LISC Phoenix annual breakfast served up knowledge, connection, inspiration

Jennifer Dokes, for LISC Phoenix

11.19.2024 — LISC Storiese-Blasts

Dr. Stefano Bloch took the stage to deliver words to an audience of believers in the work they do beyond the hallowed walls that surrounded them. The University of Arizona professor earned rapt attention when he spoke truth, based on experience and research, about loving neighbors, even when they don’t look and act like you.

You could even say Bloch, the keynote speaker at the LISC Phoenix annual breakfast, was preaching to the choir Nov. 13 at The Abbey on Monroe, a downtown Phoenix site rich with history of such occasion.

“When you’re enthusiastic about a place, it doesn’t mean that you’re just a booster for it,” Bloch said. “Sometimes the more enthusiasm and love you have for a place the more you’re able to critique a place. Find the problems, and you can help solve them.”

More than 200 people attended the breakfast that held to the LISC Phoenix tradition of honoring the work of strengthening neighborhoods and reversing the negative impact of policies and practices that create inequitable community and economic development.

This year, the teams and coaches of the fifth cohort of the Live Well Arizona Incubator received recognition for their efforts to understand and resolve problems. The teams are the cities of Cottonwood and Sedona for their work on a Verde Valley housing crisis; the Flagstaff Family Food Center; Glendale Elementary School District System of Care Center; Protectors of the Salt River - Onk Akimel Ha Ñukutham, and the Southern Gila County Economic Development Corporation.

LISC Phoenix also recognized Wells Fargo as the exemplary partner and The Abbey on Monroe as the exemplary project for 2024.

Terry Benelli, executive director of LISC Phoenix, urged breakfast guests to “enjoy the tenacity it took to bring (The Abbey) back to life.” The space repurposed for community use is an inspiration for the work necessary to help neighborhoods and individuals and push through the significant social and political challenges ahead.

“For decades, LISC has been a partner of intentionally underserved neighborhoods here in Phoenix,” Benelli said. “We provide resources, tools and, above all, the support for residents to activate their power to advocate for themselves and to control their own community outcomes.

“The obstacles that prevent basic needs for our community to be more civically engaged are again building. It’s LISC’s commitment to align with the community’s natural rhythms and respond to its needs in the coming years. Our community will need everyone in this room’s support to champion their voices. It’s our collective responsibility to create a new politics of connection.”

Bloch, a professor at the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment, spoke about the use of civil laws that are at odds with neighborliness and inclusivity.

Bloch was born and raised in Los Angeles. At times as a child, he experienced homelessness with his mother. He has devoted his academic career to researching neighborhoods like Echo Park where he grew up.

His experience as a teen was one in which survival meant avoiding certain gang members as well as certain members of the local police force. Those were the days in the late 1990s when crime rates were high, and cities put civil law gang injunctions into effect. Under those laws, you could be targeted as a nuisance by the way you look, talk, dress or behave in public.

“What I have argued and shown is that with gang injunctions, by calling people nuisances, enjoining them as gang members based off of purely superficial indicators — crime isn’t even one of the criteria — you can remove people from neighborhoods that often incoming people feel are unsafe or feel yucky about them.”

Cities use civil law because there’s not a burden of proof, there are not constitutional protections, Bloch said. You’re not criminalizing the person you have determined is annoying or a nuisance to you, he said.

“If you turn them into a nuisance, you can get rid of them,” Bloch said. “Most well-meaning people believe the bad guys are gone; now the crime rate is going to drop; now we’re going to be safe.”

In Bloch’s old neighborhood of Echo Park in Los Angeles, crime dropped without a gang injunction imposed on it. Homicides dropped to zero by 2014, he said.

But curiously in 2014, a gang injunction was imposed in Echo Park. Bloch interviewed officers about the shift in policy. Their candid remarks were eye-opening.

Officers told Bloch they knew the guys in the neighborhood aren’t up to no good; they weren’t doing the stuff they were doing in 1994. Officers said they knew that all they were doing was barbecuing at the park’s sanctioned barbecue pits.

“But when people move in and they feel unsafe when it comes to these guys, it’s our job to respond.” Bloch said officers told him. “It’s our job to make these incoming residents feel safer, even though we know that they’re literally safe. We know this is one of the lowest crime-rate areas in the country. But it’s about perception, it’s about feeling. We rely on nuisance laws because nuisance laws themselves talk about feelings. It’s about the feelings of incoming people who don’t know perhaps how to read a neighborhood and how to read the people here.”

Bloch said more than 90 percent of people enjoined in gang injunctions for being nuisances are young men of color: “Black and Latino men, almost all who are working class to impoverished people who make incoming people with more capital — economic capital, social capital, cultural capital — just not feel safe in a neighborhood that is objectively practically crime free.”

Nuisance laws don’t stop with gangs. They also are being used against unhoused or homeless people.

“If homeless people are objectively not committing a crime, you would think they would have the constitutional protections that would allow them to stay in a neighborhood,” Bloch said. “But by identifying homeless people as nuisances — and not as homeless people because there are protections against categorized people — they can be removed because they are indecent to the senses. They challenge people’s comfortable enjoyment of life, and they can be moved out even in the absence of a crime.”

Bloch said as cities becoming more economically prosperous because of different forms of funding and investment that make communities wonderful, vibrant places to be, they’re also safer.

“As cities become safer, we’re seeing these what I consider to be draconian efforts to rid those very neighborhoods of the people who don’t stylistically fit in with the city’s self-image,” Bloch said. “That has to do with skin color, with clothing, with how people spend their time. So, gang injunctions and anti-homelessness campaigns are not relying on crime reduction. They’re relying on removing people that make people who are more privileged feel comfortable.”

Bloch suggested people think before calling police about a “nuisance.”

“When you find yourself being uncomfortable over who is walking down the street, over who is occupying public space, over who you live next door to, you have to ask yourself: Is this somebody who is creating crime? Is this someone who is threatening my ability to live here? Or am I finding myself simply superficially annoyed at these people? And when I find myself annoyed at these people, whoever they may be, do I expect law enforcement or the government to come in and remove them, violating their constitutional rights just to make me feel like I can enjoy my city better?”

Bloch said he believes the answer for all well-meaning people is no.

“If people can admit that, they could see that there’s a solution to the problem and the solution to the problem is — sounds easy — talk to people,” Bloch said. “Talk to the people who walk up and down the walk, talk to the guys you think are gang members, make friends with your neighbors, get out and patronize stores you don’t usually go to.

“Get out in the community and learn to become friends with people around you, and they stop being nuisances and they start being neighbors.”

Preach.

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