Episode #5 | Season 2: Housing as the Hub of the Wheel with Chris Estes

Funding Rural | Episode #5 | Season 2: Housing as the Hub of the Wheel with Chris Estes

In the world of philanthropy and sustainability, the Aspen Institute has been a thought-leader for decades. Chris Estes, co-executive director of the Community Strategies Group at the Aspen Institute, shares his background in housing and how he’s worked to elevate rural people and places. He and several others helped to develop the Thrive Rural Framework: a tool for communities to support their own equitable rural prosperity.

“They don’t really know how to invest in those communities, because they’re trying to transfer an urban framework to a rural region.” —Chris Estes

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More about Chris Estes

Chris Estes is a national rural development leader focused on equitable, sustainable, and holistic approaches to strengthening rural communities. Since joining the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group in 2021 and becoming the Co-Executive Director in 2022, Chris has worked to integrate the Thrive Rural Framework as a tool for supporting, connecting, and growing the field of equitable rural prosperity. This includes working in coalition and partnership with national organizations to shift thinking on how federal programs measure success in rural areas as well as increasing funding for regional capacity building.

Chris has strong policy expertise and practice experience at the community, state, and federal levels on poverty, housing, and community development. His previous work includes rural capacity building with the Housing Assistance Council, serving as Interim Executive Director of the Raleigh/Wake (NC) Partnership to End Homelessness, and as a senior advisor at a national network providing home repair to low-income homeowners and disaster recovery. Chris was also the President/CEO of the National Housing Conference in Washington, DC, serving as a national thought leader on affordable housing and community development issues, including the intersection of housing with transportation, education, and health. Chris originally came to DC from North Carolina, where he led the North Carolina Housing Coalition as well as worked on early childhood issues and programs serving children and families.

Overall, Chris’s work at the national level has given him insight into federal policymaking and the inner workings of HUD and USDA-Rural Development. His experience at the community level in community organizing, affordable housing development, land use, and credit syndication has exposed him to good practices, innovations, and challenges in states and urban and rural localities across the nation.

Chris lives in Washington, DC, with his wife Cherie, spending as much time as he can in the woods, mountains, or on a bicycle.

“…Part of the frustration is that [funding] is not really centered around ‘How should we adequately support this work, and this region? And where is there rural momentum happening that we should be investing in?’ It’s like, ‘We’re just going to give everybody the same amount in an episodic fashion’ which largely ensures that nothing really is able to change much over time.” —Chris Estes

Discussion Questions

• How can your organization work with intermediaries to help support rural and remote spaces?
• Why is collaboration important in this work? What new programs/projects could come out of effective collaboration?
• How can philanthropy better support effective convenings in communities?
• How does your organization support professional development for grant partners?  How could the Thrive Rural Framework support efforts in professional development?

Resources

• Thrive Rural Framework
• Aspen Institute Bio on Chris Estes
• Three Principles for Bridging Rural Health and Prosperity
• Lessons from the Field: Rural & Indigenous Leadership for Opportunity Youth
• The Daily Yonder | Commentary: Challenging Everything We Know about Funding as a Path to Thriving Rural Communities

“Something that the Community Strategies Group tried to bring out in our Rural Development Hubs Report was this idea that where innovation was really happening, was where there were these groups that were thinking of themselves as ‘part of our job is to bring people together, build cooperation, build trust, build capacity,’ and think of collective regional solutions for these challenges. And that’s where we’re really seeing some success.” — Chris Estes

Transcript:  Season 2 | Episode #5: Housing as the Hub of the Wheel with Chris Estes

Erin Borla: 0:11
Welcome back to Funding Rural. I’m Erin Borla with the Sisters Oregon based Roundhouse Foundation. In the world of philanthropy and sustainability, the Aspen Institute has been a thought leader for decades. I ran into one of their co-directors Chris Estes, at an event this last year, and I told him how happy I was that our paths had finally crossed, and I asked him if he’d come on the show. Chris is the Co-Executive Director of the Community strategies group at the Aspen Institute with Bonita Robinson Hardy. His background is in housing and he’s worked all across the country, elevating rural people and places and really helping them bring ideas to life. He and Bonita together, along with several others have helped to develop the Thrive rural framework, a tool for communities to support their own equitable rural prosperity. We started the conversation really diving into where the Aspen Institute came from.

