Getting More Young People Involved in Local Government with Dr. Terry Christensen

This podcast is proudly brought to you by Bearing Advisors helping quality companies navigate the uncharted waters of government sales. Welcome to the Building Amazing Cities and Towns podcast, the podcast for mayors, council members, managers, staff, and anyone who is interested in building an amazing city. Your host is Jim Hunt, a past president of the National League of Cities and the author of the Amazing City, seven steps to creating an amazing city. Welcome to the Amazing Cities and Towns podcast and this is Jim Hunt, your host and I'm happy to welcome Dr. Terry Christensen from San Jose State University and Terry, welcome to the podcast. Thank you Jim, happy to join you. And you know, Terry, you know, your background and I think as impressive as it is, a lot of times I think local government people are interested in how you devoted. In your case, your life has been devoted to government and a particular amount on local government. Give us a little flavor of that, what drew you in and what's been kind of some of the signpost along the way? Well, excuse me, I did my PhD at Chapel Hill North Carolina, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and got involved in local government some there when the city was electing its first black mayor, so I did some volunteer work there. But actually, I think what most got me going and has kept me going is my PhD thesis, my dissertation was on the participation of poor people in the war on poverty. And that took me to 11 different communities across North Carolina and a lot of people don't know it, but North Carolina, you know it, is an extremely varied state. There are very urban places, very rural places, Appalachia, coastal plains and so on. So it's varied and I was going to these 11 different communities to see how they were engaging their low income people in the war on poverty. That was a key factor in the war on poverty. If there had poverty, there had to be participation of the poor in actual decision making. Some places it worked, some places it didn't. The state like North Carolina, you can have some pretty rigid local power structures that don't necessarily want to let new people into participate. But that kind of got me started, and then I guess the second thing was I came to California to San Jose State University. It is a state university, one of the 24 in California, 30,000 students, very diverse in age, in age and ethnicity and in every way. And I start teaching these classes. I'm 26 years old, half my students were older than I was because of the nature of San Jose State. A lot of people come back to school. I'm lecturing on suburbia and there's a woman in my class who lived in the original leviton in Pennsylvania. She knew more than me. I'm lecturing on police community relations. And there's a cop in my class finishing his degree. He knew more than me. I'm lecturing on land use planning and there's a planner finishing her degree. And there were just activists, labor union people and so on. And my students sort of dragged me out into the community. You got to come and see this. You got to go to this. You got to do that. There's a demonstration here. You got to go check it out. And they weren't necessarily proselytizing, but they were pushing me to get beyond an academic view of local politics to a practical view. So I started engaging. In neighborhood politics, police community relations, local campaigns running, I was a running priest of the precinct, canvassing operations for the candidate for mayor that really changed the nature of city politics ultimately. So my students sort of dragged me into the community and kept me in the community. And the way I taught local politics was with a heavy focus on experiential learning. So you got to go to some city council meetings and tell me what you saw. And yeah, I know they're boring and I know you don't want to go, but you got to go and see. And my students did voter registration. How hard that can be. How do you get somebody to actually sign up that is just passing by a grocery store and other kinds of projects like that. So also I developed our internship program for the political science department in San Jose State. And over time, placed about 1800 students with local elected officials, the mayor's office, city council's, city managers office, maybe a nonprofit organization, maybe a campaign. So I found I learned best from actual practical experience. And that really worked for the kind of students, particularly that we had at San Jose State who tend to be first generation college, not big on abstract theory, nor am I, but really wanted to learn from doing and seeing. Sorry, long answer, but that's, give you a pretty good piece of my background. And you know, it's unique to me is that when, you know, one of the things that I've always wondered is why more of that doesn't happen. As you travel around and you visit communities, you recognize, it is probably one of those laboratories that really is not that hard to enter. And there's a willingness to learn. And I think in most cases, local governments around the country, a very diverse group of people. But the one kind of institution that they revere is colleges and universities. And I just, you know, I look at it, it's like, why don't more people do it that way? What's your thoughts on that? Well, I blame it on, on graduate programs at a lot of universities that really emphasize the abstract and quantitative analysis. That's, you know, that's the science part of political science. And yeah, that's really important. But to do the science, I think you need to understand the mechanism from more practical experience. And then, and then take it from there. But I don't think a lot of graduate programs, including mine at North Carolina, put