After Hours with Jamie Rubin: Nonprofits and People in Poverty — It's Complicated

In this episode of Vital City's podcast "After Hours with Jamie Rubin," American urban revitalization strategist Majora Carter critically examines the "nonprofit industrial complex", arguing that many social service organizations perpetuate systemic problems rather than solving them. She highlights how current nonprofit models often trap communities in poverty, using ineffective top-down approaches that prioritize maintaining the organization over creating meaningful change. Drawing from personal experience and broader research, she challenges listeners to reconsider how philanthropic efforts address social issues, advocating for more peer-based, community-driven interventions that genuinely empower marginalized populations.

You can listen to this episode, "Nonprofits and People in Poverty: It’s Complicated," on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

TRANSCRIPT:

Jamie: You are listening to After Hours with Jamie Rubin, a Vital City Podcast. I'm Jamie Rubin.

Molly: So here's my question for you today. Have you ever served on a jury? 

Jamie: Um, no. I have not ever served on a jury. Gretchen, my wife, has served on two juries and she was the foreman on both of them. 

Molly: Well, that's very on brand. 

Jamie: Exactly. 

Molly: I was an alternate on a jury when I was in college, which was a fascinating experience, but I just went through jury duty last week. 

Jamie: Ah, how was it? 

Molly: I feel like jury duty is one of those things — and Gretchen clearly knows this much better than you, but — it's a drag when you are doing it, and yet if I take a step back, I think it's the most amazing thing. 

Jamie: Yeah, it is. Until we get to a regular pattern of jury nullification, maybe the last bastion of our three major institutions of government.

Molly: True. Did you ever watch the show Jury Duty? 

Jamie: No. I heard it was very funny, but I did not watch it. No. 

Molly: Oh my god, Jamie.

Jamie: Honestly, I'm not sure I have the appetite at this point in history for bastardized versions of real life civic institutions. I may have to wait a little while.

Molly: No, no, no, no, no, no. This will restore your faith in humanity. 

Jamie: I mean, I'll give it a shot at some point. Right now I'm kind of sticking with, like, reruns of 30 Rock.

Molly: Who are we talking to today? 

Jamie: Today we are talking to Majora Carter. She grew up in Hunts Point, the Bronx, which is still where she lives, and she has largely made her career as a community activist and now as a for-profit developer. She runs the Majora Carter Group, doing her best to find different ways to revitalize the neighborhood that she grew up in.

Molly: That is very cool. Why did you wanna talk to her? 

Jamie: Majora and I grew up in New York City at really the exact same time, but in very different circumstances, and we've never met until now. It's interesting to talk to somebody who's got the same sort of historical and geographic context.

Majora wrote a really provocative piece for Vital City about what she calls the non-profit industrial complex, and I wanted to find out more about what she meant. So we had a really interesting conversation about that and all kinds of other things. 

Molly: I'm excited to hear more.

Jamie: Majora Carter. First of all, thanks for joining us. 

Majora: Of course. 

Jamie: Excellent. 

Majora: Happy to be here. 

Jamie: You and I grew up in the city in the same era, I think, because I was born 1967. You were born right around then, I'm guessing, right? 

Majora: Yep. ‘66. 

Jamie: Yep. Okay, perfect. So, you know, we grew up in the ‘70s. We grew up in different places, but it was the city. It was a different place [than now].

Majora: Oh yeah. 

Jamie: You grew up where? In Hunts Point? 

Majora: Hunts Point in South Bronx. Yeah. In the South Bronx.

Jamie: What was your experience of it like? Did you feel like it was more dangerous than the rest of the city or was it just like home?

Majora: I didn't feel like it was more dangerous. I knew if you wanted to find danger, you certainly could. I went to [the Bronx High School of] Science and I knew plenty of white folks in my classes and I knew they could also find danger if they wanted it in their neighborhoods as well.

But their neighborhoods weren't on the nightly news. Mine was. So that was the difference. 

Jamie: What was the neighborhood like? What kind of place did you grow up in? 

Majora: I grew up in a private house — a two-family home that my father bought in the 1940s. He was part of the Great Migration — Black folks coming up…

Jamie: Where was he? He came up from where?

Majora: He's from America's Georgia. Southern America’s Georgia, seven miles from the man from Plains. 

Jamie: Wow. 

Majora: Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. The first time I met anybody associated with President Carter, they were like, “you know, where your people are from is only seven miles away from where President Carter is from.” Of course I know. I'm a child from not too far. Believe it or not. 