Chris Estes: 0:58
Over I would say within the last 20 years, the Institute has grown dramatically from those initial efforts around particularly leadership and dialogue, what they call it Aspen the seminar program, it began to develop what are called now policy programs, which are again in the keeping of Aspen’s focus as a convener are led by people wanting to convene folks around a particular issue, trying to push for innovative thinking to ignite positive change, gain consensus, and as I think been a place where they really wanted to bring folks from many different sorts of sectors of an issue together to do thought leadership, work on that. The community strategies group started in 1985, and was really a result of two larger foundations who are interested in learning more about rural poverty. If you remember, the 80s farm foreclosure crisis was prominent. And I think people were beginning people seem to sort of discover rural, about every 20 years in our nation’s history, when there’s something traumatic happening, and that really led to the program, doing some deep research on what was happening, and then continuing to kind of develop a model around bringing practitioners together to learn from each other. The hallmarks of our program have always been around, focus on peer learning, lifting up and honoring practitioner voice of the people doing the work, learning from each other, and then trying to synthesize those learnings into resources that can both support the field of work itself, as well as inform what philanthropy and government does, to try to improve how they interact with rural places.

Erin Borla: 2:51
I what I really love is is your work and your mentioned, people are rediscovering rural, every it’s like on a cycle, that that becomes a priority. And it tends to be around some sort of you mentioned the loss of farms, and we’re back in sort of a cycle of where people are, there’s concern that we’re not including people or people are disenfranchised. And so there’s how do we re engage and it’s occasionally we get to like, how do we fix them? How do we fix rural? And that’s not the right move. So what do you say when folks say, well, we want to help fix that? What does that look like from your your seat?

Chris Estes: 3:29
Well, I think there’s just so much there about educating people about what both the diversity of rural America in terms of who lives there, but also just the differences in the geography of the country. And what’s happened to rural historically, in the way I and Bonita try to talk about it is like, you have to understand the assets and experience of rural places, and how important they’ve been to the success of the country, and really what’s been done to them. So it’s not so much as fixing as it is helping them recover from a lot of the injustice that have been done to these places where they were extracted heavily for their value at a hike. You know, maybe people got good jobs for a while eventually. But they certainly didn’t start out that way. long histories of you know, labor movement efforts in those extractive industries where people were really fighting for dignity and sustainability. And understanding sort of after that extraction ended or whatever value or however the economy pivoted, or trade change, those places were sort of left. And I actually think there’s sort of two pronged there’s not understanding what’s wrong, what the history is, but also they see rural as like an ocean of need. And so they’re used to thinking about, I don’t understand where the infrastructure is, and frankly, I think For people of my age, I was born at the very beginning of Generation X, my entire lifetime as a as a child to really middle age, the cities were the focus of poverty in our country, we were the white flight and abandonment and concentrated poverty and the racial equity issues and, and divides were all centered on the cities. And we really didn’t think about rural much, because it was sort of seen as like, well, that’s where living is cleaner and people work on farms. And you know, how bad can it be? And I think that has has only sort of resurfaced with all of the changes due to trade economies and other things. And people began to realize their challenges. But they don’t really know how to invest in those communities, because they’re trying to transfer an urban framework to a rural region, and they see a whole lot of small towns, and they don’t understand why can’t just find everything in every town. And so understanding like, how the opportunities and the assets in a place are really important to kind of shift that mindset. And that’s really, I think, something that the community strategies group tried to bring out in our rural development hubs report was this idea that we’re innovation was really happening was where there were these groups that were thinking of themselves as a part of our job is to bring people together, build cooperation, build trust, build capacity, and think of collective regional solutions for these challenges. And that’s where we’re really seeing some success. And instead of thinking at this sort of micro level of like, how can we do this thing in our one small town, if we think about the assets of a region, maybe we have some more capacity to do things, but it’s still, the purpose of the port was both lift up the idea, but also say to the government funders, and private philanthropic funders, this, these are the kinds of things you should be investing in, because you’re going this is the way you can see some transformational change. And there is some sort of economies of scale, if you will, the capacity of these organizations, but they still can’t get the funding to do that really important trust building capacity building work, because everybody just wants to give them kind of episodic transactional funding.

Erin Borla: 7:27
And that trust building is such an important piece, because that’s what sustains the work, and what it’s what allows community to, to really have that place based connection. We talked, at one point in an episode last season about how there are folks that these big national orgs want to come in, and okay, we’re gonna do this one big climate project, but they don’t fund the organizations on the ground. And that becomes this challenge, because who sustains that project? who’s able to really maintain the work and who knows the community are? That’s the folks that are on the ground?

