While Byrne ended up unfunded, Promise and Choice survived with $30 million and $65 million apiece—far less than Obama requested but more than might have been expected in a political environment where concern for the poor is absent.
City Limits Magazine
July-August 2011:
Remember Poverty? The Problem 1.5 Million New Yorkers Can't Afford to Forget
Related Coverage
Even Entrepreneurs Need Food Stamps 07.12.11
From Blue-Collar to the Welfare Line 07.12.11
What Would Help Poor New Yorkers? Take Your Pick 07.12.11
The Poor Have Numbers. Do They Count? 07.12.11
One Woman's Plan to Beat Poverty 07.12.11
Sharon's Homework: Self-Sufficiency 07.12.11
Documentary
News Topics
The Economy
Justice
Education
Housing and Development
Government
Author
Jarrett Murphy
About | Twitter | RSS
Obama began to chart his antipoverty approach in a 2007 campaign speech in which he praised the work of Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, an effort launched in 1994 to provide comprehensive services to all residents of a low-income, 97-block area of central Harlem. About a decade into that effort, the HCZ launched the first of two charter schools that have become the hub of the entire Harlem project. Promise Neighborhoods is an effort to take that idea of school-generated neighborhood change and replicate it in other communities.
Choice Neighborhoods reflects a similar approach but has a different ancestry: It grew out of experience with the 1990s HOPE VI public housing renovation program. HOPE VI was launched to deal with distressed public housing developments, and it succeeded in destroying tens of thousands of units of failed housing (as well as some that were not in failure).
But many HOPE projects did not replace the demolished housing with anything that truly improved the neighborhood or the prospects for its public housing residents, in part because the program looked narrowly at housing and not at the other elements—economic development, schools, public safety, health care—that make a neighborhood viable. As HOPE's shortcomings became apparent, latter-year HOPE grantees began to employ a more comprehensive approach, one that evolved into Choice Neighborhoods.
"Some of the best HOPE VI innovations were strategies that went beyond the housing and that went beyond the walls of the development" to look at education and the labor market, says Luke Tate, special assistant to U.S. housing secretary (and former New York City housing chief) Shaun Donovan. "It necessitated reaching into the neighborhood in a more integrated way rather than having public housing separate and apart from the neighborhood."
Similarly, the Byrne Criminal Justice Initiative was an outgrowth of the Department of Justice's weed-and-seed program, which combated localized crime by combining law enforcement and community restoration.
All three programs reflect the administration's belief in place-based strategies that coordinate multiple agencies and programs to improve a particular neighborhood, city or region. This approach undergirds not only anti-poverty funding but also Obama's urban-planning strategy, where the Partnership for Sustainable Communities is pooling funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation to address interlinked housing, transit and environmental challenges that particular places face. In 2009, the White House ordered all federal agencies to conduct a place-based review of their policies to see where arbitrary borders between departments might be adjusted to make programs work better and cheaper.
