Undoing the systems that perpetuate economic exclusion and disinvestment is hard, high-touch work. In the following Q+A, Ryan Winkle, executive director of RAIL CDC (RAIL stands for Retail, Arts, Innovation and Livabaility), describes how his organization supports a Mesa, Arizona community in grabbing the reins of opportunity and reclaiming what should be theirs.
In many of the restaurants, shops, and homes of the Distrito Latino just south of downtown Mesa, AZ, Ryan Winkle is greeted as a friend. Co-founder and executive director of a small nonprofit called RAIL CDC, a longtime LISC partner, Winkle has been fighting for the past decade to ensure the area’s residents and businesses have the tools to succeed economically and flourish in the beloved if chronically under-resourced place they call home.
The overarching theme of RAIL’s work is economic inclusion—fostering fair access to the levers of power and wealth-building for historically marginalized communities in Mesa and Greater Phoenix, one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country.
Initially, that meant placemaking and organizing in the Distrito to resist displacement of cherished mom-and-pop businesses during construction and after the 2015 opening of a light-rail extension into downtown Mesa. When the pandemic hit, RAIL ramped up technical assistance to hundreds of district business proprietors, helping them win stop-gap grants and loans, adapt to covid-related disruptions, and survive the crisis. Now Winkle and his colleagues have their eyes on the projected $1.3 billion in new development coming to downtown Mesa over the next five years; to benefit from this investment while maintaining their community’s rich social networks and cultural identity, more denizens of Distrito Latino will need to secure ownership of the real estate where they live and do business. That’s the next heavy lift on RAIL’s agenda.
Tell us a little about the Distrito Latino. How and why did it become economically marginalized within the city of Mesa and the larger Phoenix area?
In downtown Mesa is what’s called the original square mile. That’s where the quote-unquote “pioneers” of Mesa—the term negates the Native people who were here—settled and built houses and other buildings for a commerce area. As that grew, new neighborhoods were created to the north and south. The south side was where migrant workers lived, and people on the north side often owned those dwellings and rented them to the people who performed labor.
That's the beginning of this marginalization. These two neighborhoods were built around the same time; the same assets were available. But the lot lines were different. The street sizes were different. The power lines were different. The house sizes were different. The north side is now very high-dollar houses, anywhere from $600,000 to $1.5 million. Some of the houses on the south side are legitimate shacks, still, to this day.
That’s what was seen as okay, and has to some extent been policy-driven from that time. Now on the south side we have an area that is majority minority, a majority whose first language is Spanish, and it’s one of three neighborhoods with the lowest median incomes in Maricopa County. They’re all communities of color; they have low tree coverage, fewer services, housing that has deteriorated over time.
You’ve created an economic-inclusion action plan for the Distrito Latino that exemplifies the approach developed by LISC and the Brookings Institution. But the work itself developed pretty organically, right?
Yes, it was always happening, and it became hyper-focused and better-funded almost overnight because of the pandemic. When the [LISC-Brookings economic inclusion] playbook came out last year, we thought, wow, this is exactly what’s happening with us. It helped us, too, because there are pieces that maybe we didn’t think about or appreciate. Not only that, but since we work in the Asian business district here in Mesa as well as in a neighborhood of Tempe that’s very similar to the Distrito Latino, we're kind of repeating those processes.
You’ve been successful at working with LISC Phoenix to add programmatic elements. Just this year RAIL became a U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) “community navigator” to better connect district entrepreneurs to resources, and you recently opened a Financial Opportunity Center (FOC) that provides personal financial and career coaching. How do you integrate these programs to advance economic inclusion?
When we start our engagement, from the very beginning, we have an end in mind: this person or this business owner has not only the right but the responsibility to control their future and what happens to their neighborhood.
Our SBA Navigator Program and our FOC work, they're very similar, and there’s a lot of overlap because for many of the people we work with, small-business needs and household needs are closely related.
You're taking a person—a business owner or a resident—and saying, "Hey, what are some immediate needs that we can help you with, to make things just a little better?" We do an assessment and start including them in multiple programs.
Once you help with that immediate need, they start thinking, "Okay, we make plenty of money at this business. It's just not documented well. Maybe we could work toward owning the building." We can also coach that person on a household level: “Here’s where your business stands, now what about you personally? You write yourself a check. Where does that money go? Do you document that well in your personal life? Because maybe you could buy your house.” It just becomes a layered thing.
You mention the objective of owning real estate. In a community largely of renters, that’s a key step to economic empowerment but not easy to accomplish. How can RAIL assist?
We have gone so far as to call a landowner and say, "Hey, what's the likelihood that you would sell this house to this person who's been renting here for 15 years?” That ownership is not the only way to stay somewhere, but it's a very strong way to stay somewhere.
And we are always on the lookout for, I don't want to say cheap money, but good money. For example, there's a county loan right now that's 1%, and so we've worked with a lot of people to apply for it. LISC has some funding as well. On top of that, we work with a few different banks; some are smaller, community banks. We're like, "How do we develop something with you where we can feel confident about sending our people to you, and they'll get a decent deal?”
Multiple organizations—banks, insurance groups, etc.—have corporate responsibility, and the key word right now is to be very “equitable” and help BIPOC communities. I think that the banks truly do want to get those loans out there, but a bank's a bank. They have a certain risk tolerance. They still do not feel good about some of these loans. Sometimes it's up to us to educate the people up enough so the risk tolerance is met. We have the beginning businesses, the medium businesses, and the ones that are ready for financing. If you've progressed to that readiness level but you still don't have a bookkeeper or QuickBooks, it's really difficult for us to continue to work with you. It’s time to take those extra steps.
The LISC-Brookings approach to fostering economic inclusion emphasizes the need to build relationships within a neighborhood and also between that community and holders of power at the citywide level. How does that play out in the Distrito Latino?
Over the year we've been having monthly meetings. Some of them are just to talk and share ideas. Some are very focused: what does advocating for yourself at a council meeting look like, or what does participating in a general plan look like? We also bring people together in our small-business meetings, our art engagement events, and what we call our pláticas (“conversations”) and our walking audits.
We recently had a larger, year-end meeting we call Tools to Support Our Community. The mayor came. The economic development director came. They kind of disagreed with our view on how things have happened and how things are in Mesa. That's not a bad thing, they just don't see it how we see it.
We invited a lot of different stakeholders. There were people from the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Mesa, cultural coalitions, and then a ton of small-business owners, which is the real strength. We were able to talk about how we can work together. Our neighborhood people were saying “Wow, the mayor's listening to us and thinking about our ideas.”