Anchor Institutions

Our anchor dashboard project continues to catalyze conversations about how anchor institutions can consciously assess the impacts they have on neighboring low-income communities. Our executive director Ted Howard outlined the project for Baltimore's WYPR (listen to the conversation here), spoke to Next City about how comprehensive metrics help produce anchor-led economic development that doesn't result in the unintended effects of gentrification and displacement, and blogged about the Dashboard for the San Francisco Federal Reserve's "What Works for America's Communities" project. The Dashboard has also been presented to audiences across the country, including at ICIC's Inner City Economic Summit and at a four-city teleconference in the "Redefining Rustbelt" series, organized by the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond, Chicago, Cleveland, and Philadelphia (video from both events is forthcoming). 

But what was supposed to have been the launch event for the Anchor Dashboard —a presentation at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)—was a casualty of the recent government shutdown.

Crossposted from Policy Network, and later published on the London School of Economics website, this blog is part of a debate event hosted by Policy Network in London, UK, that was reviewed in OurKingdom by grassroots activist James Doran:    

Five years after the financial crisis economic inequality in the United States is spiraling to levels not seen since the Gilded Age. While most Americans are experiencing a recovery-less recovery, the top one per cent of earners last year claimed 19.3 per cent of household income, their largest share since 1928. Moreover, income distribution looks positively egalitarian when compared to wealth ownership.

Green. Local. Not-for-profit. That’s the goal in Boulder, Colorado where grassroots activists and the local nonprofit New Era Colorado Foundation have been campaigning to turn the city’s private power source into a public utility in order to more aggressively pursue renewable energy options and reduce carbon emissions. Read more about Boulder Gains Momentum in Fight for Green Public Utility...