Blair H. Taylor, President & CEO of the Los Angeles Urban League, testified at September 9, 2008 hearing held by the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. Mr. Taylor’s testimony was as follows:

Good morning. Thank you to the Commission for allowing this important testimony to occur.

Many of the panelists have described elements of the housing crisis in vivid detail. The hope is to use this brief time with you to specifically focus on the impact of this crisis on urban communities, and also to pose possible solutions.

We will use a sample neighborhood in South Los Angeles as a proxy for inner city LA. The neighborhood I will be referencing, known as Park Mesa Heights in South Los Angeles is located in the 90043 zip code. Up front note that it is not the most blighted urban community in this city, but then again, it is clearly very far from the top. It faces a major crisis in homeownership, but also major issues in health care access, education/school performance, and violent crime. I want us to focus on this neighborhood because in many ways it both exemplifies the problems we face and also offers a roadmap for solutions.

Park Mesa Heights is an area in South LA that is home to approximately 10,000 residents – about 4,000 of these are under age 24. It is located in the heart of the Crenshaw District in Los Angeles – a traditional African American stronghold.

Today, the area is approximately 66% African American and approximately 32% Latino, with a Latino population that is growing very rapidly.

Median household income in the area is about $31,000/year. But that is where the comparable elements with the city end and a tale of two cities begins.

The local high school – Crenshaw High School, has been one of LAUSD’s 15 worst performing schools for more than a decade. It has a drop out rate of more than 50%, with nearly 1/3 of the students dropping out their freshman year.

The unemployment rate for the area is staggering – over 14%; nearly 3X the average for the city of LA.

Health statistics are abysmal – with chronic illness more than twice the LA averages, and inadequate access to health care facilities.

Violent crime was literally spiraling out of control, reaching rates of more than 250% of the LA average in 2005.

And homeownership – although traditionally higher than the city averages – is now far more threatened than most other areas of Los Angeles.

According to a study conducted by UCLA (covering from the spring of 2007 to the spring 2008), foreclosures in Park Mesa Heights are now more than twice as high as the rest of LA County. Even more startling, notices of defaults are nearly three times as high as the rest of LA County. All this points to both a massive housing crisis in the present, and also an even bigger looming pending foreclosure crisis.

Importantly, I want to stress that as someone who has worked with low income communities all across the nation, there is really nothing about Park Mesa Heights that is atypical for urban Los Angeles nor the inner city area of any other major city today.

So, what happened in this neighborhood and others like it? How were these areas left so far behind in the economic booms of the past two decades? And what is the way out? Well, let me state for the record that this esteemed panel asks really good questions! So in the remaining few minutes, let me try to very quickly address some of them.

In 2005 the Los Angeles Urban League embarked upon a new initiative called Neighborhoods@work. We did so in recognition that present approaches to changing communities like Park Mesa Heights largely were not working. A few important conclusions were reached.

The first is that we have been looking at the problems incorrectly. Like most everyone else, the League has looked at problems like the housing crisis or the crisis in education or the crisis in crime as if they could be solved in isolation. The fact is that they cannot.

We therefore set out to build a model that was holistic. One that recognized that massive unemployment rates can trigger sub prime lending and housing crises. And violent crime can trigger rapid home depreciation.

Poor health statistics and impossible access to preventative health care can prevent even highly trained and skilled workers from gaining employment.

And a poor school system drives down both individual earning potential and a community’s property values.

In other words, if you want to truly transform a community, you must focus on five things simultaneously: Housing, health, safety education and employment.

The second and related “ah­ha” was that we had to break the city down to neighborhoods as the unit of change. We had to build a model that was scalable (or replicable) neighborhood by neighborhood – one which did not try to tackle all of urban LA at once.

So we enlisted consultants to help us pick an initial site and replication partners like USC and others to help us think through how this model would replicate neighborhood by neighborhood.

Third, we realized we could not do it alone. We knew we had to gain a formidable list of partners. So we built a formidable group of public and private sector partners – 100 strong.

Fourth we knew the plan had to be metrics­driven and take place over an extended period of time. In other words, we needed to establish up front that we could not turn a neighborhood around overnight. We established tangible goals – like taking violent crime down by 50% over five years – and linked them to a concrete plan to get us there.

Four keys:

1. Look at the problem holistically.
2. Use neighborhoods, not cities, as the unit of change.
3. Lead with a member of the community and partner with others with core.
4. Create a metrics­driven plan over a long term (5 year) planning horizon.

The results:

• After only the first year, crime was down more than 30%
• The local high school is now undergoing massive reform.
• New job training and employment efforts have been launched, along with exciting
  health initiatives with local hospitals and universities.
• Block clubs have been reenergized and a new sense of pride is sweeping the
  community.
• And we raised about $14 Million in project cash support in the first year.

So what does all this have to do with the housing crisis? Well, housing crises do not occur in a vacuum. And pressures for policy change come optimally from coordinated and well informed bodies of affected persons. Nothing is more powerful and more likely to pressure policymakers for change than highly educated stakeholders. Nothing is more apt to address the housing crisis than a shift to the underlying economics of a community.

I submit that there is no strategy for long term homeownership that can be successful without a joint effort to help provide jobs and training for low income residents. No successful strategy that fails to recognize the staggering economic impact of chronic illness, or health care costs. A comprehensive plan must push preventative medicine with medical providers, and help to provide low cost health care options for urban populations. And it must also recognize and address the staggering impact of violent crime. All this is mandatory, not optional to reverse the housing decline.

And this is precisely what we are building in Park Mesa Heights.

There is a crisis we are now facing as a nation – our middle class is eroding right before our very eyes. Gains of earlier decades are being reversed – disproportionately so in our inner city communities. Today, subprime lending makes up 13% of the total lending market, but accounts for 60% of the foreclosures, according the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Discriminatory practices clearly still exist, and they certainly must be legislatively addressed. But it’s also time for some new thinking. One answer may well be the rigorous pursuit holistic approaches neighborhood by neighborhood all across this great nation.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak before you today.