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kgsminiranch · 7 years ago

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Former Dallas ISD chief: City, school district must ‘make economic diversity an explicit priority’

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The growth of affordable housing in America is likely going to slow, thanks to the new tax law passed by Congress last month.

In a recent article by Conor Dougherty in The New York Times, an analysis by San Franciso-based accounting firm Novogradac & Company found the new law will reduce the amount of “affordable rental homes at a minimum by about 219,200 to 232,200, or more” units over the next decade.

That’s bad news for Dallas ISD, where affordable housing has becoming increasingly scarce in parts of the district.

Before leaving to found housing think-tank Opportunity Dallas, Mike Koprowski preached about the necessity of mixed-income housing for the district’s future, in his former role as DISD’s chief of transformation and innovation.

During a 2016 presentation to the Dallas City Council, Koprowski asked council members to consider the impact on neighborhood schools and their socioeconomic diversity when evaluating housing plans. He also launched intentional socioeconomic integration as a pilot program at two DISD schools: Solar Prep and CityLab.

Koprowski talked to The Dallas Morning News about his new work, after taking part in a panel discussion on childhood poverty in the region.

Dallas ISD is currently underway with its own racial equity audit, beginning the process of looking at inequities born out of the district’s decades-long segregationist efforts. Is this a good place for the city to begin when trying to address the North-South gap: one part of Dallas rich with prosperity — and the other struggling with poverty?

We often talk about economic segregation, but it’s very tightly correlated with racial segregation. It’s hard to even find the difference between the two, quite frankly. So, I think the first thing that we need to do is acknowledge the fact that this did not happen accidentally. This is a direct consequence of government policy that goes back many, many decades to the red lining of black neighborhoods; white neighborhoods that we labeled ‘residential’ and black neighborhoods labeled as ‘industrial’; the World War II G.I. Bill, which black veterans were systematically left out of, meaning they were left out of generous education benefits, they were left out of generous home loan benefits; there was a racial ranking scale that the Federal Housing Administration had for a number of years that identified minorities as the least desirable residents. This stuff was engineered. It was race-based. But we also have to acknowledge the intersection between race and economics. These two types of segregation are largely the same issue.

Opportunity Dallas’ executive director Mike Koprowski at an editorial board meeting at The Dallas Morning News in Dallas, on February 13, 2015.

How can the city find the political will to move forward swiftly on this?

What we really have to focus on is the power of economic integration. I think there is a history lesson that needs to happen here, but we also need to be forward-looking and pay attention to the research that shows what happens when you have mixed-income neighborhoods and you have mixed-income schools. So if we want a stronger worker pipeline for corporations, if we want a more balanced property tax base, if we want all of these things, then mixed-income communities have to be part of the solution.

You have the historical conversation, but you also have the forward-looking conversation. If you want the things that we want, here’s a really strong strategy to accomplish it.

So what’s that strategy?

We’ve talked about housing policy in four domains. The first one is mobility to opportunity — low- and moderate-income access to higher-opportunity areas. That’s where vouchers come in to play. There’s a lot of research from Raj Chetty which shows what happens when a low-income kid, before age 13, is able to access a mixed-income neighborhood as opposed to a high-poverty neighborhood. The life trajectories change rather dramatically.

The second domain is kind of the reverse of that. There are high-poverty communities — how can we holistically revitalize those communities and attract a diverse range of people to those communities. And that means investing in mixed-income housing, education reform, health and wellness programs so that private investment starts to come. The purpose-built community model, there’s about 16 cities in the country that are implementing that model. The idea is if you can create mixed-income neighborhoods, outcomes can improve. If you have an integration of folks from different economic backgrounds, positive outcomes are very likely to happen.

The third domain is actually a corollary to the last one, which is: when there is development happening in high-poverty communities, how do you have policies that protect against displacement? So that you can actually maintain the diversity of those neighborhoods. The West Dallas case, right? Identifying gentrification early, freezing property taxes, whatever it is, there has to be sort of an anti-displacement pillar of a housing policy because otherwise, you’re just taking Little Mexicos and turning them into Uptowns. That’s segregated the other way.

The last piece is how do you incentivize the development community to do more mixed-income and affordable housing. And so that last domain is really about increasing the supply and availability throughout the entire city. One of the challenges in an Uptown, or in a hot market, a developer can come in and say, ‘Hey, I want to do this development. I can rent out 100 percent of these units at market rate, and the market rate’s pretty significant. If you ask me to do a 20 percent set-aside for affordable units, my profit margin reduces, and my investors are looking for particular yield, so what do I do?’ That’s where I think policy comes in. How do you address that gap? What incentives can you provide developers so that they do more affordable, mixed-income housing — not in pockets of the city, but throughout the city? And it’s incentives like density or height bonuses, tax abatements, parking easements, maybe some direct subsidies … this is the talk about the Housing Trust Fund, to create the resources to do it with.

I think if we had those four pillars — first, if you had low-income people being able to access high-income areas where possible, with vouchers, for example; second, if you had a holistic revitalization of high-poverty communities; third, if you could revitalize without displacement; and fourth, if you just had a stronger supply of mixed-income housing throughout the city — I think that’s the way to go.

Where does the school district play a part? Doesn’t redevelopment in some of these areas require Dallas ISD’s action first?

You can’t do one or the other; you have to do it together, almost simultaneously.

That’s why I think housing policy is education policy, and I think there needs to be an intentional effort to make sure that the city goes in and says we’re going to do holistic revitalization in this part of town, and DISD needs to be in the conversation to say here’s what we’re going to do to complement that strategy with our schools.

When you were with the district, were you having those conversations with the City of Dallas?

We started to have that conversation; senior staff was meeting. I don’t know if they’re still meeting. But we were meeting, having conversations. It was kind of proceeding when DISD was getting its bond package together and the city was thinking about doing theirs. Those conversations were happening, but it goes back to what I said — it can’t be a once-a-week, or a once-a-month meeting. It has to be really intentional, roll-up-your-sleeves, to make this work.

I think DISD has sort of found the formula, right? If you have an attractive instructional model, people from different economic backgrounds are going to be interested: the Solar Preps, CityLabs, the IB model. That’s part of the solution, but it can’t be done in isolation.

That might work in areas that have shown strong economic growth, like parts of Oak Cliff and Old East Dallas. But what about neighborhoods like Pleasant Grove, where it’s going to be difficult to pull affluent families in?

This is a long-term strategy. And I think that we commit to it today, and we get there in a couple of decades. That’s really what we are talking about. In the meantime, and I think this is often a point that’s missed, you can’t just forget about high-poverty schools. DISD is going to have high-poverty schools for the foreseeable future. So that’s where stronger teachers, stronger principals, strong instruction — all those things come into play. You can’t forget about high-poverty schools, but at the same time you’re working to improve them — ACE, TEI — you also have to figure out how do we create more mixed-income schools. I see it as a ‘walk and chew gum’ kind of thing. This is a long game, but it starts with a commitment from the boards, from the staff, that we’re going to make economic diversity an explicit priority in our work.

Is that commitment there in DISD?

My understanding is that the new Ignite Middle School is going to do the 50/50 economic diversity model, which is encouraging. We did Solar Prep and CityLab right before I was going to leave. I’m not there anymore, but it looks like they are going to keep going with that. There was enough will to do Solar Prep, CityLab and now Ignite, so my hope is that continues on. My hope is that the commitment is there to do it at scale.

When you left the district, was part of your reasoning because you couldn’t affect enough change in your role in the district?

My realization was that if we were to do economic diversity in schools at scale, then we also need to be doing this at the neighborhood and housing level. So that’s what my frustration was. We need this same sort of economic diversity movement in the housing space. I felt like at my time in DISD, the community had really rallied around this idea that education is critical to our fate. It’s critical to our future. So you saw Commit and these non-profits, everybody was really rallying around education. And I felt there wasn’t a similar groundswell in the housing space. There wasn’t an equal commitment to doing that diversity work. And yet, I knew from research that diversity in housing is as critical as diversity in schools. I felt the void there, that the conversation needed to be had, and that I could fill it.

How is that fight going?

The momentum is starting and that’s what we’re trying to do. But it’s certainly not where it is with education. … A few years ago, I think education became a dinner table conversation when talking about the fate of our city. Is housing critical to the fate of our city? Is that a dinner table conversation right now? No. I don’t think it is a dinner table conversation. But that’s where we are trying to go. What we do in housing is equally important to what we do in schools, and you can’t divorce the two from each other.

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