This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.
Author Archives: Guest Author
Containing Gentrification: A Story from the Nation’s Capital
This is the third article in NPQ’s series titled Owning the Economy: Stories from Latinx Communities. Coproduced with the National Association for Latino Community Asset Builders, a national network of Latinx community development groups, this series highlights community preservation, land ownership, and business development efforts in Latinx and immigrant communities across the country.
Gentrification is a complex and sensitive issue facing residents in many US cities. In Washington, DC, the gentrification process has been extraordinarily pronounced—with metro neighborhoods showing among the greatest level of resident displacement of any US city. A 2019 study found that between 2000 and 2013 at least 20,000 Black residents had been displaced from the city’s neighborhoods.
Into this mix has come the Purple Line—a $3.4 billion, 16.2-mile light-rail line project. On the positive side of the ledger, the Purple Line promises to provide public transit connectivity to residents in many Montgomery County and Prince George’s County communities in suburban Maryland. At the same time, the transit line—and the development that it portends—threatens to accelerate resident and business displacement. Construction began in 2017, was stalled due to now-resolved legal challenges, recommenced in 2022, and is slated to be completed in 2026.
Transit projects can be dangerous for small businesses, especially small businesses owned by people of color, for two reasons. First, there is the disruption of the construction project itself. Second, even before the transit project is complete, real estate prices often rise, leading to knock-on effects that raise rents and often price businesses owned by people of color out of the community.
With the Purple Line, the stakes are high. Many of the suburbs along the corridor, particularly those in Prince George’s County, have historically been cultural and economic hubs for immigrant and BIPOC communities.
The demographic data are clear. In the west in Bethesda and Chevy Chase, both in Montgomery County, the population is nearly 75 percent White—and wealthy: Bethesda’s median household income is $178,000 while in Chevy Chase that number climbs to $250,000. Meanwhile, Riverdale and the International Corridor, both in Prince George’s County, are more than 85 percent BIPOC and median income is more modest ($64,000 in Riverdale and $71,000 in the International Corridor).
Businesses in these communities knew a new transit line was likely to upend their local communities and that they had to organize to protect their interests. Because construction will continue for three more years (at least), the struggles are ongoing.
Nonetheless, what has emerged is an inspiring story of a Black and Latinx community learning to organize itself. There is much to be learned from these businesses turned reluctant community organizers. Negotiating the politics of transit projects is not easy. But in doing so, these business owners are working hard to make development without displacement a reality in a region where gentrification and displacement of BIPOC communities has too often been the norm.
Protecting Community Businesses
When external changes impact a commercial corridor, nearby longstanding small businesses are often disrupted, displaced, and closed.
Given the demographics, it is likely that displacement effects associated with the Purple Line will be felt most intensely by the immigrant, Latinx, and Black communities. This potential displacement marks at least the second time these groups have been pushed out by redevelopment and rising property values in the region. In the 1990s, similar cost-related shifts pushed people of color- and immigrant-owned businesses out of Washington, DC. Today, gentrification is reaching into the same Maryland suburbs where people of color relocated previously.
When external changes impact a commercial corridor, nearby longstanding small businesses are often disrupted, displaced, and closed. Take the case of Atinuke “Tinu” Ogunsalu and her family, who established roots and built wealth in Riverdale Park, MD, after migrating to the United States from Nigeria. Ogunsalu and her family opened their restaurant in 1998. Called Queensway, the award-winning restaurant serves West African cuisine.
Ogunsalu spoke at the Purple Line Corridor Coalition’s first “Annual Celebration of Community and Leadership.” The coalition is an intentional collaboration that seeks to advance an equity focus to address the risk of small business displacement in BIPOC communities. The inaugural meeting helped underline the tensions inherent in large-scale economic development projects.
Ogunsalu talked about the construction’s effects on her family-owned business. She also spoke about how interventions from members of the coalition have bolstered her faith in the future of her business. Coalition members include a range of public and nonprofit partners, including the two county governments, the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland, and housing and community business support groups.
Among the coalition participants is the organization I work for, the Latino Economic Development Corporation. Our nonprofit serves as a community development financial institution and provides technical assistance to BIPOC and immigrant-based businesses, with a focus on the Latinx community. Ogunsalu first contacted LEDC to apply for a Paycheck Protection Program forgivable loan after being rejected by a major financial institution. But now Ogunsalu had to address the potential of displacement due to the transit construction project.
Learning from Our History
As noted above, the greater Washington, DC, region is no stranger to gentrification. An earlier example of development in suburban Maryland was the Wheaton Revitalization Project, designed to house several Montgomery County government offices and the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Construction began in 2017. The 308,000-square-foot,14-story building was completed in 2021. However, this project significantly impacted small businesses in the neighborhood.
The construction site included a county-operated parking lot. During construction, parking spaces for the hundreds of primarily Latinx and immigrant-owned microenterprises in the neighborhood were reduced from 126 to 15 heavily regulated parking spaces. Construction also brought road closures, utility shutoffs, disruption in pedestrian walkability, noise, and dust. These disruptions led to a loss of revenue and, in some instances, immediate closure.
The Small Business Assistance Program administered by Montgomery County’s Department of Finance provided financial assistance of up to $125,000 through an impact-based grant. The program also required that participating businesses receive technical assistance from a nonprofit partner, in this case, LEDC. This public-nonprofit partnership helped more than 60 businesses surrounding the construction site survive the construction period.
Legislative Victory
Advocacy strategies are a vital element in how this coalition came together to support small businesses along the Purple Line Corridor—especially in BIPOC, immigrant, and Latinx business districts. It was understood that organizing with small businesses is challenging. Leverage is typically held by the landlord. Commercial leases routinely include clauses that assign all repairs to the tenant, require personal guarantees, and assess excessive Common Area Maintenance Charges. The need to develop a robust organizing action plan and strategy was obvious.
For LEDC, a focus area of our Purple Line advocacy was along the Bonifant Street corridor in downtown Silver Spring. A key vector of the strategy was legislative. Prodded by LEDC, local business owners, and our allies, in 2018, Maryland Delegate Jheanelle Wilkins introduced House Bill 0978, which would provide a tax credit to businesses affected by construction. While there had been previous county initiatives to support small businesses impacted by construction disruption from county projects, there was no precedent at the state level, which meant there was a significant need for education and advocacy to peer legislators.
The 2018 effort fell short, but that was only the first attempt. In 2019, LEDC staff organized meetings between Delegate Wilkins, county officials, Purple Line transit partners, and Bonifant Street business owners. We invited two business owners to testify in Annapolis to support an impact mitigation program for small businesses.
Ultimately, Wilkins’s bills became the foundation of the Transit Safety and Investment Act, which passed in 2021 and established a $2 million grant program for fiscal years 2023 and 2024. As the Sierra Club’s Maryland chapter noted, passage required a broad coalition including support from environmental, transportation, business, labor, disability rights, civil rights, education, workforce development, faith, healthcare, and community groups.
A Larger Challenge
Power, influence, and organizing show up differently in the communities that we serve. Along the corridor’s more affluent, White sections residents could hire lawyers and sue the construction authority, which was done repeatedly. Those lawsuits, although failing at every turn, have added to the chaos of construction and have contributed to project setbacks. The resulting multiyear delays weigh heavily on BIPOC and immigrant communities that rely on their family businesses for their livelihoods.
If [neighborhood residents] leave…so too will the Spanish-speaking businesses that rely on them.
One example of what is at stake can be seen in La Unión Mall, an indoor Latinx shopping mall in Langley Park near the border of Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. The shopping center is part of a broader majority-Latinx commercial district. This area along University Boulevard, known as Maryland’s International Corridor, is home to one of the region’s largest Latinx communities and dozens of pupuserias (which sell stuffed corn tortillas), Central American bakeries, and supermarkets that sell piñatas alongside tortillas.
Jorge Sactic, the owner of Chapina Bakery, said he could start making doughnuts and bagels to complement his specialty Guatemalan bread if his clientele changes. But he worries that many neighborhood residents, including those who cram into apartments to share rent costs, will be priced out. If they leave, he said, so too will the Spanish-speaking businesses that rely on them.
We are very much in the middle of this struggle. We understand the road is long and the need for advocacy is ongoing.
Sactic, it should be noted, is not just a business owner but a community leader who is regularly cited in local media. His influence was clear when we visited as we witnessed individuals approaching him as he sat and drank coffee outside his tiny bakery. In 2022 he ran for the Maryland House of Delegates. While he only received two percent of the vote, his candidacy speaks to the desire for small business owners like him to have much more of a say in the political process.
There remains much work to do. The fact that the Purple Line has faced multiple delays and won’t open until fall 2026 at the earliest means we are very much in the middle of this struggle. We understand the road is long and the need for advocacy is ongoing.
The Purple Line, of course, is a complex project that is not only expensive but also touches many communities. These include both wealthy, largely White suburbs on the western end of the line in Montgomery County, and the majority BIPOC suburbs in the central part of the line (still in Montgomery County) and on the eastern end of the line in Prince George’s County.
In 2018, the coalition, of which LEDC is a steering committee member, formed its Small Business Action Team. LEDC co-chairs this group, which consists mostly of technical assistance providers along the corridor, to coordinate services and efforts to preserve small businesses affected by the construction.
