Ellen Goldbaum: Henry Louis Taylor Jr. started out as a clinical audiologist, but when he couldn't help one of his patients, a bright but functionally deaf Black girl whose family couldn't afford the type of education she would need to succeed, he realized that if he wanted to truly help this community, he would need to think bigger.

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: Yeah, I thought about all of the kids that were out there, the thousands of individuals like this young girl, and I thought to myself, I've got to figure out how to do something that will change the lives of all kids like this young lady.

Ellen Goldbaum: So Taylor went back to school for his PhD in history with a focus on Black urban history. Today, as director of UB’s Center for Urban Studies at the School of Architecture and Planning, and associate director of UB’s Community Health Equity Research Institute, Taylor is a widely recognized expert on urban development, housing, race and class. As a self-proclaimed activist scholar, he has married research with community engagement for decades, but his newest endeavor, the East Side Neighborhood Transformation Project, is by far his most ambitious.

Welcome to Driven to Discover, a University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. My name is Ellen Goldbaum, and on this episode, I'll be talking to Dr. Taylor about his plans to transform a long underdeveloped community, bringing health, wealth and opportunity to the people who live there.

Welcome, Dr Taylor.

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: Thank you for having me, Ellen.

Ellen Goldbaum: You call yourself an activist scholar. What does that mean?

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: An activist scholar means that not only am I involved in the production of knowledge for social change, but I want to get down on the ground in the neighborhoods and the communities where people actually live and work, and in that shared space I want to join with them in the fight to bring about transformation and changes in the communities and the lives and the places where they live. So, being down on the ground working with people also gives me insights into the problems and challenges that they face, that I can now turn into research questions to drive the production of knowledge.

Ellen Goldbaum: “How We Change the Black East Side” grew out of your previous studies, one called “The Harder We Run” from 1991 and the 2021 sequel to it. Can you share what you learned? Particularly in the sequel.

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: There were a couple of things that we learned. The first is that over a period of some 30 years, African Americans had made no progress. Now progress is a tricky word, and by that, we meant the movement toward the transformation of their underdeveloped neighborhoods into great places to live, work, play and raise a family. When we looked at just purely the socioeconomic data, we saw that literally no significant changes have been made. For example, back in 1990 the average household income was around $39,000. Thirty years later, it was only $42,000. The home ownership rates were 33 in 1990 and 32% 30 years later, while the poverty rate dropped slightly from around 38 to 35%, but the neighborhood conditions themselves, the places where they live, had actually worsened over that period of time. Nothing had changed, so we needed to begin to do something else to alter the realities of people living on Buffalo's East Side.

Ellen Goldbaum: Your goals with the East Side transformation project are wide-ranging: more and better jobs, good schools, wealth generation and, most importantly, improved health outcomes, including lower infant mortality, lower levels of stress and related disease, and longer lifespans. Why is the neighborhood the foundation for all of this?

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: The neighborhood is where the everyday occurs. So racism—systemic, structural racism—is most pronounced at the neighborhood level, where it produces a whole series of what we call social determinants, and these determinants shape the life chances of individuals, including their health outcomes.

Ellen Goldbaum: Can you give us some examples?

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: Sure. One of the most important is the substandard, dilapidated and run-down housing that creates all kinds of health-related problems that people face. Then we have rent gouging, where individuals are charged extraordinarily high rents for these substandard housing conditions. A combination of these things produces toxic stress that impacts on all of the health-based levels of functioning. In addition to that, the inadequacy of schools creates situations that make them noncompetitive in the labor markets, which creates problems in terms of getting good jobs and opportunities. So a variety of those things, when they come together, create a negative synergism that negatively affects people's life chances, their socioeconomic status and their health outcomes. So to improve those elements, it is absolutely essential that we change these conditions in the neighborhoods where people live.

Ellen Goldbaum: Over the decades, the research that you and others have done has demonstrated that the current system of neighborhood development based on home ownership has enriched white neighborhoods while devaluing Black neighborhoods. Can you briefly explain that?

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: During the decade of the ’30s, the United States moved into a system of mass home ownership. At that time, Frederick Babcock, an appraiser, worked with the real estate industry, the financial industries, along with the government, to develop a system of determining how to establish value for property and value for housing. The system of land valorization that he established was a racist one based upon the exclusion of African Americans, whom he said, and others agreed, their mere presence triggered the decline of the neighborhood. So the housing valuation system was a simple one. As a community became whiter and more exclusive, values went up. As the community became Blacker and more inclusive, values went down.

Consequently, the racial hierarchy was transformed into a neighborhood hierarchy with Blacks and underdeveloped communities located at the bottom of the pyramid, where wealth was continuously extracted in terms of extraordinarily high rents, in terms of subprime mortgages, in terms of high prices for shoddy goods, driving the underdevelopment of neighborhoods downward. The bottom line is the value of white neighborhoods and communities is based upon the devaluation of Black neighborhoods and communities.

Ellen Goldbaum: So what is the alternative community wealth model for Black neighborhoods? And why will that be successful?

