Looking at a National Movement of Grassroots Renewal

by David Lepeska

Over the next couple of weeks, The Atlantic Cities is exploring America's rebuilding efforts in a four-part series. Read the first installment here.

A couple of sharp-eyed Midwestern academics spotted the first green shoots of a national urban rebuild three years ago.

In mid-2009, Chicago sociologist and photographer David Schalliol and Milwaukee-based urban historian Michael Carriere launched a collaborative study of creative revitalization efforts in urban areas across the country, particularly those hardest hit by decline. They've since visited more than 30 cities and turned up nearly 200 outfits and initiatives, creating a national map of grassroots renewal, from Albuquerque to Providence.

"We're seeing this huge number of groups, this ubiquity of DIY development,” says Schalliol, who is working toward a sociology doctorate at the University of Chicago. “We seem to have reached a new moment, where this kind of community-based and community-directed activism is playing a larger role in shaping the possibilities and facilitating a variety of new opportunities, from play to work to food to housing."

Some are sustainable businesses looking to redevelop a fallen neighborhood, while others are slapdash, activist-bred pop-ups that quickly come and go. Many are small-scale, longer-lasting efforts – such as turning a demolition site into a park, or reclaiming unused or abandoned buildings for housing or recreation activities.

A handful of other observers have also picked up on this movement. The Street Plans Collaborative, a group of urban planners, designers and activists, recently published their second volume of Tactical Urbanism, detailing efforts like chairbombing, guerrilla gardening and Open Streets. And author and community revitalization analyst Storm Cunningham is writing a book documenting the global rise of citizen-led regeneration and developing a website to help support it.

To Schalliol, these community-led efforts mark an unprecedented shift in the way people respond to local problems. “Rather than going to city officials and asking for help,” says Schalliol, “there's an understanding that a) the funds may not be there, b) the response may be too slow, and that c) the community itself has the capacity to deal with it.”

One of Schalliol's favorite examples is Sweet Water Organics, a Milwaukee aquaponics outfit that transformed a derelict former factory into an innovative urban fish and vegetable farm. “It's dealing with de-industrialization, trying to re-envision commerce and community,” says Schalliol.

Unlike the nationally-known Milwaukee outfit Growing Power, Sweet Water hopes to sustain itself without grants or foundation funding. “It's trying to chart a new path, with a profitable business arm and a non-profit, community education element,” says Schalliol.

The Borg Ward, an all-ages music venue and arts space in the Milwaukee's Walkers Point neighborhood, has been providing space for up-and-coming artists in the former Borgwardt Funeral and Cremation Services building since 2007. (2010)

Some organizations think they're accomplishing more than they actually are, while others underestimate their impact. Whatever the case, these small-scale efforts are certainly no silver bullet for the problems facing former industrial cities today.

“We're not positing that this DIY work can or will make up for the lost revenues," says Schalliol. "But I do think they provide a variety of models for which we can see new ways of engaging larger systemic problems and in the meantime do quite a bit of local good. As a result of this national critical mass, I think there's more of an emphasis on these issues -- and that can lead to policy changes.”

In Chicago, urban gardeners helped alter municipal policy in favor of urban agriculture. And last year, the city of Milwaukee awarded Sweet Water Organics a $250,000 loan (although some are now questioning that decision).

Schalliol lives in Chicago and has spent a good deal of time in Detroit. Carriere lives and teaches in Milwaukee. Thus, the two have done a great deal of work in those three Midwest cities. Schalliol's photos, which accompany this piece, reveal a handful of the hopeful new initiatives and the devastation that preceded them, offering a glimpse of a region bottoming out and hitting the reset button.

After showing some of Schalliol's photos at a small Milwaukee museum early this year, the duo is looking to mount a major exhibition. They're also talking with publishers, planning to publish a book on the project next year.



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originally ran on May 15, 2012 here

Welcome to the Rebuild Era

by David Lepeska


Over the next couple of weeks, The Atlantic Cities will explore America's rebuilding efforts in a four-part series. This is the first installment.

