II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 87there was a surge of conscience among businessmen — some of it sparked by idealism and
concern for humankind, and some of it by pragmatism and self-interest. Nineteen-eighty left a
sense of foreboding about what Miami really was and where it was headed. Even the most
cynical recognized that no one wants to vacation in a war zone.” In the aftermath, officials from
a newly formed Ford Foundation-backed outfit called LISC, for Local Initiatives Support Corp.,
came to Liberty City in search of struggling community development organizations to help.
They found none, but they did discover Otis Pitts, an educated native of Liberty City with a
varied background as a military policeman, railroad cook, and Miami city cop. After his police
partner was killed by his side on a call in Liberty City, he took up youth counseling work and
was running a successful agency in Liberty City when LISC found him. LISC and Pitts set up
something called the Tacolcy Economic Development Corp., to which LISC provided money
for plans and such, plus a small loan and expertise to get additional financing for rebuilding a
looted supermarket on a pivotal corner. LISC acted as a facilitator, but the project was
essentially on Pitts’s shoulders, and it had to make commercial sense. It took off when he
persuaded Winn-Dixie Stores to come in as anchor tenant, after the original tenant refused to
return. “I learned quickly that a deal is finite,” he recalls now. “You can’t put too many risks on
one deal. As soon as something like this gets started, all the aspirations and demands of the
community come together. We were under pressure to hire minority employees, to build with
minority contractors, even to help start a minority grocery chain. Well, if you just keep piling
up the risks like that with unrealistic expectations, the deal will collapse.”
So, says Pitts, he became single-minded. “The major objective,” he says, “was to build a damn
shopping center to provide quality goods and services at competitive prices in a safe and decent
environment” — basically the economic cornerstone of any community. At that, he did bring in
mostly black subcontractors and workers. Today, Pitts’s crisply appointed offices are located in
Edison Plaza, which is just what he describes. Its success has attracted a McDonald’s to an
opposite corner, and Pitts has gone on to other victories. His most recent accomplishment is the
121-unit, eight-story Edison Towers apartment house for low-income tenants, a beautifully
appointed, exquisitely maintained private residence with excellent security smack in the middle
of Liberty City. Financed with LISC help and mostly private funds, Edison Towers is a model
of how community development corporations get the job done. The financing included a
$100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, plus loans from the foundation, LISC, Dade County,
Southeast Bank, and Equitable, as well as a $1.6 million grant from a developer called Swire
Properties. [...] LISC — basically a creation of the Ford Foundation — is far in front of the
curve on business involvement with poverty. With tax credits as a partial inducement, it has
assembled more than $200 million from some 500 corporations and foundations and leveraged
over $1 billion of direct investment in more than 500 community development corporations
across the country. In the South Bronx alone, LISC has invested upwards of $5 million in some
36 development projects. “We make it an attractive proposition for a corporation or foundation
to work through us,” says LISC President Paul S. Grogan. “They may want to attack these
problems, but they don’t have the capacity themselves to evaluate the opportunities, or to make
judgments about these community organizations. They don’t know the landscape. There’s still
sort of a stereotype of unscrupulous neighborhood organizations that don’t do anything but take
the money.” LISC officials admit that many community development corporations aren’t as
successful as Pitts’s or Rivero’s, but all of them counter the “poverty pimp” images from the
1970s. “We’re able to provide the opportunity recognition and the screening, and that’s been
crucial to us,” says Grogan. The lesson we can learn from LISC: “There’s an appetite and an
interest on everybody’s part if you can make something happen in a businesslike way, and that