By Rand H. Fishbein, Ph.D. Rand is President of Fishbein Associates, Inc., a public policy consulting firm specializing in national security issues. He formerly served as a Professional Staff Member of both the U.S. Senate Defense Appropriations and Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittees. Dr. Fishbein served on the Montgomery County Commission on Common Ownership Communities (CCOC) for six years, three of them as Chairman. He is a founding member of the Distressed Communities’ Task Force and a former Vice President of the Maryland Homeowners’ Association (MHA).
Bringing Relief to Distressed Communities
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ew challenges are more vexing for state and county policymakers than the plight of economically distressed communities and their struggle to achieve longterm financial sustainability. It is a problem that touches not only America’s inner cities where poverty, crime and urban blight have been fixtures of the social landscape for generations, but increasingly suburbia, the cradle of the nation’s middle class. No jurisdiction is immune; not even Montgomery County, Maryland, identified by
the U.S. Census Bureau as one of the seven wealthiest counties in the U.S. Here, in the shadow of the nation’s capital, many communities find themselves unable to catch the wave of increasing home values even as wages for both blue and white-collar workers of all stripes continue to rise, and unemployment sinks to historic lows. Enter the Task Force on Distressed Communities (TFDC), the brainchild of a group of Commissioners from the Montgomery County Commission on Common Own-
ership Communities (CCOC). Launched in 2018, the new initiative seeks to reimagine how financially failing neighborhoods might be returned to a path of sustainability through the use of innovative, and welltimed, tools and policies. Key to the effort is understanding the social and economic indicators that can trigger a spiral into bankruptcy. For this the citizen-volunteers directing the Task Force have assembled an interdisciplinary team of experts in property management, public policy, law, finance, community governance, affordable housing, public-private partnerships, civic activism and land use. Providing technical support to this team are representatives from the Montgomery Housing Partnership, the University of Maryland’s National Center for Smart Growth (NCSG) and CountyStat, the performance management and data analytics unit of the Office of the County Executive. The Task Force has set its sights on tackling three primary challenges: 1) developing metrics for identifying at-risk communities before they falter, 2) devising sustainable policy solutions that focus on self-reliance in lieu of taxpayer bailouts and perennial public subsidies, and 3) undertaking public policy reforms that help citizens build home equity, buoying, rather than suppressing, community-wide property values.
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