Community development can help close the opportunity divide

On Jan. 20, 2017, our next president will take office and start the hard work of translating campaign poetry into governing prose.  Regardless of who that president is though, she or he will likely be elected without a policy mandate and face a divided and angry America.  After a campaign that has unfolded against intense partisan animosity and exposed high levels of economic anxiety, however, it behooves our next president to start healing our nation by claiming a community development mandate.

Policy makers have long understood that structural unemployment is a source of community decline.  Yet while the federal government has made substantial investments in affluent communities through infrastructure, tax, and housing incentives, there have been fewer – and certainly less successful – investments made to revitalize communities that face high unemployment, housing instability, and high poverty.

{mosads}Neglecting the importance of community development poses a problem at a time when nearly one in seven young adults aged 16-24 in this country is now out of school and out of work.  Moreover, the social costs of an education and workforce system that leaves too many young people without the skills they need for gainful employment is not trivial.  Young adults neither in school nor working – Opportunity Youth – cost US taxpayers around $93 billion annually in lost revenues.  And employers face a number of competitive disadvantages as well; the widening productivity and skills gap has led to high levels of employee turnover, increased spending on training, and a supply of entry-level and middle-skills workers lacking the trained talent needed in today’s labor market.

Closing the Opportunity Divide – supply-demand mismatches in the youth labor market – requires bold changes to our education and workforce systems and strong youth commitments from corporate leaders.  But as Robert D. Putnam chronicled in his book, Our Kids, it’s important to remember that rich and poor kids are increasingly growing up in separate and unequal Americas where zip codes in which they are born determines their fate.  As a result, education and workforce reforms should not be considered separate from reforms needed in communities and neighborhoods in which all kids live.

Given that many Americans already realize that while talent may be evenly distributed, opportunity and fairness in this country are not, it’s not surprising that nearly half of today’s youth believe the American Dream is more dead than alive.  Nor is it surprising that young people in particular are not racing to the voting booth to demand change in their communities.  But as June’s Brexit referendum demonstrated, apathy is a double-edged sword; while young people overwhelmingly voted to remain in the European Union only 36 percent of them came out to vote – a harbinger for American Opportunity Youth who might otherwise feel completely disengaged from interacting with a political system that does not appear to have their interests in mind.

Part of the reason our next president should prioritize community development alongside economic reforms to close the Opportunity Divide is the amount of time youth already spend outside of school in their communities.  According to one Commission on Behavioral and Social Science and Education, students spend 14 percent of their time in school, leaving more than 85 percent of their time in community spaces such as the workplace or home. The large amounts of time young people spend in their communities is not inconsequential, which makes it that much more important that efforts by our 45th president to close the Opportunity Divide specifically include commitments to rebuild every community in this country.

To be sure, internships and job experience matter.  But so do affordable housing, accessible childcare, and extracurricular activities.  We need our next president to catalyze employer-demand to see Opportunity Youth as a source of talent but also to help ensure that place-based federal initiatives actually work as intended.  The good news is that there already appears to be bipartisan support for closing the Opportunity Divide.  In June, Speaker Paul Ryan released a new plan that details ideas for how to improve skills for poor kids, while legislation was introduced last month by Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), to fight poverty through the establishment of a transitional jobs grant program and the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

But in order to level the playing field for all our youth, rebuild crumbling onramps that lead to postsecondary education and gainful employment, and close the Opportunity Divide once and for all, our next president should govern with a community development mandate from day one.

Jonathan Hasak is a Manger of Public Policy and Government Affairs at Year Up.

The views expressed by authors are their own and not the views of The Hill.