 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Molly Martin, and I'm the director of New America Indianapolis. New America is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington DC, but I've called Indiana home for 20 years, and my work focuses on racial and economic equity here in the middle of the country. I'm so excited you could join us today for Taken Spaces, the first in a new series for New America Indianapolis called Inside Out, Capital I, Capital N, or Indiana. We think that some of the ideas and innovations and leaders that we incubate and find here need national exposure and regional exposure so that their ideas can take off and so that their ideas can grow with feedback from around the country, and we're so excited to be joined by folks from inside and outside of Indiana today. For our first edition of Inside Out, we're happy to welcome Abby Chambers, Dr. Chambers now who just finished her dissertation on economic development and inclusive growth. We call today Taken Spaces because Abby's been doing exquisite work on ethnographic research and understanding how neighborhoods are affected by inclusive economic growth, how neighborhoods are and aren't accounted for in the development process. But before we get to Abby, and I'm really excited to hear what she has to say, what she learned and ask her some questions. I want to introduce my colleague, friend and partner Dr. Ray Hubersky who is with Indiana University Purdue University here in Indianapolis. Ray runs the Institute for American Thought and leads a really unique doctoral program in American Studies at IUPUI. New America Indianapolis and the American Studies Program have been partnering to introduce new thinkers and new voices to public problem solving. I'll let Ray tell you a little bit about the program, about the partnership, and about what we'll hear from Abby today. Take it away, Ray. The end for hosting this great event and for the willingness to collaborate on what we're calling the public problem solving partnership that is supported our speaker today, Abby Chambers, as well as other current students in the American Studies doctoral program at IUPUI. The American Studies Program offers students the ability to work with the faculty experts on issues that deserve sustained attention and critique. But we often find frustratingly unable to address in meaningful ways. Moreover, just as doctoral students and the sciences produce data-driven research to advance public knowledge, students in American Studies build evidence-based cases that deploy theories and methods in the liberal arts to help advance the public good. A prime example of this approach is the work of Dr. Abby Chambers, a member of the first cohort of students in the American Studies doctoral program, and the first of that cohort to defend with distinction for dissertation. When Abby first entered the American Studies doctoral program, she expressed interest in combining her training as an art historian with a concern for inequality in urban development. Intrigued, I wonder if she had in mind a public art project. No, that was not what she had in mind. Indeed, Abby produced an innovative research agenda using visual culture, critical theory, and social science to reimagine how we see development from within communities. Her work with residents in and around the Riverside neighborhood provided her far more than a research topic. She established relationships that confirmed to many of us the significance of committing oneself to community engaged and collaborative research. It is a really great pleasure for me to introduce Dr. Abby Chambers and to welcome her to this virtual stage. Thank you so much, Ray, for that generous introduction. Also, thank you, Molly, and thank you, New America, for hosting this event. Thank you all of you who are out there online tuning in. I'm really grateful to have this opportunity to share this work with an audience outside of academia and I appreciate your interest in it. Well, this is indeed a dissertation and therefore an academic artifact that is grounded in theory, which I'll get into. It's also a project that is based in observations from everyday life, and so I hope that by sharing this work in this public way, it can have a purpose applicable to everyday challenges. Maybe it'll catalyze conversations beyond this event and even start tilting perspectives about how development operates. Now let's move on to the presentation. Are we seeing the slides? There we go. Thank you. There's probably at least a dozen different ways I could summarize this work. With this presentation, excuse me, with this presentation, I take an approach that while it's simplified, it represents the dissertations, key elements, findings, and conclusions. I do want to note that during this presentation, I'm going to assume that listeners have some familiarity with Indianapolis and its prominent sites and neighborhoods, and so I won't go into descriptions of most of the places that I will mention here. Additionally, instead of starting off this presentation with a summary of the more academic introduction that I use in the dissertation, I thought I'd tell you my personal account of what I set out to do and some of the early ideas that began shaping this work. What I set out to do with this project was to research what I early on called human perspectives on economic development. This idea came from my initial interests and understanding how people read the landscapes of their communities. I wondered, how do people respond to and gather meaning from the visual cues they pick up in the places where they live? In the first semester of the PhD program, I took a course where the content was focused on thinking deeply and theoretically about how power operates in terms of who gets to make decisions, what guides their decision-making, and how those decisions manifest in people's everyday lives. That course introduced me to some of the theories that undergird this dissertation and which I'll talk more about later on in this presentation. I ended up focusing this study on economic development because I realized that it's a key mechanism that drives how and why places change. Additionally, when doing research on tax increment financing and economic incentives tool, also known as TIF, I had the opportunity to sit down with the city decision maker to pick his brain about how the city uses TIF. When talking about how TIF is measured, I asked him, how do you know TIF works like you think it does? In the context of our conversation, this question was interpreted