Chris Estes: 8:01
Yeah, that is, that is a big and long consistent problem for these regions, where people want to be able to like they can get funding to go in and do a project with someone they’ve declared victory move on. And the capacity and support to the community just isn’t there to say like, we’re going to help you sustain this, and there are full. That’s why I mentioned that episodic funding is such a history in rural places, because we’ve never, we’ve sort of set everything up as urban or metro and non Metro. So everything else that we don’t think of as Metro is just in this other category. And that generally means we’re prioritizing Metro and we’re trying to spread everything else around. And that generally means like, well, we can’t do everybody. So we’ll do this, and then we’ll go over here, and then we’ll do this. And so even at the state level, North Carolina, has 100 counties. And it was famous for like funding things and saying, Well, we were only going to commit this much funding, which means that every year 20 counties are going to get funding for this effort. So what it means for the county is every five years, you get funding for a project and in between, you’ve got to find your own and many of those places, there isn’t the capacity to do that. But they’re able to say like within five years, every legislators districts gotten support. And that’s, you know, part of the frustration is not it’s not really centered around how should we adequately support this work, and this region, and where is there rural momentum happening that we should be investing in? It’s like, we’re just going to give everybody the same amount in an episodic fashion which largely ensures that nothing really is able to change much over time.

Erin Borla: 9:55
I feel really lucky to be able to do this work because people get really passionate about the places that they live, and to be able to share and talk about those places in a way that, again, is asset based, like you talked about, rather than the things that are missing. Yeah, there’s challenges. And there are ways to overcome those challenges if we work together and talk through them, and some of them are really big, but it’s the opportunity to really talk about why they’re there and what, what’s exciting for them, and what, what makes it home for them. You know, you mentioned sort of having to explain some of those things to folks in government or larger institutions. And part of that has to do with the fact that we can’t really define rural, you talked about urban versus non Metro. You know, I think even in the state of Texas, they say there’s something like 60 different references to rural being different sizes, and different population bases. So part of that is we don’t have a clear definition across the board of what is rural.

Chris Estes: 10:56
You know, the the history of that the struggle with that definition, there’s both a congressional one where, as each new program, a congressman or a senator wants to bring about the gerry, often gerrymandered the definition to make sure their community is covered. And so that’s created a lot of problems. But I would step back and say that the macro challenge is that we’ve never looked at, if you just said, Okay, we’re going to take the non Metro part of the country, how do we have a development strategy for that, and Tony Pippa at the Brookings Institution, who’s our regular partner on all of our policy work has done some good thinking about that, but really trying to get people to go, we’ve got to have strategies, not just, oh, we fund this, we design a program to work in Metro and then we’ll have some non Metro funding, but like, what is it like to actually design programs to serve these regions, with these issues, and there certainly are enough commonality in terms of like capacity, the ability to do produce matching funding, the need for longer timeframes, and then different metrics, you know, when so much of what the government at all levels, is oriented toward is volume metrics, the idea that we’re going to show the bang for the buck by if we design a program, the more people that participate, is a way for us to show people in the community that we’ve done a good job where so that applications from rural or less populated regions don’t ever score as well, because they’re just fewer people are going to be impacted. So for example, if you were designing something for non metro or rural, you might say, what’s the what’s the percentage change in, in the outcome that you’ve sought, has occurred. So if you moved your workforce, or unemployment from, you know, you had a 25% change in, in in your was improvement, that’s a significant outcome that can be reported differently that rather than saying, like only 100, people got jobs, but if it’s a quarter of the people that were on unemployment, that’s a pretty significant change. And so the first large report we did after the development of the Thrive row framework was this measurement report, to really challenge these ideas of we’ve got to think about and value rural regions differently and how we measure success. It can’t just be jobs, created jobs, retain dollars leveraged. Those, it’s not that those things are bad. It’s just they’re not telling the story of success and transformation. And I think the jobs number is always been problematic, because it’s never really accounted for the level of wages relative to the cost of living. So we’ve produced a lot of jobs in our country over the last 30 years that didn’t pay a living wage, and yet declared victory, not just in rural spaces, but in urban and suburban spaces as well. And I think that’s part of the struggle of people, this growing body of folks who feel sort of left behind economically, and I think we’ve failed to sort of recognize where that comes from.

Erin Borla: 14:20
I want to spend some time talking about your work in housing, because I think we hear you know, so frequently, I mean, that’s the number one issue housing and childcare right now, including health care. You know, we talk a lot about that’s kind of the three legs of the stool to keep a community alive and thriving is is access to housing, access to quality education, and childcare and access to health care. And the housing piece that’s a lot of your work has been in that and how does how is that playing out? Now? I mean, that’s what we’re talking about on a regular basis, especially when we have you mentioned an aging population population Shouldn’t folks or aging more in place? What are all those things? I mean, that’s a big broad question, what are all the things that you’re working on around housing?

