Distrust me just this once? Part 3, how to build trust
By: David A. Smith
[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the previous Part 1.]
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
– Oscar Wilde
In the first two parts of this post, we encountered (via a Los Angeles Times article)
Selling the new vision: is you is or is you ain’t buying?
And it is the job of John King II, executive director of the Housing Authority of the CIty of
“Until they see it, it’s hard to get people to trust,” he said. “We’re trying to build that by delivering on what we say.”
Because the solution is its salesware, the best proof will be the development itself, fully completed, and that lies in the future, where it is unknowable. So the planners are doing the next best thing – taking them to meet their peers in other properties:
Planners have worked hard to generate tenants’ support. They took a team of locals on a national tour of similar redevelopment projects –
Peer-to-peer works. Not just the properties – the people. Actually, it’s the people who are more important, because they have been through the experience, and they know what the Jordan Downs residents do not. If the Jordan Downs steering committee is wise, it will make peer-to-peer exchange not a isolated event, but an integral ongoing process. If they’re really smart, they’ll fund these exchanges in the project budget, and encourage peer-to-peer interactions with no one else present. Get out of the way.
Community Barber. Resident Andre Powns gives a haircut to his son Alijah, 3.
There’s an essential element of trust that the project leaders need to show their residents. Not the money, not the trips, but the chance to talk to peers while no one else is watching.
– and have offered free lunches for tenants who sit through the marathon presentations and focus-group sessions.
SDI leadership,
Wrong dynamic: free lunches and marathon presentations and focus groups aren’t what builds trust. Trust builds trust.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-
Trust can be misplaced when public-choice risk is involved. But then, I’m naturally skeptical. A better peer is someone who’s traveled the same roads you have.
They count on ambassadors such as Richard Alford, who lives a few blocks away but grew up in Jordan Downs; his grandmother, aunts and sisters still live in the projects. He visited
“I whip out my pictures and [say] ‘Wouldn’t you like to get brand new pipes?’ ” he said.
Trust is not won by weight of evidence. Trust is won by immediacy, and reliability of the messenger.
“Touch my wound”
Trust requires vocalization; fear hides in silence.
He tries to push tenants to ask for what they want, and assures them they won’t be shipped out to
Though
85 miles, 3 hours 10 minutes in traffic, a lifetime in experience
A long way from the neighborhood.
“Toto, I think we’re not in the ‘hood any more”
Communities are cryptobiotica – the web of living people stronger than the web of physical structures. Disperse them like dandelion seeds and they may be new people, but they will not be the same community.
But even its biggest cheerleaders worry that the project might be undone by its homegrown web of challenges.
A community develops its own ethos, and that ethos becomes stronger even as the physical community becomes more isolated. The ethos may be strong – and it may resist improvement.
“Jordan Downs is the most extreme case I’ve seen, by a long shot,” said
“The project’s size, the sense of isolation, the horrible statistics about crime and public health . . . the sense of entrapment people feel there,” Solomon said, ticking off the consequences of a “history of abandonment” in South L.A.
We are rational creatures who make sense of the world around us. The world around Jordan Downs forgot Jordan Downs, dumped its poor there, left them to fend as best they could.
High School Graduates. Michael Jerod Adams, 17, hugs fellow graduate Vanna Briattany Colbert after high school graduation ceremonies at the housing project. The graduation was held for the
The world didn’t necessarily mean to do them harm; harm just happened. That makes it no less harmful.
To a stranger, Jordan Downs feels like a world unto itself. Stand in almost any spot on the 50-acre property and you see row after row of identical two-story buildings that look like barracks, distinguishable only by an occasional rosebush near a front door or the size of shirts on clotheslines crisscrossing every backyard.
A barracks it was, and a barrack it is … just a different group of conscripts
Right now, ugly though it may be, Jordan Downs is low-density: only fourteen apartments to the acre. That is proposed to triple, plus there will be additional non-housing uses. The place, when transformed, will be unrecognizable; all traces of the old Jordan Downs will have vanished.
If it happens. Count the recursive cycles of deprivation and poverty that block the residents’ trust.
I believe only what I can prove
1. Failure is comfortable because it is familiar
But the bunkered uniformity that ties down residents also gives some comfort; there’s less shame being out of work or on welfare when almost everyone around you is as well.
If everyone fails, then my failure is no failure, and we can all be comfortable; indeed, the only risk is in trying.
No HOPE in sight
2. Trusting only those one knows
“There’s an amazing sense of community there, and they don’t want that dismantled,” Solomon said. “These are their homies, and they cannot imagine life without them.”
If no one I do not know has helped me, then I can trust only those I know.
And I don’t want to know you
3. Fearing those who are successful
They also cannot imagine life alongside the middle-class families the project plans to lure.
That they cannot is the most severe indictment of public housing imaginable. People so isolated they cannot imagine themselves living with others. For the redevelopment to succeed, the developers will have to enable people to change what they expect to see.
“Upscale people are not going to move over here, to the heart of the ghetto,” said Smith, of Parolees for Change. “They’ll be, like: ‘Where are the gas stations? Who are all these dudes hanging around? Why did that guy take off with my car?’ “
Gas stations can be brought. Stores can be added. People will come if the community is comprehensively transformed, including its policing. Such strategies have worked in Atlanta; they’ve worked in
How do you overcome the unvoiced belief, Yeah, but it’ll never happen here?
Public housing: before, Mission Hill being demolished
Public housing: after, Mission Main as built
4. Failure shrinks horizons
At the meeting last month, one resident panned what planners figured would be a welcome draw: new businesses on-site and more frequent bus service. “Don’t you want a grocery store closer to Jordan Downs?” asked the architect.
Genevia Penny shrugged him off. The Food 4 Less is close enough, she said, and a 20-minute wait for the bus is no trouble.
Close enough for the housing project?
Prisoners kept in long confinement are psychologically manipulated by offering them hope of imminent release … they snatching it away at the last moment. Disappointment is so powerful we build up defenses against hope, and those defenses create the death of hope.
A trip to the market is a good reason to get dressed and go out; the bus stop is a good place to catch up on neighborhood gossip.
Talk about your rationalizations.
“They want to make it so we don’t get out in the world,” Penny complained. “What’s the senior citizens like me supposed to do — just sit around and watch TV?”
Self-destructive … but self-reinforcing.
Born of the public housing: Grape Street Crips, project in the background
5. The community self-polices … because no one else does
When force passes for law
Smith took Solomon on a walking tour of the projects — an eye-opener for the architect, who realized “they think we have a Pollyannaish view of their lives.” And “they” are right.
“Their daily experiences are so different from what anybody who doesn’t live in that environment can imagine,” Solomon said, recounting his introduction to a place where nobody blinks when the front-office receptionist explains that she is late because her seven-year-old son woke up to a dead body on their front step.
All the world’s landscape character and typologies will not change that.
Policing has to start now.
And it takes force
6. Trust requires the powerful to give first
At a community meeting last month, a middle-aged Latino man limped to the microphone, leaning on a walker, to present the suggestions from his group of neighbors.
“I know we can’t demand anything,” he said, his voice rising over the interpreter translating his Spanish. “But I would like to make a request. We have a lot of vandalism in the area, and we are devastated by that. So we would like to have an inspector. Right now. Today.” He pounded the handle of his walker, and the women and children at the table behind him applauded.
A fair idea. One I hope the designers immediately implemented. I wonder if they did.
I trust you means that I risk letting you hurt me even when I cannot retaliate. You are trustworthy when, presented with that opportunity, instead of hurting me, you help me – usually at risk to yourself.
But if some sentiments have surprised the consultants, some suggestions have surprised the residents.
What about a health club, where elderly residents could exercise, one of the consultants offered. Or a computer center, where senior citizens could learn to use technology?
Penny stared at her with raised eyebrows, uncharacteristically silent. Twenty-four years in the projects and she had yet to consider all of its possibilities.
Community center, Cement Factory redevelopment,
Will Jordan Downs make it? Will the residents come to trust? Will those they trust tale critical risks in return?
Another Oscar Wilde quote
A phrase quoted to me by my friend Andrea Titterington, who for the last several years has been building trust in
Nothing about us
without us
is for us.
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