John W. Haines
He’s ridden a bike up Everest, paddled down the Niger River, and been hit by a train.
Now he’s creating wealth among working families, one mini-mall at a time.
Who is this Guy?
The brain of the banker. The heart of an explorer.
John Haines grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, a fourth-generation banker, a writer, a wanderer, a prankster. He’s stubborn, funny and if there is a practical joke in the offing, He’s unlikely to pass on the opportunity. He maintains a vast array of friends across the world, whom he teases relentlessly, with whom he corresponds regularly, for whom he cooks often. He loves dogs, watches birds, asks why. About nearly everything. You could attribute his plain spokenness to being raised in Wyoming, but it’s easy to imagine him afflicting the comfortable from, say, Greenwich, Connecticut.
John has no patience for puffery, poseurs, or self promotion, and won’t hide it. He practices affable disdain for orthodox thinking around finance, poverty, economic opportunity, or anything to do with social pedigree. Again, blame Wyoming if you like, and John frequently does. Or you could attribute it to the fact that he’s survived Everest, hippos, crocodiles, being hit by a train, and has been clinically dead at least three times (that he knows of). Maybe that dose of mortality eliminated his patience for the shallow. The thing is, people who knew John Haines before all that happened say that he was always this way.
Climbing Everest (on a bike). Becoming a Banker.
After a couple of years of roaming the world with insufficient funds, and propelling an ancient mountain bike from Lhasa, Tibet to the basecamp 18,000 feet up Everest, John followed in the path of his great grandfather, his grandfather, and his dad, all of whom founded cowboy banks in rural Wyoming. In his early, traditional banking years, he built his finance and lending chops. Every weekday morning Haines shrugged into an off-the-rack gray suit and a white shirt (he was firm on the white shirt), laced up his slightly chunky black shoes, and walked a mile-and-a-half to what was then the First Interstate Bank Tower in downtown Portland, Oregon. His filthy, lime green 1976 BMW 316 sat unloved on worn tires in the parking lot of his brick apartment building. It was a point of pride that he washed it only once in all the years he owned it.
Navigating the Niger River
Then the wanderlust reasserted itself. With three friends, John hiked to the source of the Niger River in Guinea with folding kayaks on their backs. They then navigated 2,600 river miles through five countries, primordial forests, the Sahara Desert, and the massive maze of the Niger Delta to the Atlantic Ocean. Two quit at Timbuktu. Two finished. John finished.
Mourners in Srebrenica, former Yugoslavia still yearn for justice.
Mourners in Srebrenica, former Yugoslavia still yearn for justice.
Supporting family businesses. Supervising elections.
Shortly thereafter, John helped start the municipal micro-lending program in Trenton, New Jersey, one of the poorest and most violent communities in America at that time, stewarding it into a model program for the nation. He administered the environmental cleanup fund in post-Communist Czech Republic, where Soviet era factories were despoiling soil and water in spectacular fashion. He helped to supervise two election cycles in Srebrenica after the genocidal events that afflicted that town in 1992. Srebrenica was half deserted at the time, and surrounded by landmines. The mass graves hadn’t been discovered yet. John slept fitfully on stacks of ballots through that first night until armed election authorities picked them up in the morning.
Environmental banking
Returning to the States, Haines went to work for a bank specializing in environmentally sustainable lending. Here he focused on agriculture and small business. He then joined the vast aid agency, Mercy Corps, directing their domestic refugee-focused economic development programs – again focusing on agriculture and small business.
John’s most audacious commitment
Now on the north side of sixty-years old, John has taken a lifetime of work and hatched the program that today consumes his waking hours. The Community Investment Trust (CIT) is designed to create a model for working people to own assets, create a little economic security, and put their children on a path to whatever passes for the middle class in America today. As of this writing in 2022, the program is small. But if it works, it could create a national model and change hundreds of thousands of lives.
East Portland: Distress and Hope
The intersection of East Burnside and 122nd Avenue hosts a new supportive housing center, plenty of crime, gang activities, and an essential shopping precinct for hundreds of families
If you cross to the east side of the Willamette River, you arrive at some of America’s most loveliest little neighborhoods. Painfully charming bungalows and lush gardens nestle among gentle slopes. Charming commercial streets are studded with pubs, book shops, and organic grocers. The farther reaches of East Portland flatten into a less picturesque sprawl. If tall evergreens did not dot the landscape, you could be in a struggling inner suburb of any number of American cities. A drive-by tour renders these first impressions: uninspiring four lane thoroughfares lined with gas stations, convenience stores, fire stations. The neighborhoods framed by these retail strips project a threadbare, Leave-it-to Beaver sensibility. Tree lined streets with neat, one-story 1950s homes, uniform lawns, basketball hoops, speedboats in driveways.
