By MARTY LEVINE
If you do research “and you don’t impact your community, you don’t belong” in this line of work, Andre Perry told the Community Engaged Scholarship Forum on March 4. “No one invests in problems. People invest in solutions.”
Perry, this year’s forum keynoter, is a senior fellow at Brookings Metro and director of Brookings’ Center for Community Uplift, as well as a professor of practice of economics at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on assets that would benefit from renewed investment in Black-majority areas in the U.S.
Raised in Wilkinsburg, Perry and attended Pitt for a year in the School of Social Work. But he discovered that “I wanted to look at things in a more macro scale,” and shifted toward the study of policy. His research in 2018 on the devaluation of assets in Black neighborhoods found that housing was undervalued there by 25 percent compared to that of white neighborhoods. Home equity, he noted, “is the way people lift themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps.”
“We’ve got to get into our heads that there are policies and practices that extract opportunities” from people in America, particularly people of color, he said.
Perry also pointed out that, while 45 percent of all wealth comes from commercial real estate, 85 percent of commercial real estate is held by a tiny percentage of people in this country.
“If you really want to change the trajectory of Wilkinsburg,” he said as an example, “you’ve got to change the ownership of properties on Penn Avenue.”
Brookings, through his work, has also developed the Black progress index which found that, while Pittsburgh has issues, “it’s clearly not the worst place. I can show a thousand reasons why. … There’s strength in every city, even though Pittsburgh is challenged.
“When you create reports that this is the worst place,” he added, it not only publicizes an incorrect story, it also discourages investment in Black homes and businesses that would help to fix the issues.
His forthcoming book, “Black Power Scorecard: Measuring The Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It,” “is filled with stories of people like yourself having a positive impact,” Perry said. But he cautioned that “we have too many scholars going into academia, wanting to have an impact, but then being asked to do something else” by their schools.
His book is based on the research finding that wealth is the top indicator for economic security — naturally — but also for social and emotional well-being: “As wealth goes up, thriving goes up and suffering goes down. We’re not going to close wealth gaps any time soon,” but through investment in their communities, people can be raised to a level where they are thriving.
Wealth has been increasing for all racial groups over the past few decades but more for whites, “at a much faster pace,” he said, because whites have more income and generational wealth —often money inherited from property ownership in previous generations — to invest in the stock market.
“When we talk about changing conditions, we should not stop at home ownership,” he added, but also push for more people to have jobs with greater retirement income.
For all races, younger people showed lower rates of well-being in his research. “If we’re not focusing on younger people, we’re not doing the work,” he said, adding: “When we invest in Black well-being, guess what we do? We invest in white well-being. When you change the neighborhood conditions for Black businesses ... you help everyone.
“What the public needs is for us to make these connections,” he told the event participants. “It’s more important to share data that shows when you help one group you help everyone.”
This has been demonstrated through another initiative created through his research, “Buy Back the Block,” which works with communities to buy commercial real estate. He reviewed his work in five neighborhoods in Detroit, but said the program is also helping Baltimore, Cleveland, and Selma, Ala.
“Hopefully we’ll be doing some of this work here,” he said.
In Detroit, he reported, “The rise in investment did not displace those residents” who are mostly Black. “Median rent has not shifted that much over time,” adding that such efforts must focus on “investment in the people who are in the place.”
Perry concluded: “When you invest in a place, you are really changing the neighborhood conditions. ... It is not just the owner who benefits, the community benefits, municipalities benefit, the school district benefits. ... When you invest in a place, you are improving an entire ecosystem.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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