Extracts from SF Fed Reserve Bank Presentation [see Mesa details]

Re: The Health of Nations
Presentation to the National Interagency Community Reinvestment Conference

Los Angeles, California
By John C. Williams, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

For delivery on February 10, 2016
[sources in talk are noted by footnotes]
Complete transcript >> http://www.frbsf.org/our-district/press/presidents-speeches/williams-speeches/2016/february/health-of-nations-interagency-community-reinvestment-conference/
Before yours truly gets into details about John Williams, let's put the title of his talk into an historical perspective with his play-on-words to the magnum opus published in 1776 by Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith referred to by its shortened title The Wealth of Nations missing the cues about "an Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations". What Adam Smith had to say then is about as revolutionary as what John Williams has to say now, without the moralizing. He presents data for his experiences.
For these reasons and many more that you probably don’t have the patience to hear me recite, we have a broad definition of health that encompasses jobs, education, and safety. Now that I’ve given the requisite economist’s evidence, I want to make something of a departure. I’m going to wander outside my comfort zone of spreadsheets and talk a bit about my experiences and what I’ve seen, traveling across the Fed’s 12^th District.

Re: Reinvestment

. . . we are talking about investing in neighborhoods and communities. I think there’s sometimes a belief that programs aimed at improving economic mobility end up giving money away and undermining self-reliance. The same school of thought sometimes perpetuates the idea that people live in poverty because they simply haven’t worked hard enough, rather than the overwhelming truth: There are communities in which people face multiple hurdles, any one of which most of us would find daunting, and which combined are virtually impossible to overcome
Why community investment matters.
On the one hand, it’s a simple matter of fairness. This country’s compelling origin story is that anyone who works hard and follows the rules can be anything they want. But it can’t happen if we’re starting at different points on the racetrack. If the basis of the American dream is earned success, we need to have a playing field where everyone has a fair chance. No one should be comfortable shrugging off entrenched inequality as simply the way the cards were dealt.
However, some people need to see a detailed cost-benefit analysis, so if I take a purely pragmatic position, I’d point out that investing in creating safe, healthy communities is good for everyone. For one, health care accounts for a large share of the U.S. economy, and treatment of chronic disease is a big part of that.8
Whether the motivation is fairness or practicality, I’ve seen firsthand what can be accomplished, and it’s more than convincing.

Mesa, Arizona.
The initiative here = “creative placemaking,” 
[many posts on this site] 
We saw beautiful new affordable housing: 
- Escobedo @ Verde Vista
- Encore On First
- El Rancho del Arte
when they heard the average rents, my San Francisco staff all threatened to move to Mesa—complete with a courtyard playground so kids have a safe place to run around. [El Rancho del Arte]

We toured Lulubell Toy Bodega—that’s Amy, the owner, and the mayor of Mesa.
Here’s some of the unique art on offer. This was great for me, because my son’s in art school and it’s rare that my work gets me cool points. When you walk to the store, you can see that the area is already starting to look more like the small, boutique shopping areas you’d find in San Francisco or Brooklyn or LA.
We ate at República Empanada where Marco, the owner, told us his story.
He’d wanted to start a small, family business and was on his way, having bought the building. Then the recession knocked him for a loop, work dried up so he was struggling to make loan payments, and there was more than one time that it all looked ready to collapse. But he kept at it and called on friends and family. One friend donated construction materials. Others pitched in to refurbish the building. Still more loaned what money they could, and now it’s a thriving business.
This goes back to the idea that a tight-knit community is a healthier one, and that every area of community development and revitalization is intertwined.
These people are entrepreneurs.
They’re bringing jobs to the community and showing others what can be accomplished. They’re bringing personality and culture.
And they’re turning a neglected area into a safe place people want to visit, and want to stay. This is a process, and it doesn’t happen overnight.

I was talking to the mayor about the issues I see throughout my District in places that have undergone similar renaissances. I asked if they were seeing any downside effects, and he told me that they’re dreaming of the day that gentrification is their biggest problem.
In the meantime, they’re watching what’s happening around the country and looking at ways to protect current residents as the area continues to evolve.

". . . more than six years ago, the San Francisco Fed and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation formed a partnership that has become a model of community development finance, aimed at directing money to support projects that improve the social determinants of health.1
But much more importantly, physical and economic health are inextricably linked. Prosperity is like a Jenga tower: Take one piece out and the whole thing can fall. And since well-being is the sum of a host of intertwined factors, finding a path to economic mobility and success means addressing them all. I should pause here to deliver the standard disclaimer that the views you hear today are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of anyone else in the Federal Reserve System.
Research shows that an increase in family income improves infant health.2 Which is good, because research also shows there’s a strong relationship between conditions in early life and health, educational attainment, and labor market outcomes in adulthood.3 In fact, one study found that simply moving children from disadvantaged backgrounds to full-time, high-quality childcare in their early years significantly reduced risk factors for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases later on.4
We find evidence that when income increases, so do math and reading test scores, with children from disadvantaged families making particular gains.5
There also appears to be a direct correlation between the quality of a child’s neighborhood and income later in life.6
Recent findings suggest that children who’ve moved out of public housing and into lower-poverty areas in their younger years have an increase in total lifetime earnings of around $300,000. This doesn’t just benefit that one child; moving disadvantaged families with young children into higher-income communities may help that family’s subsequent generations avoid poverty and prosper as well.7