The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

CommUNITY 2000

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Civil Rights and Fair Housing Today
• CommUNITY2000: What is it? Why is it?
  • Purposes of CommUNITY 2000: Developing, Documenting and Reporting
  • Funding: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
  • Overview of Partners for First 18 Months
• Building Communities With a Menu of Strategies
  • Accomplishments for Modeling by Organizations Nationwide
  • Successful Strategies: The National Partners
  • Successful Strategies: Local Partners
  • Contact Information
• National Partners
  • Building Community Throughout the Country
  • National Advisory Board
• The Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston
• Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities
• Access Living
• The Fair Housing Council of San Diego
• Building Community for the Future
• Appendix A: Case Studies on Coalition Building Activities
  • Introduction
  • Case Study Methodology
  • City Approaches to Community Tensions
  • Cross Cutting Themes
  • Recommendations
• Appendix B: Census 2000 Charts
• Acknowledgements

Appendix A: Introduction

At the beginning of the 21st century, the dominant social justice issue in the nation continues to be the persistence of racial isolation. According to research compiled by Professor John Logan of the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, "the 2000 Census shows little change in community integration despite growing ethnic diversity in the nation."1This analysis of residential patterns finds that with few exceptions, white, black, and Hispanic people continue to live in neighborhoods that are not significantly integrated. Since 1990, this continuing pattern of segregation has persisted, even in the wake of great population shifts of minorities from cities to suburbs.

Successful neighborhood integration is central to the American ideal of equal opportunity. Among the questions raised by data suggesting the United States' failure to achieve higher levels of integration are the following:

• How do neighborhoods create inclusive communities that welcome every resident?

• How can local governments, advocates and other sectors of the community come together to respond to or reduce tensions that may occur as residents begin to live in integrated communities?

• What are communities doing now to alleviate the problems that arise when people choose to live in more integrated communities?

All Americans have a stake in resolving these important questions, for the consequences of failing to do so are severe. Recent years have witnessed too many painful reminders of how attacks against innocent people driven by irrational hatred threaten the very body and soul of America. Not only do these crimes have devastating effects on the victims, their families and friends, but hate crimes are acts of violence against the American ideal: that we can make one nation out of many different people.

Yet while victims of bias-motivated crimes such as James Byrd and Matthew Shepard have garnered national attention, many incidents of non-criminal or non-violent bias-motivated behavior do not make the headlines; nor do the misperceptions and negative stereotypes that can make members of communities fearful of groups viewed as posing as a threat. From killings and beatings to acts of arson and vandalism to physical and verbal assaults, these bias-motivated behaviors injure or even kill thousands of people, terrify countless others, divide Americans against each other, and distort our entire society.

Unfortunately, hate violence is a more serious problem than is generally recognized. A 1997 report published by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) and the Leadership Conference Education Fund (LCEF) entitled, "Cause for Concern: Hate Crimes in America," confirms the breadth and growth of the hate crime problem in the United States, documenting with statistics and case studies the extent of hate crimes in the country, and includes examples of hate crimes that have occurred when racial minorities move into predominantly white neighborhoods.

No national statistics are currently kept on the number of housing-related hate crime incidents. However, hate crime experts agree that a large percentage of hate crimes are committed against victims within the neighborhoods in which they live. FBI data collected under the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 now provide the best — although incomplete — national picture of the magnitude of the hate violence problem in America. The FBI Uniform Crime Report defines a hate crime or bias crime as a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin. According to the 2000 FBI Hate Crime Statistics Report, there were a total of 8152 biasmotivated criminal incidents reported across the country for 2000. Of the incidents, 4368 (53.6%) were racial bias motivated; 1483 (18.2%) were religious bias motivated; sexual orientation bias accounted for 1330 (16.3%); ethnicity/national origin bias was the cause of 927 (11.4%); disability bias was connected with 36 (0.4%); and the remaining 8 incidents (0.1%) were the result of multiple biases.

Beyond the sheer numbers, hate crimes and other bias-motivated types of behavior are pernicious because they polarize citizens and exacerbate tensions throughout a community. Hate violence is not only a crime against an individual, but an assault against an entire group of people. The consequences of bias crimes reach beyond the harm inflicted on an individual victim; one sector of the community may feel that it has been targeted for violence, which may confirm that sector's worst fears that others in the community harbor a deep-seated animus. Stated another way, hate violence not only has an impact on the perpetrator and victim, it also undermines the sense of community among those not directly involved in a particular incident.

A similar dynamic can emerge from non-criminal incidents that are motivated by hate. Threats and intimidation where people live communicate a clear message: "You are not welcome here." Housing related tensions such as outbursts of protest and NIMBYism (Not in My Backyard), which can occur long before a housing-related hate crime is committed, can very effectively communicate the same message, causing people in targeted groups to feel despised and unwelcome and those in non-targeted groups to be considered as silent conspirators.