Jamie: That's incredible. So Hunts Point, your dad, you grew up in a two-family house that your dad bought? With one of the home ownership programs that were started under FDR, probably?

Majora: Well, my dad was Black, so he wouldn't have had that much of a chance to get much of those. Proportionately, very few people got there. 

Jamie: Probably true. Yes, yes.

Majora: My dad was able to get his house because he was a Pullman porter. He was traveling, deadheading on a train out in L.A. His main line was the New York-New Haven line, which is where he wanted to live. He was like, “My dream is to own a home,” like a lot of Americans. And he wanted to live on that line. He won $15,000 in a horse race. In California. 

Jamie: What, in Los Angeles? 

Majora: Yep. And he carried that money back home in a satchel across the country and went to that line. At that point, the Hunts Point rail station, which was right there on that line — they closed them down, but there was talk that it was gonna be reopened.

He went and he found an Italian family. At that time, the neighborhood was still predominantly white. And the Sacco family sold my daddy their home. 

He didn't feel really good about living there, being the only Black person on the block, or bringing his soon-to-be wife, which is my mom, there either. And so he actually rented it back to them for two years.

Jamie: There are so many strange things about that story. Among other things, what I really want to know is how the heck did he win $15,000 in 1940 or whatever? 

Majora: A horse race! With a buddy. And he did a pretty good thing with it. It provided a safe and secure place for me. I was the youngest of their 10 kids and that house really did shelter a lot of folks. He had one of those houses.

Jamie: Where everybody would come, people who needed help or whatever?

Majora: All the time. My dad, his last job was as a janitor at the Spofford Juvenile Detention Facility, which he hated mostly because — this is before all the studies about juvenile justice and how badly we treat kids in this country were out there — he actually knew that there were kids who were put in in jail because of stuff their parents had done.

The social service safety net was not so great. It was like, well, “What are we gonna do? I guess you're gonna go to Spofford.” Fortunately some of the kids did come to stay with us, as opposed to being in jail. There were just weird ways to make that happen. On some level we got to experience that. Which was good. 

Jamie: There are a lot of different tangents we can go on here. I'm going to try to get back to the question of who you are, but I don't think we've even gotten past 1945 yet.

Majora: Well, that's who I am.

Jamie: It's who you are. There's no question. And that's what a lot of your work is about as well. So let me just play back what I heard. You grew up like I did in the seventies and then you went away to college. You went to Wesleyan?

Majora: Wesleyan! I'm actually wearing that t-shirt today. 

Jamie: Hey, nice. And then what? 

Majora: I did grow up during the era that's often referred to as the Burning Bronx. There's all those years of financial disinvestment that happened — not just in the Bronx, but all over the country and urban areas. Whether it was planned shrinkage, or — oh God, what’s that other term? The backhand wave referring it to is like “negro removal.” 

Jamie: Urban renewal?

Majora: Urban renewal. And so I watched part of my neighborhood burn. There wasn't a whole lot of investment coming in, you know, thanks to redlining. Between financial, disinvestment, redlining, not making any loans in those areas… I actually remember watching the light manufacturing that was in the neighborhood and knowing when it went away. One of the most visceral memories that I have of being a kid is actually the smell of baking bread from a commercial bakery down the street from my house, and then all of a sudden it was gone. 

Jamie: Replaced by? 

Majora: Later on, the smells, whether it was the sewage treatment plant, and then there was a sewage sludge pelletizing plant. We had a lot more truck traffic because there were more waste facilities that came to these places that were once light manufacturing places that people from the neighborhood would walk to, and that I'm sure provided jobs and wellbeing for people. 

But poof, that's gone. I remember feeling as a kid that something was going on. Between the fires, watching them burn, and seeing more drug use in the community — my brother was killed as a result of the drug war when I was about seven or so — [I remember] planning my escape from the neighborhood. Being a really bright kid, I was told — I was reading before I was four 'cause I remember reading all my birthday cards when I turned four — I was one of those kids. Even back then, we had plenty of smart kids, but it was, “you're going to grow up and be somebody and you're going to get out of here.”

By the time my brother was killed, I was like, “I am going to go to a great school.” I called it a “name school” at the time. It had to be a name that would make people just go, “Wow, you're from someplace great.” Obviously that was not my neighborhood, and I got myself into the Bronx High School of Science.