to mean, how do city leaders know that TIF creates benefits for all residents? To my question, he answered very frankly, we don't. Basically, the system of measures that city leaders use to track TIF's outcomes, doesn't tell the whole story about what TIF might and might not be doing. They make a lot of assumptions, or excuse me, they make a lot of decisions based on assumptions. This was a clear gap in understanding not only TIF but economic development in general. I concluded that a good way of finding out whether economic development produces the benefits that city leaders assume it does was to simply ask people, do they perceive that they benefit from the city's efforts? Thus, the study came to focus on analyzing perceptions, inspired partly by the work of Philip Converse and Kathy Kramer. In Converse's article, the nature of belief systems in mass publics, he explains that people like city leaders and others with macro level decision-making power, people who he calls political elites, may have distinctly different ideological frames guiding their decisions compared to the average person. In her book, The Politics of Resentment, Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, Kramer makes a similar case. She explains that residents in poorer rural parts of Wisconsin felt like their communities did not receive their fair share of public resources in comparison to urban and suburban communities. Rural residents perceived non-rural decision-makers to be powerful political elites who ignored, disrespected, and even undermined the local wisdom, lifestyle, culture, and experiences of rural residents in favor of supporting urban and suburban residents instead. Kramer's research even shows that state and federal government expenditures per capita were comparable in rural, urban, and suburban areas, but residents persisted in their beliefs that they were losing out. Rural Wisconsin residents were tapping into certain symbols and signals from public officials and the news to conclude that government spending was inequitable. Next slide, please. These insights led me to developing the following research questions. What are residents' perspectives on economic development and what influences have shaped those perspectives? What are practitioners' perspectives on economic development and what influences have shaped those perspectives? What are the disconnects between residents and practitioners' perspectives on economic development and how do those disconnections inhibit equity, inclusion, and the expansion of freedoms? Next slide, please. The methods I used to answer these questions included fieldwork in the Riverside neighborhood, which is one of several neighborhoods located in the near Northwest area of downtown Indianapolis. I chose the Riverside neighborhood for this fieldwork because it is an historically and systemically disinvested area where the population is comprised mostly of African-American people. I wanted to hear perspectives on development from people in an area that had not yet begun seeing significant injections of public, private, or philanthropic capital, but where some activities seem to be indicating that such investments may be on the horizon, potentially catalyzing a socioeconomic transformation similar to that of other near-downtown neighborhoods, such as Mass Ave and Found Square. Those areas were once more working-class or alternative in culture, but today they're more upscale and mainstream, which is to say, they reflect a white, middle-to-upper middle-class culture. My fieldwork span from January through October 2019. During that time, I interviewed 47 people over the course of 42 interviews. 15 interviewees were current residents and two were former residents. Nine people were people who I call neighborhood affiliates. These were people who worked in the Riverside neighborhood or near Northwest area usually in close contact with residents and who were seen by residents as embedded members of the community. Finally, 21 interviewees were city-level practitioners who worked at organizations whose missions directly or indirectly supported economic or community development across multiple neighborhoods, the entire city, or even the central Indiana region. I also attended 39 community meetings and events in the area and I had innumerable informal conversations with people throughout my fieldwork period. Next slide, please. In interviews and at community meetings and events, I listened for indications of the ideological frames people use to understand economic development's impacts, and I compared people's perceptions across the three different classifications of interviewees, residents, neighborhood affiliates, and city-level practitioners. I approached the fieldwork informed by community-based participatory research or CBPR, participatory action research, or PAR, and oral history methods, all of which stress that new knowledge is co-created between researchers and participants. As much as I was the quote researcher on this project, the interviewees, especially the residents, as well as other people I encountered during my fieldwork in the community, played important roles in guiding the research. It was their leads that I followed as I figured out where to go, who to talk to, and what I should pay attention to. In particular, oral history methods emphasize that each individual has a unique story to tell, and each person's story is based on their interpretations of what they remembered and experienced. As the researcher, it was my job to understand those interpretations. After each interview, I transcribed the conversations, and then I shared each transcription with the interviewee so that each of us had a record of what was said. I then uploaded the transcriptions to a web-based program called deduce, which enabled me to use an open coding process to identify themes and what respondents said. Next slide, please. I used a particular theoretical framework to undergird this research. The framework is informed by the writings of theorists in economics, spatial production, and visual culture. Especially important to the study is economic theorist Amartya Sen's argument that development's paramount purpose should be to facilitate freedom, which he defines as, quote, individual capabilities to do the things that a person has reason to value, end quote. According to Sen, development should create conditions under which an individual can pursue things that are meaningful to them, be it material prosperity, the highest levels of civic or professional leadership, a life of