New Kid on the Block

"We recognize that the city of Austin needs to coordinate better how it responds to neighborhoods," says Cora Wright. That would be her job, or at least one of the mandates of the new Office of Neighborhood Services that she directs. And that is not what you'd call a radical insight; nothing is closer to a public truism than The City Just Don't Get It. "And the things that help preserve and maintain neighborhoods need to be done systematically." The ONS, which aims to go live in March with its first big project -- a "neighborhood academy" for citizen education and designated "neighborhood support teams" in East and Northeast Austin -- is nothing if not systematic. Or at least "data-driven" and focused on "best practices," to use two of Wright's recurring concepts. But is it what Austinites, or more specifically Austin neighborhoods and the City Council they helped elect, are looking for?

That depends on what they're looking for, which nobody really knows. Even the name of the office poses a slew of questions. What is a neighborhood service, anyway? Is a "neighborhood" a place on the map, or is it a group of people who feel united by identity and interest, or is it both at the same time? Either way, how do "neighborhoods" fit in between the city and its citizen customers? Do different neighborhoods require different services, or at least that the typical services be provided in a different way, because every neighborhood is unique? If so, how does the city do that? And what does the ONS, an office within the Health and Human Services department, do to make that happen?

Wright's job is to answer those questions on the way to helping the city Get It at the neighborhood level. It's probably not surprising that this requires an approach that differs both from the city's SOP and from the visions and practices of Austin's powerful lobby of organized neighborhoods, since the stalemate between those two sides is what got us an ONS, with much flourish from city topsiders, in the first place. And that new neighborhood paradigm -- our buzzword, not hers -- is what Wright wants the ONS to create.

Up until now, you'd never know that Wright is getting ready to do something both innovative and risky, since the ONS has coalesced, like an interstellar object, out of a cloud of abstract programspeak, from the city manager on down. This fogginess has left even the City Council confused about what the ONS is supposed to do and how it is supposed to work. But what is clear is that city leaders, under pressure from a neighborhood constituency that's ready to take shots at the ONS before it even hits the ground, want Wright and her office to do something -- anything -- that works.

---

Getting Started

The spark that produced the ONS came from the city's pilot neighborhood planning program and its subsequent corporate parent, the Smart Growth Initiative. When the City Council picked the first neighborhoods to be planned, it busted its budget by selecting not two but three. As a consequence, the third plan -- for the Chestnut neighborhood on the Eastside -- was adopted by Health and Human Services, with Wright (who was already on staff at HHS) as the department's point person.

In those pilot projects, there were no limits on what issues were fair game for neighborhood planning. So Chestnut, even more so than the other two first-round pilots (East Cesar Chavez and Dawson), ended up with a truckload of recommendations, many of which went far beyond the conceptual confines of "planning" into questions of city service delivery, which in Chestnut is weak at best. This tabula rasa approach ensured that the planning process, though undoubtedly constructive, took much longer than the city would have liked. So when the city moved last year to drop the "pilot" from neighborhood planning, it decided to speed up the process by limiting the plans to the traditional topics of land use, transportation, and urban design.

Meanwhile, once the Smart Growth Initiative started to run into heavy neighborhood static, the leadership of the Austin neighborhood scene -- both within and without the Austin Neighborhoods Council -- expressed its longing for a single neighborhoods office within the city. This office was variously envisioned as an advocate or ombudsman for neighborhood interests, or as a channel through which the city could support neighborhood associations and other land-based civic infrastructure, or both.

So the ONS has emerged to fulfill all these mandates -- giving citizens and neighborhoods a "single point of contact" for their issues, helping them organize themselves and make their efforts effective (or, to use the au courant phrase, "capacity building"), and exploring ways to improve city service delivery at the neighborhood level. "If we're successful," says Wright, "I hope to influence a more effective working relationship between city departments and residents. We need to communicate and make information and participation accessible."

One of Wright's two initial strategies is the Neighborhood Academy, which is exactly what it sounds like -- an evening-and-weekend classroom-style instruction program, with courses teaching citizens how to organize a neighborhood, develop a neighborhood plan, work with developers or with the city, or understand the Land Development Code and zoning ordinance. These courses would be taught by experts, which could include neighborhood leaders, city staffers, or others, facilitated by the ONS. These experts could also be available to consult with individual neighborhoods.

"We want to offer specific tools to help people navigate within the process of advocating for their neighborhoods," Wright says. The ONS also wants the Neighborhood Academy "to be a place where we [the city] get direct feedback on how to communicate our decisions and initiatives. -- I'd actually like to see city departments learn from citizens. We need to recognize that we don't have all the answers."

---

Support Staff at Work

The other startup program of the ONS is those "single points of contact," which City Hall insiders refer to as "SPOCs" but which Wright has dubbed "neighborhood support teams." Originally, it was envisioned that each of the city's six police sectors might have such people on the ground this year, but that was scaled back come budget time last summer to two-person teams in Central East and Northeast Austin. (Obviously, the needs were seen as being greater in these historically disadvantaged areas.)

These teams -- one program administrator and one "ONS neighborhood planner" (as opposed to the likewise-titled folks in the planning department) -- would have multifaceted missions. On the one hand, they'd be "responsive to requests for basic information and to receive input on how the city can deliver services," says Wright, "and being accessible to citizens about chronic areas that need to be resolved." In other words, the first call you make when you have a problem should not be to your favorite City Council office -- where savvy folks direct their requests now -- but to your neighborhood support team.

