POST Great Society COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Unlike mainstream business-focused economic development which had congealed around chambers and port authorities, postwar community development seemed more like a herd of cats, each attending to its own business. Within community development there were always wings: settlement houses, housing reformers, recreation and community centers; neighborhood mobilizers, new towns/suburbs, slum clearance, and public housers. Community development lacked a stable core; it was mostly a fluid collection of policy whirlpools—with sympathetic allies such as planners, architects, and Progressive capitalists/managers, who drifted in and out of the disparate CD policy coalitions. If there was anything that functioned as a core, a barely adequate one at its best, it was foundations and Policy World theorists such as Mumford or Bauer.
Despite its remarkable success in passing the 1937 Housing Act, CD housers’ pre-1940 timing couldn’t have been worse. They rode a wave of popular enthusiasm generated by a genuine housing crisis in the midst of a Depression. The 1937 Housing Act raised slum clearance, neighborhood renewal and public housing as the preeminent CD strategy. By 1941, however, war production worker housing effectively ended low-income public housing for a decade, while popular opinion shifted to combating the perceived deterioration perceived in Second Ghetto slums. In the ensuing Washington policy stalemate that characterized the 1940s, CBD-oriented real estate and chamber groups “stole” or “shared” (depending on one’s perspective) neighborhood slum clearance and diverted (over the 1950s) much of it into CBD/commercial center, “eds and meds” urban renewal. The bitterness fostered in those years between this early “growth coalition” and CD housers/community mobilization activists still remains today. Lost in the mud-slinging was that both sides were desperately attempting to combat suburban decentralization—Alice O’Connor’s “crisis of metropolitanization” (1999, p. 96).
Neighborhood succession during the forties and fifties was an increasingly brutal process. The incredible destruction unleashed by mid-1950s’ federal-funded highway construction made it even worse. Ethnics simply moved out to peripheries and suburbs. Migrants from the Great Migration moved in, developing what today is labeled the Second Ghetto. This Second Ghetto presented a very different situation from the First (ethnic immigrant). Alinsky’s CD community organizing approach, for example, was essentially a First Ghetto strategy and it didn’t work well in the Second Ghetto with white organizers mobilizing African-American neighborhoods. White and union community organizers like Alinsky (who had moved from active community organizing in 1942) increasingly found themselves on the outside looking in, using AfricanAmericans as their foot soldiers in an unstable alliance that quickly ended (see Chicago’s Woodlawn). By War’s end, CD neighborhood-focused strategies/wings were facing an almost existential crisis as to how to apply community development to the Second Ghetto.
Solving that existential crisis is essentially what the Ford Foundation, Gray Areas, and Cloward and Olin were attempting to do in Chapter 16. Their experimentation produced the War on Poverty and LBJ’s Great Society. Great Migration blacks decidedly fought slum clearance, high-rise public housing, and racial discrimination, especially in real estate, often tolerated by City Hall. While Alinsky had avoided partisan community organizing, Second Ghetto community mobilization attacked City Hall, real estate developers, universities, and whoever was part of the coalition bringing slum clearance to the neighborhood.
Second Ghetto Community organizing had little choice but to sink its roots deep into the political culture, economics, and politics of the distressed neighborhood. The resistance and bitterness generated by Second Ghetto neighborhood succession, its reaction against racism and discrimination, and the unifying catalyst of slum clearance dislocation provided a fuel to community organizing that, when linked to a 1960s’ northern civil rights movement, and Great Society community action and maximum feasible participation, fostered new wings of African-American-oriented Community Development.
The 1960s’ instability (both policy and political) created by the almost seven years of urban riots also served as an incubator for different community development strategies. For all the controversy associated with Great Society community action and CAAs, community action brought about more “empowerment” than economic growth or social assimilation. CAA’s raft of comprehensive services included local action plans, and in their short three years of effective existence they never really got anything substantial done. CAAs, after all, were advisory and had no power to compel social service, housing, welfare bureaucracies, never mind school systems, to follow CAA direction. Maximum feasible participation set in stone the principle that low-income neighborhood residents possessed an inherent right to participate in matters concerning their individual and community’s life. The wedge CAAs inserted into the heretofore impenetrable urban bureaucracies provided leverage and optimism that community organizers would shortly tap.