humility and frugality, or a life of middle-class comfort. It is important to make the distinction between economic transactions that can lead to exclusionary economic growth and transactions that can lead to the kind of inclusive development that Sen talks about, which removes barriers, extends opportunities, and advances freedom for all people. Next slide, please. I also use theories about spatial production and spatial justice from Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Edward Soja to describe how the way in which urban spaces, such as neighborhoods, streetscapes or parks, how they're arranged and the ways in which they function, look, and feel is produced by actors who, more often than not, are members of the dominant class. Next slide, please. Marxist theorists like Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Alcacer, and Pierre Bourdieu describe the dominant class as a group of individuals and institutions that hold decision-making authority over both politics and economics, which gives them the power to structure society in ways that primarily channel political and economic benefits and advantages back to the dominant class to maintain its collective power. Next slide, please. That's the theoretical definition. In practice, the dominant class is comprised of city leaders and decision-makers and people with enough cultural, economic, educational, and social capital to be invited to or to assert themselves at decision-making tables. They are part of a culture of privilege, which allows them to sit on boards, hold leadership positions in city government and nonprofit organizations, philanthropies, and for-profit businesses and corporations, and to perpetuate a set of behaviors and ethics often understood in popular American terms as upper-middle class. Due to the history of racial segregation in the United States, which has excluded many people of color, particularly African-Americans from making socioeconomic gains, the dominant class is comprised mostly of white people. This became an important consideration in my study. Well, because while most of the residents I interviewed and many I encountered during my fieldwork were African-American people, most of the city-level practitioners I interviewed, and in fact, most of Indianapolis' leadership in the public and private sectors are white people. Next slide, please. As a result of this racial division, the concept that takes prominent position in this study is George Lipsitz's idea of the white spatial imaginary. This is a concept he describes in a 2007 article called The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race, theorizing the hidden architecture of landscape. In that article, he describes the white spatial imaginary being, quote, based on exclusivity and augmented exchange value and functioning as a central mechanism for skewing opportunities and life chances in the United States along racial lines, end quote. The white spatial imaginary is an ideological frame, even a type of inherent bias, for envisioning how spaces should be organized and used, and it views spaces through a lens that is tinted by white expectations, experiences and priorities, and tilted toward white supremacy. It is a tool for the dominant class. Next slide, please. Finally, I use visual culture theory and semiotics, particularly concepts described by Roland Barth and Stuart Hall, to understand how people imagine that processes, actions and decisions, and the visual forms that manifest from them signify encoded meanings, which people then decode as they develop perceptions. Visual culture theory and semiotics help explain why once investments start being made in an area, for example, once houses start being renovated, streets and sidewalks start being repaired, storefronts start being filled with new businesses, and charter schools start opening in and around an area. It seems like there's a snowball effect where the investments increase steadily, catalyzing a type of neighborhood change that existing residents may perceive to be inequitable, exclusionary and unstoppable. Next slide, please. This idea about tensions in neighborhood development leads me to the dissertation's key findings. First, many residents described economic development as a process that takes real and perceived neighborhood ownership away from the existing community to transform the place for the benefit of outsiders and newcomers. Second, city decision makers contend that displacement is not a problem in Indianapolis, even though residents consistently see economic development leading to displacement. Third, the type of disconnect that persists between perceptions of people who live and work in the neighborhood and those of city decision makers is the result of exclusionary development practices and helps perpetuate inequities. Next slide, please. A key concept that emerged from this study is the idea of a place being taken. This concept was used by residents and neighborhood affiliates to describe a loss of ownership, stewardship, and or decision-making power in their community. Next slide, please. I first heard this concept conveyed by a pastor in the area who said this, quote, from the Madame Walker building, that whole corridor along Indiana Avenue, leading this way toward Riverside out of downtown, was black. I mean, they've taken over. One of the two churches that was on the Underground Railroad, Bethel AME Church, now is being turned into a hotel, a viable place on the canal that was an Underground Railroad site. He snapped his fingers, been taken. And then you go to the Madame Walker building. He snapped his fingers again, taken. Next slide, please. In a conversation with a former resident who grew up in the neighborhood, still owned his family home there and remained active in the neighborhood's civic life, the man also talked about a downtown site that had been taken. I asked him to describe how the process of taking worked and he explained it this way. In various ways, first is that there's no investment allowed in there, there's no loans given, then there's no way to upkeep what's there and so people tend to move out. Those who have maybe say better resources, they're gonna move to greener pastures. And so those who remain behind are those who are lower economically. And so the neighborhood goes down and then they, decision makers, came up with the schools, changing school busing so people would leave again because the school system changed their integration and busing. And so it's like a leak in the pipe, you know? And it becomes worse and worse and