No, I didn't get myself in. My teachers at I 74 literally went to my mom and to the moms of other kids in the class and were just like, “These kids are not going to get in unless they get extra tutoring and we’re willing to give them tutoring.” I had a bunch of teachers—Mr. Rexel, Ms. Galvin, Mr. Nolan, Ms. Lugo, there were a few more—who every day after school for what felt like months would meet with us and go through a tutoring program. 

Jamie: And this was you and a cadre of other kids that were in that position? 

Majora: Yeah. And the idea was, “we're going to get you out of the neighborhood.”

I actually did get into the ABC program, you ever hear of that? A Better Chance. But my mom didn't want me to leave. 

Jamie: Wow. So did you go from Wesleyan into community work? Or you went a different roundabout way?

Majora: Totally no. I went to Wesleyan. I started in theater, and then realized I didn't really like being on stage and it was just a little too soul-bearing for me. But I ended up becoming a film major, and so I graduated and then I actually got into NYU film school.

I put it off for a year. I was just going through some other crazy stuff and then I ended up having to not do it and I was just like, “I can't afford it.” I decided to instead go to NYU for creative writing, because my plan was to write the Great American Novel.

Jamie: So whatever it is you were being taught, backed by those teachers, it didn't have a lot to do with practicality, obviously. 

Majora: Not at all. But that was my plan. I was going to write the Great American Novel. And then I was like, no, I’m not. I can't. I was still so broke that I needed to stay with my parents. I could not find a place that I could afford anywhere, so I was at Mommy and Daddy's house. I didn't want to be back in the South Bronx at all. It was such a defeat. 

Jamie: But that was a spur to go get full-time employment, I'm guessing? So where did you do that? 

Majora: I didn't get full-time employment for a while, because I was still in school. But I did — and this was the thing that changed everything — an AmeriCorps program for writers. The Bronx Council of the Arts had this program where they would have writers go out to all these different places, because of course through that we were going to like, “change the trajectory of everybody's life.” 

They'd send us to senior centers and schools and needle exchange programs. It was actually a beautiful, beautiful project. Once a month or so, we would meet with all the rest of the people in the cohort.

There was this dude who I really liked and he was super fun. He was really creative and he kept talking about this place that had all these artists and really creative people there — in the Bronx. Come to find out that it was actually in my neighborhood. And it was on my block. 

Jamie: What was it called? 

Majora: It's called The Point. They were really vibrant at the time. Everybody [was there], like Arthur Avilés, who was this dancer with Bill T. Jones’s modern Dance Company. He's also from the Bronx. There were all these really, truly amazing people.

And I was like, “oh my God, these people are like me — we're creative and cool. We've got all sorts of good things and we're from the Bronx.” It was the first time I really felt like we had something to offer. We always did, but it always felt like people from the Bronx would have to leave in order to find their people.

Jamie: Because whatever it was they felt couldn't be found there. 

Majora: Right. I never for a second thought that there weren't cool people that came from the Bronx, but there was nothing that the Bronx had that could keep us there.

Jamie: This is going to skip ahead a little bit just because you're touching on what you write about and where you work at this point: the Bronx and lots of other places like the Bronx, I think your theory is that they don't nurture the talent in a way that keeps the talent home.

Majora: Yes. I think they would argue that they do nurture the talent — through gifted and talented programs, through creative arts after-school programs, things like that. But it's often done under the guise of, “you're going grow up and get out of here.”

I certainly went through that. 

Jamie: You keep talking about “they.” Who is the “they” that is doing that? 

Majora: I would include the nonprofit industrial complex, definitely educators, the media certainly plays a role in that. Everybody loves the story about people pulling themselves up from their bootstraps, leaving a hardscrabble life and making their way someplace else.

That is part of the American zeitgeist. I wanted to challenge this idea that there are some communities that are just beyond redemption. 

Because what does that mean for the people that are left behind?

Jamie: At the [New York City] Housing Authority, one of the things that we talk about is this idea that public housing was never envisioned to be a place that was permanent housing. It was supposed to be housing for younger people or the working poor or whatever, who were on their way up.

Majora: Right. 

Jamie: Because everybody in America was on the way up. The ladder only went in one direction. What's happened, of course, is that nobody ever leaves NYCHA. Part of the problem is the housing crisis, but there's a waiting list of 250,000 people. Nobody leaves. So what does that say?

I guess it says they feel stuck. I don't think it's by choice. I don't think people brag about living in public housing right now in New York City. 

