Community Economic Development in Social Work

Steven Soifer, Joseph McNeely, Cathy Costa, Nancy Pickering-Bernheim

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231508575
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Sociology

Community economic development (CED) is an increasingly essential factor in the revitalization of low- to moderate-income communities. This cutting-edge text explores the intersection of CED and social work practice, which both focus on the well-being of indigent communities and the empowerment of individuals and the communities in which they live.

This unique textbook emphasizes a holistic approach to community building that combines business and real-estate development with a focus on stimulating family self-reliance and community empowerment. The result is an innovative approach to rehabilitating communities in decline while preserving resident demographics. The authors delve deep into the social, political, human, and financial capital involved in effecting change and how race and regional issues can complicate approaches and outcomes. Throughout, they integrate case examples to illustrate their strategies and conclude with a consideration of the critical role social workers can play in developing CED's next phase.

PART

Settings and Framework

THE FIRST SECTION OF THIS BOOK introduces social workers to the field of community economic development (CED), also known as community building, and features four case studies of community development corporations (CDCs) that demonstrate CED principles in action. We first examine definitions of CED and then trace its four “waves,” during which its methods have grown more sophisticated and have evolved in response to policy and sociopolitical changes. The case of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation—one of the earliest CDCs in the country and still going strong today in Brooklyn, New York—highlights how CDCs can adapt and shift strategies over time to meet changing community needs.

Next, we discuss why CED is important to social workers and the field of social work. What roles do social workers play in community-based organizations using a CED approach? What skills and training do social workers need to be effective at creating change at the neighborhood level in the face of poverty and other social problems? Monsignor William J. Linder, the founder of New Community Corporation—a highly successful CDC in Newark, New Jersey—was a social worker at heart. The case study of his work to launch New Community Corporation after civil unrest in Newark in 1967 illustrates the skills needed to effectively practice CED.

Because so much of CED work takes place in urban settings (though CED has roots in rural areas as well and is currently being applied in rural areas), we then trace how cities and their geographic building units—neighborhoods—came into existence in the United States. Understanding how and why these cities and neighborhoods grew and flourished and then declined and deteriorated is crucial to implementing CED effectively. The case study of the Warren/Connor Development Corporation, a CDC operating in Detroit, Michigan, since 1984, well reflects the rise and fall and revitalization of cities as “white flight” changed cities’ population composition and the United States shifted to a service economy.

From here, we explore the long history of CED in the United States and why understanding the policies and politics underpinning CED is so important to this field of practice. The case of Chicanos por la Causa, one of the oldest CDCs in the country, provides an excellent example for understanding the role of politics and a changing political and policy climate. Originally focused on meeting the needs of Chicano residents of South Central Phoenix, Arizona, Chicanos por la Causa has taken advantage of evolving policies and funding opportunities to become a statewide CDC and a provider of comprehensive services to all individuals regardless of ethnicity.

CHAPTER

What Is Community Economic Development?

COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (CED) is one of the true inventions and success stories of the last decades of the twentieth century and of community development in the United States. As the plight of U.S. cities in those last decades grew more dire—cities lost population, jobs, and their taxable bases and faced increased concentrated poverty, crime, drug abuse, and school failure—community development corporations (CDCs) and other nonprofit, community-based development organizations using CED methods were quietly and consistently saving individual neighborhoods (Gratz, 1994; Rubin, 2000). One historian heralded CED as “the most direct and powerful … of all the neighborhood-based fighting strategies that evolved in the United States” (Halpern, 1995, p. 127).

Indeed, where a large number of CDCs and other community-based organizations operated in a given city, and especially where there was persistent support for them, they contributed so much to turning around the ominous trends that writers would come to talk about “comeback cities” (Grogan & Proscio, 2000). In Cleveland, for example, after twenty years of solid work and sophisticated support, more than two dozen of these organizations demonstrated a consistent and impressive track record of results. In one of the most dismal real estate markets in the country, the city of Cleveland’s housing values were higher than those of the region as a whole, and the neighborhoods with active CDCs had higher housing values than the city of Cleveland’s averages (Burns, Wing, Butler, & Weinheimer, 2001).

Across the United States, the phenomenon of successful self-help organizations working at the neighborhood level to improve physical, social, and economic conditions grew from dozens of experiments to hundreds of pioneers to thousands of reliable, sophisticated institutions. They grew out of opposition to large-scale public projects such as highway construction and urban renewal, religious-institution-based efforts to save constituents’ neighborhoods, and nonprofit housing efforts. A social change movement became an industry as CDCs and community-based organizations became more sophisticated and sustainable.