then it's easy pickings then. In the same area that was not allowed to have loans, all of a sudden it's the way of someone somewhere. I can't point the finger to be sure, but somebody says, oh, this is now good for economic development. Well, I guess so because for the last 15, 20 years, you more or less raped it. This man used the violent imagery of rape to characterize how economic development worked and he wasn't the only one. Another resident used a rape analogy and also called it death by a thousand cuts when an area's physical and social infrastructures are allowed to deteriorate. Still other interviewees likened economic development to starvation when needed resources are not allocated to the area. Interviewees talked about economic development being characterized by subtractive and degenerative processes that degrade a neighborhood and its people, exploiting, even increasing their vulnerabilities and reducing their agencies so the area becomes ripe for the taking, susceptible to redesign, repurposing and repopulation according to plans created by people who are outside of the area. Those outsiders are members of the dominant class who have the power to make such decisions because they have access to and control over the resources that can bring their plans to fruition. Next slide, please. Residents perceived that development consistently excluded them and people like them, people of color, from reaping benefits from the growth that economic development produces for others specifically for white people, and they connected their own marginalization to historic racial disenfranchisement. Because the nation's history of racial disenfranchisement and economic exclusion is well documented, yet African-Americans, both in Indianapolis and nationally continue being excluded, residents expressed the belief that the exclusions must be intentional. Next slide, please. This question of intentionality is conveyed by the words of the same interviewee who characterized economic development as rape. He said, quote, If I can see it, the exclusion, and I don't have degrees in economic training, then everybody else can see it. More has to be done because if I can see it, they can see it. All the politicians, the mayor, the mayor's office, the Indiana General Assembly and the people in their offices, the business people, if I can see it and the people that live there can see it, Ray Charles can see it. In other words, the problem is so obvious that the only explanation for continued exclusion is that the exclusion must be intentional. Next slide, please. Of course, practitioners I spoke with didn't see it this way. While residents, neighborhood affiliates and city-level practitioners seem to agree from a conceptual standpoint that economic development ought to do what Amartya Sen says, it should reduce barriers and create opportunities to enable all people to do the things they have reason to value. Practitioners did not agree that economic development takes spaces, especially not intentionally. Residents perceived that development leads to a type of cultural displacement which practitioners did not seem to be aware of. Practitioners only tracked physical displacement, which is what can happen when a gentrifying area becomes unaffordable to existing residents and they're forced to move. This was a disconnection in the way the interviewees perceived the outcomes of development. And it was most apparent in the way they talked about the affluent, predominantly white Fall Creek Place neighborhood, which is situated about two to two and a half miles north of downtown Indianapolis, a comparable distance as the Riverside neighborhood is from downtown. The area that is known today as Fall Creek Place was once known as Dodge City. The popular narrative is that Dodge City was full of derelict housing, vacancy and crime, and it was made better by transforming it into Fall Creek Place. But that narrative washes over the fact that it was home to a population comprised mostly of African-American people who lived their lives, made memories and maintained meaningful social connections there. The transformation of Dodge City into Fall Creek Place displaced the culture that was there and created a new neighborhood that today is populated mostly by affluent white residents. The process was initiated using a $4 million homeownership zone grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development plus municipal financing and public-private partnerships between city entities and local organizations. Residents and neighborhood affiliates I spoke with and encountered looked at Fall Creek Place and perceived that the development has mostly benefited white people. While the area's overall population has increased, it's mostly been due to white people moving in. The area's population of black residents in real numbers, not percentages, has actually decreased. All the while, assessed home values and median household incomes have skyrocketed well above the county's medians. Next slide, please. When I talked to practitioners about Fall Creek Place, I heard a different narrative about the benefits that the development has brought to the area compared to what residents said about the displacement that happened there. One practitioner bristling at the idea that Fall Creek Place had been gentrified said this. So people say that whenever you start seeing white people move into a traditionally black neighborhood, it becomes gentrified. I don't think that's always the case. Fall Creek Place was no homeowners were displaced, renters were displaced, it was a homeownership zone. But at the end of the day, it was pretty much racially equal. I think it was 51% to 49%. And that's pretty much about as equal as you're gonna get. But because you were starting to see more white people living there, it became more of a racial issue that the process turned a traditionally African-American neighborhood into a white neighborhood when in fact, the reality was it was pretty diverse. This practitioner did not understand the power of the white spatial imaginary. That when a place is transformed to meet white tastes and expectations and the way it looks and the people who live and engage there and the types of businesses that open there, it can lock out people of color even if there's still racial diversity because in Fall Creek Place, the culture of whiteness became embedded in the landscape of the area and now signals inequity and exclusion to many non-white residents. Next slide, please. Another practitioner also rejecting the idea that displacement