This work is a small part of a hard-won community development agreement, which only occurred after significant public pressure. Indeed, the existence of the coalition itself was the product of years of organizing. More than 150 “labor, environmental, civic, and business groups, as well as local officials [came together] to form the Purple Line Corridor Coalition,” according to Dan Reed of the leading DC local news site, Greater Greater Washington. Goal one of the coalition could not be clearer—to ensure that “diverse, locally established businesses prosper both during and after the construction period.”
This effort has led to some wins. The community development agreement of 2018 and the legislative victory of 2021 have helped fund technical assistance that is keeping many BIPOC-owned businesses alive. For example, during an outreach visit to the Queensway Restaurant owned by the Ogunsalu family, a coalition consultant learned that the business had been operating without air conditioning and in a severely deteriorated building. It appeared that the owner was actively disinvesting in the property.
The consultant flagged the case for further discussion, leading to a walk-through with local government officials, area community members, nonprofit partners, coalition staff, and additional consultants. The visit led to new knowledge about a municipal code enforcement policy that had recently been extended to cover commercial properties. As of the fall of 2022, some cleanup occurred at this commercial plaza. What began as outreach by one nonprofit flourished into a working relationship with a community of stakeholders who understand the importance of protecting legacy businesses such as Queensway Restaurant.
However, the displacement risk persists. To address this, the coalition is forming a loose real estate working group to understand the financial, policy, and development mechanisms available to support Queensway and other businesses.
An Ongoing Struggle
While there have been many individual business wins, there is no tool available to fight the cynicism or feelings of disenfranchisement or disempowerment when businesses see inaction from the local government and its partners.
Small businesses along the Purple Line light-rail construction project still struggle to access the capital they need to survive. Recently, the coalition has been making efforts to contract with commercial real estate brokers to focus on supporting small business relocation, preferably along the Purple Line construction corridor; identifying existing vacancies and opportunities; and attracting new entrepreneurs. Another priority is strengthening commercial renter protections in Prince George’s County.
Coordination among transit authorities, local government agencies, and community-based organizations is critical to mitigate the negative impacts of construction and to avoid displacement stemming from the rising commercial rents that greater transit access typically brings.
The good news is that while the challenges facing small businesses along the Purple Line project are complex, viable solutions do exist. Groups like the coalition advocate for policies that support equitable development, help preserve small businesses, and create opportunities for new entrepreneurs.
It will not happen overnight, but with continued effort, the Purple Line Corridor can become a thriving hub for building community wealth in Black and Latinx communities in Prince George’s County.
This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.
“Educational Purposes”: Nonprofit Land as a Vital Site of Struggle
Editors’ note: This article is from Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine’s summer 2023 issue, “Movement Economies: Making Our Vision a Collective Reality.”
At the height of the pandemic, I was swept up in a titanic battle being waged over the right to a city. 1 That city was New Haven, Connecticut. I found myself in the middle of a David and Goliath struggle between the citizens of the town and its biggest economic powerhouse: Yale University. At the center of the story remains a pivotal question, with implications that reach far beyond New Haven: Who actually benefits from the land controlled by wealthy nonprofits?
There was no better example of the costs of wealthy nonprofit land control than Yale University’s dominance over New Haven. And the city’s residents were starting to push back. 2020 found New Haven residents, organized by the coalition New Haven Rising, storming the city’s March 30th Zoom budget meeting to express their disgust at Yale University’s continued strain on the city’s finances. In a campaign that was ultimately called “Yale: Pay Your Fair Share,” many pointed to the university’s vast, tax-exempt property holdings as one of the biggest landholders in the city. This publicly subsidized real estate portfolio, as they pointed out, sits in sharp contrast to the deficit-ridden New Haven public schools hungry for property-tax dollars. Two months later, residents followed up with a 600-vehicle “Respect Caravan” that brought downtown traffic to a halt. 2
While immersed in organizing, this powerful coalition of residents, university wage-workers, city alders, and students were also reading. Members of the New Haven Rising coalition reached out to me in 2021, including Edwin Camp and Barbara Vereen, who told me that Yale’s powerful hold on the city had made them feel sometimes isolated, but they finally saw their struggles reflected in my book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. 3 In this book, I explored what happens to host communities when wealthy nonprofit organizations control exorbitant amounts of land in our cities and towns. New Haven Rising insisted I put down the pen and join their fight. Given the work that I was doing around universities and cities, how could I refuse?
Even before getting to New Haven’s Prospect Street, I could hear that residents and organizers had already begun the process of taking back a piece of the city. On a sunny May afternoon, they had disrupted the quiet and solemn atmosphere of Yale’s ivy-covered stone buildings with the sound of R&B and hip hop blasting from a powerful sound system. 4 Once on Prospect, I was awash in a sea of excitement and activity as over 150 residents, labor activists, students, and onlookers buzzed about, handing out food and water, playing with young children, stewarding informational tables, dancing to the music, and finishing a massive art project that immediately drew my attention. This rally sat in the shadows of Yale, but school was in session out on Prospect Street.
I was brought there to discuss how the Yale struggle is situated within a much larger national context, but all of my words and research paled in the face of the stunning data visualization before me. Comrade artists had begun by painting a tiny red stripe on Prospect St, representing Yale’s then-$13 million annual voluntary contribution for taxes. This was juxtaposed with a massive 670-foot blue stripe that ran the length of the block, to capture the university’s then-$30 billion endowment. The visual contrast between this nonprofit university’s financial contribution and its wealth accumulation was stunning. And the endowment was just the beginning of the story.
Speaker after speaker offered moving testimonies of what it means when one of a city’s biggest landholders is a tax-exempt nonprofit like Yale University. A young adult explained how Yale’s expansion into the neighborhood was a direct agent of violence, both raising property values and pushing youth into dangerous enemy gang territory. Students and teachers described how their property-tax-starved schools had outdated textbooks, overcrowded classrooms without enough seats, and bathrooms with no soap. The connections here between university prosperity and neighborhood impoverishment were direct and deadly, and the nonprofit control over land was the smoking gun.
Hedge Funds That Conduct Classes
Today, universities turn their research into lucrative commercial goods and patents in a range of fields, from the pharmaceutical industries and software products to health services and military defense weaponry.
We have largely presumed that higher education is an inherent public good, most clearly marked by its tax-exempt status. Colleges, universities, and their medical centers are registered with the Internal Revenue Service as 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit organizations. Because higher education institutions provide the public good of education to surrounding communities, their property holdings are exempt from taxation in all 50 states. Even on the point of educational service, one could question the legitimacy of this arrangement, as schools become increasingly more selective and target out-of-state students who pay a larger tuition. 5 But furthermore, we must consider the broader implications of the financial consequences wrought by this property arrangement.
In today’s higher-education landscape, classrooms filled with professors and students have become a minor side business on the increasingly profitable college campus. The greater value of campus land is in its nonprofit tax-exempt status, which serves as a financial shelter for profitable research and private investors. The meteoric rise of the knowledge economy positions schools as financial titans in our big cities and small towns, and the financial arrangements produced by the tax-exemption of nonprofit land is central to their wealth hoarding. After a group of universities lobbied to pass the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, higher education institutions could now take the results from publicly funded research and convert it into intellectual property. 6 Schools like Stanford, MIT, and Yale immediately scrambled to create technology transfer offices that helped them privatize and profit from the work done in laboratories sitting on tax-exempt land. 7 Today, universities turn their research into lucrative commercial goods and patents in a range of fields, from the pharmaceutical industries and software products to health services and military defense weaponry. 8 And after the fall of factories in the United States, knowledge has become the new face of capitalism, with university bell towers described in glowing terms as the smokestacks of today’s cities and towns. 9
Both university leaders and city and town officials laud the “economic impact” that comes from the public–private partnerships now converging on campus land. 10 The research makes lifesaving discoveries, trains the next generation of knowledge workers, generates spin-off companies, and attracts new investors and workers to invest back into cities. And now, from New York’s Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island and the new Arizona State University Polytechnic campus in Mesa to the glittering glass and steel partnership between Amazon and Virginia Tech, everyone wants a campus. Such campus formations don’t even account for the millions made off of uncompensated “student athletes” and the low-wage workers who service massive tax-exempt college sports stadiums in the same neighborhoods. 11
Under the cover of “educational purposes,” research that has the potential to generate millions in patent revenues—let alone the revenues from construction or health services—benefits from the reduced overhead of sitting on property-tax-exempt campus land.
After decades of urban disinvestment, many urbanites celebrate these schools as “anchor institutions” to help drive their area’s big comeback or renewal. 12 Today’s schools redirect to cities and college towns what used to be known as “suburban research parks” 13 and now are termed “innovation districts,” in which academic research and corporate sponsors bring together real estate development, various forms of retail, and relatively cheap knowledge labor. 14 Once-impoverished neighborhoods, largely populated by residents of color, are now being redeveloped to optimize “value capture” via the conversion of city or town blocks into both research and real estate development profit-making ventures. 15
Local governments, developers, and universities reap economic rewards by dressing up spaces of academic/industry collaboration in a mix of luxury housing, storefronts, classrooms, and laboratories. Real estate developers like Wexford: Science + Technology have calculated the benefits of working on property-tax-exempt campus land. Wexford focuses exclusively on what they call “knowledge communities” and works with cities and schools to build a monied portfolio of university-affiliated projects like Philadelphia’s UCity Square, Converge Miami, and Aggie Square in Sacramento. 16
Under the cover of “educational purposes,” research that has the potential to generate millions in patent revenues—let alone the revenues from construction or health services—benefits from the reduced overhead of sitting on property-tax-exempt campus land. Again, these financial and spatial arrangements can be quite lucrative for cities, towns, universities, and their private investors. But exactly how does this anchor model benefit the residents who live in the surrounding neighborhoods and most likely also clean the campus floors, work in its labs, or secure its perimeters?