To effect change at the neighborhood level in cities across the United States, CDCs and other CED organizations combined their empowerment agenda and social goals with the sophisticated techniques of private-sector real estate development and finance and the best of public-sector neighborhood-level urban planning and social development programs. They formed alliances with city hall and business leaders with whom they may have once fought, and they developed partnerships with growing universities and hospitals, whose expansion once threatened the very neighborhoods the CDCs sought to strengthen. They cobbled together public, private, and philanthropic resources and sophisticated business and real estate investments that changed the nature of development finance in the United States. National and local foundations that once shied away from community development because it required granting such large amounts of money found that CDCs gave them more financial leverage than any of their other grantees.

What exactly is community economic development? What are CDCs? Where do they come from? How do they succeed, and what are their strategies? What are their methods and tools of success? Where are they going? What is the role of the social worker in CED, and how do social workers prepare for employment and leadership in this phenomenal industry? Those are questions this text will answer. This chapter will examine the definition of CED and the basic concepts and structures of the CED field. It closes by summarizing the current state of the field, including today’s trend toward community building as the main focus of CED, and by describing some of the debates around and critiques of CED. The following chapters examine the evolution of CED in the context of the larger history of community development in the United States and the unique role of social workers and social work education in this field.

DEFINING COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

The field of CED has been given short shrift in the academic literature. Most of the scholarly works documented in the literature are evaluations of CDCs (Mayer, 1984; Vidal, 1992; Walker & Weinheimer, 1998). In the literature on CED that does exist, academic writers often proceed without defining CED. Halpern (1995) devotes a whole chapter in his fine history of neighborhood initiatives to CED without ever defining the field. Rubin and Rubin (2008) also devote a whole book to the “community-based development model” without ever defining CED, describing the work of community-based organizations rather than defining them. In their fundamental text, now in its fourth edition, they portray CDCs as a vehicle for taking community control of housing, community development, and economic development, activities assumed to be understood by the reader. They portray CED as evolving from and being a manifestation of community organizing and community empowerment, as do Murphy and Cunningham (2003).

Consistent and concise definitions of CED, when it is defined in academic literature, are hard to come by. For example, Sherraden and Ninacs (1998a) define CED as the process of “link[ing] social and economic development through the creation and regeneration of accessible institutions that empower and improve the life chances of community residents” (p. 1). Bruyn and Meehan (1987) focus on the key variables of empowerment, input, and the degree of control that neighborhood residents have in the overall process, but especially in the economic arena. Simon (2001) states nicely that “the core definition of CED embraces (1) efforts to develop housing, jobs, or business opportunities for low-income people, (2) in which a leading role is played by nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (3) that are accountable to residentially defined communities” (p. 3). Yet another definition, this one from the former trade group for CED, the National Congress for Community Economic Development (NCCED), defines CED as “the economic, physical and social revitalization of a community, led by the people who live in and around designated geographic areas of that community” (NCCED, 2005, December, para. 3).

The Encyclopedia of Social Work describes CED as “community development [that] has evolved into a competitive interdisciplinary field practiced in a variety of social and economic sectors, including downtown and neighborhood development, affordable housing, social entrepreneurship, workforce development, financial management, among others” (Johnson-Butterfield & Chisanga, 2008, p. 380). Using the rubric of community practice, Gamble and Weil (2010) view CED activity as coming under the framework of what they label “social, economic and sustainable development” (p. 209). To them, sustainability is the key word of the their definition.

Murphy and Cunningham (2003) offer perhaps the broadest definition, redefining CED as organizing for community-controlled development (OCCD), which they go on to define as “people coming together within shared living space to plan and deploy resources in ways that enhance the local community, enrich society, and advance social justice” (p. 6). Because CED has the capability of extending conventional investment and business practices of the private sector to previously excluded markets and neighborhoods, Halpern (1995) calls CDCs “a vehicle for reinventing capitalism” (p. 142). Peirce and Steinbach (1987), in their now classic report to the Ford Foundation, summarized CED succinctly in their title as “corrective capitalism.”

The lack of a clear definition may be a product of the interdisciplinary nature of CED or, as will be demonstrated in chapters 4 and 5, the field’s being composed of organizations with different backgrounds and ideologies that have embraced common practices and joined together for purposes of public advocacy to meet common goals. A practitioner turned author, Temali, in conjunction with the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation (2002) defines CED in terms of its goals as:

Actions taken by an organization representing an urban neighborhood or rural community in order to 1) Improve the economic situation of local residents (disposable income and assets) and local businesses (profitability and growth); and 2) Enhance the community’s quality of life as a whole (appearance, safety, networks, gathering places, and sense of positive momentum).

(p. 3)

Rubin (2000) likewise points to the importance of goals and the sense of positive momentum or hope: “Development activist [sic] want their projects to symbolize to community members and outsiders that hope remains” (p. 18).

We suggest that any definition of CED must include the following elements: It is a process of multifaceted comprehensive revitalization, building, or rebuilding to plan and implement a place- and people-based strategy that is community driven, democratic, and participatory. Furthermore, CED benefits the community, which retains the wealth generated from revitalization; uses private-sector tools; and attracts private-sector investment to create a sustainable economic and social dynamic in the community. CED also looks to make the community viable over the long term, reconnecting the community to the mainstream economy and social and political structures of the region through a partnership of the community with the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Finally, the effects of race-and gender-based discrimination, among other concerns, must be factored into the work. Therefore, we define CED as (1) the practice of revitalizing the economic, physical, and social infrastructures and networks of a specific low-income community or set of neighborhoods that (2) includes input and direction from the affected residents, thus (3) empowering both the individuals and institutions within the geographically defined area; (4) benefits residents of that community; and (5) makes sure that various discriminatory practices are avoided in the work.

HOW THE DEFINITION EVOLVED FROM A NARROW TO BROAD PERSPECTIVE

It is important to recognize that definitions of CED evolved over many years as practice and programs changed, beginning with a narrow concept and later growing to be broad (see chapters 4, 5, and 7 for more detail). The exact origin of the term is unclear, but it began to be widely used during the War on Poverty in the 1960s, related to the creation of CDCs, and the term was current enough by 1970 to be used as the name of the trade group that the first CDCs formed in that year, the NCCED, as mentioned already.

The first wave of CDCs resulted from a program of the Ford Foundation and the federal government begun in the late 1960s; these CDCs had a definite set of components set forth by the program (see chapter 7). A second wave of similarly motivated, place-based neighborhood revitalization organizations that developed outside of the original CDCs broadened the scope of CED and made the set of components less definite (Halpern, 1995). Still later, organizations that were less place based adopted the methods of CED to empower and benefit nongeographic constituencies, thus forming a third wave of CDCs (Peirce & Steinbach, 1987). Some, including the authors of this book, consider the plethora of single-purpose, nonprofit affordable housing organizations and faith-based organizations that exploded in the 1990s as part of this wave of CED (Brophy & Shabecoff, 2001). This text broadens the definition of CED still further to suggest that a fourth wave has emerged that is devoted to comprehensive community building (see chapter 15).

RELATED FIELDS AND TERMS

CED should be distinguished from terms that are closely related and describe fields of work with which CED has some overlap. Brief definitions will be given here to distinguish CED. A more developed understanding of these fields will come from discussion of the history of community development work in the United States in chapters 4 and 5. Readers should consult more specific texts (e.g., Blakely & Bradshaw, 2002, on economic development) or the very fine glossary of CED terminology by the California Community Economic Development Association (2011) for additional detail.

Community development is perhaps the oldest term encompassing a broad set of activities for creating all of the physical and social aspects of a thriving community and economy in an underdeveloped country or area. For example, the international Community Development Society (http://www.comm-dev.org) uses the term this way, but it adds a heavy emphasis on participation of members of the community in directing the process. In developed countries, it has come to mean revitalization of areas that are not benefiting equitably from the opportunity, productivity, and prosperity of the developing economy and its society. In the United States, since the time of government programs for urban renewal, community development has come to mean physical- and housing-oriented revitalization activities, with some social service supports that are supported by federal government programs. Usually, community development in the United States is undertaken by local or state government or by some agency outside of the target community with some level of community participation.

Economic development is a broad term encompassing all efforts to spur business growth or expansion. It is usually associated either with financial investment in infrastructure development that allows business to flourish with direct or indirect financial support for business growth and the facilities needed for such growth. It encompasses both the attraction of business not presently in an area as well as the promotion of the “homegrown economy.” Economic development in the United States is usually undertaken by state or local government or quasi-governmental organizations, with the government efforts organized on a state, local, or...

Índice

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Part 1: Settings and Framework
• Part 2: Strategy, Organization, and Success
• Part 3: Tools of Development
• Part 4: Putting It All Together
• Appendix I: Anymidwest City
• References
• Index
• Series List