is a problem in Indianapolis said this. I don't think we've been successful enough to worry about gentrification just yet. And I don't say that to seem insensitive, but when forest census tracts have experienced growth and values that could lead to displacement and if 30% of our census tracts are seeing a 10% loss or more in value, that tells me we're not successful enough to worry about displacement. We hear in these practitioners' comments, conceptualizations that displacement is solely a physical phenomenon where people are forced to move, that it's trackable in quantifiable terms and that when it's not quantifiable, it must not be happening. They overlook an important cultural component that is difficult to track. Next slide, please. What's more, even when they hear about concerns that some type of displacement is happening, some practitioners reject the claims rather than trying to understand them. For instance, one interviewee said, I think the challenge with talking about gentrification is that it's pretty complex and in some ways, it's informed by a lot of narratives that people have picked up from somewhere, like they read about it at school or they read about it in the newspaper, they watch a movie, but they've never defined their term. This practitioner did not seem to imagine that people had conceptualizations about the complex phenomena of gentrification and displacement based on their own lived experiences and the historic experiences of people like them. He thought residents were merely regurgitating what they had heard from other sources. Next slide, please. As a result of the disconnect between how residents and neighborhood affiliates perceived the outcomes of economic development compared to the ways in which practitioners perceived outcomes, development has continued to be exclusionary and to perpetuate inequities. Residents I spoke with expressed fear that the Riverside neighborhood would be affected by gentrification and displacement. They feared that their neighborhood would be taken because their concerns about the negative impacts that economic development has had on communities like theirs in the past have not been seen as valid. Additionally, they see signs of the taking process. They recognize that their neighborhood has been ignored for years and suddenly there's investment coming into the area as new charter schools have opened. Homes are being renovated and built. Grants are suddenly being made to local organizations and businesses are opening in and around the area. But as economic development continues being administered using the same kinds of systems of measure mostly created by white people using the white spatial imaginary, it seems we'll keep getting the same kinds of results until new processes can disrupt status quo decision-making. It seems inequity and exclusion are inevitable and freedoms will continue being inhibited from reaching historically and systemically disenfranchised people and places. Next slide, please. So what is the solution? The solution I propose is to disrupt development decision-making using a neutral third perspective. This would be an individual or a team of people who would actively initiate and moderate difficult conversations about development. Such a perspective can audit development processes and be a conduit of knowledge building between historically and systemically disenfranchised populations and geographies and decision-makers who because they operate within the dominant class which defaults to channeling benefits back to itself may not realize the extent to which they're being inequitable or exclusionary. Carefully auditing development processes can assess the extent to which residents feel invited or welcomed to offer opposing perspectives or excluded from doing so by investigating questions like these. Do residents perceive that they have the freedom to exert their agency and development decision-making or do they perceive that processes are close to them? To what extent are processes actually closed to residents because they're happening behind closed doors or within closed networks? Do residents perceive that their efforts to exert their agency will be impactful or do they perceive that exclusionary development is unstoppable? A neutral third perspective would be an embedded researcher or team of researchers who can build authentic trusting relationships with residents, practitioners, and other parties involved. They would use qualitative on-the-ground methodologies to gather residents' insights and expertise contextualized by their own lived experiences and the researcher or research team would assess perceived and real needs and abilities from many angles. They'd be able to discover areas of disconnect between city leaders' assumptions and residents' perceptions and experiences and identify points of exclusion so that inclusive solutions can be reached. Next slide, please. My dissertation describes how development can operate in exclusionary and inequitable ways when residents, neighborhood affiliates, and practitioners hold disconnecting perspectives about economic development and its outcomes. Closely examining development processes and creating mechanisms that can meaningfully enable residents to incorporate their perceptions and experiences into development decision-making can ensure that their neighborhoods change in ways that are equitable and inclusive and that facilitate freedom, enabling people to pursue the things they have reason to value. With the last slide, I just wanna say thank you for your time and attention and I'll pass things back over to Molly. Thank you so much, Abby. Obviously, I'm a fan of the work. I think it has so much important stuff to unpack and for the information of the audience, I was lucky enough to have Abby in bed with me at New America for a year as a resident fellow and do some research with our Future of Property Arts team and do some work with me here in Indianapolis. So it's always good to see all the great work that she's done come to life. So with the remainder of our time, we have about a half hour together. I wanna dive in on some points of clarification first. We've had some good questions in the chat just so we're all used to the same language. And so I wanna start with a question from Mark which is a really good one. White spatial imaginary, besides sounding like a really terrible bar band. What does that mean? How do we explain that to our average listener? Okay, so yes, I was hoping I had explained it well enough but totally understandable that it didn't quite come