In this regard, CAAs “created or fostered scores of new affiliations and organizations—single issue coalitions, tenant organizations, legal services, public interest law firms” (Halpern, 1995, pp. 113–18) that served as vehicles for community mobilization initiatives. As community development entered the 1970s it encountered a world totally different from that of a decade earlier. Moreover, they had regained their federal partner, able and willing through a federal agency, HUD, to provide resources and support policy advocated by a greatly expanding, mostly Washington-based CD Policy World. No longer did Mainstream economic development enjoy anything close to a monopoly in ED jurisdictional policy-making.
The sections below will outline the Community Development renaissance that was the 1970s and even the Reagan 1980s. CD was vibrant and, true to its heritage, exhibited a variety of wings and approaches mostly centered around the neighborhood. Most importantly, an African-American political culture produced new forms of community development to attack the problems of the Second Ghetto. A new CDO, the Community Development Corporation (CDC), emerged as the CD structure of choice. Community mobilization approaches were popular; their variety and flexibility facilitated their dispersion into the West and the New South—as vehicles for new immigrants to access municipal policy-making. Finally, strategies able to operate within the capitalist economic fabric, mostly housing-focused, were devised to restore as best as possible economic markets amid the collapsing economic base of Big Cities and the growing economic bases of a resurgent Sunbelt. During this period an emerging Third Ghetto (in which deindustrialization imploded any reasonable hope of employment as a strategy to neighborhood prosperity) almost surreptitiously appeared.
In spite of its remarkable success during these decades, community development could not escape nor overcome its seemingly inherent bias toward forming numerous autonomous streams (wings) that could never quite link themselves together to sustain a single mighty river. In the spirit of mixing metaphors, so prevalent throughout this history, community development remained a herd of individual cats, however professionalized, each following their inner light.
Black Capitalism
In Chapter 6 this history noted a bi-modal African-American economic development policy culture: individual achievement and assimilation into society and the economy (Booker T. Washington) versus separate development/removal of colonialist institutional domination, and community-wide achievement through socialist/community-based enterprise (Du Bois). The King-led civil rights movement mostly conformed to the former, with Du Bois-like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael advocating the latter.
Integration and jobs were the March on Washington’s twin goals, and black capitalism, skills training, and integration into new neighborhoods and schools were King’s principal ED strategies. The Ford Foundation, even Woodlawn’s TWO, and the Kennedy administration’s urban guerilla boutique (War on Poverty) pursued goals congruent with economic, social and political assimilation (Cross, 1969, pp. 136–58). Johnson funded the Job Opportunities in Business Sector (JOBS Program) to train the hard-core unemployed, with the National Alliance of Businessmen locating actual employment opportunities.
Senator Robert Kennedy, after he and Jacob Javits walked through the newly established Bedford-Stuyvesant CDC neighborhood (1967), submitted legislation to attract corporate elites to locate branch plants in the ghetto (offering tax credits, accelerated depreciation, wage subsidies and training allowances). Hiring of residents, supply/services contracts and stimulation of neighboring service businesses—not to mention occupational training—were hoped-for consequences. Kennedy followed up with additional legislation pledging tax credits, accelerated depreciation and wage subsidies, but the bill languished (Harrison, 1974, p. 16). His rival, President Johnson, sent a letter to 600 large corporations asking them to invest in the ghetto. IBM located a 600-worker plant in Bed-Stuy (Cross, 1969, p. 74). Both claimed credit. In any case, the strategy never took root; the results were poor, and of the few plants that opened, many eventually closed down (Tabb, 1972).