While housing-related hate incidents are the exception rather than the rule, to catalyze community response to housing-related tensions when they do occur, LCCREF, in conjunction with the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), a prominent national advisory board with relevant expertise, and local partners in Boston, Chicago, San Diego, and the Triangle Region of North Carolina launched CommUNITY 2000, the nation's first housing-related community tensions program. CommUNITY 2000 has been conceived in response to the need to address a complex problem in a strategic and coordinated manner, both on a national scale and in the local sites. Recognizing that dealing with existing community tensions, as well as working to prevent their development, is an important element of ensuring equal housing opportunity, CommUNITY 2000 brings together a national and local coalition of organizations with extensive experience and expertise in intergroup relations, hate crimes, fair housing, and related civil rights issues. This coalition core structure provides extensive national coverage and facilitates involvement at the local level where tensions occur, as well as coordinates resources in a cost-effective manner and avoids duplication in addressing a multifaceted problem.

To ensure the fullest range of input, participation, coordination, and buy-in, CommUNITY 2000 also leverages several other critical coalitions, including:

• the civil rights coalition within which LCCREF occupies a central position;

• the National Advisory Board guiding the CommUNITY 2000 project, which includes prominent experts in intergroup relations, hate crimes prevention, law enforcement, civil rights, academia, communications, and the media; and

• the local coalitions that are being created in each local site through the project.

If successful, CommUNITY 2000 will not only provide, through a core coalition structure, communitybased responses to the particular circumstances faced by communities in Boston, Chicago, San Diego, and the North Carolina Triangle Region, but also set the stage, as we share our learning, for future and ongoing collaborations toward the alleviation of fair housing-related tensions in communities throughout the nation.

Toward this end, LCCREF has undertaken this study, part of a larger environmental scan designed to assess the extent of work and expertise in this field. In this report, we focus on the extent to which other groups around the country are forming or have already formed coalitions to address the issue of community tensions. Given the complex and multi-faceted nature of the issue, a coalition-based approach would seem to have the greatest likelihood of success.

Thus, we engaged in the case studies that follow in order to:

• examine the potential for the formation of coalitions among fair housing groups, intergroup relations advocates, civil rights organizations and other institutions concerned with community harmony;

• analyze the effectiveness of these coalitions in instances in which they do exist and the barriers to their existence in instances in which they do not; and

• draw conclusions regarding the challenges to forming coalitions, thereby setting a context for the work of CommUNITY 2000.

Our study focuses on ten cities: Atlanta, GA; Cincinnati, OH; Durham, NC; Houston, TX; Louisville, KY; New Orleans, LA; Omaha, NE; Phoenix, AZ; Pittsburgh, PA; and Richmond, VA. We have taken care throughout to provide illustrative examples gleaned from interviews with fair housing advocates, intergroup relations activists, civil rights and religious leaders. In addition to housing-related activity, we have included examples of hate crimes that may have a community connection , as well as incidents of police brutality, intimidation, or discrimination that may catalyze the creation of progressive coalitions. During the course of our field research, we looked for patterns in the types of coalitions formed, any specific reasons or catalysts for the formation of a coalition, as well as any similarities (and unique circumstances) that have prevented coalitions from forming in areas which otherwise appeared ripe for a coalition to exist.

While CommUNITY 2000 is by nature and design an inter-organizational collaboration, we nonetheless acknowledge that engaging the activities that foster and nurture coalitions and collaborative endeavors can sometimes involve trade-offs. Stated another way, as was pointed out by nearly all the organizations we interviewed, the energy and resources that an organization invests in fostering coalitions can also be spent pursuing other important goals that it may be able to accomplish on its own, or within the already existing level of collaborative activity. Consequently, we found that the organizations we researched consciously strove to determine the desirable balance between achieving optimum effectiveness within their current arrangements (often as solitary actors) and investing in actions designed to foster a higher level of collaborative action.

As the reader will see, while many of the organizations we contacted conceded that they could spend more time and energy on fostering coalitions, few defined the current level of collaboration in their city as lacking or otherwise problematic. Given the nature of this study, it is impossible to determine with substantial certainty whether a particular organization is making a mistake by not investing more in collaborative activity.

Nevertheless, in the sections that follow, we do frame the untapped potential for coalition formation in the cities we studied in a light of significant regret. Central to the success of the American civil rights movement has been the ability of organizations representing diverse constituencies and interests to set aside their individual differences and collaborate to pursue common goals. In situations affected by community tensions, this conclusion is no less true, where the multi-faceted nature of the issue suggests to us that a coalition-based approach is likely to have significant benefits for local communities. Accordingly, we offer this report in the hope it provides a useful tool that will meet the challenges faced by a broad spectrum of communities across the country.