The challenge

Although Detroit is known as Motown, or Motor City, three in 10 of its residents are too impoverished to own a car. Public transportation is severely limited: the city bus system is near total collapse. In the 1970’s, a public transportation plan included an elevated monorail as the hub of a light-rail mass-transit system; that plan was killed by severe recession and political infighting in the 1970’s. Only traces remain of a three-mile loop between the Renaissance Center office towers and mostly abandoned buildings downtown. Detroit and surrounding southwest Michigan comprise the nation’s largest highly populated region without rapid transit.

Partly as the result of an inadequate urban and regional transportation system, Detroit is losing jobs, while employment opportunities are growing in the expanding suburbs. Economic and racial segregation have increased. According to the 2000 census, the Detroit metropolitan area is the most racially segregated region in the country: the city is 80 percent African-American, while the suburbs are 85 percent white. Approximately 25 percent of people in the region live within the city limits, but they own only 6 percent of the property value. The creation of a unifying regional transportation system will require a strong, multiracial, urban-suburban coalition. But according to conventional wisdom such an effort is unlikely to succeed, because race and racism have long confounded the urban-suburban debate.


Seeds of commitment

Victoria Kovari, Metro Equity Project Director of MOSES, grew up in a white working-class neighborhood on the fringes of Detroit. Her family spoke its native Romanian at home. “Unfortunately my family felt that we were not as smart, nor as holy, nor as American as we thought our neighbors were,” she says. “But my experience attending a Catholic school also bred in me a responsibility to the poor and the conviction that, in spite of whatever humiliations one suffers, we are all called to do great things with our life, to build the Kingdom of God. This conviction has been my saving grace all these years, and it continues to fuel the fire of my discontent with the way things are.” The first person in her family to go to college, Kovari became a social worker and community organizer. Her community development work evolved from traditional housing and neighborhood revitalization work to tougher problems of regional equity, urban sprawl and concentrated poverty.


Accomplishments

Kovari’s early achievements include: collecting 12,000 signatures to put a fair rent proposal on the Detroit ballot; leading Jeremiah Community Development Corporation to initiate and complete Newberry Homes, a $12,000,000 development of 60 low income single family units in SW Detroit, and founding and directing the Southwest Alliance for Neighborhoods (SWAN). At SWAN, she raised more than $1,500,000, completed more than $1,000,000 in development projects in five years, rehabilitated a dozen vacant homes for sale to low-income families, dispersed $300,000 in home repair grants to low-income families; created the first bilingual home-ownership training program in Detroit, breaking ground in one neighborhood on the first housing construction in 50 years.

In 2000, she resigned as Director of SWAN to devote herself full-time to addressing “metro inequities,” as she describes the largest challenges facing the Detroit region. She led the re shaping of MOSES — a successful congregation-centered community organization with 70 member churches in the metropolitan Detroit area —into an urban/suburban coalition with statewide alliances and partners. MOSES recognized that the problems of its neighborhoods were rooted in state policies that subsidized suburban sprawl and left much of the older urbanized area with growing pockets of concentrated poverty. Resisting the temptation to organize only within Detroit to fight urban blight, Kovari and other MOSES leaders began meeting regularly with experts and suburban leaders to create a coalition of city and suburban institutions.

Under Kovari’s leadership, MOSES won a seat on the local Transportation Advisory Committee, which oversees more than a billion federal transportation dollars coming into the region every year. She brought together bishops, rabbis, unions, major auto manufacturers, other corporations, environmentalists, mayors, legislators and community members from across the state for the first time to meet with State Legislators on the issue. MOSES is at the forefront of creating a successful vision for regional mass transit. In 2001, MOSES organized a meeting of 1,000 residents from the city and suburbs, joined forces with other groups, and successfully fought for passage of a bill to create the first-ever Detroit metro area regional transit authority. As these efforts promise expanded job opportunities for impoverished families, they also defeat the conventional wisdom about urban-suburban political gridlock.


Leadership style

Kovari maintains hundreds of relationships with a broad range of diverse people bringing them together to tackle tough issues and take concrete action. With contagious passion she has been willing to take risks and to push herself and MOSES beyond conventional boundaries. Her religious faith informs her leadership style, but she crosses boundaries easily. “Although we want to win on our issues, It’s more important to build a powerful organization than to run a good campaign,” says Kovari. “Successful campaigns or programs should build the organization so that unsuccessful campaigns cannot destroy it.”


The future

Thanks to the efforts of Kovari and MOSES, Detroit may once again be known for its achievements in transportation. Better regional public transit will benefit people across geographical boundaries, improving access to jobs, health care and education. “I saw the issue of public transit as one way to begin to build regional momentum to attack urban sprawl and concentrated poverty and find regional solutions to regional problems,” says Kovari. “I also see transportation as a unifying issue, one that has the potential to bring city and suburban congregations together by benefiting both.”


More about Victoria Kovari

“Victoria is fun and calm and seasoned and reasoned. But she has chutzpah and is ready to take on a giant. I’ve seen her face down a politician and I feared for him.”
— Rev. Steve Jones, Past Chair, MOSES