a, put a heavy emphasis on emphasis on, on practical learning. You know, I did it partly because it's the way I learned and partly because it worked. It worked. That's what you want, that's what you want students to do. And Jim, I love that you said, it's easy to enter when you talked about local politics. Because that's the other thing the students find out. You do an internship. And then somebody says, come back and volunteer on my campaign. And oh, wait, I'll pay you. So I have tons of students who are serving in elected office now or working in nonprofit groups locally because they, they, they connected early on, on, on through the class. I'm so proud of that and excited by what they're doing. Yeah. And I, when I was involved and we'll talk about the campus city collaboration that you know, developed. But I, I had a young man that came to my office one day and he was fascinated that I'd had this kind of rich background in local government and mayor and council and then went on and did some stuff on the state national basis. So he was asking for advice because he said, I'm really interested in this. And I said to him, the best advice I can give you is to go to he said, it's a meeting. Yeah. And I said, when you go, under public comment, get up and introduce yourself because you're thinking you want to be involved. So I said, just get up and introduce yourself, say that you're a college student. He was actually in the master's public administration program. What's your doing and just say that you just came to observe. And then the other secret is stay the entire meeting. And in shake hands with the mayor and the council members. So he came back to my office about a month later. And he said, Jim, I went there three times. And every time I got up and just said to introduce myself. And he said, now I'm on the planning commission. I love that. Yeah. As strange as it seems, it does work that way of that, you know, kind of getting in. So let's talk a little bit about the, you know, you call it the, go ahead and tell us what you call it because it's we we call it community diversity. And it does confuse people. We call it spell it capital C O M M. That's the community part capital UNIVER. That's the university part capital C I T Y. That's the city part community. And it is a partnership between the community being neighborhoods adjacent to the university within about a mile or two radius. So nearby. And the university itself and the university pieces to provide faculty with classes doing service learning. So students doing service learning projects may be related to education or health or land use planning, especially my students, my students did voter registration, helped organize candidate forums for the further community. And the city as well as a participant. So you're you're partnering with the city staff that's doing planning for the neighborhoods that you're in with the police officers or the fire department or the librarians that are working in those neighborhoods. So it's a three way partnership and it really launched that way. have to say the city of San Jose was really important in setting it up, in setting up the circumstances where it could work, because around the year 2000, it's a long time ago, but around the year 2000, the city set up some, what they called the Strong Neighborhoods initiative, which was they selected 19 underserved neighborhoods around the city, and went into those cities with their staff unified. You know how cities get into silos, Jim, planning's over here and police is over here and they don't talk to each other. The city manager's idea was they need to talk to each other about what they're doing in these specific communities. And they put some money behind this, they had some redevelopment funds then, that agency's gone, but they had some money. So they could say, "When are to these neighborhoods?" and said, "Organize yourselves, form a neighborhood coalition, get a bunch of people involved, select your priorities. What are the top 10 things you want to see happen? And we'll help you make it happen. We'll provide some funding for it." Some of the things were very specific things that the city could do like improve street lighting, improve sidewalks, develop or refurbish a park, kinds of physical things that cities do. Some of the things were not things cities aren't very good at, like building a college going culture. How do you do that? Cities don't work in the schools typically, less not here in California. Or improving health and improving healthcare and vaccination rates and so on. And the cities don't do healthcare in California. That's a county function we had to get the county involved. So there were things that the cities really couldn't quite do, and there were things that the city could do. And at this point, some people at the university, not me, I was the founding executive director, but they recruited me after they came up with the concept. And the concept was really around a deeper engagement between the university and communities and a long-term engagement. One way they put it was that a typical service learning project is like a one-night stand. So by bringing my students in, we do voter registration in your neighborhood. And then we go away and you don't see us again. Somebody else comes in and does, I don't know, some healthcare education. And they do it and then they go away and you don't see them again. And what the dean of our College of Education and the chair of our urban planning department wanted was not a series of one-night stands, but a marriage, a long-term commitment from the university, across departments, to a specific neighborhood so that we could build a long-term relationship, willing to help build community, not only in that neighborhood, but within our students and faculty with the neighborhood. So the idea was we choose some areas of neighborhoods very near the campus. We commit to being there for a long time and we're in these neighborhoods now, it's 16 years. So it is a long time and you really build relationships with the community folks and council members, the elected officials, the city administrators, the cops, librarians, kind of across the board by that long-term commitment. So that's worked out. So the community is formed and then we come in and we look at the top 10 priorities that the neighborhoods have set, the neighborhood action coalitions have set with the city in the strong neighborhoods initiative and there are some things there we can really do like building a college going culture. The neighborhoods around campus are 50% immigrants, majority of families don't speak English at home. They haven't been to college, they don't know what that's about, they don't know how to talk to their kids about it. So the university could come in and go into the elementary schools and work with the kids and work with the parents especially to help them understand this is what it takes. You can go to community college here in in California for almost no money. You can go to the state university at San Jose State next door, you don't have to pay room and board because you can live at home and tuition is relatively cheap and here's how you get scholarship money. So our education faculty and students started going into the elementary and middle schools and high schools to educate parents and kids and this is educating our students too right they have to explain how it all works. The folks from the college of education want to be teachers so now they're out working with with the kids. Same with the health health sciences department working on health in the in the schools and in the community centers and then my students did some other very specific projects I'll get into if you're ready. I'm well what would you let you interject here. Well I was going to say yeah the you know the one thing too I knew that you you put a lot of students out on the streets in in various ways so explaining that just and what I think the beauty of this and I hope it's transformative around the country is that you know this is a resource that's clearly underused. Yes. And the biggest benefit and we're like I think we're talking to the choir with each other. Yeah but you recognize the big benefit comes to those students whose work careers for the next 40 50 years will be impacted by what they did. So tell us a little bit about that community engagement. Not only their work careers but their their their social lives their lives off work they're more likely to be engaged in what's happening in their own neighborhoods. Yeah one of the things that we made as a condition for community university early on was yeah the residents set the priorities they choose the projects this is what we want to see done but they don't just hand them off and let the university students and city do them they have to be involved themselves. So over time between resident participants and student participants in these 15 years we've done 460,000 hours of service that's worth millions of dollars. If you were actually paying people for this work we've had a hundred thousand resident shifts I say shifts because it wasn't a hundred thousand different residents participating but somebody came to 10 meetings right and you know that's hard hard to hard to get people to do become to that many meetings. So residents had to participant students had to participate. The residents are getting something done for their neighborhood the students are learning how to do things for neighborhoods. Things related to their subjects of study like political science, voter registration, candidate forums. We did surveys public opinion polls of the neighborhood to ascertain what what people wanted to see happen but also why they did or didn't engage. Why don't you come to public meetings? What keeps you from coming to a public meeting and that helped us figure out how to get people to come to public meetings. So the students are learning in their subject area but it's also serving the community and it's teaching them to engage with community. The residents are serving their own community but they're engaging with students. They become teachers too of the students. So it can be a wonderful relationship when it works. They're always challenges right but when it works it's pretty great and I think it involves it creates a longer term involvement in commitment amongst the residents but also among the students. Yeah and the friction in most the university college communities are those neighborhoods at joining campus. Yeah and in the transitional neighborhoods where the landlords have come in and purchased properties you still have some long-term residents and you know that little area can it can be a source of a just terrible public relations and terrible image for the university or it can also be that refreshing part of an elderly lady who's serving tea to the volunteers that are coming out and things like that that you know we miss so much without engaging that that I you know I hope that more people listen to this type of discussion. Our volunteers, our student volunteers, well they weren't really volunteers because they were required to do this for their class but they're they're painting that lady's house and she's making them tea and cookies. Yeah and the university loved this because the what you're talking about the town-down relationship can be very tense but the residents love the students they might not like the university it's a big institution in their midst but they like the students and that really changed the whole image of the university. I want to talk about two specific very specific projects that I was engaged with if it's okay with you yeah good good. Okay so two of the top priorities that the neighborhood we worked most with identified were that we have a rapid transit system here in in the Bay Area called Barc Bay Area Rapid Transit it's heavy rail and it's been up in the north bay and east bay for a long time but it's for a long time it's been planning to come to the south bay to San Jose and there's a station planned to be in the neighborhood where we were working and the residents there said okay the station is coming they're going to do something there right now the plan is just a big surface parking lot that's not what we want. But if we want to see things happen in that area that are good for our neighborhood, we need to plan and community. Can you help us do that planning. Another piece of this was there's an old railroad line that runs through the neighborhood that runs up to and passed where the transit stations going to be. And some residents said that should be a trail. Let's convert it. It's a rails to trails project. Well, you haven't back eased a lot. I know. Yeah. And a rails to trails project that'll connect our neighborhood to the bar station and beyond. And the neighbor didn't have the capacity to do these. The city wasn't that interesting, but the university could do something. So we brought in the urban planning department. And over the course of three or four years, over 60 urban planning graduate students worked with the residents in a dozen workshops and more workshops at the high school workshops in Portuguese. Little Portugal is one of the neighborhoods we're working with workshops in Spanish and Vietnamese. Work shops in even in elementary schools, pretty basic, but still. And the residents came up with a plan. And the urban planners package did it a beautiful 230 page glossy booklet with photos and maps. And it's very sophisticated. It's shot a lot of people because you know about nimby's not in my backyard. But these residents turned out to be yinbys. Yes, in my backyard. They planned for a high density mixed use transit oriented development with a plaza that was an idea of the high school kids. We want a neighborhood gathering place with a plaza around the bar station, the transit station. And took it to the city and the city actually adopted it as the plan for for that area. That's that's the big that's the really big win. It took some persuading that we had allies on the city council. And in the planning department, the planners were a little more reluctant to have somebody else do the plan. So they had to be they force some adaptations. And then the same thing for the trail. The trail was part of that plan. The rails trails project was part of that plan. So that was became part of the cities overall general plan that there would be a trail there in the county also adopted it. Once they got adopted, the university kind of dropped out because now you've done it. Here's the plan. Community is not an advocacy organization. It's a facilitating right. But I wasn't part of community by then I'd retired from the university. And so I helped the active residents form advocacy groups for the trail and for the and for the transcendent area development, transcendor in our development. And those groups since 2014 or so, I've been very active at trying to push the trail. They the trail advocates do clean up twice a year that brings people in keeps people engaged. Joe's the community is ready to stewardship of this project. And they've persuaded the city and the county to adopt the trail and say, yes, this is a future trail. And most recently, the city gained an easement for that whole rail stretch of railroad tracks. So the city now has control. And it can happen because of community advocacy. And similarly with the development around the transit station, we formed a watchdog group. And they are watch dogs. They'll grow. When a project comes in that isn't consistent with the plan. They don't win every battle. But they're there to advocate for the community plan. So this is what we call a legacy project with community, community, diversity doesn't really engage in any more, but there are the people that community helped organize. And one more legacy. There are three members of our city council. Who did student learning service learning through community in these neighborhoods, doing clean ups on the trail, helping with the workshops for the urban planning. So we have some pretty good allies on the city council for the project and their people, their planners, who were some of these urban planners who developed the plan, who work for the city now. There's a great education for the students. It's been a great outcome for the residents. It's I'm so proud that so many residents have stayed engaged for so long. Because this is something I may not see in my lifetime. A lot of them won't see in their lifetime, but they've really had a vision for the future. And you know, I was on what you know, it was like watching a movie that I kind of knew the ending is was you talked about that. I thought, you know, when you're producing urban land folks and engineers and all sorts of people that have an opportunity to have hands on. They end up working at the engineering firm that's going to be doing city council and all. And I'm just, you know, it's one of those things. And I think you kind of just said there, the long term nature of this is that you have to have a belief that the folks coming behind you are just as good as we are. Absolutely. You know, that you you give you pass that off and you don't just you become the old, you know, the folks that are always don't think we didn't do it that way in our time. But I appreciate you sharing that because it is. I and you think in terms of projects and like you mentioned the NIMB. So how many times across the country do we see the people that get on one side for something and on the other side against it. And these projects last, you know, takes forever just to get off the first base. And what you described as a grassroots process that naturally the planners are not going to say this is absolutely perfect because then we'll realize we may not need planner. But they do play a big role. But to have the community coming forward is something that every planning association I've ever been involved with. They pay people to to get that accomplished. And in some cases they try and select, you know, the people that are only four or against. And what your process was is that folks just let's work on this together and give and take. And I think that says so much about that process. Yeah, it was a very positive process and people felt good about participating and felt listen to so it wasn't the planners or anybody else developer. Having been saying this is what we're going to build. What do you think it was what do you what do you think should be built. What do you want this to look like and be like. And fortunately it turns out that that pretty progressive vision for what should happen. Yeah. And Terry from a standpoint of someone who got their PhD back in the early 70s. And and you have stayed active. You're not the guy in the ivory tower. You're the guy. You know, when you look over your accomplishments, your writings and all. You've done it through doing as you've described today. So what's your outlook in terms of assessment of the condition of local government across the country. Well, I'm optimistic because I love local government and local politics and what it can do and be for people. But I'm also a little worried for a variety of reasons. And in no particular order. The demise of local news media is really a serious hindrance to what we've been talking about. We have a we still have a daily newspaper in San Jose. A lot of places don't anymore, but their coverage of local politics is superficial at best. It's their way understaff. We're a city of a million people. They have one beat reporter that covers all of local politics. Plus there are 14 other cities around here. So the suburban cities. So they don't cover all the issues, especially the more specific neighborhood issues that are going to really engage people. So that worries me a lot. Overall engagement of of community, I think is becoming more of a challenge post COVID. Because everybody kind of took a break from participating. You know that student you talked about that went to the meeting three times. People weren't going to meetings. Right. Elected officials weren't going to meetings. They were doing it by zoom. And zoom is a very I love talking to you by zoom that we're one on one. Zoom when you have 30 or 40 people. It's very impersonal. It's very passive. It doesn't engage people like A public meeting does. And I think I find we have found it's been hard to get people to reengage post COVID post zoom. The neighborhood groups that we're talking about, but also, you know, in city politics more, more generally. So there's been a slow, slow revival to get people to come to come back. So I worry about that. I guess that the other things are NIMBYism, which is a powerful force here and in lots of other places. We're trying to deal with a horrible homeless crisis here in San Jose and in California. And finding places where you can build low income housing affordable housing supportive supportive housing is very hard because neighborhoods are I think paranoid about it, but they're legitimate concerns that they share and sometimes get blown up and it makes it really hard to solve some of these problems. So, nimbyism is a challenge. I guess what I feel optimistic, oh, there's one more challenge. States are taking more and more control. One of the things that's happening in California is because of nimbyism and local resistance to building more housing of any sort, except high end. The state stepping in and changing zoning laws. So, local government have less control and is less able to say no to projects. And yeah, that's good for housing, but it's not so good for local control and for engagement of communities. On the brighter side, I look at the young people and if you can get them to connect, if you can get them engaged, it's powerful. They're particularly interested in climate change. They're much more likely to be Yimby. So, we do have a Yimby movement in the Bay Area nationally and that's young people who they wanna have housing and fair enough they should have housing. But so young people, that's the hopeful piece of local government, local politics. Otherwise, there's some things to worry about. Do you agree? What do you think? - Well, I was gonna say, I come from, I struggle throughout my life of, when there's a group of people on one side of the street screaming, I was trying to look and see what's happening here. And as you said, the traditional, when I graduated from college back about the same time you were getting your PhD and my wish was a career, a job to have a home one day and be on a street and have a, just to have some of the paper boy who I used to be one, throw the paper on the porch and you'd read it. And the more I'm around young people and my own kids and grandkids and then other people that I'm engaged with is that their hopes and dreams are not what ours were back in 1972. And the housing crisis, and it clearly is a crisis, I think all over the country, that some of the strategies to address it, we don't pay enough attention to the actual people that are going to be living in those places we build. And as you say, the states are pulling at local government because it takes away our creativity and our uniqueness. And I always say is that as a laboratory, not every experiment is positive. But you don't invent the new cure for things without having failure