Speaking at a construction workers' conference in Washington in late April, President Barack Obama acknowledged that our highways are clogged, our airports overwhelmed, and our roads and bridges in need of repair.

"American workers built this country, and now we need American workers to rebuild this country," said the president. "Join us in this project of rebuilding America."

Leaders have been urging their citizens to rebuild at least since the ancient Greek statesman Pericles

Whether political point or post-downturn reality, the call to rebuild has been gaining traction among politicians, activists, businessfolk, and pundits, and it's about more than just infrastructure. If dubbing this an era of rebuilding requires some optimism, it might also be a necessity, particularly for American cities.

Leaders have been urging their citizens to rebuild at least since the ancient Greek statesman Pericles called his people to reconstruct their capital after Xerxes' burning of Athens in 480 B.C. Today, embattled European leaders invoke the better days to come. Egyptian presidential candidate Amr Moussa recently laid out his Rebuilding Program for post-Mubarak Egypt.

Then there's the U.S. These last few years represent the country's most difficult economic period since the Great Depression. Yet our climb out of that earlier hole offers little to inform our current situation. The initiatives established under the New Deal – such as the National Recovery Administration, the Works Progress Agency, and the National Labor Relations board – focused on construction and industry and empowering American workers.

Today, Americans are struggling to recover not only from the devastation of the Great Recession, but also a loss of faith in financial institutions, housing, American manufacturing, even the very idea that hard work inevitably pays off.

Most low-skilled jobs are gone and never coming back, and in many ways, it's cities that have suffered most. Municipal governments are hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and facing bankruptcy. Vast neighborhoods have been hollowed out by foreclosures and blight.

While Detroit's magnificent collapse is widely known, Chicago, for one, has suffered a subtler decline. As reported in a recent OECD study on the Chicago region, overall job growth here has trailed the national average for decades. And from 1960 to 1990, more than 96 percent of new regional jobs were created outside downtown Chicago, the de facto regional capital.

That economic shift away from cities was the root cause of America's urban collapse. Starting in the 1950s, the middle class – and the American Dream – migrated from urban neighborhoods to the suburbs. Industry and corporations soon followed.

Ester Fuchs, director of Columbia University's Urban and Social Policy program, details the fallout in the latest issue of Columbia's Journal of International Affairs:

America’s great cities were left in economic free fall, with concentrated poverty, unemployment, high crime rates, failing public schools and severely deteriorating physical infrastructure, including roads, mass transit and parks. Academics and policy makers agreed that cities were irrelevant to America’s economic future; they would become places for poor minorities who could not afford to move to the suburbs. Urban policy became code for social-welfare policy.

Power players came to view cities as irrelevant to economic vitality. The reelection of Ronald Reagan in 1984, writes Fuchs, "showed it was possible to win a presidential campaign while losing the vote in America's major cities."

Now it's come full circle. Americans began returning to cities in the mid-1990s, sparked in part by Mayor Giuliani's turn-around of New York City. Today, both the U.S. and the world are more urban than rural. And just as we've come to accept that cities are the engines of the global economy, the economic downturn has pulled back the curtain on our long-festering national secret.

That explains why Chicago officials are worried that their city attracts a fraction of the information workers drawn to coastal cities like Los Angeles and Seattle, and why they've begun to focus on rebuilding.

In recent weeks, local and national observers have been debating Mayor Rahm Emanuel's innovative method of financing a city-wide infrastructure rebuild. The three-year-old Rebuilding Exchange hopes to change the way Chicagoans demolish and reuse housing stock, while the Rebuild Foundation is expanding its community-through-culture vision across the Midwest.

Of course, the local is national. At Chicago's Green Festival last weekend, Van Jones spoke about his new book, Rebuild the Dream, which lays out a vision to repair our government and renew the middle class. Similarly, Obama has made middle class revitalization a central policy goal.

