidable and drawn out focal point of her life.

Situations like Ticehurst’s are all too common.

The United Way report shows that while New Jersey is an economically diverse state where the cost-of-living varies widely, state households have continued to struggle across the board since the recession.

Among the findings:

• ALICE households exist in every age bracket in New Jersey, but the largest segment of the group is those who are typically in their income earning prime. Households headed by those aged 25-64 represent 75 percent of those beneath the ALICE threshold.

• The average budget needed to provide basic needs, both for the individual and the family household in New Jersey, increased by 19 percent from 2007 to 2012.

• High paying jobs are scarce. Jobs paying less than $40,000 a year now comprise 53 percent of all jobs in New Jersey, and these jobs are projected to be the primary source of labor growth in the coming years.

“I think this sort of verifies for all of us that ALICE isn’t going away,” said John Franklin, CEO of the United Way of Northern New Jersey. “People really begin to understand that we’re not just talking about some number somewhere. We’re talking about a huge portion of our population.”

While there have been signs of economic recovery in New Jersey, they have been weaker than hoped.

The state’s unemployment rate was 6.6 percent in June, down from 8.4 at the same time in 2013. The United Way report also shows while ALICE households have continued to increase since 2007, the rate of growth slowed considerably from 2010 to 2012.

And New Jersey Legal Services, who has published two similar reports on poverty in recent weeks, predicts that when new Census data is published Tuesday, it will show that the number of poor residents in New Jersey has plateaued or declined slightly.

New Jersey Legal Services Director Melville D. Miller was quick to note that while a potential decline in the poverty rate is good news, it still leaves the state at near record levels.

“The real question is are we making any substantive long-term progress, and right now it’s difficult to see any real strong evidence of that,” Miller said.

While the improved unemployment numbers are encouraging, Carl Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, said they don’t reveal the true nature of what has been a weak recovery.

“For people in poverty, their attempt to escape from poverty has been more difficult because of the large number of people with more education than them competing for available jobs,” Van Horn said. “And in our own research here, we found that more than half of Americans who were able to get another job, their next job was either lower-paying or paid the same.”

“So people are either staying where they were or they’re downwardly mobile.”

Ticehurst is hopeful that her new business venture, called NEST-cessities, will take off, but she knows it’s a risk. Barring a miracle, she said, her family won’t be able to afford to stay in the apartment much longer.

“You can hang on for a little while, but six months comes up on you really quick. It’s hard,” she said of life after losing her job.

A Newark native, Ticehurst has lived with her 8 year-old daughter in a neatly organized, one-bedroom apartment above a restaurant in Montclair for the last four years. Her daughter occupies the bedroom, while she sleeps on a single bed just outside the door – except on Fridays.

“The restaurant gets noisy on Friday nights, so we have to sleep out here,” she said, pointing at the living room. “It’s not terrible, but you can’t sleep."

But like so many in New Jersey in her situation, Ticehurst said she will forge ahead, controlling what she can and girding for obstacles that she can’t. Her only goal, she said, is to find a way to maintain some form of stability for her daughter.

“It’s the foundation of whether I am a success or whether I am a failure,” she said. “I never imagined I’d be in this position at this age – a mother with such a questionable job situation. I just don’t want to let her down.”

The Democracy Collaborative
Sept. 10, 2014

Fostering resilient communities and building wealth in today’s local economies is necessary to achieve individual, regional, and national economic security. A community wealth-building strategy employs a range of forms of community ownership and asset building strategies to build wealth in low-income communities. In so doing, community wealth building bolsters the ability of communities and individuals to increase asset ownership, anchor jobs locally, expand the provision of public services, and ensure local economic stability.

Effective community wealth building requires rethinking present policies, redirecting resources, breaking old boundaries, and forging new alliances. Over the past few decades, despite limited government support, new and alternative forms of community-supportive economic enterprises have increasingly emerged in cities and towns across the country as an important counter-trend to the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, income, and opportunity. In contrast to traditional economic development strategies that use local resources to attract outside investment, these wealth-building strategies leverage local resources to generate local equity and community-owned initiatives.

A key need now is to develop and promote policies that can build upon, support, and codify these emerging strategies, especially at the state and local levels, where there are significant opportunities to enact progressive economic development and wealth building policies. As they develop, these experiments in the “state and local laboratories of democracy,” are likely to generate larger national applications.

Our new report, which can be downloaded below, is a representative survey of some key emerging best practices in state and local policy-making to support community wealth building — designed to support economic inclusion goals, create quality jobs with family-supporting wages, address generational poverty, stabilize communities and the environment, and address growing wealth inequality. The recommendations below build off our work since 2005 tracking innovative state, local, and national strategies strategies through our Community-Wealth.org website, where we have paid close attention to the policies that have helped scale and generalize best practices in community wealth building since the emergence of the field. Our recommendations also draw specifically from our work to develop a model national policy to support comprehensive community wealth building in our 2010 report Rebuilding America’s Communities: A Comprehensive Community Wealth Building Federal Policy Proposal, our 2013 invited proposal of a policy agenda for community wealth building to the Illinois Governor’s Task Force on Social Innovation, as well as our work on the ground with policy makers and economic development officials in cities like Cleveland, Ohio and Jacksonville, Florida.

In what follows, we have tried to highlight both low-hanging fruit — tested policies with proven track records in multiple jurisdictions—as well as more promising aspirational experiments, pointing towards more systemic economic transformation. It has been our experience, as advocates for community wealth building working across the US and beyond, that policymakers and local stakeholders are much more open to transformative measures than one might expect, but only if these measures are grounded in a foundation of empirical rigor and pragmatic realism about the political and economic constraints faced on the ground. We have also found that policies which mobilize broad coalitions of stakeholders in their implementation are much more robust than policies which are identified with the efforts of a single political actor. The selected recommendations below, therefore, focus in particular on “what works” and what works best when communities work together.

Date: Sep 2014

Publisher: The Democracy Collaborative

Download:

PoliciesForCommunityWealthBuilding-September2014-final.pdf