across. So it has to do with the way that decision, not only decision makers but in this case decision makers make decisions about the way space ought to look. And that's based on white standards, white expectations and even more specifically middle to upper middle class standards and expectation, white standards and expectations. But it also has to do with when like a white person goes into a space, a community, a shop, any space and that level of comfort or discomfort if it's a space that doesn't meet their white standards. So it has to do with the expectations somebody has a white person has about a space that makes them feel comfortable. Does that, I hope that clarifies. That's great Abby, thank you. And I think one thing to flag you and I know each other well so I think we can say it. We are two white women having this conversation and that's not lost on either of us. And I think one of the things I wanna make sure we talk about today is how we as white folks in Indiana or just across the country can show up differently as developers and neighbors and practitioners and also talk to our people, right? This isn't a problem for folks who are already vulnerable to systems to solve. So speaking of people kind of in power talking to our people you mentioned some of the practitioners that you interviewed and we had a question in the chat about what role they played and I'm gonna read into the question a little bit. Were they funders, developers, bankers? Did they run CBOs? Did they run Neighborhood Development Corps without outing anybody? What kinds of folks that talked to? I'm kind of intentionally vague because while Indianapolis is sort of like one of the largest cities in the nation it's also kind of a really small city. So most people I spoke with were people who worked for the city. So in some sort of department in the city again, I kind of hate to be too specific. Other people were in organizations that partnered with the city. So those could be nonprofit organizations community development type organizations or they might be not so much community development but say like housing development kind of a sort of a niche area of community development. So those were the kinds of people I spoke with. I didn't speak with anybody from a philanthropy. So I'll say that specifically in terms of the in response to the person's question. So they were mostly, they were upper administrative level people that had a really broad view. So I tried to talk with people who were in upper administrative and executive administrative roles because they're really the ones that sort of are the gatekeepers of how funds are gonna be used or other types of resources who gets invited to tables. So I really wanted to talk to people who are key decision-making roles. That's really helpful Abby and it sounds like that just speaks to a point you made that there are people who have power by virtue of their job or their race or their access they will necessarily by the way the system works now be approached first with some of these questions and decisions and then you have folks who are actually living with the decisions and how do you unify that? Well, for the folks that you did talk to or even for folks generally interested in development how have they responded to your work? Have folks heard it? Have they reached out? So, well, as I said I did share transcripts with everyone. I don't know if people read their own transcripts. I had a couple of people say, oh, I'll thank you for my transcript. I'll follow up with you with some more comments or something, but nobody did. I wanted people to have an opportunity to see what they said and clarify anything that they felt like they didn't communicate clearly in the interview. I only had one person say, you know, I don't like the way I said that. And it was a resident who it was very simple and it was I thought very sweet and generous that she wanted to correct her language. She called low income people poor people and she was like, you know, that sounds really insensitive and that's not how I mean it. Can we change that? That's the only change anyone wanted to make. I have shared the dissertation with people I interviewed. I haven't heard anything yet. Maybe after this presentation, I will. Maybe they, you know, wanted to hear this because reading a whole dissertation can seem like a lot. So maybe I'll hear, but I do want to say I do encourage feedback and pushback on it. So, and if somebody, Molly, if you can have one of your New America colleagues, maybe put my contact info in the chat because I forgot to put it on the slides, that would be great. Sure. And just so you know, Abby and everyone who's online knows we'll share the presentation, the recording, some links to some of the work that you've done for New America in the past and some other work that we think folks might be interested in so that they can reach out. And to that point, I know that we've heard from INDOT and they have a new diversity and inclusion team in-house and are interested in having a conversation about this with you. So we'll make sure we make that happen. And thank you, Zachariah, for raising that. I think what you've said many times and it's come up in the chat and I'll, I'm always gonna be candid with you. Sometimes things come up in the chat and I don't really know what to say. It was a question about racialized language here in the chat or really a remark about using terms like white, black, et cetera. And obviously at New America Indianapolis we stand pretty firmly on using those terms but I wanted to acknowledge the comment. And I also wanna ask you about some other language. So when we talk about how you and me, Abby, how we can talk to our folks, what are some words you never want to hear again when we talk about economic development? Oh gosh. Gosh, Molly, I might have to think about that one. I guess it's not so much the terms that are used but maybe like the way that they're used. Well, I guess for instance, we talk about inclusion. To me that means everyone but I remember reading a report from Brookings and I came across a sentence that said something, I can't remember it verbatim but said something about like a 3% poverty rate being an acceptable rate of poverty. And I'm thinking that is not real inclusion, you know? So when we talk about inclusive growth, do we really mean everybody? To me, I think it ought to. We shouldn't be okay with people living in poverty. I think another term that is bothersome is the term community engagement, not so much because that's a problem, it's great. But