Conference on Clinical Legal Education

May 18–22, 2002
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Learning from Other Disciplines

A presentation by Kenneth M. Reardon
Associate Professor in City and Regional Planning Cornell University

Promoting Community/University Partnerships That Work: Lessons from the East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP)

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Before I begin my remarks this morning I want to thank Charlie Wiesselberg from the University of California at Berkeley for inviting me to participate in this important conference. I was eager to do so in spite of the fact that meeting takes place during the last week of Cornell’s spring semester. Why was this the case?

First, Nina Tarr, an old friend of mine from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me this was a first-rate group of progressive legal scholars, teachers, and activists whom I would enjoy meeting. The fact that 400 of you showed up early on a Sunday morning to participate in this plenary session indicates how well Nina understood the character of this group.

Second, I was eager to speak before a professional group whose standing in low-income communities of color was lower than that of urban planners - its not easy to find such a group. So, this morning I feel elevated in your presence!

Charlie has each of us to spend a few minutes discussing our approach to working with clients, or as we prefer to say in urban planning, community partners, as well as our approach to preparing our students for practice.

My approach to practice has been powerfully shaped by my work as a community organizer in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut and my subsequent experiences as a community planner in a variety of distressed urban communities, especially, my most recent tenure as the director of an interdisciplinary urban outreach project in East St. Louis operated by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I was fortunate to work with Nina Tarr and Cynthia Geerdes of the UIUC Law Clinic.

This project began along the “low road to morality” which, as you know, is a well-traveled path in higher education when State Representative Wyvetter H. Younge (D-East St. Louis) challenged the then-president of the University of Illinois, Stanley O. Ikenberry, Jr., to demonstrate his commitment to low-income urban communities, such as East St. Louis, by establishing an ongoing community development assistance project in this once-thriving riverfront community.

Representative Younge’s request was very influential with Dr. Ikenberry because, because as the newly-elected chairperson of the Illinois State Legislature’ Higher Education Finance Committee, she had the power to keep the University’s budget in committee, which is exactly what she threatened to do if the campus, as the state’s land grant university, failed to do the right thing in East St. Louis. Within three days of her request, the University set aside $100,000 in existing funds to create the Urban Extension and Minority Assistance Project (UEMAP) in East St. Louis designed to support resident-led revitalization efforts in this struggling central city.

Between 1987 and 1990, University students and faculty participating in UEMAP completed more than forty community-based research projects focused on critical economic and social problems confronting East St. Louis residents and businesses. Unfortunately, only one of UEMAP’s projects which were undertaken by University students and faculty using what William F. Whyte, the famous Cornell sociologist, called the professional-expert research model, was successfully implemented. When student and faculty interest in UEMAP waned in the late 1980s as a result of the project’s persistent program implementation problems, the campus decided to recruit a new faculty member to assume leadership over the project.

I was fortunate to be invited to join the faculty in UIUC’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning in the Summer of 1990. Shortly after my arrival on campus, I was asked to assume leadership of the University’s faltering UEMAP Project. As a well-trained Cornell social scientist, I began my involvement in the project by interviewing a broad-cross section of community leaders familiar with revitalization efforts in East St. Louis regarding their assessment of the University’s ongoing community-based research efforts. None of the forty individuals I interviewed upon my arrival at UIUC appeared to be aware of the University’s past outreach efforts. When I asked them what they thought of the idea of an ongoing community/university development partnership in East St. Louis, Miss Ceola Davis, a long-time community activist, responded by asking me to give her my hand.

As she squeezed the skin between my thumb and index finger until it became quite red she said, “Honey, the last thing we need in East St. Louis is another university researcher, who looks just like you, telling us what any sixth grader already knows.” Seeing my confused response, Miss Davis subsequently escorted me into her office where she showed me three tall stacks of UIUC-generated research reports which purported to examine the causes and effects of persistent poverty in East St. Louis. Miss Davis explained that the University had received more than $13 million for these reports that had failed to produce significant improvements in the quality of life for East St. Louis’s residents.

Several days after meeting Miss Davis, she invited me to return to East St. Louis to meet with leaders of the Emerson Park Development Corporation (EPDC), a recently-established community development corporation, serving the city’s poorest residential neighborhood. Following a brief conversation, EPDC’s leaders invited my colleagues and I to enter into an ongoing relationship with their organization to revitalize their severely distressed neighborhoods. In doing so, they conditioned their invitation on the following five points.

First, they indicated that they, not the University or their funders, would decide what issues would be addressed by the new partnership.

Second, they wanted local residents to actively participate with University Students and faculty at each and every step in the research process from problem identification to project evaluation.

Third, they asked the University to assist their organization in securing access to public and private funders with whom the University has relationships in order to move from project planning to program evaluation.

Fourth, they demanded the University establish a long-term relationship of no fewer than five-years beyond a one-year probationary period. While I told them I understood the minimum five-year commitment, I told them that I was a bit confused by the proposed one-year probationary period. They responded by saying that university professors were, in their experience, great at “talking the talk, but terrible at walking the walk”.

Fifth, they requested the University’s help in establishing an independent, non-profit organization, to provide ongoing leadership to the neighborhood's ongoing community-based planning and development efforts.

We responded to these concerns by agreeing to initiate a comprehensive neighborhood planning process using a participatory action research approach. During the following year, we launched an ambitious “bottoms-up, bottoms-sideways” planning process designed to involve residents in a series of activities including: mapping their area, photographing key features, surveying local building lots and structures, and interviewing local residents, business persons, and institutional representatives regarding their perceptions of the area and its future. Assisted by our students, the leaders of the Emerson Park Development Corporation produced the Emerson Park Neighborhood Improvement Plan that was chosen the “Best Plan of the Year” in 1990 by the American Institute Certified Planners.

At the completion of the planning process, residents began working on small-scale projects that could be implemented without significant external funding. During the spring of 1991, neighborhood residents assisted by campus volunteers removed illegally dumped trash from ten of the building lots along the neighborhood’s most prominent thoroughfare. Press attention resulting from the success of this activity, resulted in a $15,000 donation from a St. Louis-based foundation which enabled EPDC to continue their volunteer clean-up of the remaining illegal dump sites in the neighborhood. Momentum generated by the success of these activities, resulted in the launching of an ambitious self-help housing improvement program.

Local residents, with the help of UIUC architecture, landscape architecture, and urban and regional planning students and faculty assisted more than thirty homeowners in making needed exterior repairs to their homes. The success of this effort, led to a $200,000 HOME Grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to complete major repairs to the homes of eight low-income homeowners. Soon after the completion of these repairs, EPDC was awarded a $100,000 Urban Resources Partnership Grant for open space improvement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Encouraged by the success of these efforts, residents began organizing to ensure that a proposed regional light rail line served the neighborhood. Residents were eager to see the neighborhood get a station on the new rail line that would provide them with mass transit access to good jobs within St. Louis’ central business district (CBD) and in the vicinity of the St. Louis Lambert International Airport.

Working with engineering, architecture, planning, and business students and faculty from the University, EPDC was successful in its campaign to shift the alignment of the proposed light rail in order for it to serve East St. Louis’ four poorest neighborhoods. The movement of the MetroLink line into the Emerson Park neighborhood had two very positive impacts on the community. First, many neighborhood residents were able to secure living wages jobs with firms located near the airport. Second, the new light rail line provided the neighborhood with improved access to the region’s central business districts and major employment and cultural centers. These changes made the area highly attractive to the region’s largest real estate developers who approached EPDC with competing proposals for constructing new residential housing and commercial areas within Emerson Park. After meeting with several developers, EPDC’s leaders decided to enter into a development contract with McCormick-Baron Associates to create a new $28 million mixed-use development featuring seventy new homeowner units, two hundred affordable rental units, and six commercial stores. McCormick-Baron’s Parsons Place Project was attractive to EPDC’s leaders because it featured a mix of housing types desirable to neighborhood residents, provided EPDC with a share in the project’s developer and management fees, and gave local minority contractors the opportunity to bid on a significant portion of the project’s construction jobs.

In the months following the initial announcement of the Parsons, Place Project, EPDC was awarded a $1 million YouthBuild contract to train long-time unemployed residents in the construction trades. In addition, a local paint factory which had hired few local residents while spewing red particulate matter throughout the neighborhood was acquired by a Scandinavian firm which added scrubbers to the factory’s smokestacks and created a new job-training program for local residents. Shortly after this announcement, Jackie Joiner-Kersee, the great Olympian, who is an East St. Louis native, announced plans to construct a $13 million inter-generational educational, cultural, and recreational center adjacent to the recently completed first phase of the Parsons Place Project.

In the past year, the residents of the Emerson Park neighborhood have received additional goods news. The first fifty-homeowner units contained within the Parsons Place Project have sold quickly and are now occupied. In addition, the State of Illinois has chosen to build the first public elementary school to be constructed exclusively with state funds in Emerson Park. Finally, EPDC received official notice that their proposal to establish a charter junior high school focused on community planning and design has been accepted by the state and is scheduled to open on the fall.

Over time, local residents and University students and faculty participating in the project have developed a highly interactive approach to their work that they referred to as an empowerment model of community planning and development. This approach to urban problem solving integrates the key principles and methods of participatory action research, direct action organizing, and popular education into a highly effective method of social change. This method has proven to be highly effective in both enhancing the organizational capacity of EPDC and producing major physical improvements in this once-proud, working-class neighborhood. The success of EPDC’s empowerment approach to community development prompted other East St. Louis neighborhoods to undertake similar neighborhood improvement efforts. Neighborhood leaders from these areas have recently come together to form a city-wide coalition for municipal reform called the East St. Louis Community Action Network (ESLCAN) which has challenged the local political machine’s control over local, county, and state policy-making.

The success of these EPDC organizing efforts has helped the project acquire a significant national and international reputation for excellence in community planning and development. They have also served to inspire residents from other severely distressed neighborhoods to undertake their own empowerment planning efforts proving the old bromide that “trend need not be destiny”.

Thank you!

For more information regarding the East St. Louis Action Research Project, visit: www.eslarp.uiuc.edu

For information regarding Professor Reardon's current participatory action research activities in Upstate, New York, visit: www.rrap.cornell.edu

Contact Information:

Kenneth M. Reardon
Associate Professor in City and Regional Planning
College of Architecture, Art, and Planning
Cornell University
201 W. Sibley Hall
Ithaca, New York 14853
607-254-5378 (Phone)
607-255-1971 (Fax)
kmr22@cornell.edu (Email)