Rows of Sweet Houses. And Signs of Trouble
But closer examination starts to reveal something else – not just about East Portland, but about the United States: poorly camouflaged suburban distress. Here on Portland’s fringes, it’s off-brand mobile phone stores, pawn shops, Family Dollar stores, peeling paint, lawns jumbled with broken toys. Go to Flint, Michigan and burnt husks of former homes bellow at you. Here in East Portland, distress speaks in a softer voice. The majority of these homes are occupied by renters. And over 90% of the children at the local primary schools qualify for free or reduced cost meals. Gentrification has not migrated this far east, but homeless populations have. By some estimates, over 40% of residents here live below the federal poverty line, and that, because of transience and the houseless population is an undercount.
Thirty years ago these were all-White neighborhoods. Today, at David Douglas High School an astounding 80 languages are spoken. This is an epicenter of change in the United States of America. A diversifying population, an increasingly struggling working class, a shrinking middle class, immigrant families striving to make it, earlier waves of settlers try to maintain a grip on precarious economic security.
Unlike the local economy, the opioid crisis is thriving here. Social and economic distress are both expressed and exploited by gang culture. If you raise kids in this part of East Portland, gangs will come calling and you’ll need a strategy and good luck to keep them safe, or unaffiliated. White supremacist gangs like the Brood and East Side White Pride thrive here. Hispanic and Black gangs like the Nortenos, Surenos, Crips, and Bloods have dozens of offshoots here. Vietnamese and Laotian gangs carve out and defend their smaller territories.
“I didn’t think about it failing.
It was like paddling down the Niger. You just had to start downriver.
And then keep going.
So I did.”
Community Investment Trust: Boring Name, Beautiful Tool
John noodled over the idea for a few years and eventually came up with a program now called the Community Investment Trust (CIT). He would use philanthropic funding to buy a run down mini-mall in East Portland. He would create a financial product wherein people with limited resources could invest as little as $10 per month and over time own a small part of a building in their community. Tenants of the mall could invest. Neighbors could invest. The thesis, supported by a good deal of evidence, was not only that gradual-if-modest wealth would begin to accrue, but economic behavior would change. The Trust was to be an onramp to financial literacy and positive economic behavior.
He had to pitch the idea to the money people, and then to the neighbors. No one had ever tried this before. Any new idea encounters resistance, but this one was particularly tough to sell. The idea is abstract and technocratic, the wealth accrual gradual. There’s nothing sexy or compelling about a run down mini mall. The neighborhood could hardly be more nondescript. “You should not be getting poor people into real estate.” “It’s too risky.” “They’ll never invest.” “They won’t make their payments.” In short, the idea felt like a non-starter in a lot of ways.
But John “designed around doubters,” and over time both a solid real estate business plan and the pitch for community ownership compelled several organizations and philanthropies to support the project. “This is where Milton Friedman meets Karl Marx in the parking lot.” John crisscrossed Portland, and then the country, gave radio interviews, wrote articles, spoke at dozens of events.
It’s working. They bought and rehabbed the building in East Portland. They kept many of the tenants and attracted new ones. They had a barbecue in the parking lot, paid for daycare, bought pizza, and invited the neighbors. And people started investing. The little mall may have been a place where dreams go to die, but it has become a place where dreams begin. Lives are changing. Economic futures may be changing as well.
Community Investment Trusts Across the United States
CITs are now in various stages of development in Kansas City, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Memphis, Dallas, Seattle, Colorado Springs, Albany, New York, Waco, Texas, Fresno, California, and Beaverton, Oregon.
Why this?
John Haines could have done any number of things. With all of his experience and skills, why is he buying distressed mini malls – and making a fraction of the money he could make in the private sector?
John’s memoir reveals a man ravenous for discovery, movement, and learning. His work, in contrast, is disciplined, structural, rooted in places no traveler would choose to journey toward.
“Once I had the idea, I knew it had to happen.”
The intersection of East Burnside and 122nd Avenue hosts a new supportive housing center, plenty of crime, gang activities, and an essential shopping precinct for hundreds of families
Anyone who knows John well will tell you that the moment he decides he has to do something, he’s going to finish it.
Propel a steel mountain bike 18,000 feet up Everest? Had to. Paddle a kayak nearly 3,000 miles across West Africa to the Atlantic Ocean? Same again. Enable real asset ownership for lower income people? Create a new investor class?
Change financial literacy and behavior for millions of under-served people? Had to.
Understanding the compulsion to both start and finish things is only part of the puzzle to understanding the man. He is equally driven by a sense of fairness.
Haines not a pure egalitarian. He’s far too sophisticated an economic thinker to believe that perfect equity is a thing, people being what we are. But in John, unfair things elicit both personal revulsion, and far less commonly, sustained, strategic action.
Where to now?
John Haines has been working on the Community Investment Trust since 2007. This was the program that brought everything he knows and is good at together in one place: an understanding of debt, equity, financial literacy, poverty alleviation, social equity, iconoclastic economic and business thinking, optimism, and persistence. “This is important, and it’s big, and it’s what I do now.”