oftentimes community engagement is pretty shallow. It doesn't go far into the community and that's why I bring up that idea of the audit process because a lot of times community engagement, for example, if you've got a developer wanting a zoning variance and so they go to the neighborhood meeting and they ask for buy-in basically and that's all they have to do. They don't really have to reach very deeply into the community in order to make sure they're not gonna get a bunch of pushback. So it's not so much the terms but how they're used and sort of the shallow nature of their undertones. That's a great point and I hope I'm attributing this correctly. Joe, I believe pointed out in the chat that we can talk about diversity and we can talk about racial diversity and representation but we don't usually unpack it to understand in which situation are we talking about which group? What are the other elements of that identity that are really important to take into account? And Joe, you mentioned lived experience and that's really important. What is the lived experience of race? What is the lived experience of poverty, of gender identity of all of these different things and they don't all neatly fit the same way for same folks. I will let you know, Abby, that I had a couple of words in mind. So I have the microphone, I'll go ahead and say. I get very tired of hearing like up and coming, recovering because I think a new neighborhood, hot new neighborhood by all accounts, it was there before, right? But it was kind of in the white spatial imaginary maybe didn't look the way that some folks thought it should look, didn't look a way where they would feel comfortable. We have a number of other questions to get to you but I did have one I wanted to talk about and that was what do we do when we're looking at neighborhood saying or when we're looking at recount saying, well, I mean, gentrification isn't a problem. How do we get between that? Yes, literally you can look at some numbers and suggest that people have not been displaced as we define it, but we know that how it feels matters more than what's on paper. Do you have any advice for new data or new approaches to measuring that question? Well, I think that it would have to go back to the idea of the audit and digging down into each place where development is happening to understand how people are responding to it. How's it going for you who live there already? Are you seeing red flags? Do you feel like you're going to be pushed out? While all this investment is happening to attract newcomers, do you see also investment to help keep the existing residents in place? And a way that we could also track it more quantifiably is as newcomers come in, well, who are they? Is it all white people moving in? Or do we see maybe people who reflect the historic population of the neighborhood moving in? And I think that's been one of the problems about gentrification is that we have these existing socioeconomic disparities and gentrification doesn't try to, or development doesn't try to mitigate that prior to redeveloping a neighborhood. It just sort of like barrels in and kind of ignores a lot of those disparities while the development. It's like so eager to do the development that it doesn't address the gaping holes that are those socioeconomic disparities. And that's really, I think the core of the problem is why we see gentrification. It's a symptom of those socioeconomic disparities. Mm-hmm. Do you think, you mentioned the audit a couple of times and this third party. So what sorts of skills would that third party need and how do you make sure that that third party doesn't become kind of one more cog in the machine of people who have power? You know, how do you make sure that the community remains vocal if you are kind of finding this ostensibly neutral third party? Tell us a little bit more about how you foresee that. Yeah, well, I would see, you know, somebody who would have the ability to go in and listen objectively, watch both who is speaking in a room and who isn't. And in addition to hearing what people are saying also seeking out what isn't being said. So it's seeking out what's called the agonistic perspective or the opposition. And I think that our decision makers, people in decision making power really could benefit themselves, these processes, these places and the people in them if they would slow down these development processes and take the time to go out and look for these perspectives. You know, how is development going? What do you need? Because each community is going to have different needs. And that really needs to be sought out very intentionally. So the questions are flowing fast and furious. So I'm gonna pivot topics a little bit and forgive me everyone. We have pre-algebra, a live court hearing and this event going on in this house. So I'm gonna read from my iPad here. Elizabeth asks kind of a practical question. So what happens at the granular level, the ordinances, the permits? Who's getting permission to change structures and shape structures? What do we need to consider there? What have you learned that you think might have implications for public policy about really granting permission to make these changes in the first place? Well, something that struck me in my field work was there was a situation where a new industrial business owner in the area wanted a zoning variance. And what struck me was that the default answer to somebody like that from the city on that zoning variance, the default answer is yes. And residents have to fight that yes. If they never fight it, the person will probably get it. And residents have to fight so hard. I watched them fight so hard against this thing. Now I will say with this specific thing on Riverside residents, if they're listening, we'll know what I'm talking about. It wasn't like everyone was against it. It was contentious within the neighborhood. But it just struck me that from a business owner's perspective, the default answer to them is often yes. And it is the burden of residents to fight that. And to me, I wonder what we can do to flip that around where the business owner maybe has to go through a little more intensive community engagement. And I'm talking about the really deep kind in order to get that yes from the city. Getting the yes from the city has a lot of strings attached. And I'm not commenting on the folks who work for Indianapolis or work for the city. I'm really commenting about the need that all cities have to build their tax base. And Susan raises this question and mentions Drew