Eppa’s scholarly work has focused on how corporate leaders in industries such as craft brewing can collaborate to change regulations.  This collaboration can constitute a kind of social movement, and success can sometimes arise by challenging regulators to beat each other to the punch with favorable treatment of growth industries that may be good for their communities.   Of course, it can also disrupt regulators.  Eppa began by describing his broad research program and its implications for public policy.

Craft brewers generally deployed two interesting strategies that enabled their success.  The first is venue-shifting to local jurisdictions, and obtaining permission for their businesses through vehicles like one-day event permits.  The second is to locate in states without local licensing agents, and to focus there on working with local advocates from agriculture and tourism to start their businesses through projects such as creating inclusive town days and local, place-based CSR programs.

Eppa answered Anita’s question about the somewhat paradoxical phenomenon of craft-brewery town identities in city after city:  Asheville, Portland OR, Austin, and so on.   Why is this a national phenomenon given the long history of craft brewers in getting squashed by large national brewers before and after Prohibition?  Eppa’s answer:   Beer is a medium of human connection.   For craft brewers, it’s “us against the world.”   A rising tide lifts all boats.  In Ballard, Seattle, for example, brewers have been collaborating to create a district where small brewers support each other. The ethos is that the challenge is in moving from 13% of the industry in the US to 25% of the industry….  

Anita asked Eppa to segue over toward his experiences as a community organizer seeking to save Jerry’s Pond, and to revitalize the neighborhood in the process.   

Jerry’s Pond was created in the 1870s by local industrialists through clay extraction.  It was used for ice-cutting and then eventually became a swimming hole.   After drownings and evidence of contamination with industrial asbestos waste, the pond was fenced off in 1961 and went unused for decades as affordable housing and further industrialization occurred in the neighborhood.  Fast forward to 2021:   The Pond, located in the middle of one of the most highly trafficked intersections in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was surrounded by affordable housing and derelict industrial buildings.   A company called IQHQ bought the site with the intention of developing biotech labs and workspaces in the buildings, but it also had an intention of working with the community to differentiate the project as highly community oriented.

Eppa and his friends in local community groups worked with the company to craft a vision for how this could be accomplished given the thicket of restrictions that had been placed on the area over time.  These included preserving wildlife as championed by Mass Audubon, cleaning dangerous asbestos, and working with local training programs targeted at creating jobs for residents of the affordable units that were located nearby.    IQHQ accomplished something important, which was to build trust by working over long periods of time with community groups through hundreds of meetings over thousands of hours.  

The big question here:  How can degradation and historic contamination of a site set the stage for redemption?   The community group has been working with the company now for several years, but its history extends back decades.  

Anita asked Eppa to reflect on what this means for his research program on community-building through local craft breweries – and community-building in general.

Eppa’s reflections include the idea that regulators often want to champion private actors that demonstrate a deep community commitment.  This requires expanding time horizons, and finding ways to stay in conversations despite the burden they create.

One of Eppa’s most penetrating reflections for scholarship in this area is that the private-public partnership model may place an onerous burden on all involved.   Can we come up with new systems of governance at the local level that don’t demand so much time and effort and continuity of commitment from volunteers?   What could be the role of the city in a situation such as this?   How do you foster community accountability in such a complicated situation?

Eppa landed by referring to the famous book called “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putman, which describes how interactions between members of a community constitute the fabric that gives it life.   Eppa wants broader and deeper connections with renters and residents in the affordable housing complex in the conversations.  There’s got to be a more direct way to build trust and engagement…   or isn’t there?