One plaintiff in the Princeton case was so disgusted that he dismissed the university as a “hedge fund that conducts classes.” 18 It’s the kind of insult increasingly lobbed at today’s schools, with NYU often described as a “real estate company which also issues degrees.”
As we saw in the case of New Haven residents or with the developments of Wexford, a critical paradox has emerged from higher education’s nonprofit status that is especially acute when thinking about the issue of land: property-tax exemption is meant to signal higher education’s public good but actually allows for an easier transfer of public dollars into a school’s private developments. Even public universities, which are in fact government entities, use this public good status to secure their own interests in for-profit research and/or to shelter the financial security of private developers and investors that sit on campus land.
First, the profitable research produced for private companies in educational buildings creates what former New Haven mayor Toni Harp has called a “property tax gray area.” 17 Second, many schools also reap the benefits of police and fire protection, snow and trash removal, road maintenance, and public schools—all public amenities that are usually funded by property taxes. The property tax exemption of nonprofits then passes the financial burden of public services on to the host cities and their residents.
In 2016, Princeton University was ordered to pay more than $18 million to settle a lawsuit with residents of the historically Black neighborhood of Witherspoon-Jackson. Residents discovered a noticeable jump in in their property tax bills but few structural improvements in the neighborhood—and wondered why. They realized that nearby university buildings remained tax exempt while research for the pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, generated millions of dollars in commercial royalties in those same school buildings. One plaintiff in the Princeton case was so disgusted that he dismissed the university as a “hedge fund that conducts classes.” 18 It’s the kind of insult increasingly lobbed at today’s schools, with NYU often described as a “real estate company which also issues degrees.”
Many have described these new financial arrangements as the “corporatization of the university.” But while accurate in some ways, such descriptions can also be misleading: the property-tax exemption afforded university campus developments actually reveals how their nonprofit status creates financial benefits specific to nonprofits that exceed explanations of corporatization and require their own analysis.
For example, I received a phone call from a Missouri local official serving an inner-ring St. Louis suburb (aptly called University City), 19 describing how the distinct status of higher education brought unique forms of exploitation to his community. After the nearby (and more affluent) town of Clayton halted Washington University’s campus expansion in St. Louis, the school turned to the nearby, more vulnerable working-class, multiracial town of University City. The school has started to buy up multifamily residential properties in the community for student housing. And the conversion of these buildings into what are sometimes derisively called “mini-dorms” not only takes the properties off the tax rolls but also inflates land values beyond the reach of the working-class single families who have traditionally called University City home. 20 And this tax hustle is not unique to wealthy, private schools. Let’s turn to Arizona State University.
In 2018, with a six-to-one vote, the Tempe City Council approved an Omni Hotel and Conference Center project that would pay almost no sales tax for up to 30 years. It would also pay no property taxes, because it was slated to sit on university land owned by the Arizona Board of Regents. 21 Meanwhile, as in many states, Arizona continued to pull back on its contributions to public higher education.
Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University and a self-proclaimed “academic entrepreneur,” was unabashed about looking for new “revenue stream[s]”. 22 ASU realized that in real-estate-friendly Arizona, they could lease their tax-exempt land directly to private companies. And instead of shelling out property taxes, such companies make a lower direct payment to the university. In this arrangement, the state legislature has no say on how the money is spent—which is usually on such things as new sports stadiums and the gigantic salaries of high-profile athletic coaches, like former NFL coach Herm Edwards. 23 Such university developments simultaneously raise property values and contribute little to public services. The most embarrassing edifice to this type of land scheme is the State Farm Insurance regional headquarters that sits on ASU land. This is the largest commercial development in Arizona, and it pays just a fraction of its property-tax burden, with public service costs passed on to residents.
In January 2019, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich sued the Arizona Board of Regents for, essentially, renting out its tax-exempt status to private businesses. 24 Few were surprised when the State Supreme Court dismissed the case in developer-friendly Arizona. The Arizona Supreme Court recently revived this lawsuit, 25 but ASU continues to expand its campus projects throughout the region, including a Wexford-developed innovation campus in downtown Phoenix. Such unabashed manipulations of the property-tax gray area of nonprofits have only multiplied in recent years—but these glaring acts of exploitation, in the name of the public good, have not come without a response.
Equitable Urban Communities: The Smart Cities Lab Approach
The work here is guided by a mantra heard in the communities where I studied and struggled: The smartest cities develop without displacement.
As I continued to work with the members of New Haven Rising, the experience was transformative. With all of the data accumulated from writing In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, I created the Smart Cities Lab, to research and consult on best practices for building equitable urban communities. Given my work, it specifically focuses on university-driven urban development. The notion of “smart” has often focused on technological innovations and sustainable design, and I asked: What about the people—the diverse and marginalized communities that struggle to maintain sustainable lives in changing urban locales? And not only what about them as victims of urban development, but also how can people’s practices of historical preservation, mutual aid, and even speculative/artistic visions of life serve as models for smarter cities?
The work here is guided by a mantra heard in the communities where I studied and struggled: The smartest cities develop without displacement. Admittedly, the work at SCL was initially quite academic, focusing mostly on data collection and research dissemination; but the twin forces of the global pandemic and the racial justice mobilization of summer 2020 found communities all over the country seeing themselves in my research and insisting that I push past research and toward advocacy.
I continued to work with the “Yale: Pay Your Fair Share” campaign, which ultimately forced the university to add $52 million over the next six years to the city’s budget in compensation for property tax loss. 26 Of course, for a school with a now-$41.4 billion endowment, $10 million a year is little; 27 but this modest victory is important, because Yale identified the payments as tax compensation—which, after years of resistance, signals that schools do in fact have a fiscal responsibility to their host communities. Other communities have watched this development with great interest, and now the lab is working on various strategies to realign the land control of nonprofits with a more robust public good ethos.
We have worked with organizations in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island to push forward legislation that would force nonprofits into a greater fiscal responsibility for their property tax exemption. For years, the city of Boston asked wealthy nonprofits with property holdings over $15 million to give 25 percent of what they would pay in property tax if they were for-profit entities. This calculation was designed to not penalize modest nonprofits and only account for the percentage of tax collections that fund public services. And still, not one school ever paid the full 25 percent. 28 The lab is now working with a collection of residents and elected officials to make that 25 percent mandatory and applied statewide.
The lab has also supported communities in protracted land use battles in both Berkeley and Miami. As a way to generate more revenue, the University of California, Berkeley has continued to raise enrollments in violation of its Long Range Development Plan. 29 A mixture of affluent NIMBY types, historic preservationists, and working-class residents finally had enough. In a series of lawsuits, they generally demonstrated how unregulated enrollments, without enough campus housing, pushed students out into the city and shifted burdens for facilities onto the city; and private landlords converted single homes into “mini-dorms” to profit from the growing market. 30
We are working with various groups to highlight these real estate deals and private partnerships brokered by UC Berkeley in the name of serving the public good, and the lawsuits cite research from the lab. The involvement of NIMBY-type homeowners made the struggles over UC Berkeley’s profit-oriented developments a little murky, because, while far more complex, the fight over growing enrollments was spun as being led by disgruntled citizens more concerned with property values than expanded educational opportunities. But the broken promises of national developers like Wexford clearly demonstrate the exploitative nature of private investors seizing on the financial shelters provided by nonprofit campus land.
When Wexford partnered with the University of Miami to build their Miami Converge development, community organizers valiantly pushed back, forcing them to at least agree to lease ground floor spaces to nonprofits that served the Black and Latinx communities of Overtown and Allapattah that surround the property. Now those nonprofits are being threatened with eviction. Because SCL is working at a national scale, we use Wexford’s efforts to resolve tenant concerns at Miami Converge as a litmus test for Wexford outreach and development ambitions in other communities where we also work. In short, SCL’s global vision allows us to say that Wexford’s efforts to resolve the harms they are inflicting on our partners in Miami will dictate our capacity to support (or resist) the firm in other communities. One of those communities is the Black Bottom, located in West Philadelphia. 31
Penn, Drexel, and other nonprofit members of the West Philadelphia Corporation have run rampant in the Black Bottom since the 1950s, displacing hundreds of Black families and, ultimately, renaming the area University City. 32 SCL worked with community historians and residents to recover the original 1969 agreement for University City that came as a result of hard-fought community organizing. 33 The actual agreement mandated that affordable housing would exist alongside the university research and private development projects targeted for the area (to be renamed University City).
Struggles over campus expansion have been instructive on their own, but the summer of 2020 protests also helped us clarify the central role that campus policing plays as a critical mechanism for higher education’s seizure—as well as control—of campus land in projects of expansion.
The recovery of this original plan happened just as UC Townhomes, the one affordable housing development in the area, is currently threatened with demolition to make way for the many med-tech investors and real estate developers that continue to feed on the breached agreement. (The development buzzards currently circling include Wexford.) SCL worked with Councilmember Jamie Gauthier to advocate for a modest inclusionary zoning overlay pilot to help compensate for the failure to construct affordable housing as outlined in the original commitment. We continue to partner with the organization Black Bottom Tribe to help craft their demands for a comprehensive reparations package in the face of historic damages caused by members of the West Philadelphia Corporation. 34
One modest form of repair came out of a meeting with medical students at Penn, in which I referenced the tons of food thrown away daily at school cafeterias as “low-hanging fruit” in building out more just land use practices in West Philadelphia. I talked about how that food could be easily repackaged into healthy meals for communities in need. A medical student, Cooper Penner, took me up on that challenge, and with the voluntary assistance of low-wage food service workers, is now running a food redistribution program from the Penn medical school cafeteria. And even though the university—of course—benefits from the good publicity, it still (as of May 2023) fails to offer financial aid to this worthy endeavor.
We were also proud to offer support to the Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles, residents who faced eviction at the hands of Boston University (BU) this year. 35 When wealthy LA real estate developer Frederick Pardee died, he left these residential properties to his alma mater. BU initially favored profits that could come from the offers submitted by private developers—which would, of course, have made the nonprofit university a direct driver of gentrification and displacement. But after a resident-driven campaign (fought in the streets and on social media) built momentum, the university felt compelled to accept an offer from the tenants’ community land trust. 36
Struggles over campus expansion have been instructive on their own, but the summer of 2020 protests also helped us clarify the central role that campus policing plays as a critical mechanism for higher education’s seizure—as well as control—of campus land in projects of expansion. By working with organizations like the Cops Off Campus Coalition, SCL has also been able to develop an analysis of campus policing as a pernicious and violent mechanism of land control, labor management, and political disenfranchisement. The jurisdictional politics of campus policing reveal this higher education unit’s primary role as an agent of gentrification and displacement far above any claims to “community safety.”
During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, UCLA allowed this stadium to be used as a field jail to detain protestors without access to food, water, or medical attention.
Schools, including the University of Chicago, hold policing jurisdiction and arrest and detention powers wherever there is a campus building even just projected for development, while other institutions, like Yale and the University of Cincinnati, have Memorandum of Understanding agreements to police the entire city. And in an overwhelming number of states, the Freedom of Information Act exemption for private institutions is extended to campus police even when engaging nonuniversity residents. In practice, students at predominantly White institutions continue to be given amnesty for campus crimes, while the largely working-class neighborhoods and communities of color in these host cities face overpolicing and racial profiling.
The disparities in policing share a common thread of signaling safety and convenience for students at predominantly White institutions alongside the researchers and investors that converge on lucrative campus lands. At the same time, the extended jurisdiction of these policing units allows the institution to regulate community behavior. Such university-oriented policing sets the stage for university affiliates and buildings to occupy spaces and retrofit neighborhood lands for university value capture.
The convergence here between the campus and policing extends beyond individual patrol units in host communities. Consider the struggles over UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium. Through the powerful UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, we learn how universities deployed the legacy of a racial justice icon to both seize public lands and turn them into a detention center in the face of lawful public assembly and protest. 37 During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, UCLA allowed this stadium to be used as a field jail to detain protestors without access to food, water, or medical attention. 38
Moreover, this sports complex sits on land that was initially deeded to the federal government to serve disabled and houseless veterans. But over the twentieth century, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs abandoned its housing mandate and leased out parcels of the property to various agencies and nonprofits, including UCLA. When houseless veterans sued the VA in 2011 for lack of housing, a court ruled UCLA’s lease illegal. But the university joined a lawsuit for the recovery of land and quickly began diversity-washing the property with the name Jackie Robinson. Now largely Black and Latinx veterans struggle to maintain lives in a “Veteran’s Row” of makeshift shelters sitting along the fence of the VA. 39
And interest in these nonprofit land struggles has gone global. In the Netherlands, partners at Erasmus University’s Vital Cities and Citizens watched as their institution partnered with local and regional government actors and other nonprofits to propose a Cultuur Campus project in the largely immigrant community on Rotterdam’s South Bank. 40 Colleagues saw devastating parallels with the work of my lab and their own experiences around nonprofit-driven land development and policing in this marginalized South Bank community. We are now thinking through efforts to negotiate more equitable terms for the host neighborhood that will surround this proposed development.
Forging A Different Path
These schools, and their medical centers, are today’s workshops…and their campuses are a critical urban land form that not only sets land values for whole cities but also has become the site of much broader struggles over affordable housing, living wages, neighborhood displacements, and democratic governance.
To be fair, the successes of the SCL have been piecemeal and incremental. Pushing higher education to reconsider its profit model is a daunting challenge. At the same time, it is in struggle, with communities, that we cocreate the building blocks for nonprofit land use strategies that serve a broader range of public interests and more equitable visions of community development.
SCL has partnered with the Humanities Action Lab at Rutgers University-Newark and Minnesota Transform to initiate The Renewal Project. This will be a research and public engagement project about higher education’s largely untold national role in the devastating history of demolition and displacement during the urban renewal period following World War II. 41 The work will include a mix of historical recovery, coursework, public commemorations, and—crucially—campaigns for reparations to atone for both historical harms and their present-day legacies.
There is no question that nonprofit land is a vital site of struggle for economic and racial justice; and in SCL’s varied efforts of research and advocacy with communities on the ground, we have come to a series of broad conclusions that guide our work:
- Colleges and universities must offer reparations for their role in in the slave economy, Indigenous land seizures, 42 Jim Crow segregation, and urban renewal practices.
- Schools must calculate some form of Payments in Lieu of Taxes for the public benefits they reap from tax abatement. Instead of a flat rate, we believe that educational institutions can contribute a degree of PILOTs in relation to their contribution to local projects, including the transfer of endowments to community-serving financial institutions.
- County or city/town assessors must develop a formula to properly evaluate higher education’s land use claims of “educational purposes” on campus properties.
- A community benefits agreement must be attached to all campus development projects, which can include affordable housing mandates, zip-code-specific job outreach and job training, and scholarships. Further, the common areas of all campus properties should be governed by a community charter to guarantee the equitable public use of campus space. Of course, CBAs have been created to uneven effect. So, in addition, city/town governments must create community-based zoning and/or planning boards with the legislative authority to approve or reject projects based on their community benefit.
- Finally, both private school and state university police have functioned as an occupying force to protect the assets of campus developments through militarized mechanisms of land control. Yet crime runs rampant on predominantly White campuses while surrounding neighborhoods of color face over-policing. We call for divestment from campus police and investment in teams of preventative outreach and trauma care alongside investments in housing and food security programs—all of which research proves actually reduce harms for everyone and are functions best provided by a university. 43
In the broadest sense, we must continue to discard the dated—and in some corners, persistent—mythos of these nonprofits as simply “cathedrals of learning.” In fact, these schools, and their medical centers, are today’s workshops—our knowledge factories—and their campuses are a critical urban land form that not only sets land values for whole cities but also has become the site of much broader struggles over affordable housing, living wages, neighborhood displacements, and democratic governance. The challenges are vast, but the response has been mighty—and it is growing. This story, about the monetization of nonprofit land and the mounting demands for community control, offers us a critical touchstone for grasping some conditions of precarity; but it also points the way to forging a different path in the world—one beyond today’s late capitalism.
Notes
- David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (September/October 2008); and Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), accessed April 21, 2023, The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/henri-lefebvre-right-to-the-city. Originally published as Le Droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968).
- Thomas Breen, “Rally Demands Yale, YNHH Pay ‘Fair Share,’” New Haven Independent, May 26, 2020, www.newhavenindependent.org/article/coalition_protest; Ko Lyn Cheang, “Respect Caravan Clogs Downtown Streets,” New Haven Independent, July 29, 2020, www.newhavenindependent.org/article/yale_respect_new_haven_caravan; and Sophie Sonnenfeld, “Labor Paints Prospect Street With ‘Respect’ Message,” New Haven Independent, May 1, 2021, www.newhavenindependent.org/article /yale_respect_new_haven_paints_.
- Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021).
- Sonnenfeld, “Labor Paints Prospect Street With ‘Respect’ Message.”
- Ruth McCambridge, “On Nonprofits, Taxation, and the Public Trust,” Nonprofit Quarterly, April 29, 2019, nonprofitquarterly.org/on-nonprofits-taxation-and-the-public-trust/; and Ozan Jaquette, “State University No More: Out-of-State Enrollment and the Growing Exclusion of High-Achieving, Low-Income Students at Public Flagship Universities,” Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, accessed April 26, 2023, www.jkcf.org/research/state-university-no-more-out-of-state-enrollment-and-the-growing-exclusion-of-high-achieving-low-income-students-at-public-flagship-universities/.
- Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, 42–43.
- Ibid., 42–43.
- Ibid., 18.
- Ibid., 36.
- “Boston College’s Economic and Social Impact: Answering the Call at a Local, Regional, and Societal Level,” Econsult Solutions, Inc., 2021, econsultsolutions.com/case_studies/boston-colleges-economic-and-social-impact/.
- Neil Kleiman and Erika Poethig, “Here’s How Cities and Anchor Institutions Can Work Together to Drive Growth,” Next City, October 1, 2015, nextcity.org/urbanist-news/anchor-institutions-cities-national-resouorce-network.
- Paul Garton, “Types of Anchor Institution Initiatives: An Overview of University Urban Development Literature,” Metropolitan Universities, September 9, 2021.
- Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
- Bruce Katz and Julie Wagner, The Rise of Innovation Districts: A New Geography of Innovation in America (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, May 2014). And see Digital Futures Complex In the Cincinnati Innovation District, Cincinnati Innovation District, accessed April 21, 2023, images1.loopnet.com/d2/grT32PMrARH6FWZBMfCGn6REYdyCJb37vHatRoCfCfg/document.pdf; and “We Are a Community of Innovators,” Innovation Quarter, accessed April 21, 2023, www.innovationquarter.com.
- University-driven value capture happens here in a number of ways. The property-tax-exempt campus land sits at the core—but then this property arrangement also subsidizes the construction of housing, retail, and recreation for the university and its outside real estate developers. Campus land holds the below-market labor of contracted researchers and graduate students working on federally funded research that will be brought to market and returned to the school in the form of royalties. Alongside real estate developers, private investors in pharmaceuticals, software, health services, and so on are drawn to the savings in overhead and labor costs that come from working on campus land. This publicly funded or subsidized land arrangement also attracts nonuniversity affiliates to campus areas as residents, which draws additional developers in to profit from the conversion of older neighborhoods into campus areas, which raises housing and retail costs for long-term residents while simultaneously drawing resources from host communities that rely on property-tax revenues and living wages. The value capture here not only is concentrated and exclusive to campus affiliates but also explicitly relies on the extraction of public revenues at federal, state, and municipal levels—not to mention the daily costs of deprivation paid by residents who are often low-wage campus workers and the targets of campus police charged with protecting campus land.
- “Decades in the Works,” Wexford Science + Technology, accessed April 21, 2023, wexfordscitech.com/portfolio/; and see Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, 42–43.
- Markeshia Ricks, “Tax Yale Effort Revived,” New Haven Independent, March 16, 2016, newhavenindependent.org/article/tax_yale.
- Elise Young, “Princeton’s Neighbors Say to Heck with Freebies—We Want Cash,” Bloomberg, May 2, 2016, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-02/princeton-s-neighbors-say-to-heck-with-freebies-we-want-cash?leadSource=uverify%20wall.
- “History: A City Realized,” University City, Missouri, accessed April 21, 2023, www.ucitymo.org/54/History-cont.
- University City Councilmember Jeff Hales, conversation with the author, May 20, 2022.
- Jerod MacDonald-Evoy, “Tempe approves $21 million tax break for hotel and conference center,” The Arizona Republic, last modified January 11, 2018, www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe/2018/01/11/tempe-tax-break-hotel-and-conference-center-too-steep/1020421001/.
- Rachel Leingang, “How Michael Crow took ASU from a party school to the nation’s most ‘innovative’ university,” Arizona Republic, last modified December 14, 2019, azcentral.com/in-depth/news/local/michael-education/2019/02/28/michael-crow-changing-arizona-state-university-reputation-party-school-asu-innovation-global-brand/2670463002/.
- Rodger Sherman, “Arizona State Has Hired Herm Edwards to Be Its New Head Coach … or CEO … or Something,” The Ringer, December 4, 2017, theringer.com/2017/12/4/16733572/herm-edwards-hired-arizona-state-university-college-football.
- Laurie Roberts, “Mark Brnovich targets ASU tax dodge: ‘Michael Crow has become the most powerful person in Arizona’,” Arizona Republic, January 10, 2019, www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2019/01/10/asu-michael-crow-target-mark-brnovich-lawsuit-tax-dodge/2539874002/.
- Kevin Stone, “State of Arizona ordered to pay nearly $1M over dismissed ASU hotel lawsuit,” KTAR News92.3 FM, February 11, 2020, ktar.com/story/2974473/state-of-arizona-ordered-to-pay-nearly-1m-over-failed-asu-hotel-lawsuit/.
- Mark Zaretsky, “Yale University’s plan to increase payments to New Haven by $52 million gets go-ahead,” New Haven Register, March 16, 2022, www.nhregister.com/news/article/Yale-University-s-plan-to-increase-payments-to-17004295.php.
- “Yale reports investment return for fiscal 2022,” Yale News, October 4, 2022, news.yale.edu/2022/10/04/yale-reports-investment-return-fiscal-2022.
- Slide presentation from Massachusetts State Representative Erika Uyterhoeven, February 15, 2022; see also Zoe Kava, “Uyterhoeven’s PILOT reform bill under review in Mass. State House,” Tufts Daily, February 16, 2022, tuftsdaily.com/news/2022/02/16/uyterhoevens-pilot-reform-bill-under-review-in-mass-state-house/. And see “Payment in Lieu of Tax (PILOT) Program: Fiscal Year 2022 PILOT Results,” City of Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu, accessed April 21, 2023, www.boston.gov/departments/assessing/payment-lieu-tax-pilot-program; PILOT Action Group, accessed April 21, 2023, pilotaction.weebly.com; and Davarian L. Baldwin, “Universities and Cities: Why We Must End the Nonprofit Path to Wealth Hoarding, NPQ, December 22, 2021, nonprofitquarterly.org/universities-and-cities-why-we-must-end-the-nonprofit-path-to-wealth-hoarding/.
- Davarian Baldwin, “How UC Berkeley has used public power to become a private developer,” San Francisco Chronicle, last modified June 1, 2022, www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/UC-Berkeley-development-17204108.php.
- Annie Lowrey, “NIMBYism Reaches Its Apotheosis,” The Atlantic, February 26, 2022, theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/uc-berkeley-university-enrollment-nimby/622927/.
- Jake Blumgart, “Blighted: How The Inquirer covered the clearing of West Philadelphia’s Black Bottom,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 8, 2022, inquirer.com/news/inq2/more-perfect-union-black-bottom-philadelphia-20221208.html.
- Laura Wolf-Powers, University City: History, Race and Community in the Era of the Innovation District (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).
- “The 1969 College Hall Sit-In,” Penn History, Penn Libraries, University of Pennsylvania, accessed April 21, 2023, archives.upenn.edu/exhibits/penn-history/sit-in-1969/.
- See “Black Bottom Tribe,” accessed April 12, 2023, http://blackbottomtribe.org/.
- Sarah Michelson, “Baldwin Hills Tenants Fighting Boston University to Keep Their Homes,” Knock LA, December 30, 2022, knock-la.com/south-la-homes-boston-university/.
- Roshan Abraham, “These Tenants Fought Boston University For Ownership Of Their Homes, And Won,” Next City, January 26, 2023, nextcity.org/urbanist-news/these-tenants-fought-boston-university-for-ownership-of-their-homes-and-won.
- Maggie Vanoni, “UCLA professor calls out university for use of Jackie Robinson Stadium in protester detainment,” Los Angeles Daily News, last modified June 4, 2020, www.dailynews.com/2020/06/02/ucla-professor-calls-out-university-for-use-of-jackie-robinson-stadium-in-protester-detainment/.
- Hank Reichman, “UCLA Faculty Protest Use of University Stadium to Confine Arrested Protesters,” Academe Blog, June 3, 2020, academeblog.org/2020/06/03/ucla-faculty-protest-use-of-university-stadium-to-confine-arrested-protesters/; and Summer Lin, “UCLA rips the LAPD for using Jackie Robinson Stadium as ‘field jail’ for protesters,” June 3, 2020, www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article243239366.html.
- Ananya Roy, “Jackie Robinson Stadium: Prisoners Made Here,” Knock LA, November 11, 2020, knock-la.com/jackie-robinson-stadium-prisoners-made-here-d18a8ba4f34f/.
- Marianne Klerk, “Davarian Baldwin: ‘De cultuurcampus op Zuid is symbool voor de groeiende macht van universiteiten in steden,’” November 23, 2022, versbeton.nl/2022/11/davarian-baldwin-de-cultuurcampus-op-zuid-is-symbool-voor-de-groeiende-macht-van-universiteiten-in-steden/.
- See, for example, LaDale Winling, Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
- Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-grab universities,” High Country News, March 30, 2020, hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities.
- Davarian Baldwin, “Why We Should Abolish the Campus Police,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 19, 2021, www.chronicle.com/article/why-we-should-abolish-campus-police.
This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.
What Does It Mean to Dismantle Racial Capitalism Anyway?
Editors’ note: This article is from Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine’s summer 2023 issue, “Movement Economies: Making Our Vision a Collective Reality.”
Imagine this.
Flint, MI, has clean water and kids aren’t poisoned by lead. All of our communities have fresh, potable water, and our lakes and rivers aren’t polluted. Everyone is safely and comfortably housed. All of our children are well fed, and everyone has dental, medical, and mental healthcare.
These are just some of the things that we should have but that capitalism has robbed from us.
When one thinks about race and the economy, it’s important to understand that economic exploitation is not primarily about the greed and racism of a few, but rather is structural, and historically grounded.
Capitalism, as designed, is extractive. And the extraction that led to the original accumulation of capital had a whole lot to do with what historians have called the Atlantic or triangular trade. The three vertices of the triangle were Europe (especially Great Britain), the Americas, and Africa. The way the trade worked is that Europeans would sell manufactured goods (and horses and alcohol) to (primarily) West Africans and in exchange purchase human beings. These human beings were taken in slave ships across the Atlantic to the Americas; those who survived the passage—and many did not—were enslaved principally in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, and produced agricultural goods for sale in Europe (goods such as rum, sugar, cotton, tobacco, and coffee).1
The profits from this trade were fundamental to the forming of a transnational capitalist class—and, of course, provided money that could purchase more human beings from West Africa. This human trade continued for over 200 years. The amount of wealth extracted and accumulated in this manner was extraordinary. David Blight, the distinguished Yale historian, has pointed out that enslaved humans in 1860 were “the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.”2 And, to say the obvious, even though the Civil War ended slavery in the United States, structural racism has remained a constant in our economy to the present.3
A couple of years ago, during a podcast interview, Maurice BP-Weeks (a cofounder of the Action Center on Race & the Economy, where we work) highlighted the importance of this extraction. “The most important thing about the concept of wealth extraction for me is intentionality…This isn’t a market inefficiency. It’s a strategic choice made by a set of actors.”4
The term racial capitalism was popularized by Cedric J. Robinson, a professor of political science and Black studies. Robinson encountered the term among scholars of apartheid South Africa in England, and adapted it for his 1983 book, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, to foreground the racialized nature of global capitalism.5 Robinson argued that the system of capitalism emerged from and relied on the existence of an already racialized society, and thus there can be no separation between the two. To be clear, racial capitalism is not a type of capitalism that divides workers along the lines of race; rather, all existing capitalism is racial capitalism, and by using the term, today’s scholars and activists reinforce the centrality of race in the material mechanisms of our global economy.
Of course, describing our economy is one matter. Changing it is another. It is to that theme we turn below.
Within the United States, racial capitalism affects everyone but is especially deeply felt in Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities. At the international level, people—who are overwhelmingly of color in the Global South—are targeted with unsafe working conditions, low wages, toxic and polluting industries, displacement, and other forms of violence in the name of profit.
Building a Movement against Racial Capitalism
We know what we are up against. Within the United States, racial capitalism affects everyone but is especially deeply felt in Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities. At the international level, people—who are overwhelmingly of color in the Global South—are targeted with unsafe working conditions, low wages, toxic and polluting industries, displacement, and other forms of violence in the name of profit.
The way racial capitalism works in the United States means that exploitation occurs simultaneously along racial and class lines (and other factors, including gender). An example of this can be seen in the Paycheck Protection Program, the 2020 program approved by Congress with the stated goal of assisting businesses that were struggling to pay their workers in the wake of the COVID-19 economic shutdown. A 2021 Reveal News analysis of more than five million PPP loans in large metropolitan areas found that the rate of lending in majority-White neighborhoods was significantly higher than in majority-BIPOC neighborhoods.6 Specifically, Black-owned businesses were less likely to obtain PPP loans from banks due to the racial biases of lenders.7 This means that in 2020, the year of the so-called racial reckoning, “one of the largest financial [government] bailouts since the Great Depression” actually served to further the racial wealth gap.8
In our work, we aim to counter such tendencies as they manifest in both the policies of corporations and those of government agencies—be they federal, state, or local. Our campaigns are centered around racial economic justice. In doing so, we have always taken care to recognize the role that corporations—particularly in the finance and tech sectors—play in causing harm to communities of color. In response, we seek to devise interventions to counter that dynamic.
An example of our approach is the #StopShotSpotter campaign, which ACRE helps anchor and coordinate.9 ShotSpotter is an artificial-intelligence–powered gunshot-detection technology that is owned by the corporation that newly rebranded itself as SoundThinking. It is essentially a microphone that is placed in neighborhoods across cities that alerts the local police department of locations where sounds that resemble gunshots are picked up. SoundThinking is a part of the growing surveillance-industrial complex that is being used to criminalize, police, and incarcerate people living in Black and people of color communities.
It is no surprise that the technology is extremely faulty and it is deployed almost exclusively in non-White neighborhoods.10 An investigation by the Associated Press found that “the system can miss live gunfire right under its microphones, or misclassify the sounds of fireworks or cars backfiring as gunshots.”11 A study by the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern Law School in Evanston, IL, found that ShotSpotter has a false alarm rate of 89 percent.12 The Office of the Inspector General of the City of Chicago reported, “[Chicago Police Department] responses to ShotSpotter alerts rarely produce documented evidence of a gun-related crime, rarely give rise to investigatory stops, and even less frequently lead to the recovery of gun crime-related evidence during an investigatory stop.”13
What ShotSpotter does do, however, is contribute to the overpolicing of Black and people of color communities, further increasing the risk of adverse police encounters. A 65-year-old Black man was thrown in jail for nearly a year after he was wrongly accused of murder based on a ShotSpotter alert.14 Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old Latino boy, was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer responding to a ShotSpotter alert in March 2021.15
Resistance to debt restructuring in Puerto Rico presents a second example of how interrelated campaigns challenge practices of racial capitalism. Banks targeted Puerto Rico with predatory and unsustainable debt deals because of technicalities specific to its colonial status.
Organizers in cities including Detroit, Durham, and Chicago are joining together through the #StopShotSpotter campaign to demand that their cities cancel their contracts with SoundThinking and to alert shareholders about the investment risk posed by the company’s dismal record. SoundThinking’s contracts with cities across the country turn public money into corporate profit by creating a market for a failed service targeting communities of color. SoundThinking has created a profit model based on false promises of public safety, turning the contributions of people of color to public funds against them via surveillance technologies and increased police encounters.
Racial capitalism gives us a framework for understanding why ShotSpotter exists and the intersecting mechanisms of harm that it inflicts on our communities. There isn’t anything explicitly racist, per se, about the technology behind ShotSpotter. It is a glorified microphone that is purportedly able to identify gunfire after it has already occurred. But that technology relies on racialized tropes of criminality and danger, is concentrated in poor Black and people of color urban neighborhoods, and is placed in the hands of departments staffed by racist police officers. Thus, SoundThinking’s executives and investors profit from and contribute to a racialized market.
Resistance to debt restructuring in Puerto Rico presents a second example of how interrelated campaigns challenge practices of racial capitalism. Banks targeted Puerto Rico with predatory and unsustainable debt deals16 because of technicalities specific to its colonial status.17 The deals burdened Puerto Rico with a debt load that was out of proportion to its revenues, which had suffered due to US colonialism, extraction, and climate catastrophe. When Puerto Rico was inevitably unable to pay back the debt, the hedge fund managers who owned the loans demanded that the government cut services, privatize schools, slash pensions, and lower the minimum wage so that they could profit by collecting the full value of the bonds they had purchased for “pennies on the dollar.”18 While Puerto Ricans were struggling to rebuild after the devastating Hurricane Maria, mortgage servicers owned by the private equity firms TPG Capital and the Blackstone Group were aggressively foreclosing on their homes.19
Puerto Ricans living on the island as well as those on the US mainland organized against this Wall Street profiteering. In Puerto Rico, community leaders, students, union members, and retirees banded together and held demonstrations calling for the cancellation of Puerto Rico’s predatory debt. Ultimately, the debt was reduced by more than $25 billion.20
Stateside, Puerto Ricans in New York,21 New Jersey,22 and Florida23 pushed their state pension funds to refuse any new investments in private equity firms that were foreclosing on Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of the hurricane. The New Jersey pension fund confirmed that no new investments were being considered and voted to urge TPG to participate in negotiations with Puerto Rican advocates.24 After sustained pressure and demonstrations, the TPG-owned servicers eventually gave in to demands to implement foreclosure moratoriums.25
The framework of racial capitalism helps movement activists and leaders to understand the interconnectedness of colonial extraction and racism in the treatment of Puerto Rico by the United States and US-based corporations. Anti-Blackness and White supremacy serve as the foundation upon which Puerto Rico’s colonization exists; thus, when finance companies target Puerto Rico as a playground for extraction, they depend on the racialization of the state and its people to justify their actions.
Dismantling Racial Capitalism: Toward a Long-Term Agenda
By running campaigns that target finance and technology corporations, we can challenge two central nodes of power in the oligarchic political-economic system that upholds and profits from racial capitalism in the United States and the world.
More broadly, campaigns aim to make the racist practices of corporations explicit, expose the corporations profiting from racism, and force public officials to stop funneling public dollars to corporations and instead direct those resources to public services that improve all communities. As Georgetown philosopher Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò smartly put it, the broader strategic issue is that “If it is true that racism and capitalism are in a mutually supporting relationship, then we should expect that any potentially effective anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles will also be mutually supporting.”26 This means we must focus our aim not just on structural racism and not just on capitalism, but rather on how those two forces are interconnected and intertwined. This, for us, is the heart of the racial capitalism concept—and why we must always keep this front of mind in our work.
As one of us observed in a Nation interview a year ago, too often, when it comes to movement strategy, “We play checkers, they [corporate executives] play chess. And unless we straighten that out, we’re always going to be chasing results while playing their game.”27
We believe one answer lies in taking on tangible fights that empower people to make a real impact on their lives and that have a real chance of winning. That helps build the bases of our movement organizations, while also starting a broader national conversation about the allocation of power and resources in our economy.
We are motivated to run the campaigns that we do because we want to live in a world where Black people and people of color can thrive. To us, this looks like improved access to healthcare, housing, and education. It looks like building not just individual, but community wealth. We know a better world is possible. Across the country, we hear of stories about emergency mental health services that don’t involve calling the cops; we hear of community land trusts that are keeping rents below market and allowing residents to build equity; and so many more alternatives to our current reality.28 We must find ways to support these alternatives so that they can scale.
This work, however, must be linked to a sharp analysis that also directly challenges the power centers of racial capitalism. For us, this means a range of things. In finance, for example, it involves challenging the undemocratic nature of the Federal Reserve to make it more responsive to the public and shift its focus from supporting Wall Street to financing needed public infrastructure (such as renewable energy) on the one end, while advocating for public, community-controlled banks in places like Chicago and Philadelphia to facilitate local community investment, supported by city deposits, on the other.29 In the world of work, it means actively challenging the “gig economy.”30 It also means supporting community-centered strategies that leverage labor union power, like Bargaining for the Common Good.31
In all this, we know that racial capitalism is, like the hydra, a many-headed monster. In this work, there is no one right answer—and anyone who tells you otherwise has surely not examined the nature of contemporary racial capitalism very closely. We believe one answer lies in taking on tangible fights that empower people to make a real impact on their lives and that have a real chance of winning. That helps build the bases of our movement organizations, while also starting a broader national conversation about the allocation of power and resources in our economy.
Notes
- “The Triangular Trade—Black Peoples of America,” History on the Net, accessed May 10, 2023, historyonthenet.com/black-peoples-of-america-the-triangular-trade. Regarding deaths during the Middle Passage, see Steven Mintz, “The Middle Passage,” Digital History, University of Houston, 2016, www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook_print.cfm?smtid=2&psid=446. See also The Transatlantic Slave Trade (Montgomery, AL: the Equal Justice Institute, 2022).
- Quoted in Ta-Nehisi Coates, “What Cotton Hath Wrought,” The Atlantic, July 30, 2010, theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/07/what-cotton-hath-wrought/60666.
- The point is obvious, and a source shouldn’t be necessary, but to provide one, see: Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.
- Steven Pitts, “Racial Capitalism—Because I Am Black All the Time,” Convergence, April 9, 2021, com/articles/racial-capitalism-because-im-black-all-the-time.
- See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021; original work published 1983). See also Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?” Boston Review, January 12, 2017, www.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction-race-capitalism-justice.
- Mohamed Al Elew, “Which neighborhoods were neglected by the Paycheck Protection Program?,” Reveal, May 1, 2021, org/article/which-neighborhoods-were-neglected-by-the-paycheck-protection-program.
- Steve Maas, “Racial Disparities in Paycheck Protection Program Lending,” The Digest 12 (December 2021), nber.org/digest/202112/racial-disparities-paycheck-protection-program-lending.
- “PPP Reporting Network,” Reveal, accessed May 22, 2023, org/ppp-reporting-network.
- “Racist Data Over-Policing Algorithmic Bias,” the website for #StopShotSpotter, accessed May 21, 2023, com.
- Todd Feathers, “Gunshot-Detecting Tech Is Summoning Armed Police to Black Neighborhoods,” Vice, July 19, 2021, vice.com/en/article/88nd3z/gunshot-detecting-tech-is-summoning-armed-police-to-black-neighborhoods.
- Garance Burke et al., “How AI-powered tech landed man in jail with scant evidence,” Associated Press, March 5, 2022, com/article/artificial-intelligence-algorithm-technology-police-crime-7e3345485aa668c97606d4b54f9b6220.
- Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center, “ShotSpotter Generated Over 40,000 Dead-End Police Deployments in Chicago in 21 Months, According to New Study,” press release, May 3, 2021, macarthurjustice.org/shotspotter-generated-over-40000-dead-end-police-deployments-in-chicago-in-21-months-according-to-new-study/.
- The Chicago Police Department’s Use of ShotSpotter Technology (Chicago: City of Chicago, Office of Inspector General, August 2021), 22.
- Jon Seidel, “New lawsuit aims to halt Chicago’s use of ShotSpotter,” Chicago Sun-Times, July 21, 2022, suntimes.com/news/2022/7/21/23273332/shotspotter-lawsuit-chicago-police-toledo-shooting-michael-williams-arrest-charges-dropped.
- Jamie Kalven, “Chicago Awaits Video of Police Killing of 13-Year-Old Boy,” The Intercept, April 13, 2021, com/2021/04/13/chicago-police-killing-boy-adam-toledo-shotspotter/.
- Laura Sullivan, “How Puerto Rico’s Debt Created A Perfect Storm Before The Storm,” Blackout in Puerto Rico, NPR, May 2, 2018, npr.org/2018/05/02/607032585/how-puerto-ricos-debt-created-a-perfect-storm-before-the-storm.
- Saqib Bhatti and Carrie Sloan, Broken Promises: PROMESA is a Model for Undermining Democracy and Pushing Austerity Elsewhere in the S. (Chicago: ReFund America Project and Action Center on Race & the Economy, August 2017), 4.
- Hedge Papers 17: Hedge Fund Vultures in Puerto Rico (New York: Hedge Clippers, July 2015), hedgeclippers.org/hedgepapers-no-17-hedge-fund-billionaires-in-puerto-rico.
- John Reitmeyer, “Alarm Over NJ Pension System’s Ties to Foreclosures in Puerto Rico,” NJ Spotlight News, February 2, 2018, njspotlightnews.org/2018/02/18-02-01-members-of-state-investment-council-make-clear-they-would-not-be-comfortable-if-pension-fund-profited-from-the-hardships-of-puerto-ricans/. See also Hedge Papers No. 53: Private Equity and Puerto Rico: How a TPG Capital Affiliate is Buying Up Mortgages and Foreclosing on Island Residents (New York: Hedge Clippers, December 19, 2017), hedgeclippers.org/report-no-53-private-equity-and-puerto-rico/. See also Private Equity Stakeholder Project, “TPG Capital and Blackstone affiliates at center of Puerto Rico foreclosure crisis,” January 26, 2018, pestakeholder.org/news/tpg-capital-and-blackstone-affiliates-at-center-of-puerto-rico-foreclosure-crisis-2.
- “Puerto Rico formally exits bankruptcy following largest public debt restructuring,” Associated Press, March 15, 2022, nbcnews.com/news/latino/puerto-rico-formally-exits-bankruptcy-largest-public-debt-restructurin-rcna20054.
- Erin Durkin, “State Controller Thomas DiNapoli urged to stop investments in firms that hurt Puerto Rico’s economy,” New York Daily News, January 17, 2018, nydailynews.com/new-york/thomas-dinapoli-urged-stop-investments-hurt-p-article-1.3761226.
- John Reitmeyer, “Alarm Over NJ Pension System’s Ties to Foreclosures in Puerto ”
- Jacob Ogles, “Puerto Rico leaders to Rick Scott: Divest state from company doing foreclosures,” Florida Politics, October 20, 2018, com/archives/279414-puerto-rico-leaders-rick-scott/.
- John Reitmeyer, “Alarm Over NJ Pension System’s Ties to Foreclosures in Puerto ”
- Hedge Papers 58: Pain and Profit after Maria: Companies Taking Puerto Rico by $torm (New York: Hedge Clippers, May 22, 2018), 9.
- Olúfẹmi Táíwò, “A Framework to Help Us Understand the World,” Hammer & Hope 1 (Winter 2023), hammerandhope.org/article/issue-1-article-8.
- Lucy Dean Stockton, “Why the Left Needs to Change How It Fights,” interview with Bree Carlson, The Nation, October 5, 2022, thenation.com/article/activism/bree-carlson-interview.
- See, for example, Samantha Michaels, “The Alternative to Police That Is Proven to Reduce Violence: Why don’t more people trust it?,” Mother Jones, June 7, 2022, motherjones.com/crime-justice/2022/06/mental-health-san-francisco-street-crisis-response-team-cahoots-police-violence; and Sarah Holder, “Displacement-Proofing San Francisco’s Tenderloin District,” Bloomberg, February 18, 2022, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-18/san-francisco-housing-model-keeps-rent-below-market-rate.
- Rebecca Vallas, “Inside the Push to Remake ‘the Fed,’” interview with Saqib Bhatti, The Off-Kilter Podcast, October 22, 2021, org/content/podcast/off-kilter-podcast-inside-push-remake-fed; Saqib Bhatti, “Brandon Johnson Should Establish a Public Bank in Chicago,” Jacobin, April 24, 2023, jacobin.com/2023/04/brandon-johnson-public-bank-chicago; and Philadelphia Public Banking Coalition, Philadelphia Public Banking Visioning Summit Part 1, September 18, 2021, YouTube video,1:24:32, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8278erftIPY.
- See, for instance: Gig Workers Rising, Death and Corporate Irresponsibility in the Gig Economy: An Urgent Safety Crisis (Action Center for Race and the Economy, Gig Workers Rising, PowerSwitch Action, and Working Partnerships USA, 2022).
- On bargaining for the common good, see NPQ’s 2022 article series “Building a Movement for the Common Good,” NPQ, accessed May 21, 2023, org/series/building-a-movement-for-the-common-good; and BCG Advisory Committee, “Introducing Bargaining for the Common Good,” September 7, 2022, nonprofitquarterly.org/introducing-bargaining-for-the-common-good/.
This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.
Passion Doesn’t Pay the Rent: Why the Arts Must Embrace Pay Equity
If you want to make it in this field, you’ve got to pay your dues. That’s been the ethic in the arts and culture sector for generations. And it’s such a familiar concept—akin to the iconic American “bootstraps” mythology. Alas, it is just as mythical.
Because what lies behind this “pay your dues” ethic is a very different logic, namely pay to play—an inherently elitist system that makes entry into the field of the arts exceedingly difficult for anyone who doesn’t already derive their financial security from other sources.
The result is a far less diverse workforce and leadership pipeline, high turnover, low morale, and ultimately, arts and cultural offerings that are less vital and fail to reflect the values and visions of our communities.
A Regional Coalition Emerges
In western Massachusetts, in a region known as the Berkshires, and across the state line in Columbia County in New York state, a group of arts organizations have come together to do something about elitism in the arts and to advocate for fair compensation.
For over a year, a group of six (later expanded to eight) arts organizations coordinated and carried out a survey to systematically understand the real experience of entry- and mid-level workers, humanize their experience with first-hand stories, and make recommendations and commitments to increase pay equity—both as individual organizations, and as a growing movement. My role, as a consultant, has been to support this coalition.
The resulting effort—the Pay Equity Project—was inspired by a few separate informal grassroots whistleblower efforts initiated by brave arts workers in the region.
The coalition members, who were initially brought together by a local organization called Multicultural BRIDGE, are: Art Omi, Berkshire Art Center, Community Access to the Arts, Flying Cloud Institute, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, WAM Theatre, and Williamstown Theatre Festival. A local community foundation, the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, has supported this effort and was the study’s primary funder.
The full report, published in June, can be found here.
“It’s really difficult to feel passionate about your work when you can’t get out of debt, afford a house or a car that actually gets you to and from work.”
Survey Findings
The study’s results are based on surveys with 188 entry- and mid-level workers. The participants came from 43 area arts and cultural employers and held 33 different position titles.
A few highlights include:
- About half of respondents consider their pay and benefits “unfair, and expectations unreasonable.”
- The average hourly wage ($19.49) barely exceeds the livable wage rate for the region ($17.78) for households with no children and no unemployed or dependent adults, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. For workers with children and/or adult dependents, $19.49 becomes severely insufficient.
- Over half of respondents (56 percent) have additional jobs to get by.
Beyond the numbers, we solicited long-form insights from respondents and conducted two focus groups. Here is a sample of those verbatim responses:
- “My life isn’t sustainable. I get further and further behind in all ways: financial, social fabric, health, education.”
- “It’s really difficult to feel passionate about your work when you can’t get out of debt, afford a house or a car that actually gets you to and from work, or even enjoy a nice dinner out. I gave up all my free personal time and still struggled to make ends meet and was pushed even further into debt.”
- “It is not worth it in the arts anymore.”
Employers were also asked to share anonymized data about salaries and benefits for their entry- and mid-level staff, which we consolidated into a database. Compensation information for the highest paid employees in nonprofits is easily accessible for free online using GuideStar or ProPublica to access IRS 990 forms. But compensation information for people on the lower rungs is much harder to find. That made our new database, fed by 38 participating employers representing 963 total employees, extremely valuable.
Here are some highlights:
- A third of the employers reported that some or all their interns are unpaid.
- Employers reported that 30 percent of their full-time employees earn less than $50,000 annually (before taxes), and some are earning much less than that.
- Nearly two in three employers (65 percent) lack plans to increase pay equity or aren’t sure what steps to take.
A National Problem
Of course, the issues uncovered in our local survey are not unique to our region.
Two larger scale initiatives with similar objectives are:
- Valuing Our Nonprofit Workforce Survey 2023: This effort is led by Third Sector New England. The survey stresses persistent disparities: “Compensation benchmarks across the nonprofit sector have changed drastically since the start of COVID-19. But there are still disparities when it comes to ensuring equitable wages for nonprofit employees.”
- The national Arts Compensation Project is led by the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) and AMS Analytics. The survey is framed as “an important step towards greater pay transparency, parity and equity for arts workers.”
Two completed initiatives provided additional insight and inspiration. Racial equity is the focus of The Burden of Bias in the Bay State: The Nonprofit Racial Leadership Gap in Massachusetts, undertaken by the Building Movement Project in 2019. Insight regarding Massachusetts and national trends helps underscore the added burden for people of color. That report found that more respondents who are people of color experienced bias through “organizations that lack ladders, succession planning, or effective mentoring, as well as nonprofits in which favoritism and inconsistent standards yield unfair outcomes;” that fewer people of color reported receiving cost of living and performance-based raises; and that about half of people of color surveyed said their race had been a barrier to career advancement.
The most important recommendation is for employers to develop compensation frameworks which outline how compensation is set.
A second important initiative is the Pay Equity Standards certification program, which was developed in 2020 by a small organization in Chicago called On Our Team. Originally created to address labor and pay equity issues in costume design and other theatrical design areas, the program has expanded to other sectors and other cities. To earn the Pay Equity Standards gold badge, employers must satisfy a series of criteria, such as a maximum five-to-one salary ratio between CEOs and the lowest paid employee.
Recommendations and Commitments
The following recommendations were the culmination of quantitative and qualitative insights from entry- and mid-level workers themselves, anonymized compensation data from employers, and a national scan of compensation equity initiatives. As such, these recommendations are also commitments that all eight lead organizations have made. The recommendations and commitments fall into two categories: recommendations for employers, and recommendations for movement building.
The most important recommendation is for employers to develop compensation frameworks that outline how compensation is set, including minimum pay rates, targets based on living wage data, and consistent and transparent salary bands based on job titles and responsibilities.
Additionally, the report calls on sector organizations to analyze and track the compensation ratios across the organization between the highest and lowest paid employees. Many of the recommendations concern transparency, such as listing rates of pay on all job descriptions and hiring postings, as well as having transparent protocols regarding overtime.
The report also emphasizes the need to eliminate practices that foster exclusion, such as unpaid internships. Related changes outlined include valuing lived experience in making hiring and promotion decisions and adjusting job training and professional development strategies to increase retention and help a broader range of people to succeed.
Finally, the report calls for incorporating concrete targets for compensation equity into planning, including incorporating equity commitments in multiyear financial projections and making compensation equity a regular board agenda item.
From Report to a Movement
The members of our coalition are under no illusion that a report alone will change practice and culture in the field.
Once employers practicing pay equity reach critical mass, assumptions and expectations will shift.
We now have the data. The next step is to move toward advocacy. To this end, We plan to host an annual regional Pay Equity Summit, with broad participation among arts and culture organizations, as well as other nonprofit and for-profit regional employers, to track progress, showcase pay equity initiatives, and increase accountability.
Additionally, priorities of the group are to advocate for pay equity both at the governmental level—local, state, and federal—and in the private sector, including individual, institutional, and corporate donors. Part of this work, too, is narrative in nature—that means both challenging still commonplace notions that justify exclusionary practices such as unpaid internships, as well as amplifying stories that highlight the essential role of arts and culture workers in communities.
How Do We Pay for It?
One of the most common reactions to the project and our findings is, “Sounds great. How do we pay for it?”
There are several answers to that important question. One is to increase funding for the field. While the extent of the increase in donor backing for racial justice can be overstated, the racial reckoning of the past three years does create greater possibilities to generate donor support for transformative change.
A second answer is cultural. Once employers practicing pay equity reaches critical mass, assumptions and expectations will shift, and it will make no more sense to ask how to find resources to ensure equitable compensation than to ask how to free up resources to ensure the presence of bathrooms at a workplace.
A third answer is simply about setting priorities to pay workers what they are worth.
Sometimes, this can be fixed internally, by narrowing the gap between executives and staff. But in cases where that won’t work, programming should be aligned with actual human and financial resources. In the short term, pay equity is achieved by reducing workload. In the longer term, the message is sent about what the real costs are to provide a full program without exploitation.
Clearly, the Pay Equity Project is part of a larger national conversation. Individual organizations, regional coalitions, and industry associations throughout the nation are gathering data, changing pay structures, advocating for legislative reform, and more.
One important discovery from our survey is that there is an extraordinary cultural divide between entry- and mid-level workers on the one hand, and board members and donors on the other. Making visible the experiences of what remains a largely invisible arts underclass is critical to changing how the art world functions.
So long as working in the arts is considered a privilege, the privileged will dominate the field. Not only is this result unconscionable, but it also diminishes the quality of artistic expression, and it ultimately threatens the viability of the sector.
This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.