Classic. I'm sure a lot of you know Drew. And he always said, hey, it's an incentive to develop and quote revitalize neighborhoods because we need more people who can pay taxes to move in to Indianapolis and to move around the Midwest being a net out migration region as we are. So what sort of policy lovers do you see for flipping that dynamic? You've talked very eloquently about flipping the power dynamic of who has to ask and who has to fight. Who's gonna pay? Yeah, no, that's a great, great question. I do recognize that our city, lots of cities struggle because their source of income is tax revenue. And so we need taxpayers here. But what I think too often happens is that we ignore the fact that we have lots of people already living here working very low wage jobs. And that is a problem that I don't think gets enough attention. We have lots of existing jobs here. And there's lots of conversation about creating new jobs that pay $18 an hour or more or a living wage. But what about people in our existing jobs? What are we doing about that? And I just don't see enough conversation about making existing jobs, good paying jobs. I'm so glad if I could do a handspring I would but I am old. And I just think wages are a huge question here and Indiana as a culture a lot of Midwestern states have this has been very proud in the past of keeping wages flat because it is again to your point about power dynamics appealing to owners and not necessarily appealing to workers. So I think that's a really important point. So one question about kind of local history you've dug deep, you know it well. Have you seen differentiations in development policy through the transitions across mayors? Are there partisan lines? Are there practitioner lines? Are there different eras that you've seen that they can teach us some lessons? You know, I'm afraid I have not dug that deep into sort of the specific, you know mayoral breakdown of how development has operated in Indianapolis. So I don't think I can do justice to that question. Sorry. No, I think it's an important thing to say. It's an important question. I don't know if other folks in the chat have any insight, we certainly welcome it. And that would be a fascinating study. And heads up to anyone considering joining the program. There's a dissertation question for you. And we will be sharing the transcript of the chat, the public parts with everyone who attended. So if there's a question that doesn't get answered, we'll make sure it does. And if there are insights folks want to share, we'll make sure it makes it to everyone. Molly, one thing I will say though is that early on in my PhD program I was tasked with creating a database of TIFUs for about, it was about a 20 year history. And I will say something I found interesting was that with the Hawkset administration, I was told that the Hawkset administration started using TIF differently. And I did see that being reflected where, and again, TIF is Tax Increment Financing, where TIF started being used, for example, for training grants to train workers up with some new skills and hopefully help advance them in better paying jobs. There's still questions around those training grants, I know. But the TIFUs, somebody had told me they were using TIF less. It wasn't less, it was just different. Our city has used TIF a lot. That's a really important point. We are coming into kind of the last five minutes of the event. I know we have a lot of questions we haven't gotten to yet. Reassure everyone out there, we will pass questions along to Abby and to other folks at New America and in our circle so that we can get some answers and some dialogue on those. So don't think that those are all lost. But I do want to come back, Abby, to kind of a core point that you made through your work, which is we have to do nothing with folks without them. Like it's an age-old premise and it's really important. How do you break the momentum of all of these processes to say, stop, you need to start with the folks who are living where you are talking about? Where do you even begin? Well, I think that's up to our decision-makers. They have to be the one to take hold of that development timeline. I know that it's hard in some cases with private developers going into an area like Riverside where there maybe are a lot of vacant properties, properties going up for tax sale. Tax sales, share of sales may be one area to look at who's gaining ownership of spaces in these neighborhoods. Also, in my dissertation, I do also talk about the role that a philanthropy can play. There's a case study about the Taggart Memorial and changes that have been happening there. And all I'll say about that is that a large grant was made by Lilly Endowment. And residents told me about how they weren't included in that process. So it's not just the city. It's not just for-profits. It's not just private developers. Everyone can play a role in slowing these processes down and building in conversations with residents. And that really deep, meaningful community engagement. Thank you, Abby. I think that is an excellent point to sort of wrap on. I will say, I will follow up with all of you with a copy of Abby's remarks, a recording of the event, and then links to other articles we think you might be interested in. We had some excellent questions and observations in the chat about structural racism and the systems in poverty and finance and development that have resulted in the isolation and also the abuse of lots of different populations, the black community in Indianapolis, Spanish-speaking populations all over the country, the black community, and the great migration, and then certainly immigrant communities and folks coming to the country for the first time. There are lots of intricacies and legacies of these really punishing policies that we have to consider when we talk about displacement and ownership and wealth and justice in this country. So this is just the tip of the iceberg. I know we could talk for hours, but I'm so grateful to you, Abby, for being a partner for doing this work, for sharing your dissertation with us. New America, Indianapolis is so grateful to IUPUI and the American Studies Program and to Ray Habersky. And certainly, last but not least, we're grateful to all of you for tuning in during what I know is a busy and a difficult time. So please, everyone stay well. We will share the program back with you and we hope to see you again after the first of the year for the next in the Inside Out series. So everyone take care. Thank you so much and have a great day.