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: I think the most important aspect of the model is to move away from individualism toward collectivism and the collective way of life. When we look back at the history of African American people, we have seen that down on the ground in the neighborhoods and community, we have always embraced a collective approach to attacking our problems and challenges. Now we want to bring that to scale. For example, when we look at the most successful institution in our neighborhood and community, it's the church, and the church, it's nothing more than a collective. It's a cooperative. The minister doesn't own the church. The people own the church, and the minister works for them.

And so when we look at the lodges and the fraternal organizations, all of the organizations that have strength and power in our community are based upon the collective model, where people pull together their nickels and dimes, they pull together their brains and their thoughts, and they are able to create dramatic institutions that bring about change. We are upscaling that concept to a neighborhood level and building on a long tradition in the African American community: self-determination and the fight for community control. We're institutionalizing and spatializing that in the form of the neighborhood.

Ellen Goldbaum: So how, how do you actually do that?

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: I think two things. One is realize the centrality of the neighborhood in the process of transforming society. The second is the development of a demonstration project where we can refine this approach and indicate how successful it can be in a single location and place. And then we upscale it to the Black East Side, then we upscale it to other underdeveloped neighborhoods, and then we upscale it to higher income neighborhoods and communities. Because I want to emphasize, we're not talking about good and bad neighborhoods. We're talking about a system where all of the neighborhoods need fixing.

Ellen Goldbaum: As briefly as possible, what is the timeline for making this happen? And at what point are you at right now?

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: We're operating within frameworks of five years. Where we are now is that we have developed the model, and now we have identified the site for the demonstration project, which will be census tract 166 in Buffalo, New York, and that's in the northern portion of the Broadway Fillmore neighborhood. And so now we're just in the process of looking for the money. We've submitted one grant, we're in the process of submitting another, and we'll continue to submit until we get the money to reach the baseline dollar amount that we think we'll need in order to implement the project.

Ellen Goldbaum: And what is the funding for?

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: The funding is to create the staffing that you're going to need and the resources that you're going to need to launch the project. We're going to have to have organizers down on the ground working on a block-by-block step with the residents. We're going to have to have housing specialists who will be working with us on the development of designs to get rid of the substandard housing. We're going to have to have planners who will help us organize visioning sessions so that we can build unity within the community around the type of neighborhood we hope to construct. We're going to have to have the team in place to drive the levels of economic development.

So right now, when we look across Buffalo, there's an organizational mismatch between the challenges we face and the organizations that we have in place to meet those challenges. So the organization that we will need to do this is a neighborhood planning, design and development team, and it's going to take money and resources in order to do that.

Ellen Goldbaum: So how are you going to involve the community in doing this?

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: The goal of this project is to strengthen and build a powerful community that is capable of controlling its own destiny. So we're going to do that in several interactive ways. At the top of the level, the organizers who go into these neighborhoods and communities will be from these communities. They'll know and understand the streets and what they're about. They'll know from their own experiences the challenges that the people are facing inside of these communities, and they will be working with them.

Another thing that we plan to do is leverage existing organizations to help bring about change. So if we've got groups that are doing job training, groups that are already delivering services, we'll work with those groups and we'll refine those models so that they will actually be attacking root causes.

We know that the rebuilding and transformation of that neighborhood is going to be an economy of scale, so we will train the people who live in the neighborhood to engage in the work of transforming the neighborhood. So that if you're building new houses, the residents will be involved. If you're rehabilitating houses, the residents will be involved. If you're laying sewer pipes, the residents will be involved. So that the transformation and rebuilding of their neighborhoods will also provide them with an opportunity to rebuild their lives by participating in this transformation process. This will be a project that is driven by the community and for the community, and they will be involved in every aspect of its growth and development.

Ellen Goldbaum: Is the neighborhood up for it?

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: I think so. We spent a great deal of time analyzing all of the neighborhoods on Buffalo's East Side. Before we made this decision, almost six to eight months in that process, we narrowed it down to five neighborhoods, and then those five neighborhoods, we did extensive research in those neighborhoods, including some 565 house-to-house interviews. So when we made the final decision, we knew we had selected the best site for that community, and we knew that we were dealing with a community that was ready to fight for change.

Ellen Goldbaum: So there will be barriers and challenges, of course. How do you stay optimistic about all of this and keep everyone else who's involved optimistic?

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: I'm a historian as well as an urban planner, and so I look not only at the site, but across space and time. And so there's several reasons that give me optimism. First is that African Americans have always won in their ongoing struggle for freedom. We won the battle against slavery. We brought slavery down to its knees and shattered that institution. It is gone. We won the battle against Jim Crow. We pulled Jim Crow off the stage of history and destroyed the kind of rigid segregation and racialized hostility that go with it.

So today, our movement is based on theory. We have studied the situation, we understand the causes that are driving the underdevelopment that is occurring in the community. We know what we are doing, and we have built and developed an approach that we believe will be workable, and we've organized a team of folks from across the city and region that know what they're doing. So we're confident because history is on our side. We're confident because we have produced the type of knowledge that informs our theory and our practical activities. We are confident because we know how to learn from our mistakes, turn them into building blocks for success. So yeah, I'm optimistic. Very optimistic.

Ellen Goldbaum: That is great. It is great to hear you. Thank you so much. This sounds amazing, and we look forward to hearing more from you.

Henry Louis Taylor Jr.: Thank you. It's been a pleasure being here.