Spotlight: David Bowers, Vice-President at Enterprise Community Partners
David Bowers is the Vice-President and Mid-Atlantic Market Leader for Enterprise Community partners— a national nonprofit that addresses America’s affordable housing crisis. David is also a community leader in Baltimore and Washington D.C. as an ordained minister, the founder of the NO MURDERS DC movement, and has supported and led the work of multiple organizations that seek to address racial and economic inequities and support communities.
The sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread Black Lives Matter protests over the past year have brought a critical question to the forefront for Americans: how can we improve livability and health in traditionally underinvested and underserved communities?
In Baltimore and Washington D.C., David Bowers has been leading efforts to redress disparities in health and equity through his work with Enterprise Community Partners and as a minister and community leader. Through his work with Enterprise, a national affordable housing nonprofit, David has spearheaded a host of initiatives to build greener and more robust affordable housing, as well as make beneficial education, transit, and economic opportunities more widely available.
One of these programs he has led is the GreenPath initiative which preserves affordable and green housing near transit nodes. Through the program, Enterprise helps groups finance the acquisition and preservation of currently existing affordable housing, and promotes a high standard of green building to create increasingly healthy, energy-efficient, and sustainable housing stock. The efforts of GreenPath which began in 2000 have continued with Enterprise’s work as a member of the Purple Line Corridor Coalition, a public-private community collaboration in Maryland whose work includes preserving housing affordability along the Purple Line route in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.
David has also led the D.C. Green Communities Initiative which sought to institutionalize sustainable and equitable practices. One of the initiative’s main objectives was changing operating procedures that became standards for local and state governments as well as developers by promoting new training regimens and policies.
These three programs, and a host of other efforts led by Enterprise, David notes has shifted the paradigm in the sphere of affordable and green housing, “the market has so transformed that the building code has been greened in certain places like D.C., and there are green building standards in Baltimore. So for us, that’s a success." David also emphasizes that “there’s still so much work to be done in terms of sustainability, but for us in terms of affordable housing and building, good progress has been made there in terms of our initiatives.”
In recent years, one of Enterprise’s top priorities has been bridging the racial equity gaps between black and white citizens in Baltimore City and D.C. by looking at various indicators in the health, wealth, and housing space. This has included engaging in thorough outreach and research in three identified neighborhoods in Baltimore including Cherry Hill— a neighborhood the Smart Surfaces Coalition is also focusing on in green infrastructure analysis and future sustainable building. “We don’t bring in a kind of top-down approach. We are in the process of establishing what the indicators are that we want to go for and discussing them with local community stakeholders, and determining who the groups are that we should be working with to help have positive impact in the lives of local residents,” David said regarding the program's efforts to move the needle on communities’ rate of housing stability, homeownership, household wealth, and employability over the next five to ten years.
When thinking about equity and building green and affordable housing, David emphasizes that there needs to be a greater focus on equity and economic empowerment, “I think that’s a key thing that needs to be looked at and tying it to an extent to which there are economic mobility opportunities- can you employ folks and are there opportunities for people to create businesses or get jobs where they are part of the green economy.”
When considering sustainable building projects in neighborhoods, David believes that intentional policies must be implemented that benefit residents. For example, David suggests that an equity lens needs to be applied when considering who funds a certain project and who is employed, “to either require or incentivize in such ways that black and brown folks, people of color, can get access to those economic opportunities.” He notes that “the benefits are going to accrue disproportionately to black and brown people because they are disproportionately living in unhealthy places, that is good, but also you want to make sure they have an opportunity to get paid so there is a green economy empowerment that comes with it.”
In fulfilling what David believes to be his core purpose of helping others and improving their livelihood, both through Enterprise and as a minister and community leader, a sense of urgency is often necessary, “someone’s gotta be the voice that says we’ve got to do more, we’ve got to step up and push… that’s what we need in the service space is for someone to say: no more homelessness, no more murders, no more being displaced.”
Considering the mounting challenges posed by the pandemic to ensure greater equity in housing and in communities at large David feels that, “we have the brainpower, we just have to have the will and sustained commitment and connection, coordination and collaboration to keep people on it. It’s not easy, it’s really not, but that’s when you become a real difference maker.”