Cincinnati is one of the fastest-growing cities in the Midwest. Corporate giants such as Procter & Gamble and Kroger are headquartered there, and some of its close-in neighborhoods have become chic, with coffee shops and new condominiums. But, as in Detroit, downtown prosperity is not trickling down to the poorest, predominantly African American residents, who are more likely to get displaced by the new condos than to own one.
Cincinnati is among the most segregated cities in the United States, Dr. Victor Garcia, a trauma surgeon at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told me when we met for coffee. Child poverty is second only to Detroit. Studies show that concentrated poverty is associated with increases in hypertension in children as young as six years old, he said. Life expectancy differs by 20 years between neighborhoods within a half mile of one another.
Garcia is a soft-spoken, middle-aged African American doctor with graying hair at the temples and intense eyes. We met at a busy downtown breakfast spot. I arrived early and saw that he was in an intense conversation with his earlier appointment—city officials, he told me later. He finished up that meeting and joined me at a booth, and then filled me in on how he had come to rethink his life work as a pediatrician when he saw that health—survival, even—for young African Americans in his community would take more than access to medical treatment.
Dr. Victor Garcia, a pediatric surgeon in Cincinnati.
“I’m seeing more and more kids coming in with gunshot wounds,” he said. “In these neighborhoods, you see the equivalence of the PTSD that you see in veterans coming back from war.”
This level of violence is a public health emergency and a moral failure, in his view. He made a pledge to take action when a 14-year-old girl died in his arms of a gunshot wound. She was just the latest of many young victims of gun violence he had treated; the number in Cincinnati rose 300 percent over 10 years, he told me. Their average age is 12.9 years old. Dr. Garcia told the girl’s mother he would do everything in his power to make sure he’d never have to tell another mother that her daughter had died from a cause that is so clearly preventable.
“Violence is a symptom,” he said, “as is infant mortality and premature birth.” All are symptoms of multigenerational poverty. The real key to preventing childhood death is to create new ways that people can earn living wages in the urban core, he said.
To compete with global corporations that produce in low-wage regions, a business needs to be locally rooted. Cooperatives or similar structures in which workers have an ownership share of the business work best in these communities, he believes.
“If people have skin in the game, they are more likely to stay with it and more likely to leverage their genius to making it more productive,” he said.
One idea for Cincinnati? Grow microgreens inside, under lights, in abandoned buildings in the inner city. One such venture, Waterfields, is operating now. The company delivers trays of live greens to high-end restaurants. These microgreens are flavorful and popular with chefs.
The business is tiny, but Dr. Garcia believes there is potential. What if the big “anchor institutions” in the city, like the hospitals and schools, committed to buying all the produce they could from local companies like Waterfields? You’d create sustainable jobs not only for those enterprises but also for the businesses that serve them—day-care centers for the children of company employees, for example. Clusters of businesses are needed to begin bringing a neighborhood out of poverty, he said.
By growing locally, you could take on two of our most pressing crises—inequality and climate change, he said. You could reduce the carbon impact of growing vegetables, plus employ people with low skills or no skills. And because they would be co-owners, this model would help restore their sense of pride.
Dr. Garcia is inspired by the example of the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland. There, area hospitals, a local foundation, a couple of universities, and a national organization dedicated to local wealth building—the Democracy Collaborative—formed the Evergreen Cooperatives to address exactly these sorts of issues. A worker-owned laundry caters to these large anchor institutions, supplying jobs in poor neighborhoods.
This is the dream Dr. Garcia hopes to bring to Cincinnati. Reconnecting the economy to the community can mean living-wage jobs and restoring hope and agency for people who have been left out. Clustering jobs helps the vitality ripple out, so the expenditures of one business can provide a customer base for other businesses.
How much potential is there to bring back prosperous local economies—and to make them just, inclusive, and green? Writer and urban activist Jane Jacobs is well known for up-ending the conventional wisdom on urban design, which had favored high-rise apartments and freeways that demolished long-standing neighborhoods. Her books illustrate the importance of human-scale design and the sense of community that develops when people regularly encounter each other on busy streets. Cities are complex and decentralized, she shows, and they operate best when they work like diverse emergent ecosystems.
Jacobs is less well known for her ideas about human-scale economics and how to revive the economies of cities. Among other things, she has written about “import substitution”: Replace items bought from outside the metropolitan area with items manufactured, grown, or processed within the city, and you boost local hiring. The people who land these jobs then have money to spend, and if they can spend at least some of their income with other local producers, the effects continue to ripple out into a virtuous cycle of prosperity.
Unfortunately, most cities do not take this approach.
“The problem is that economic development professionals have naked self-interest,” economist and author Michael Shuman told me when I asked him about this later. “Bringing one big [corporate] player to town makes page-one news; it’s good for their career and for the politicians they serve. The fact that it has nothing to do with the economic vitality of the community is irrelevant.”
It gets worse. We need to realize that much of what is traditionally considered “economic development” undermines the local economy, Shuman said. These approaches take tax money from all of us, including small and medium-sized business owners, and give it to big corporations in the form of subsidies and tax breaks. This undermines job creation, since small and medium-sized businesses—not giant transnational corporations—create two thirds of all new jobs in the United States.1
Likewise, subsidies to big coal, big oil, big cattle, big agribusiness, and other extractive industries all tip the balance against small and medium-sized, locally rooted businesses. Because big companies exert outsized influence in government, subsidies for the extractive economy continue at the national and local levels, and as they do, they undermine the local economy, ecological sustainability, and community stability.
The outcome of this lopsided power is evident in all parts of our lives. Deregulated Wall Street banks bet recklessly on the mortgage industry and millions lose their homes and, in many cases, their entire net worth. Exxon lies about climate-change science and spends millions to promote those lies, and action on the climate crisis is delayed by decades. BP pollutes the Gulf of Mexico with a giant oil spill. Massey Energy blows up mountaintops. Companies close their factory doors to move to nonunion states where wages are low, and then close those factories to move abroad to where wages are even lower. Furthermore, these companies and their wealthy executives use their lopsided power to win tax cuts for themselves and impose austerity budgets for everyone else. Local governments find themselves in budget crises, unable to maintain basic services, much less to help the poor get a fresh start when their homes and jobs are taken away.
Bringing our economies home is one of the most important ways to restore democracy and to bring vitality, ecological sustainability, and self-determination to our communities.
Americans get it. Two thirds of them (67 percent, according to a 2015 Gallup poll2) have confidence in small business—the highest percentage for any U.S. institution except the military. Big business and banks, in contrast, are trusted by only 21 percent of Americans.3
What is less clear is how to bring economic power home.