I took another look at the Journal article on the Local Initiative Support Corporation’s decision to bail out of Winston-Salem.
LISC syas its specialty is major rehab projects in urban areas, and Winston-Salem is too just too small for such large projects. But LISC also had trouble attracting the business community. You have to wonder why, based on what local community development groups said about working with LISC:
But some of the people who worked with LISC in its years in Winston-Salem said that the process was frustrating.
The Southside CDC bought several lots in the Happy Hill neighborhood with LISC money. But the LISC money they expected to get to build houses never came, said Cary Cain, the president of the Southside CDC from 1998 to 2003. The CDC ended up selling the lots back to the city.
“You had to do it LISC’s way or no way. It’s very hard. It took all your independence away. LISC was trying to run the organization,” Cain said.
Cain said he asked LISC representatives to stop coming to board meetings because he thought that they were a distraction and ran people around for nothing.
The organization also didn’t provide the money or other kinds of support the CDC needed.
“In order to do this work,” Cain said, “you have to have money, and we never did get enough to get our project off the ground.”
…..Paula McCoy, the current program director of the Winston-Salem LISC office, said that it was hard for the office to get the visibility with the business community that it wanted.
“We don’t do direct service,” she said. “It was a concept that was hard for people to grasp.”
It was also hard to attract the business sector, she said, because most city efforts are focused on downtown and not surrounding neighborhoods.
That’s technically true, but I’m sure business leaders weren’t real anxious to be micro-managed by a semi-bureacratic organization that’s tight with its dollars.