Majora: No, they don't. 

Jamie: It's not something they feel proud of. I do think that in the ‘30s and ‘40s at least, there was a certain pride in it.

Not pride, necessarily, that I'm living in publicly supported housing, but like, this is it. This makes sense. This is what I've got, and this is going to be my beginning. 

Majora: If our economic situation is not changed, of course people feel stuck. That’s the thing that does trouble me because so much of it does, unfortunately, come down to racial and class lines and folks are not given an opportunity.

The opportunities are unevenly applied. NYCHA and other housing authorities — that's not the cause. I'm grateful that there is a place for people to be. But it's really more about how we systematically and systemically work to create opportunity.

Jamie: The back half of your argument is opportunity, but not opportunity to leave and never come back. 

Majora: Yeah. I mean, you could. It’s so funny, because NYCHA is often considered an island unto itself. 

Jamie: It looks like an island.

Majora: And I'm sure it was designed to be that way. It's never really considered part of the community itself. That in and of itself is an enormous problem that is almost never really addressed. 

Whether I do urban revitalization strategy consulting or development projects myself, it's all about creating more opportunities for mixed communities. Concentrated poverty is something that statistically really does exacerbate all the other issues that we see are so prevalent in very low income communities.

Jamie: Well, and we know this.

Majora: When I think about the nonprofit industrial complex, I wonder: Do we really know it?

Jamie: You've talked now a couple times about the nonprofit industrial complex. This is the article that you wrote for the Vital City issue on nonprofits. Let's talk about what that means, because I've never heard that one before. 

Majora: Really? 

Jamie: I mean, I know what you mean, but I've never heard the term. We talk about the defense industrial complex. So you got a whole different coinage here. 

Majora: Well, I didn't make it up. I'm sure I saw somebody else write it. I was like, “oh yeah, of course it's an industrial complex.”

Jamie: I'll give you credit for it. Take credit for it.

Majora: Don't give me credit for it. Somebody will come after me.

Jamie: Tell me what the thesis of the article is and what you mean by this.

Majora: It's an industrial complex. The whole root of anything being an industrial complex is that it exists to perpetuate itself. It really does make me laugh: I can't tell you how many times I've heard very long-time executive directors or people that are working in the field say things like, “Oh, we're working ourselves out of a job.”

And I'm like, “No, you're not. You're still there.” 

Jamie: You think they mean because they're going to solve the problems?

Majora: Yes, they're going to solve the problems. And of course it's gonna happen. When I really stopped to look and think about it, we were doing the same exact things. How can you do the same exact things and expect different results?

Jamie: Before we get into what the problems are, is it something about the nonprofit form that creates the issue in your view? 

You've never been in government, right? 

Majora: No. It’s not for lack of trying. 

Jamie: Okay. All right. Well, you should try it. It's interesting. It's a good way. 

Majora: They won't let me in. I don't, I can try. 

Jamie: They take all comers. One of the things about government management — I'm not an expert, but I've done enough of it — is that you really can't motivate people particularly well.

All the tools that are available to you in the private sector are not available to you in the public sector. You can't give people raises, really. I mean, we're testing that at the federal government now, but it was supposed to be very hard to fire people. So the nonprofit world, it's not organized labor in the same way, for the most part. But is there an issue with how you motivate people? 

Majora: I think you can motivate people with all sorts of wonderful benefits. If you even just think about how you treat people, that's a wonderful way to make sure people stick around, and it’s sometimes not that hard to do. The work in and of itself can be a reward. And it certainly is. I mean, Lord knows I did it long enough at a terrible disrespect to my body.

But why can't we take some of those tools from the private sector? 

Jamie: It feels like you have in your mind some issue with nonprofits specifically. 

Majora: I'll give an example. I was working on the grassroots level in a disadvantaged community—we're working with a population that was there to be supported through philanthropy. A funny thing happened when it became clear that here we were doing this incredible work, getting noticed all over the world, and I administratively needed help.

One of my funders — I wrote in a line item for administrative assistance, and I was told, “Do you really need that?” And I'm like, “You have an assistant. I'm the one doing the real work.” 

Jamie: How did that go over? 

Majora: Well, I wasn't that obnoxious. But I basically said just that.

It took her a minute, but she had to realize, “Oh, right, it would actually be more productive for you to be doing the great, innovative work that you've been doing if you didn't have to do all the rest of this stuff that somebody else could do.” But the fact that I had to explain it to somebody was just like, y’all are tripping. Like straight up tripping. 

