COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT TURNS A PAGE
The Depression nailed community developers as it did everybody else. A variety of mostly negative factors took the wind out of the settlement and neighborhood wings. While the hitherto dominant CD wings lost momentum, however, an entirely new approach pioneered around the University of Chicago and its adjacent neighborhoods. This new approach, community mobilization (”organizing”), turned out to be a durable and important new wing for community development. Four factors generated headwinds for CD:
- Maturation (professionalization) of the settlement and community center wings created a CD schism.
- The emergence of unions captured the loyalty of CD’s native clientele.
- Federal and state welfare/workforce/employment programs cream-skimmed hotbutton issue areas away from CD.
- The character of neighborhood succession fundamentally shifted: ethnics inclined, if possible, to periphery movement and new residents introduced en masse a racial dynamic into the neighborhood-based CD wings—a Second Ghetto was in process.
The 800-lb gorilla, however, was that another wing, the “housers,” uniting with planners and marginalized neighborhood community developers—with a certain measure of access into municipal/federal policy-making—formed a coalition that assumed de facto leadership of the approach (see Chapter 11). Housers and their slum removal, new town suburbs and public housing initiatives took over the spotlight—for almost two generations. If it did not involve housing and slums in some way, it was pushed off to CD’s margins.
Settlement and community center movements had matured. Volunteer settlement workers, replaced by professional social workers operating out of larger bureaucracies, were increasingly viewed by other community developers as “agents of social control”—which was not meant as a compliment. This CD schism helped push social workers into forming their own profession. Social work (case management) professionals worked directly with individuals, separating themselves professionally from the larger and more political ends of CD that pursued larger social goals. Those remaining in non-housing community development, and new adherents attracted to it (this evolution played out over a generation), were concerned with “collections of people,” groups and classes adversely affected by the economy and society. Rather than assist people on a one-by-one basis, CD increasingly focused on two types of “collections of similar people”: (1) those living in a particular place—a low-income, immigrant or racial majority neighborhood; (2) groups with shared needs in housing, family assistance or juvenile delinquency, for example. Community development remained focused on people and neighborhoods—but endeavored to empower groups of individuals through programs, social reform and systemic change.
Moving into these new foci, CD competed with labor unions and traditional ethnic institutions for the attention of their clientele.
The Chicago Area Project
One of the more obvious weaknesses of neighborhood-based community development thus far was its dependence on either Progressive volunteers or “experts/professionals” and the gap between them and neighborhood residents. External “do-gooders” could not compete with indigenous organizations like the Catholic Church, the parochial school (the Bells of St Mary syndrome), the ward boss and newly rising unions: “By far the most troublesome and controversial concept in the history of community-based reform [was community] participation.” The Chicago Area Project (CAP) broke with CD tradition and employed workers from troubled neighborhoods “as a direct challenge to social work professionals, and outside expertise” (O’Connor, 1999a, p. 87).
CAP was the brainchild of Clifford Shaw (Illinois Institute of Juvenile Research) and an old friend, Ernest Burgess (Chicago School of Sociology). At the start (1934), it was an experiment to design a program to prevent juvenile delinquency. Juvenile delinquency “was receiving growing attention, both in its own right and as a proxy for a broad array of social problems … linked to the debilitating effects of poverty and social marginality” (Halpern, 1995, p. 50). Its chief innovation was that it used neighborhood residents as staff and then as project leaders. In addition, instead of competing with local institutions, CAP enlisted their support.
The first of these project/experiments was Chicago’s Southside Russell Square neighborhood. Its direction was provided mostly by a board of affluent residents and a ton of resident volunteers as staff and committee members; and it was financed locally, some funding provided by the local priest who also opened a boys’ club in the church basement. Its chief programmatic tool was “curbside counseling” by former delinquents (actual ex-cons) who had straightened up. It also paid attention to small-scale physical
improvements such as using trashcans rather than dumping in streets and backyards, and shrubbery. Despite being one of the worst juvenile crime-ridden neighborhoods in Chicago, the project was a success (it continues to this day)—and two other neighborhood projects followed (1938). One of these was the Back of the Yards neighborhood, next to the stockyards and Sinclair’s “the Jungle” slaughterhouses, one of Chicago’s worst. Selected to staff the initiative was a University of Chicago graduate student and CAP “curbside counselor, Saul Alinsky.
Back of the Yards: Reveille for Radicals
Back of the Yards was an old, stable, white, 95 percent European Catholic, working stiff Slavs, 4-square mile area in which 95,000 lived. Attractive to union organizers (Congress of Industrial Organizations, CIO) who wanted to unionize its worker residents, Alinsky moved in, watched—and learned from them how to involve the community. In early 1939, he organized the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) and filled it with residents. Allying with Joseph Meegan, the resident director of the neighborhood recreation program, he went door to door to recruit his board and allies. His first major victory brought a local parish priest on board—and the local Catholic bureaucracy joined as well. Although the church distrusted, hated actually, the “communist union organizers” Alinsky included both in his organization.
From 1939 to the end of World War II, Alinsky engaged in project after project of all types and descriptions—the key denominator being the council and residents selected, financed and implemented them. They delivered services, exacted concessions from the city, the machine and from business, and conducted the only known “shit in” at Chicago’s airport (Fisher, 1994, pp. 51–65). Alinsky/Meegan developed five rules or principles:
- The professional organizer is the catalyst for social change.
- The primary task is to build a democratic community-based organization open to all members of the community, especially traditional community leaders and institutions.
- The goal is to win power because the neighborhood organization is the counter to a neighborhood composed of “the powerless and the unorganized.”
- Any tactics necessary should be used—the end justifies the means—and organizations acquire power by winning victories.
- Organization must be pragmatic, flexible and non-ideological so that it can support any project the neighborhood council pursues. (Fisher, 1994, pp. 53–4)
Alinsky had greater ambitions, and eventually left to promote community organizing nationwide. He left Meegan (and the priests) in charge. Meegan, a sort of godfather and ward boss, served as executive director for nearly fifty years, retiring in 1982. Said and done, Meegan and his successors grew the BYNC into a prototype neighborhood-based organization (NBO). The BYNC persisted through neighborhood succession (Hispanic mostly) and continues to this day. It is a mature NBO because, as Fisher observed, “there is a complementary relationship between social movements and community organizing. Local organizing oriented to social change can exist without a movement, but it will not thrive for very long. When a movement develops, however, community organizations often ride the wave of mass support” (Fisher, 1994, pp. 53–4).
Alinsky did not become the Che Guevara of American community development, however. Alinsky’s organic, rooted-in-neighborhood concerns organizing was too parochial—often relabeled as “populist”—a bad word in CD land. Alinsky’s approach offered:
[offered] very little critique of the economic system [that] … perpetuates poverty in the neighborhood … Alinsky ultimately possessed a strong faith in liberal capitalism … [and] Alinsky organizing does not question the economic foundation of the existing order or seek to replace the political system that maintains that order; his approach overlooks the possibility that capitalism is not set up to serve the poor and working class and that it is ultimately undemocratic. (Fisher, 1994, p. 64)
His book, possibly the most read book in community development, had its greatest impact in the aftermath of the Great Society. While he may not have “founded” community organizing, and nor was he the first, he was the most visible. What he did was devise the organizational platform, an EDO for social change, social reform and neighborhood development that would arguably become the cutting edge of modern community development—the community development corporation (CDC):
A community-wide reform organization, an umbrella organization that would provide a forum for mobilizing all the discrete constituencies of the community around common priority problems, identified through democratic processes of discussion, deliberation and voting. (Halpern, 1995, p. 54)
The Second Ghetto: A Metaphor for “Turning the Page”
When Arnold R. Hirsch first published Making the Second Ghetto in 1983, he summarized much of the thought that community development had developed to that point; but he also unleashed a torrent of new studies, themes and concepts that channeled community development thought for several decades (Hirsch, 1998). “Making” in that respect served as a platform, a foundation most neighborhood CD approaches incorporated. Hirsch’s Second Ghetto includes the period under discussion in this chapter, but also extends to 1960. The pattern Hirsch outlines, based exclusively on Chicago, has been found to apply in a broad sense; but individual cities (Mohl’s Miami for example) and regional differences (not to mention differences in Hispanic settlement of urban areas) suggest dynamics uncovered by Hirsch are more interesting than the specifics of Chicago—the most segregated city in America in this period.
The book describes many “moving parts” that produced the Second Ghetto. Over the years, the tendency has been to simplify them into the role federal, state and local governments played in Chicago’s postwar segregation. My simplistic take on Hirsch is that he describes how 1930–60 Chicago reacted to the Great Migration. The discussion centers solely on black migration. The First Ghetto, arguably (it has been differently interpreted) is that area in which African-Americans initially resided (pre-1930 or so). Sheer numbers of migrants forced expansion from the First Ghetto into adjoining white neighborhoods, creating the Second Ghetto. The distinction between the two ghettos seems to be time. The resulting succession of neighborhoods was vastly more complex (and insidious) that the old Chicago School literature would suggest. There were many bad guys; the private sector (downtown elites and real estate especially) and willing governmental dupes were the worst. White ethnics and University of Chicago “liberal” elites did not fare well. It seems whoever was in authority, wealthy or the majority population created the Second Ghetto. The core focus of “Making” was how public policy and individual/corporate actions negatively affected African-Americans and created the Second Ghetto.
Hindsight suggests, at its best, that Hirsch depicts a story as it unfolded in an era that has moved on. Written almost a generation after the Great Society, one can see how (anti)urban renewal, its effects and lessons, had become a cornerstone for community development. Decentralization, deindustrialization, suburbanization of poverty, inequality and the amazing durability of “the ghetto”—despite a rather transformative redirection of redistributive public policy—strongly argue that Hirsch’s Second Ghetto was a “snapshot,” a frozen frame, a single chapter of a story that still is unfolding. The image of racial change and neighborhood succession Hirsch drew, however, served as a policy paradigm of what happened over the next very troubled decades. It has since been “replaced” by works such as Thomas Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis first published in 1996 (Sugrue, 2005). Starkly said, and certain to generate controversy, Hirsch’s “Making” serves as metaphor for the evolution of community development during and after the New Deal—especially after World War II.
During those years, while an old-style Progressivist-era community development withered, without fanfare or conscious planning, a new-style community development slowly, almost imperceptibly, emerged—built around the dynamics associated with the Second Ghetto. Centering on blacks, ghettos, inequality, racism, an intense rejection of capitalism and corporate elites, and a distrust of governments that too often served the interests of those private elites, a new-style community development replaced the old-style “preserve the capitalist system, Americanization” of Progressive-era Protestant elites. In the process the Second Ghetto paradigm fostered a sort of CD “spatial fix” which transformed suburbs into the enemy of blacks and central cities which, unless confronted, would result in the enforced segregation of black and poor people into permanent ghettos. A larger CD world view developed. Although this reformulation and generational shift will extend for the next two decades, from this point on I will distinguish between old-style and new-style community development. There was no magic moment that definitively marked this shift and policy transformation; but, arguably, its first visible trace becomes evident in the making of Great Society policy, starting in the middle 1950s.
Ron W. Coan 