Scope of community development programme
Answers
Understanding the central role of workforce quality.
In most urban neighborhoods, the most important economic assets are the workers who reside there and the value of their skills to the regional economy. Linking neighborhood residents to the growth sectors of the region – through workforce programs, recruitment system, transportation, and childcare – builds income, expands the labor recruitment networks of inner-city households, and creates the consumer basis for increased urban business formation. Community-based organizations (CBOs) can play a role as intermediaries between neighborhood residents and regional growth, given a civic infrastructure that values and requires these connections.
Linking urban business formation to regional growth.
Relationships can exist between growth outside of low-income neighborhoods and business formation within them. No matter how disadvantaged, inner-city communities have significant business formation opportunities, especially in the area of retail franchises. Other light industrial and specialty service businesses – including small-scale assembly, warehousing, and food processing – can also be supported, especially if they can take advantage of the supply and service needs of more established central business districts or suburban business park companies. To do so requires engaging the private sector not only as philanthropist but as business investor and partner.
Viewing housing markets as mobility strategies.
Changes in the incentive and production structure of low-income housing have made many inner-city CDCs into skilled housing developers. Having become adept at the government subsidy market, CDCs have focused narrowly on the public value of how to shelter the maximum number of low-income residents and have neglected the question of how housing markets foster social mobility. This disregard for the broader economy of housing makes it difficult to position inner-city neighborhoods as objects of diverse consumer demand or as places where low- and moderate-income people can build assets. CDCs can help maximize housing choice by creating a range of homeownership opportunities for people with varying incomes, by developing the scale of units that will sustain and build values, and by helping local working class families become small-scale housing entrepreneurs and landlords.
Becoming part of the regional public policy agenda.
Partly as a result of the practitioner nature of the community development field and partly as a result of our collective narrowness of vision, community development has confined most of its policy agenda to the success of its core product – affordable housing. Rallying around the preservation of the low-income housing tax credit and other housing subsidies or around Community Reinvestment Act compliance has become the staple of community development’s public and private sector policy agenda. But in an era of welfare reform, a vibrant (if uneven) economy, and new questions about the meaning and limits of metropolitan growth patterns, the agenda must be broadened. CDCs should be part of the broader conversation regarding transportation policy, regional tax sharing, work force policy, and smart growth strategies. How these issues play out directly influences the lives of inner-city residents. Yet presently, few regional planning commissions, metropolitan business associations, or transportation authorities are regularly informed by inner-city community development advocates.
There is nothing in these approaches that weakens the commitment of CDCs to the core effort of neighborhood improvement or to viewing low-income people as the key customer of those efforts. Rebuilding places and re-connecting people is never an either/or proposition. But reversing the declining social economy of many inner-city neighborhoods is not a self-referential exercise; it requires the creation of institutional and economic linkages between households and businesses within inner-city communities and the broader geography of opportunity.