On the other hand, the neighborhood support teams are "to be ombudsmen, advocates, and problem solvers," says Wright. "They'll need to be skilled in crisis intervention and have the skills to take a look at how the city should solve the larger challenges a neighborhood represents. They'll need a sense of what the conditions are in each area and be able to benchmark those conditions against what we consider to be sustainable community indicators -- where we want the neighborhood to move." (The sustainable community indicators, or "SCIs," are a term of civic art, the fruit of the Sustainable Communities Initiative that predates, and has now been subsumed by, the welter of Smart Growth.)

The team will ideally "be able to advocate with city departments and solve issues the same day, not in a few weeks," Wright notes, and thus avoid one of the major woes bedeviling neighborhoods today. "And while the priority emphasis is on how the city delivers services, we're not the only player. The team will have to know about how community-based organizations in the area work and help link people to the resources available."

---

What About the Politics?

In sum, the ONS is a project in social work, as expressed in the rhetoric of management, aimed at solving what have traditionally in Austin been seen as purely political problems. (Even the supposedly platonic principles of urban planning and design were, in our fair burg, politicized long ago.) "While I think Cora Wright is advocating a lot of good things for neighborhoods, her job is not really to be an advocate for neighborhoods," says former Austin Neighborhoods Council president Jeff Jack. "She came out of the social-services end of the spectrum, and because of that, in neighborhoods that have a lot of social-service programs, her job has been to look at whether they're doing a good job. That's a good role, but it's not the advocacy role we had hoped for."

Jack uses the lately fought battle over the Gotham condo tower on Town Lake as an example of what the ANC really wanted. "When that went through the pipeline, there was nobody who said 'Hey, wait, the neighborhoods and the community have an interest here.' We had nobody in city staff to go back through the history of the Waterfront Overlay to see what the neighborhoods were trying to protect. The staff was an advocate for the development, and the basic information that should have been presented to the Planning Commission -- about the height restrictions -- never got presented. Hopefully, an advocate would be part of the team to bring up neighborhood issues early in the process, to ensure that we don't get to loggerheads, as we often do."

This example actually highlights a structural hill that the ONS would have to climb. Ideally, someone doing what Jack suggests would be working within the Development Review and Inspection Department (in his example), not in a separate office in a separate department under a separate assistant city manager. Indeed, the ONS and the neighborhood planning program, which will have to work together, exist in different domains on the city org chart.

Considering how many complaints are heard about city staffers blowing off citizens and failing to implement even the highest-profile policy changes, it's not a given that whoever answers the phone at DRID (or Public Works, or Solid Waste, or HHS itself) will jump when ONS calls. But City Manager Jesus Garza has made clear that this is exactly what he wants city staff to do, although at what peril we don't know.

Bolstering this directive is the high-level "neighborhood corporate team" atop all the city's neighborhood-related efforts -- ONS, planning, housing, code enforcement. This once-a-month conclave will hear from the front lines and "have open, action-oriented discussions with the city manager at the table," says Wright, "to promote systematic communication across department lines and looking at trends. This can validate the departments' own perceptions about their impact on neighborhoods, and I have confidence that the city manager wants to solve problems as expeditiously as possible."

Unlike neighborhood planning, which sprang from the work of the City Council-appointed Citizens Planning Committee, the ONS concept has devolved almost entirely from city staff, as the council looks on with a mixture of intrigue and bafflement. "I think we probably could have done some more strategic thinking about what the problem is that the ONS is supposed to solve," says Council Member Bill Spelman, who at his day job -- at the LBJ School of Public Affairs -- is teaching a graduate seminar (or, in LBJ-ese, a "policy research project") looking at how to best structure neighborhood service delivery in Austin.

"The problem Cora is starting to solve is about neighborhoods not knowing how to get services from the city -- so we have the academy and single points of contact," Spelman continues. "That's a reasonable starting position to get people's attention; if we do that, we need to get the departments themselves thinking about how the boundaries around them need to break down. But there are seven people on the council who all have different ideas that have 'neighborhoods' and 'services' in common. And this is our chance to see if we can do some work in that area and see where it goes."

---

Talk, Listen, and Learn

What everyone seems to agree on is that, if neighborhoods are talked to and listened to by city departments, the neighbors will be willing and able to help the city do its job better. "I don't think many citizens expect city government to do everything for everyone," says Wright. "They want the city to do its part. At varying levels, they're willing to do their part, but they don't know how best to do that.

"And that's true all over the city," Wright continues. "I believe that there's a level of organization that exists in all neighborhoods. There's a level of organization and cooperation that exists on every block. The neighborhood associations have shared a role in discussing and making decisions, but that also happens in small groups and even among individuals. Some neighborhoods need help in organizing themselves in ways that resemble traditional government -- like the 'organized' neighborhoods in Austin already have -- but that's not always how people in neighborhoods organize themselves. I'd like to see us find out how they do organize themselves and start there."

So if the ONS is an effective translator and megaphone for those citizens' concerns, people all over the city could have the stroke that one finds in super-organized neighborhoods like Hyde Park, Old West Austin, or Balcones. "Basically, neighborhood associations are just advocacy groups for ordinary people," says Jack. "When we say there's a neighborhood agenda in Austin, we just mean that there should be a strategy for dealing with the rights and interests of our existing citizens."

And, as Spelman puts it, "If we can help neighborhoods conceptualize problems more broadly and then meet them halfway, what sounds to bureaucrats like whining is actually a very sophisticated analysis of the problems the city faces. Neighborhoods have figured out problems, know where the pressure points are, and can help the city spend its resources more wisely. I think that's doing the city departments a tremendous favor, and I think they'll see it that way."