Bart Harvey: Opportunities for Others

all Street might as well be a million miles away from Baltimore's tough Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood, but it is here that former investment banker Bart Harvey has found his calling. For years, Harvey, an introspective, religious person, had contemplated a life built around service to others, even as he enjoyed a successful career as a high-flying real-estate dealmaker at Dean Witter Reynolds. Then he was introduced to the late James Rouse, the visionary developer who founded the Enterprise Foundation in 1982.

"Jim Rouse imparted to me the gift of his joy and optimism about life," explains Harvey. "He believed in both the free-enterprise system and the use of wealth to provide opportunity for others. When I joined the Enterprise Foundation in 1984, Jim told me, 'Now you're an investment banker for the poor, not the rich.'"

The Enterprise Foundation's mission is to build a national community development movement that provides all low-income people with affordable housing and the opportunity to move into the economic mainstream. Working through a network of more than twelve hundred community-based nonprofit organizations out of its Columbia, Maryland, headquarters, the Foundation and its related organizations have raised and leveraged $3 billion and helped create one hundred thousand homes for low-income Americans. They have also placed some thirty thousand people in jobs. Harvey, who was named the Foundation's co-CEO in 1992 and then chairman and CEO two years later, was instrumental in getting Congress to pass the highly successful low-income housing tax credit program.

The resident-led revitalization effort taking place in Sandtown-Winchester, one of the Foundation's sixteen core projects nationally, epitomizes the dreams and disappointments of urban America. Much of this neighborhood where Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall went to school has been reclaimed from the drugs and despair that not long ago defined it; its ten thousand residents have seen more than one thousand houses rehabilitated. Community facilities and activities are thriving, and residents' levels of health, education, and job preparedness all show improvement.

But urban ills such as crime and rundown areas remain. "This is not an overnight process," says Harvey, "but we are moving closer to our goals. The reality is that this is a far more balanced community than it was. There are extraordinary people here who are working very hard and persevering at problems that would discourage and overwhelm most of the rest of us."