Leveling the playing field through Community Development
Community Development as a field of study and as a call for action is about people coming together to narrow the wealth gap and the race gap between communities, to move toward equity and justice for all communities. Its origins arose out of the broad-based citizen demands of the ’50s and ’60s to advance civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, consumer rights, and the anti-war and environmental stewardship movements. Community development committed itself to bringing more resources to where needs were greater. All of these movements aimed at broadening and deepening democracy.
The deeper roots of community development lie in the Declaration of Independence call for a society in which we are all created equal, the basis of democracy. Martin Luther King termed that aspiration a “promissory note,” prodding all of us to take steps toward its fulfillment. The arc toward fulfillment is uneven, however, as the nation experiences moments of real progress, like Reconstruction, then retrenchment with Jim Crow, then progress again through the ’60s into the ’70s, and since the ’80s the reassertion of white supremacy and rich people’s entitlements, like now. Community Development is about pushing forward toward delivering on the promissory note.
The private sector, the government, and the community make up the interactive triad of forces that account for planning, building, and operating communities at all scales. Balancing the goals and the measurements of success among the three can lead to stable and improving conditions for all three. The last 40 years, however, have thrown these forces out of balance. The community force, more particularly communities of people of color and low wealth, have only seen the gulf widen between haves and have nots, between whites and others.
This piece frames the factors that interact with each other to determine the quality and trajectory of neighborhood health. It describes the forces at work to either progress toward community development goals or to perpetuate this downwardly spiraling imbalance. It lays the base for my community development course at Georgia Tech, a field that has been upended by ongoing revelations from the BLM movement and the biases and unpreparedness laid bare in people’s response to the pandemic. In this light, the Biden administration could achieve real progress toward equity and justice. Or the forces of wealth and white supremacy could limit its performance to a few palliatives, whose best effect might be to slow down the spiral but not to reverse it.
To lay the base for exploring transformation, the course reviews efforts to deal with institutionalized inequities. It seeks to replace the policies, resource allocations, and attitudes of systemic racism with ideas about how to move toward greater equity. It takes its cue from locally-generated community development success stories, where neighborhood health has measurably improved. The course is project-based: It engages students with effective ongoing community development initiatives in Atlanta. Focusing on lessons learned, students will project the kinds of structural changes in public policy, regulation, and finance necessary to reinforce, replicate, and accelerate best practices. The course considers the pros and cons, the opportunities and threats, posed by the expanding use of various digital technologies like big data, smart cities, and social media on community-building processes. The course will focus particularly on the rules, the tools, the techniques, and the strategies that combine to build our civic environment and along the way to assess the outcomes through an equity lens.
Community development is a comprehensive process, where the factors that continuously interact with each other define the neighborhood and provide a basis for measuring progress. The sketch below pictures how these factors interact and combine to describe community.
Community development is place-based, where location and other physical attributes can either ameliorate or exacerbate the spatial impacts of the growing fracture between rich and poor, white and Black, and other inequities. Community development practice in any particular neighborhood should stem from meeting the needs of the neighborhood, from immediate toward the longer term. Moving forward on an effective agenda requires a collaboration between the people there in partnerships that complete the necessary resources and skills to implement actionable development projects. For those who make their living by planning, designing, and building places, city planners, urban designers, engineers, and developers, the starting point is to listen.
Unlike the factors that interact to define a neighborhood, the forces at work in community development practice tend not to form themselves into a comprehensive or connected whole. Just as it is important to understand the interactive factors that make up neighborhoods, so it is for those committed to the community development mission to understand the roles, responsibilities, and measures of success for each of these forces. These include at a minimum:
- activists, community people, those who demand action to address an issue, who are able to stir up and maintain community interest in addressing the issue
- community development corporations and other locally generated organizations whose interest is to follow up, to act, to develop housing or other projects that respond to community-identified priorities
- public agencies, always the keepers of the laws and the holders of development support resources, limited by scant funds to address the needs of neighborhoods whose needs are greatest, and subject to political forces among which rich, mostly white people continue to hold sway
- non-profit organizations, whose roles can range from providing resources to acting as developers
- private developers, focused on their projects, bound by having to make a profit, thus leery of developing below market rate projects unless subsidized, yet with the most developed skillsets for actually getting stuff built
- foundations, where public foundations are the collectors and distributors of contributions from ranges of individuals, family, or private foundations, often directed toward particular causes; and private foundations whose contributions reflect the values of their founders, some very few of which support community development goals and purposes
- academia, where community development research is directed toward support for community development policies and practices that level the playing field and whose trove of data and analysis may reveal transformational information that helps to further advance community development purposes.
Finally, the course considers the means available or necessary in order for deprived communities to gain the power and resources they need to build a brighter future. The defining question is:
WHERE IS THE MONEY? [the subject of a future rantagram]
From Jim Cotton, a wise community resource officer for Birmingham decades ago, “You don’t have to move to live in a better neighborhood.”