More typical of the sixties were programs supporting development or support of black-owned businesses (51 percent). Such programs fell within definitions of “black capitalism,” which meant encouraging black-owned startup and profit maximization for existing firms. Federal (and government) programs, such as SBAs almost always pursued “black capitalism” as their formal strategy. In 1969 Nixon established the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) by executive order. In that year that office and the Census Bureau conducted the first national survey of minority-owned firms. The survey uncovered over 322,000 MBE firms producing over $10 billion in sales, one half of which were black-owned. OMBE grants helped establish a national network of minority business-assistance nonprofits, including the National Minority Purchasing Council, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the National Council of La Raza. SBA in 1969 also renamed and refocused its SBIC program to establish the Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Company program (MESBIC), which, while usually white-owned, provided venture capital through purchase of stock in minority-owned firms.
Black capitalist strategy was not only adopted by governments; many examples can be also be found of local African-American led initiatives, such as Rev. Leon H. Sullivan’s Opportunities Industrialization Center in Philadelphia (1964). The Center, an employment training program tied to the Rev. Sullivan’s church, was funded by his 10–36 plan (parishioners contributed $10 for 36 months). The proceeds established the Zion Non-Profit Charitable Trust which, with endowment support, started a number of subsidiary programs, probably the most notable being the Progress Investment Associates which built moderate-income housing. Finally, philanthropies such as the Taconic Foundation, which founded in 1967 the Cooperative Assistance Fund, a fund capitalized by infusions from nine other foundations, intended to invest in minority business firms. The Ford Foundation cooperated with this fund (Von Hoffman, 2012, pp. 23–4).
Another example (1968) was Pittsburgh’s Dorothy Mae Richardson and her block club. Originally formed to fight rats and landlords (redundant?) and improve access to housing loans, the club allied with a local bank and together set up an innovative program to make home loans and provide technical assistance to low-income neighborhood residents. They called their new program the Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS), which by mid-1970 had blossomed into the nationally renowned NHS program to be further described later. Other examples of local black capitalist programs include the East Los Angeles Mexican-American Community Union (TELACU); Cleveland’s Hough Area Development Corporation; and Father Louis Gigante’s South East Bronx Community Organization Development Corporation to serve Puerto Ricans. (von Hoffman, 2012, pp. 26–7).
Not without its successes, black capitalism, however, lost momentum rapidly. In a very short time, it was overwhelmed by a Du Bois-like African-American community development: community economic development.
Community Economic Development
Early Great Society/community development-related initiative programs struck a discordant note among many in black ghetto neighborhoods:
The rapidly weakening economic and social connections between the minority poor in inner-city neighborhoods and the larger world outside the neighborhoods [shifted over the following years] to a focus on self-reliance, separate development, and community control of public institutions … driven simultaneously by feelings of abandonment and an effort to assert pride and dignity in a distinct identity.
The shift sadly seemed to isolate/separate the neighborhood from racially mixed neighborhood initiatives/CDOs (Halpern, 1995, p. 84). But the Second Ghettos, Clark’s “Dark Ghettos” (Clark, 1965) were literally torn asunder or burnt down just as soon as new residents arrived. The southern Civil Rights Movement not only raised expectations, but also taught how political power could be used for social and political change. Prodded by the urban renewal Negro removal, facilitated by Community Action Programs, and triggered by ad hoc events—constant injustice, an increasingly sputtering Big City economy—these “communities within communities” organized and struck at the power arrayed against them, be it Robert Moses, city hall, bureaucrats, business, whatever. Dark Ghettos resurrected earlier notions about African-American neighborhoods as colonies, and, as Halpern noted, assimilation and black capitalism lost appeal; but, more importantly, they lost meaning to many—especially the younger generations.
Community economic development reemerged in the mid-1960s out of a growing conviction among a subsequent generation of inner city community leaders that the economic renewal of their communities was of little concern to the private sector or to government. … the goal of integration as a chimera and the American ideals of social and geographic mobility and equal opportunity as irretrievably corrupted … Community economic development thus served at first as a concrete expression … in an old idea in the African-American community, that of separate development … including an insistence on local control of as many social institutions … and self-reliance [as] an affirmation of black identity. (Halpern, 1995, p. 128)
Bennett Harrison saw such community economic development as “institution-building,” not as merely increasing per capita income or individual achievement. He saw it as “a substantial expansion of black businesses (particularly through cooperative forms of ownership) [and the] large-scale transfer to property to ghetto residents.” For him, community economic development involves “pre-vocational [remedial] and skill training” by these firms—and local control of schools, police and health facilities (Harrison, 1974, p. 13; internal citations omitted). The distinction to grasp is that community economic development can “look like” a black capitalist or traditional housing strategy. Its key purpose, however, is not integration and individual entrepreneurial success, but the advancement of a community, and its residents, as a whole.