Chris Estes: 15:08
So it’s interesting, because certainly when I started working and learning about housing work, which is probably when I started, I mean, I certainly knew some stuff about it. But I really started thinking about it when I started the school of social work in 1998, and was working in a low income, small community in Chapel Hill and realize that in rural places, traditionally, the only conversation about housing was usually about substandard housing, or adequate plumbing. There were commitments that had been made in the, in the Great Society efforts in the late 60s and early 70s, there was a fund that came out of that called the Carolina fund that had done a bunch of work in North Carolina and those early periods, North Carolina had created a Housing Trust Fund in the 80s. To really which dressed on like, so people weren’t straight piping into the into the water source. So it’s like, real basic stuff. And when you were trying to talk about affordability, when I started doing the work in in the early 2000s Peep, it just wasn’t resonating, they would talk about substandard stuff, but it was rurals. Affordable, they didn’t think about it in a in a way. And it was really difficult in a in I think in a lot of not just rural regions, but states that were predominantly rural, for them to recognize that housing could and was going to become more affordable people just had much more laid back views on like zoning and planning. And a lot of places, both large and small, have really grown dramatically. And now we’re all talking about housing affordability. So it’s frustrating, because typically, people don’t really want to work on the issue until it becomes a crisis. The way I used to present on it when I would travel around the state and then nationally, was that housing was the hub of a wheel. And the outside of the wheel is where all the issues that we spend a lot more time historically talking about whether it was education, or what’s happening with seniors or people with disabilities, or open space or traffic, or jobs. And that housing the spokes were essentially all this interconnectedness between those issues and housing, because where you live and what you live in, ultimately determines a huge part of how healthy you are, how safe you feel, and how far goods and services and opportunities are from you. And, and that’s only more exacerbated in rural spaces. Because the distance between stuff can be so much greater. There is no public transportation network, that’s adequate going to get you places and you know, where you can afford to live, may be so far away from where the employment opportunities are that you’re spending a significant amount of money on transportation, much less the child, the childcare issue comes in immediately for all families with children, how do you find a solution? When distance is a problem, but the country and states have just not been? They understand it’s an issue, but they have not been willing to invest in it. And I think there’s a couple of things tied up in that. I think the words affordable housing often generate a vision of large public housing developments built in the late 60s. And the sort of concentration of poverty, which seem both like bad ideas and dangerous. I think it’s loaded with a lot of negative terms about low to moderate income people or people of color. And so that this idea, we’ve really continually as a country always been trying to segregate ourselves, both racially and socioeconomically. And so housing is really at the center of that it’s a very emotional issue. And the recognition now that everyone’s upset about affordability, but most communities that are especially ones that are larger, they don’t want any of the solutions, either they don’t want to have to do anything differently. They don’t want to give up land and build homeless shelter for women and children. Because that’s going to increase crime, or that’s going to you know, so all these things come out that people have these pretty hard biases against and it’s made housing a really difficult issue to solve. In rural it’s it’s complicated by the fact that the market really isn’t building much housing, because at less places have population growth, people are having to find their own housing solutions. And that’s why manufactured housing and modular housing sort of became the de facto rural solution if you weren’t, you know, building a log cabin by the lake or something. And those those had their own challenges about how they were set up and how sustainable they were. And will this actually be an asset long term. And so it’s been a challenge for rural places to kind of recognize that as their housing stock declined, they actually had less housing, which makes it more affordable. I’ve also heard a lot of places saying like, we don’t want to get any bigger people are coming here. And I said, Well, if you do that, what happens is people are still going to come, it’s just going to the prices are going to go up even faster. And so more and more people are going to be pushed out. And that’s essentially we referenced Aspen, Colorado, that’s essentially what happened there people saw it as a beautiful place, saw the opportunity to move there, and then work to make sure that they didn’t build it any denser than it was. So everybody had that same sort of great views, small town. So that just meant everything went from a million dollars to $10 million. And that’s what’s happening in a lot of places that they’re setting becoming, if you have any sort of natural features, Lake River, mountains, any sort of outdoor recreation component, wherever you are in the country, those places are seeing an influx of second homes and recreation economy growth, which is great in terms of, you know, can have some positive economic development. But it’s definitely made communities more unaffordable, and trying to figure out how to navigate that and suddenly step into planning and building and development is just not something rural regions have a lot of experience in.