But that is totally normal. I think in the article — because it really just, just came out of nowhere — but it was just like, “Yeah, you know, here we have this great [setup]; I love my job; we've got great benefits. We're doing really well. I feel like I have a good work-life balance.” No grassroots leader says that, because that's not true. It's totally not true. 

The people who fund them can say that. Nobody wants to talk about that kind of stuff. There's an expectation, especially if when you're working at the nonprofit level, that somehow or another you're supposed to do more with less. That's the valiant, wonderful thing that you can do, because you know you're doing God's work or whatever. Who is that serving? Do you honestly expect for people who are literally killing themselves to actually do this work? 

Jamie: So the work should be its own reward in some way, in some weird way.

Majora: And it's just like, it's not theirs. But again, no one else is expected to do that. 

Jamie: Nobody's expected to do that.

Majora: And yet we keep that stupid moralistic thing. It peters down to the folks that are doing the work.

Jamie: The problem that you're highlighting, I think, is the funders. You're nonprofits, so you have to have funders. The funders aren't really interested, for the most part, in supporting what it takes to be innovative. They’re interested in supporting what they always support, which is direct services. And so that’s what you get.

Majora: Yeah. I think people love the underdog story, feeling like they're helping somebody. If you save someone or you get them out of those awful straits that they're in, then you could say you've won. What does that mean for all the folks that are left behind?

Jamie: New York City has outsourced a lot of its social service provisions to the nonprofit sector. It's about the same size in terms of the number of people, I think.

Majora: I was shocked at how big that number was.

Jamie: It’s enormous. It's not going to turn around. We're not going to bring those people back into the government, and we probably shouldn't. So what do you do about that? They are providing essential services to plenty of people. 

Majora: If we play the long game, which means you have to look back and look critically, have we really created the kind of change we wanna see? And are there folks out there doing something different? 

An example: if you look all over the world, peer-based health support, community-related support. Everybody knows this is actually a good way to do this.

Jamie: Explain what that means basically. 

Majora: For example, back during the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the eighties, what researchers all over the world discovered really quickly was that people got better health outcomes if they got the information from their peers.

Very, very little of that is actually done in this country. It's still just the same direct service where you've got this very top-down approach. 

Majora: Even though stats show it's not really working so well.

Jamie: To lecture to you about what you’re supposed to do.

Majora: Lecture. Right. And ads in subways. Like on some level, they even reduce the impact of a family's influence on their child, because you can't listen to your parents — this person is telling you what's really important.

Jamie: Oh, that's so interesting. 

Majora: And you're gonna tell me that doesn't have an impact on the social fabric of a family and thus the community that they're in? Of course it does. But again, when you look at statistically how many funds are actually spent on that type of support, those types of interventions are relatively teeny. Funders keep doing the same thing. You go to neighborhoods like the South Bronx and you see how many legs are cut off, how many limbs are cut off because of diabetes — something's not working. 

The roots of modern philanthropy and the nonprofit world — from the Carnegies and the rest of the families — were just to keep people in line. 

One of my favorite things was the Carnegie steel mills. They would do this thing where the workers in their company town who pounded the most steel, or whatever it is you do to make steel, got to take home a golden trophy that looked like a golden anvil. 

That was all they got, and then maybe a little bit of extra food or something. Ultimately, it's just like you literally poured your body and pounded this thing into submission. Ultimately, who was it helping? It created more profits for the steel mill. Not so much for the people that were doing the work. 

Jamie: That's pretty dark. I'm not suggesting this is where you are actually going, but a lot of the foundations you mentioned — the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation — they're all named after somebody who was rich.

I think it was Balzac who said that behind every great fortune, there's a great crime. That's pretty dark. 

Majora: The Central Indiana Community Foundation did a major study a few years ago to see if their giving was systemically biased, and they discovered that it absolutely was. They were no different from any other major foundation in this world. Not many folks do that. It's just to check to see like, how are we doing?

I've been talking about how flawed I think the nonprofit industrial complex has been and how it ultimately serves to support itself. If it was a business and you got these outcomes, the investors would fire the CEOs.

Jamie: I was very involved with a direct services organization in the criminal justice world for a while. I got there and then shortly after, they started doing some measuring, which was in itself kind of an amazing thing. They had never done it, but they started to measure outcomes, and they were really sobering.

It was mostly outcomes around recidivism, and some around their counseling [of] kids. And the [results] were basically terrible. You can argue all kinds of reasons why that is. It's an impossible job. 

Majora: Or you can look at what actually worked well in some other places, which I can share with you. 

Jamie: I'm not arguing with you, but I'm just saying that you have a lot of discussions at the board level about, “Well, the recidivism numbers are hard to make sense of because there's a lot of parole violations that are unfair.” But they're terrible numbers, and we're throwing a fair amount of money at it. It's a very, very difficult discussion to have in front of people who are doing the work all day long. Are you basically saying you're not doing any good, so why don't we just not do this anymore? 

Majora: No, I'm not saying that. 

Jamie: No, I'm not suggesting you are.

Majora: I'm just saying that it's pervasive. The fish rots from the head, like, from the rebirth of this country. It was never designed — from the planter class, they weren't trying to be kind to anybody. Whether it was the enslaved folks or the white indentured servants, their descendants aren't doing all that great either. 

Jamie: No, they're doing terrible. 

Majora: But somehow or another. I don't get it. I do get it. But yeah. 

Jamie: Let's talk about climate. Was there a particular reason that you focused on climate for a while? 

Majora: I absolutely felt like there is a big connection between how our communities were planned and the environmental burdens that were placed on them because we happen to be poor communities of color.

It seemed to me like a really important way you can help people both in the communities and outside of them. For us, it started as building the kind of projects and communities that, frankly, folks did not expect to see in places like the South Bronx.

When I first started talking about doing project-based development, people could not understand why I was talking about doing things like transforming dumps into parks. People were like, “We have real problems.” And I was like, “I get it. We have plenty, and one of them is that nobody really cares about our community — even the people that are in it.” That was abundantly clear to me. 

If we didn't start creating real reasons for people to see value in our community — to literally see it, not just think about some future for themselves away from where they were, but literally see it — how are we going to get people to think about their environment and feel a value in it?

Jamie: Circling back to some of the stuff we talked about earlier, if you don't have a community that people feel is theirs and is worth living in, the first thing you're going to want to do is get the heck out. I assume this is what your point is, that you need to create a community that people actually want to stay in.

It's not a question that ever occurs to people around where I live and where I've grown up. It's not even a conscious thing we need to beautify, but you just take it for granted.

Majora: Until we actually started to work on those types of things in our community, I didn't even know what that was like. It was like, “No, you go to other places to see that and to feel that.” 

Jamie: So tell me what you're doing now, because you've gotten out of the nonprofit industry. You broke free of the industrial complex. Where are you spending your time now? 

Majora: I’ve expanded the idea of what the environment was and what having an environmentally just community should and could be. All of our market research — surveys and focus groups that we've done — shows that people leave the community not because they're thinking about crime or anything like that, it's mostly just that there is nothing to do in their neighborhoods.

When we started thinking about developing, and literally being a community developer, it was more about what people are leaving the neighborhood to experience. You talk about how being on the Upper East Side, there's an experience when you walk down the street, you know you're gonna find something that will appeal to you. It could be the park, it could be a cool place to have a drink or a bite, whatever. Building some of those things was what we had to do. I started a cafe in the community, which was an offshoot of Birch Coffee, which was all over the city.

We transformed it into the Boogie Down Grind, which was much more South Bronx, the birthplace of hip hop. We leaned into that in terms of decor and music. The thing that we hear often about the space is, “Oh, wow. I feel like I'm in Brooklyn.” 

Oh my God! I guess I succeeded? That was not the goal. But I say that to tell you that nobody expected anything like that to be in our neighborhood.

Jamie: So you're an owner of these places? 

Majora: Yeah. I started them. 

Jamie: Where did you get the financing from, just out of curiosity? You're not building housing yet? 

Majora: Not yet. I'm working on that. But we made plenty of money outside of New York City. I didn't understand the way folks did development, and I used all of my own money. Which, looking back, was just the dumbest thing to do, but there wasn't anybody going, “Hey, that's not how you do that” or, “Maybe we should, you know, invest in places like the South Bronx.” Nobody was gonna do that. 

We acquired a former rail station in Hunts Point, actually the same station that attracted my father to the area.

Jamie: Wow. What are you gonna do with it? 

Majora: Again, using all of our own money, we got it to the point where we could open it up as an event hall. We did all the interior demolition. It's a gorgeous space designed by Cass Gilbert, the same architect as the Woolworth Building. Knock on wood, we’re close to underwriting to actually get the first phase done. Right now, we've only been able to operate it when the weather was nice, because we don't have HVAC. 

Jamie: Do you have a roof? 

Majora: Yeah, we have a roof. 

Jamie: Who'd you buy it from? 

Majora: Amtrak. We acquired it through Amtrak. We’re working with them now on a much larger mixed-use development. We're in pre-development for a much larger mixed-use development — home ownership and mixed-income rental housing, because I'm not trying to concentrate poverty. I will never put my name on something that I feel does that.

Jamie: So not a hundred percent affordable? 

Majora: Absolutely not. Well, we'd like to reclaim the word affordability so that it actually takes into account people at different income ranges because there is no such thing as a completely poverty-stricken community that is actually gonna do well for itself. 

Jamie: The throughline from the place that your father had in mind is crazy. Did you do it with that in mind? 

Majora: Of course you knew the place. I knew the story. I saw the place every single day.

When it became available, I was like, “Look, we are going to have Penn Station access; it's gonna be 15 minutes from this spot into Midtown. This is where we need to start thinking about development.” I don't want to do it the same way that I feel it's been done in these communities, where it's either that you're maintaining poverty or you're gentrifying the place. I think there's something a lot more creative.

Jamie: I think that's great. Let's finish on what I hope is an optimistic note. It's kind of an odd time for people who work to try to do good things, and arguably we don't have the greatest leadership at the moment in the city. 

Majora: Oof. That is also an understatement. 

Jamie: My understatement. But you keep working, and I keep working in my own different ways. I know lots of folks; you do too. Do you do it because you feel like, “well, I've got no choice but to try?” Or do you do it because you feel like, “look, we're gonna get through whatever this is, and I don’t what's on the other side, but might as well try to hit the ground running when we get there?”

Majora: I am only two generations out of that peculiar institution called slavery.

My grandfather and my grandmother were both enslaved. Both my parents came from Jim Crow South and lived through all sorts of things. So is it the best of times right now? Is it the worst of times? No, I don't know. But we’ve lived through a lot more and I've invested a lot in all the things that we're doing right now — not just monetarily, but the mental and spiritual faith that I put into the kind of concepts and ideas that I believe will make the world a better place. So I'm not going to stop. I have work to do until I feel like I'm done. And then I'll just do something else.

Jamie: Majora, it's so nice to talk to you. Thanks for doing this. Thank you. And for everything you do. 

Majora: Thank you. It was really nice. It was fun.

Jamie: Here are a couple of takeaways from my conversation with Majora Carter. Majora talked about the nonprofit industrial complex, and it's an interesting idea. I’d never heard it before, but it definitely rings true to me from a couple of decades of working with nonprofits, chairing boards and working with foundations.

I think we can assume that everybody in that complex means to do good things. But they're very much trapped, and I think they kind of trapped themselves in the old ways of looking at things. It's not really the fault of their organizations, for the most part, because they need the money to survive. I think there’s an argument that it’s the foundations’ fault, fundamentally. They're the ones who can make change because they dictate the terms. And it's really quite unusual — in my experience, at least — to find them constructively engaging with the people that they give money to, and to find them actually meeting the organizations where they live. You know, spending time with them, trying to figure out what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong; giving them the resources to improve; maybe bringing them some new models to consider and try to integrate into the good work that they are doing. I think that's a much better way to be a steward of the work that you're doing, as opposed to simply an all or nothing approach. 

My other takeaway is what Majora thinks about the community she grew up in. She chose to come back, which is great, but that's not a common occurrence in her view. And she sees the negative in that.

She looks around the community where she lives now, and I think she would say that there just isn't that much there to keep people who have the ability to go somewhere else, for whatever reason. The remedy isn't necessarily what we often see — and I see this in NYCHA, for example, all the time — which is the kind of stuff that the nonprofit industrial complex and their funders often want to push into these kinds of areas.

It's not building a new community center, it’s not plowing thousands and millions of dollars into services necessarily — although that's helpful. Maybe they would really like a supermarket. It boggles my mind that we never forced them to build supermarkets, which we are now going to do. Or a store, or something. 

Majora, the way she told it in our discussion, could trace back her decision to return to the neighborhood when she found this incredible arts center right around the corner from where she grew up and had no idea it was there. It's that kind of little gem that makes a neighborhood.

Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin.