Neighborhood participation in community development: A comparison of strategic approaches (original) (raw)
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Assessing the Role of Community Development Corporations in Inner City Economic Development
New York University Review of Law and Social Change, 1997
would like to thank Kammie Gormezano for research assistance. I am also indebted to dozens of community development professionals who shared their views and experiences with me. The views expressed in this article are my own, however, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Center For Real Estate and Urban Policy or its Board of Advisors.
Community Development Corporations: Critical Factors That Influence Success
Journal of Urban Affairs, 1999
With federal devolution and the ascendancy of community-based development strategies to center stage, the role of community development corporations (CDCs) has gained significance. This analysis focuses on programmatic and organizational attributes of CDCs that affect community development success. Success is defined as a CDC's contribution to the improvement of residents' access to financial resources, physical resources, human resources, economic opportunities, and political influence. Based on previous studies and our own analysis of three case studies, we posit four key factors in CDC success: mission, organizational competency, political capital, and funding. Analysis of the experiences of the case study organizations reveal the specific ways in which these factors operate and the influence of varied contextual factors.
Politics & Society, 2007
Two Community Development Corporations (CDCs) in Oakland, California, anchor the following analysis. These legally homogenous organizations have implemented similar “low income” redevelopment projects widely hailed as representing a single successful blueprint for urban revitalization. Despite their similarities, however, these entities have produced starkly different socio-economic outcomes—a phenomenon traced to the CDCs’ divergent internal structures and the contrasting external contexts of their development activities. These variations generated competing “logics” of redevelopment. On one hand, we find a CDC dominated by market-oriented interests and the economic logic of exchangevalues, while on the other, we find a CDC dominated by community-oriented interests and the social logic of neighborhood use-values.
Community development corporations (CDCs) played a central role in addressing the housing crisis of foreclosures in America’s urban neighborhoods. The success of CDCs, however, is closely tied to market forces, neighborhood characteristics, and policies at multiple levels, as well as factors internal to CDCs. What factors support or impede the success of CDCs that operate in such complex environments? We examined the experiences of two CDCs serving three small, ethnically diverse cities in Massachusetts regarding resources, policy, practices and local markets related to neighborhood revitalization. We derived lessons about the factors internal and external to these CDCs that affected their ability to acquire and redevelop foreclosed housing in the target areas they serve.
Capacity Building for Neighborhood Development. An Analysis of the Chicago Approach
1994
Recent urban redevelopment efforts in Chicago (Illinois) have often come at the expense of current low-income residents as upscale living replaces businesses and homes and raises rents. Local Community Development Organizations (CDOs) offer an alternative path to economic development by being a foundation for neighborhood efforts that meet the needs of community residents. Resources for CDOs come from a variety of sources, chief among them being the public sector and the Federal government. Data for Chicago show that funding for neighborhood-level economic development activities in Chicago has been relatively meager, because of both competing interests in the city budget and a lack of Federal commitment to rebuilding the inner city. Data also show that the economic neighborhood development resources expended through the City of Chicago's corporate budget are concentrated in high-income areas. This report highlights neighborhoods that should receive greater levels of support for economic development. If sufficient proposals have not come from these communities, the City, foundations, and civic organizations should take the lead to create and assist CDOs to generate development. Five appendixes provide tables of data about neighborhood development. (Contains 2 tables, 5 maps, and 20 appendix tables.) (SLD)
The Impacts of Targeted Public and Nonprofit Investment on Neighborhood Development
2005
The authors are very grateful to the many people who assisted in the completion of this study. In particular, we would like to thank Dan Tatar of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and Greta Harris of the Richmond office of LISC, whose longstanding commitment to improving the effectiveness of community-based development led them to initiate this study. Without the financial support of the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank, this study would not have been conducted. In addition, Wendy Hirsch of LISC and David Sacks of the City of Richmond's Department of Community Development gave generously of their time, retrieving, organizing and helping to interpret the data necessary for this study and patiently helping the authors understand how the city and LISC's investment processes work. We are also grateful to Frances Stanley of the Federal Reserve Bank, who helped to organize the data and who created all of the maps used in this report. Also, we would like to thank Cecilia Bingenheimer, Jennie Blizzard, Larry Cain, Cindy Elmore, Elaine Mandaleris and Jennifer Sparger for their assistance with editing and graphics. We are also very grateful to the people-real-estate developers and appraisers, lenders, public officials, nonprofit community development corporation staff and advocacy group representatives, as well as the neighborhood residents-who gave
Hybrid forms of civic participation in neighborhood redevelopment
The notion of community has enjoyed wide currency in neighborhood redevelopment in the US and UK, not only as part of a marketing rhetoric to sell cities but also as the cornerstone of initiatives guiding the revival of urban areas. Often, a call for civic initiative and participation is at the center of redevelopment discourse aiming to enlist residents in inner city neighborhoods to build community and participate in the governance of place-making. In this paper, our goal is to contribute to the growing body of critical commentary about the increased currency of community and civic participation in policies and programs, specifically in the context of neighborhood redevelopment. We are particularly interested in how potential tensions between the tasks of creating places of belonging and places of investment are resolved in the everyday conduct of citizens. Relying on longitudinal data from four low-income neighborhoods in the US Southeast that have participated in a funded redevelopment initiative, the analytic focus of the paper is on examining residents' efforts to 'build community'. Through a number of data vignettes, we illustrate how residents' seemingly mundane acts are motivated by simultaneous orientations toward communality, market-led development, and social justice. Their strategic stance toward neighborhood development is partly fuelled by institutional discourse that prioritizes 'outcomes'. At the same time, it is also symptomatic of neoliberalism as lived experience that is characterized by a need to negotiate hybrid and contradictory interests, motivations and outcomes.
Citizen Participation and Strategic Planning for an Urban Enterprise Community
1998
Public policies rarely have single objectives. For the federal Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities initiative, bettering the socioeconomic opportunity structure among a collection of the nation's low-income areas is only one of its goals. Another initiative objective is to foster the representation of common citizens, especially residents, in the planning and implementation of strategies and programs designed to redevelop these low-income areas. Strategic community planning was the method chosen by the initiative's designers to achieve both objectives. This article, which makes use of the case study approach, addresses strategic community planning as an instrument of advancing citizen representation in urban redevelopment processes. Specifically, it describes and critiques the process jointly administered in three upstate New York cities — Albany, Schenectady, and Troy — that are participating in the urban portion of the federal initiative. The purpose of this study is to assess the degree to which residents of the low-income areas of these three cities participated in the strategic community planning process.
The purpose of this study is to explore the most prominent factors impacting the performance of community development corporations, or CDCs, as they strive to produce and rehabilitate affordable housing stock while empowering citizens to become involved in local issues of concern. Previous efforts have linked CDC success to several areas of capacity, including staff experience, the extent of ties to intermediary groups, and the degree of community involvement and representation in the organization. To test the strength of the relationship between such organizational attributes and the attainment of CDC objectives, an electronic questionnaire was submitted to a sample of CDC executive directors across the U.S. The data collected indicates that executive director tenure is moderately correlated with the number of funding sources held by each CDC. In addition, the number of informal ties to intermediaries, the freguency of community outreach meetings held annually, and the number of volunteers assisting CDCs in any capacity were also associated with greater access to funding, Finally, none of the studied capacity indicators had a significant corelation with either the revenue-expense ratio or the number of single-family housing units produced or rehabilitated annually. The results suggest that reducing turnover at the executive director position, working to foster greater ties to informal industry support networks, and increasing outreach and volunteer promotion efforts may all create additional opportunities for the acquisition of needed funding.