Erin Borla: 21:32
Yeah, it’s a double edged sword, right? When you look at sort of long term housing, and long term sustainability and having to make some of those hard choices versus economic improvement. And we talked about that with data centers and distribution centers that are coming in where there’s that sort of real short term boom for the construction of that facility and additional increase in in population. But then the longer term is, well, you know, what’s the tax incentive for bringing that that group here, and they really aren’t farther from opportunity as far as like, increase the number of teachers that we have at the school, and we have to do all these other pieces that they may not have the tax base to do that. So but if you’re, if you choose one, as an elected official, if you’re stuck between choosing economic, what appears to be prosperity from the new shiny thing, versus some long term strategic planning, it’s a very hard choice. And folks are put in a position that there’s not a win.

Chris Estes: 22:32
I will say, without a doubt, the two year election cycle is the enemy of all long term solutions. Political leaders at every level, local, state, federal, are not rewarded for strategies that are going to show benefits, or even at being asked to think, four to six to eight to 10 years in the future. It’s like what can happen in the next two years, that will show that I’ve made progress. And it’s, and that really does lead to a lot of short term implementations short term decision making, you know, you’ve I’ve seen lots of stories of people chasing, you know, first it was those data centers, and people were giving away, you know, tax incentives on water and electricity. And all of a sudden, their grid needs to be upgraded. And now everybody’s water bill went up. And, you know, there were six new jobs out of that, and like the tax base didn’t grow. And but it’s really hard if you’re a low income region, and you’ve got an opportunity to recruit something that to say, well, we didn’t want to give away the farm to get this, quote, unquote, no pun intended. And I think that’s really where, again, we try to center the work about what is it like to develop a strategy about building wealth locally? Like how do we pursue those strategies? And how do we design funding systems at the federal and state level to be more centered around that rather than this attraction? Extraction framework? How can we get somebody to move here and give us jobs? And that can lead to more long term thinking, but I do think it’s, it’s a consistent problem are our funding, particularly on the government level, at every level, are not really able to drive towards long term transformation because people want quicker turnarounds on impact.

Erin Borla: 24:27
Well, and I think you’re exactly right. It’s a phrase I use all the time, but it’s that interconnection, of all the different things that that make a community work. And if we’re not looking at all the intersections and the interconnectedness of how each decision then can snowball into something else. We get lost in the in the micro analysis. So recognizing those those intersections, and I’m so glad that that’s something that Aspen’s focusing on so much, I just really I’ve learned so much and I’m so glad to be able to spend time with you today. Thank you. For sharing and telling us all about the great work that you’re working on, we’ll certainly have show notes and things. So all of that framework and everything will have links on the on the website as well.

Chris Estes: 25:11
Well, thank you, it was great. I really appreciate the opportunity. It’s always fun to talk about this and great to get to catch up again and talk more with you as well.

Erin Borla: 25:31
I want to lift up that Chris mentioned the need for a strategy to help communities build wealth locally. Oftentimes, that comes with supporting strong leaders at the community level and getting them involved in the civic process. Those positions, especially in rural and remote places, are often volunteer positions, city council, county commission, or even school board members. Many people step in wanting to make a difference, but with little to no political experience. And those positions are time consuming and hard. Philanthropy has an opportunity to support the training to develop leadership skills and community members to take those roles. These positions can then communicate more closely with state and federal partners, the needs that exist in each region. We need to look at projects and community for the long term. That doesn’t mean that we abandon immediate needs. Philanthropy has the space to do both. We can crisis managed or responsive grantmaking and do upstream work with strategic initiatives. In Oregon in 2020, the state was hit with terrible wildfires, Roundhouse Foundation was on the ground and helping support communities in their time of crisis. But the lessons that those communities learned from that devastation have helped to prepare communities for the next disaster. Roundhouse worked closely with those partners to bring people together, who’d lived through the fires and could give support to other communities looking to better prepare their region for upcoming fires and crises. Lastly, I’d just love to touch on the word convening, because philanthropy loves to convene the one thing people have less than less of his time. So make sure that those convenings honor the fact that so many people have 10 other jobs they’re doing, encourage takeaways. So folks know what to do next, and that their time is valuable and that their opinion matters. What are the action items that are expected of that meeting? And most importantly, set those expectations ahead of time for participants before, during and after each convening? What are folks looking for? What are they going to take away? And what are they expected to do next? We’ll have links to this episode and Aspen Institute’s Thrive URL framework and all sorts of transcripts and others at FundingRural.com Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai