Community development is not just about building apartment units or new housing, Federal Reserve officials told a Boston audience today. It’s about lowering crime, boosting the economy, and – perhaps surprisingly – improving public health.
Government officials, community developers and public health organizations converged upon the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (FRBB) on Wednesday to discuss the links between public health and community development. The goal of the conference is to put various groups together in a brainstorming session on how to improve lower-income neighborhoods.
"Community development workers are really health care workers – we’re just on the prevention side, not the treatment side," said David Erickson, Center for Community Development Investment director for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
Better housing conditions and vibrant neighborhoods significantly decrease chronic asthma and stress-related illnesses such as heart disease; David R. Williams, Harvard University professor of public health, outlined the strong correlation between poverty and shorter life expectancy. The differences are also pronounced among black and Hispanic minorities, who tend to get sick more often and die younger than white people, he said. For example, life expectancies have increased throughout recent decades, but minorities lag behind. A black man in 1990, for example, had the same life expectancy as a white man in 1950.
Prabal Chakrabarti, assistant vice president and director of community development for the FRBB, stressed the importance of bringing different groups into collaboration together, and expressed a wish that the day’s events help community developers and public health professionals form useful connections with each other.
Paul Grogan, president and CEO of The Boston Foundation, a grant-making organization, exhorted the crowd to think big during his keynote address on Wednesday morning.
Back in the 1960s, he said, even well-respected academics and policymakers honestly believed it was useless to battle the rampant blight of America’s urban areas. But a handful of community development corporations took root in that era and began to do what they could on a smaller scale, leading eventually to flourishing communities. Boston had particularly good success with those efforts – the city would be unrecognizable to many who lived here during the 1960s and 1970s, he said.
Housing advocates were also able to create and push for a low-income housing tax credit, an idea that proved invaluable for creating housing, Grogan added. That kind of creative financial engineering is necessary today to combat the pervasive problems, such as poor health, that cities still grapple with.
"It’s time to take it to a new level," he said.