and cities are the best place to have failures rather than a state or a country doing some flawed program. - Yeah, so true. - Do it all around. And if building the tiny home movement, I'm not a, I mean, I said, I'm a creature of where I came. I'm not a big fan of it, but in my town, it was garage apartments that really housed the World War II boom, and then they graduated into other housing. And now, so I'm like you, the future, which we probably, we'll see some of it, we won't see all of it. But I'm somewhat optimistic that we can, that as local government, I think we're, the capabilities are there and I would say for people and you've experienced as a college professor and I've had experiences where I've been in with young people. And if you're not optimistic about the future, it probably says you've spent more time at the country club with your colleagues than you have with young people. 'Cause they're arguing on social media. - Right, yeah. - So, and maybe just to close and give us kind of a perspective, we talked a little bit just off camera here about kind of the technology movement that's happened, then it does include the demise of local papers. So is there a technology solution for some of the ills that are caused by losing local papers, local reporters? Does this kind of social media investigators, does that have a role or will it replace that local? - Well, there's the potential. I think funding is a challenge. So we do have a local online news source called Spotlight San Jose, which is about three years old, funded by donors like me and grants. And they do maybe three or four articles daily and they're posted online. And so they're filling a big piece of the gap left by the larger traditional newspaper. So there's potential there with their big funding challenges to getting those kinds of institutions, nonprofits, and otherwise going. I don't think there are any successful for-profit online local news sources, but maybe there are in some places. So it's a challenge. Social media has been a boon because we can communicate with each other so quickly. But you know, it's not as effective as an in-person contact. So for each of the organizations I talked about before the ad because they group, we have about 300 people on our email list. So we can do an email blast and that's really good. Come to a meeting, but I think it was much more effective when we used to have to call people up and say, hi, it's Terry. There's a really important meeting coming up, Jim. You've got to be there. And maybe I get three or four people there. And that's probably more effective than that email blast. So, you know, the current social media, there are positive aspects about it, but nothing's the same as the traditional personal contact. And that's also what people keep coming back for at meetings. When you see people, you know, you know, they're hugging, they're hands shaking, there's talking about after the meeting. Do you hear what Jim said? There's convincing before the meeting, things like that. The social contacts, I think, are so important in-person social contacts. And we're losing those. And that makes it harder to engage people and keep them coming back. And it's one of those things too, is that what you mentioned, you said it, is that you can be so anonymous online. You can be this. Yeah. You know, a lot of times it's at the Zoom meetings, people takes their video off. So, you don't experience like, oh, that's Terry. I saw him down at the volunteer thing at the building and all. And so it's harder connecting that way. And then the other part is, is that government, and I think you'd probably agree with me, you know, government, a lot of times there's people that feel like the biggest challenge is having to deal with the damn public. (laughs) Yeah. Yeah. And when that's, when somebody is standing in front of you, and I used to tell people, you come to a meeting and you complain about something. And if you think that that's not valuable, even though you lose your position, they don't follow your advice. Yeah. I can remember hundreds of people, their faces out in the audience during my 27 years as an elective official. And not a one of them, when they were given hell to the city, I took it, I thought I'd never want to disappoint this person again. And sometimes it was, you know, very sympathetic, others was anger, but I always, as my decision-making process, I always thought, how does that affect Mr. Smith over on Fourth Street, go upset with the garbage collection or whatever? And it's important and you don't get that with just the random comments or the things on social media. So, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. Well, Terry, our clock, I mean, as you well know, a lifetime of service is hard to condense down into a permanent podcast, but I've really appreciated, I mean, your insights are just invaluable. And for any of our, we'll put the contact information, hopefully you won't be delused by people, but, you know, I think with all of the colleges and universities across the country, to just pick your brain a little bit on the value of engaging that, I think the service would be felt long after we leave this world if people would take up that, you know, programs. I hope some will. But thank you, Dr. Terry Christensen and Santa Op, say, State University and Terry, it's been a pleasure and I hope to see you in person one day. That'd be great, Jim. Thank you very much. And I love your seven steps to an amazing city. Great, thanks, Terry. Okay. This episode of the Amazing Cities and Towns podcast was proudly brought to you by Baring Advisors, helping quality companies navigate the uncharted waters of government sales. This has been the Amazing Cities and Towns podcast, a production of a local government podcast network, your choice for local government podcasting.