Ford Foundation Announces $200-Million Effort to Revive Metropolitan Areas

The Ford Foundation will spend $200-million over the next five years to help the country’s metropolitan areas take a more coordinated, effective approach to promoting economic opportunity, the fund’s president plans to announce today.

The new effort seeks to ensure that cities and suburbs work together in responding to needs such as affordable housing, transportation, and job creation.

“The notion that suburbs can thrive while city centers atrophy has proved damaging to our nation,” Ford’s president, Luis A. Ubiñas, said in a statement. “Metropolitan areas that manage to interweave urban and suburban development, everything from transportation to arts and culture, attract more people and more investment.”

The announcement is the third big grant commitment by a foundation or a corporation in the last week. Wal-Mart and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation recently announced new initiatives, a sign that the economic recovery may be emboldening grant makers.

Ford hopes its new approach will help communities move away from competing for government and private money toward working together on regional initiatives. While the foundation has long supported urban revitalization, it says the new money will help identify successful policy innovations and enable other metropolitan areas to adapt them.

For example, the foundation plans to support public-transportation projects that connect people with jobs, including the M1 light-rail project in Detroit and the construction of 25 “transit villages” along San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Ford grants will help create low-cost housing in New Orleans and San Francisco through approaches such as “shared equity” homeownership. In that approach, families that get a public subsidy to buy a home agree to share the equity they earn with the government, which then makes that money available to another family.

In cities such as Detroit and Flint, Mich., the foundation will support the creation of regional “land bank authorities” that put properties that have been foreclosed to productive use.

Advocacy Efforts

As part of the effort, Ford will bring grantees together with policy makers and try to win more money and attention for problems facing metropolitan areas. The goal is to connect local communities with broader city and regional projects.

“When we look at metro regions and see pockets of serious unemployment but also pockets of employment opportunity, and disjointed transit systems that fail to connect people to the services they need and the jobs they seek, it’s clear that a different approach is needed,” said Pablo J. Farías, vice president of Ford’s Economic Opportunity and Assets program. “We need metropolitan regions to embrace a shared economic destiny.”