The first project I worked on was in the late 1980s: the renovation of an old, vacant building at Second and D Streets NW in Washington, D.C. The Community for Creative Non-Violence—and Mitch Snyder in particular—had petitioned, protested, and gone on a hunger strike to secure federal assistance to convert the 200,000-square-foot structure into an enormous homeless shelter, complete with a commercial kitchen, medical and dental facilities, and beds for 1,500 men and women.
Approximately $14M—about $35M today—was ultimately made available. The nonprofit I worked for, a church-based organization deeply involved in cooperative conversions and tenants’ rights, led the redevelopment effort.
The finished product was beguiling in nearly every respect. Over the course of the project—my first out of college—I learned about project management, construction draws, and even how to operate a Bobcat while scooping up and hauling away thousands of pounds of dead rats. Compared with the building we had inherited, the transformation was dramatic: a gleaming stainless-steel commercial kitchen, state-of-the-art bathing and lavatory facilities, and newly finished spaces capable of sheltering 1,500 people. At the grand opening, the applause was considerable.
But even as I was thrilled to be at the ribbon cutting, something troubled me. Many of the homeless people I had come to know expressed serious reservations about the shelter, principally about their personal safety and the security of their belongings. Many were struggling profoundly with drug or alcohol addiction or mental illness, often both. One evening, a few weeks after the shelter opened, I sat with a group of homeless men camping beneath the Whitehurst Freeway and asked why they were not staying there. To a person, the answer was: “Because I don’t want to be with those people.”
During the two years I spent working on the project, an uncomfortable question kept surfacing: Was it sound to concentrate so much human distress in a single building? When relatively few people occupied a space, their individual needs could be addressed, and the consequences of their difficulties for others remained manageable. But somewhere on the other side of an invisible line, too many people carrying too many problems into too little space overwhelmed the facility, the people within it, and the surrounding community. We had succeeded magnificently at renovating a building.
I was far less certain that we had created a good place, or even a good solution. Meanwhile, a nagging notion was forming in my mind about the costs and benefits of concentrating—quarantining, really—societal problems versus dispersing them. For the moment, I buried all thoughts about Ursula Le Guin’s warnings.
When the project was completed, and funding for my position ended, I went to work for another nonprofit. This time, I developed new homes for low-income first-time buyers and rehabilitated older apartment buildings for low-income renters.
Although I did not yet know what a fractal was, I had begun to recognize a pattern that repeated itself at different scales: the pursuit of more housing units, greater concentration, and greater density without sufficient regard for how social distress and neighborhood dysfunction compound spatially. The neighborhoods where we sought to create homeownership opportunities were among the most distressed in the city. The blocks we selected were often the most distressed blocks in those neighborhoods. Why? Because those were the places where we could afford to build. Why were they more affordable? Because people did not want to live there. Anyone who could afford to live someplace else generally did. Those left behind were, naturally, the people with the least mobility and, often, the greatest difficulties to overcome.
In the course of converting the old federal building into a massive shelter for the homeless, we never thought to describe the project as the development of a massive property for the dysfunctional. Nor had we paused to ask whether placing 1,500 people struggling with addiction, mental illness, and profound instability in a single building was, on balance, a good idea. Our metric was simpler: Were they off the street? Underneath that question was the insanely arrogant conceit that “off the street” was an unalloyed good and a moral imperative. Just as almost no one asks today whether it makes sense, in the larger scheme of things, to co-locate all of a county’s social services in one area of one city, not once during the development of the shelter did anyone on the project team ask: What happens to the area around this building when 1,500 drunks, addicts, and otherwise deeply troubled people are concentrated on half of one city block?
Similarly, as we built houses for low-income buyers on some of the worst blocks in the most distressed neighborhoods of a city then engulfed by the crack epidemic, we rarely asked whether the larger proposition made sense. Our metric was whether we had given someone the opportunity to own a home. That focus kept us from asking harder questions. Was ownership genuinely beneficial if the house was unlikely to appreciate? Why was it unlikely to appreciate? Did it make sense to put someone who had just exhausted nearly all of their savings at closing into a property that would require a continuing supply of money, time, and practical capacity to maintain? Knowing the predictive value of credit history, did it make sense to put financially fragile buyers into positions of potentially great vulnerability when a rent-controlled apartment or a share in a cooperative might have made more sense?
The intentions were good. The work was real. The immediate accomplishments were visible and measurable. None of that ensured that the outcomes were sound. And not once were opportunity costs really considered.
Questions like these sent me on a much longer journey, one that continues today, in pursuit of a deeper understanding of neighborhood dynamics, decision-making, fair division, social dysfunction, and the spatial consequences of each. That inquiry eventually led me down another road, toward a better understanding of the built environment and the genuine social value created by high-quality urban form, and toward growing skepticism about the limits of design as a response to sociological reality. From the Radiant City to New Urbanism, the design and planning professions have repeatedly made astonishingly ambitious claims about how much the arrangement of buildings, streets, and public spaces can do to repair society. I came to believe that good form matters enormously, and that confusing the shaping of place with the solving of human problems is its own kind of professional hubris.
These lines of inquiry led me to examine how the public realm is shaped by the quality of the edges between private and shared space; how commons can be governed responsibly; how individual actions accumulate into neighborhood conditions; and, ultimately, what justice may require of those engaged in planning and community development.
I founded CZB 25 years ago because, by then, I had spent more than a decade watching cities, nonprofits, foundations, and advocates become increasingly proficient at building systems to respond to problems downstream while neglecting the conditions upstream that continued to produce them.
I had watched—and participated in—the development of housing that alleviated individual hardship while concentrating poverty spatially. I had watched the National Equity Fund, Enterprise Social Investment Corporation, and other intermediaries syndicate thousands of deals that, from one angle—and especially at the grand opening—looked shiny, new, and successful, but rarely, except in the hottest markets, made sense in the larger scheme of things. I had watched outputs masquerade as outcomes and, in the process, watched us put in place many of the conditions that made poor outcomes for vulnerable people more likely—the very conditions that Raj Chetty and his colleagues at Opportunity Insights would eventually catalogue and map with such extraordinary clarity.
I had watched states make money available to localities only on the states’ terms, with too little regard for whether the prescribed uses actually served those communities or responded intelligently to local conditions. I had watched architects and designers overpromise what physical form could accomplish. I had watched social scientists withhold support from sound but imperfect action until yet another multivariate regression could establish what perfection required. Too much faith in design was a problem. So was paralysis in pursuit of proof.
We can do better, I thought. Then one day I came across the work of Amory Lovins and heard him and others at RMI say, “If it exists, it must be possible.” I was inspired to try.
Those who most profoundly influenced my work in community development—Alan Mallach, Paul Hawken, Dean Macris, Ron Heifetz, John Rawls, Gale Cincotta, Harvey Cox, Samuel Mockbee, Lloyd Smith, and Don Terner, some still with us and others not—helped me understand that justice, environmental stewardship, capitalism, and competition need not be opposing forces. They can work together. Doing so requires clarity of intention, honesty about consequences, and an unwavering focus on outcomes. That is where the effort to do better begins.
For more than two decades, CZB has tried to do better—often falling short, sometimes succeeding, but always trying to distinguish activity from progress, outputs from outcomes, and good intentions from good judgment. Our work has remained grounded in a Rawlsian concern for justice and an obligation to consider those most vulnerable to the consequences of public decisions. It has also been shaped by the unsettling questions raised by Parfit about our obligations to future people. Decisions made today can alter circumstances for decades or generations, often in ways that cannot be undone. That knowledge demands humility about our ability to foresee consequences and seriousness about our responsibility for them.
As I write this, we are launching CZB 2.0. It is not a departure from the reasons CZB was founded. It is a recommitment to them, with greater discipline, sharper language, and an even stronger emphasis on clarity.
Clarity is not simply the presentation of more information. It is the hard work of determining what is actually true, distinguishing signal from noise, working in genuine partnership with our clients to define the outcomes being sought, and making costs, consequences, and tradeoffs visible.
Without clarity, strategy becomes little more than a collection of plausible activities. Without strategy, progress is reduced to motion: projects completed, money spent, meetings held, boxes checked, with little evidence that conditions have materially improved.
The connections therefore matter. Clarity must lead to strategy: a deliberate choice about what to do, what not to do, where to concentrate effort, and how limited resources can produce the greatest public value. Strategy must lead to progress: observable, measurable improvement in the conditions that justified action in the first place. Clarity without strategy is merely understanding. Strategy without progress is merely intention. CZB 2.0 is organized around getting done what matters.
We continue to try to help create plans, codes, policies, and strategies that strengthen the public realm and confront social and economic realities honestly.
We continue to partner with communities in the difficult work of making places that are not merely attractive or well-intentioned, but great, just, durable, and memorable.
That is why I founded CZB. It remains why the work matters. It is why we are launching CZB 2.0 now.