A new non-partisan organization, Americans United to Rebuild Democracy, seeks to set Congressional term limits and clean up campaign financing in an effort to restore faith in elected leaders. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently acknowledged, “our country needs a renewal.”

Still, the latest jobs report shows sluggish growth nationwide, while new home construction remains particularly low in the Midwest. And construction workers, like those Obama spoke to last week, still can't find work.

Yet on the day of his speech, One World Trade Center became the tallest building in New York City. Just one small step on the way to 1776 feet, but perhaps an apt moment to mark the start of the Rebuild Era.



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originally ran on May 9, 2012 at http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/05/rebuild-era/1948/

Chicago Non-Profit Wants Your Trash

by David Lepeska

for Atlantic Cities

Chicago's Rebuilding Exchange is looking to do two goods with one organization. The job-creation outfit, founded in February 2009, teaches its students how to recycle trash into a variety of furniture. "We're looking to create a market for deconstruction reuse and use it as a job training opportunity for disadvantaged communities," says Elise Zelechowski, the deputy executive director of the Delta Institute, which runs the Rebuilding Exchange.

Today, more than 100 people have completed the Rebuilding Exchange training, and 2011 revenue from sales of reclaimed wood, furniture and workshops topped $200,000. Zelechowski expects to double that total this year while diverting 2,000 tons of waste material from the landfill for recycling.

Until now, trainees have been recent prison releasees. Starting in June, a new partnership with the Cara Program will bring in people with a variety of barriers to employment, including homelessness, substance abuse, and criminal convictions.

Their training includes deconstruction, warehousing and woodworking. Of the first group of graduates, nearly 9 in 10 found work in retail, warehousing, furniture-making, or woodworking. One accepted a job with another development nonprofit, the Rebuild Foundation, on the city's South Side.

About 80 percent of Rebuilding Exchange's waste material comes from renovations, the rest from deconstruction. The material is either readied for re-sale to local businesses or used by RX Made, a line of reclaimed wood furniture built by staff and trainees and designed by local professionals.

The line includes tables, chairs, coat racks and other pieces that can now be found at some of Chicago's hipper bars and restaurants, like Longman & Eagle, 2 Sparrows, Maria's Packaged Goods, The Southern and Bang Bang Pie Shop.

Nearly 100 volunteers help Rebuilding's 12-person staff organize deconstruction training and furniture-making, as well as several public courses and workshops launched last fall. Among the most popular are the Make-It/Take-It series, in which students make an end table, mirror, or bench, and take it home. About 1,000 people have taken the courses, which cost from $65 to $150 and last three or four weeks.

The organization also hosts DIY fairs and antique and flea market events at its warehouse headquarters near the Chicago River. Still, Rebuilding receives half its annual budget from donors like the Chicago Community Trust, Polk Brothers Foundation, and Boeing. Zelechowski is confident the balance will continue to tilt away from subsidies. “We've proved that this is a viable industry, a real business model, that when handled properly, materials in the waste stream can become valuable resources,” she says.

There should be more of those materials in the future. The board of Cook County, which includes Chicago and is the country's second most populous county, approved a new management plan for solid waste this week that emphasizes reuse and recycling.

A similar emphasis could be expanded beyond Chicago. The Construction Materials Recycling Association, based in Eola, IL, estimates that Americans generate some 350 million tons of construction and demolition waste each year, though EPA estimates are lower.

Recent studies from California, Washington, Delaware, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Wisconsin suggest an average C&D waste generation rate of 1.7 pounds per person per day. Expanded nationally, these figures would mean the U.S. generates more than 500 million tons of C&D waste each year.

Accurate, recent data are hard to find, admits Zelechowski. But she's confident the foreclosure crisis has increased unused building waste. She's begun talking with people in Detroit and other distressed cities to help launch similar initiatives.

“We're really interested in working with community-based groups and municipalities in the Great Lakes region to emulate this model,” she says. “We've been at it for a while, we're still learning and continuing to innovate, and it's important to achieve some scale and make it competitive."