What did follow from community economic development was its reliance upon the CDC as a flexible structure that could flow with trends, developing needs and entrepreneurial opportunities. In this view, CDCs are not merely bureaucratic structures, however; they are dependent upon a political and resident support for their success and continuity. While CDCs may not follow a community-organizing, path they must create “a solid base of political support within the community … to present a solid front to outside agencies” (Harrison, 1974, p. 22). The infusion of “political support” in a community economic development strategy, however, alters the criteria employed in the practice or implementation of programs and tools. This is most vividly expressed in the vast difference between mainstream ED business lending and community economic development. In the former the company that receives the loan is expected to pay the loan back; loans are made to firms with a reasonable expectation they can do so. This is not necessarily true for community economic development lending, which is less concerned about the loan be repaid than that the loan enables entrepreneurism, resilience, community visibility and a variety of social-psychological and identity factors of benefit to the larger community.
Community economic development as well as other CD approaches share a common need for a structure sufficiently flexible and suitably empowered to formulate, advocate and implement its strategies, and to utilize tools and manage programs. The nonprofit community development corporation (CDC) arrived on the CD scene during the 1960s and has remained the workhorse organization (CDO) of community development since. Accordingly, it is helpful to step back and examine what has become a cornerstone EDO for most American communities of size.
Community Development Corporations
The post-1960s’ CDC explosion and the huge variety of programs they administered make it impossible to single out any one as “typical.” One of the first CDCs to form was associated with an “asset-based development strategy and structure.” The Harlem Commonwealth Council (HCC) formed as a CDC in 1967 with assets of $15 million. HCC included “an office building, a factory manufacturing wood, metal and plastic interiors for supermarkets, an office equipment and furniture company, a dataprocessing facility, a foundry, a contract construction company, a pharmacy and a sewing/hi-fidelity store” (Harrison, 1974, p. 18). HCC’s “major purpose is the economic revitalization and on-going vitality of Harlem, enabling residents to actively participate in that vitality” by developing “assets/businesses” to provide employment, services, and quality of life to the neighborhood (Harrison, 1974, p. 18). The HCC conglomerate is still around (and vibrant) as I write this history. Many may think of CDCs as poor but poverty-stricken, store/church-front nonprofits. The HCC proves the opposite also was true.
Whether HCC was the first, who cares; earlier in 1964 the Ford Foundation made a sizeable grant to the Allegheny Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods (ACTION), founded in 1955 by Mayor David Lawrence and Richard King Mellon (our old urban renewal heroes) to improve city housing. The grant to ACTION was intended as a “proxy for local government, concentrating much more on economic development (than social services), and on residential and commercial building and renewal.” It was, as Domhoff asserts, a “distinction of considerable significance … An attempt to create an organizational structure relatively independent of local government for improving conditions in the inner city” (Domhoff, 2014, p. 7).
In 1965 another Ford grant was made to City Crusade against Poverty to train neighborhood leaders; and in 1966 yet another to the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, intended to unite corporate and neighborhood leaders in an effort to bring sizeable private firms into the ghetto to create jobs (“Jobs to People”). That, of course, was the CDC RFK and Javits funded, discussed earlier in the Black Capitalism section.
From its inception, the CDC was a structure sufficiently flexible to pursue different strategies and operate in different neighborhoods; it could be set up by churches, labor unions, Hispanic neighborhoods, white ethnics and, of course, African-Americans. In Chicago it funded Shel Trapp’s efforts as well as Gale Cincotta’s—both of which led anti-redlining programs intended to force banks to invest and instill appropriate real estate practices in changing neighborhoods. Within a decade of the Great Society, a national, state and local nonprofit community development network had sprung up—the foundation unit being a neighborhood-based community development corporation.
The first CDC’s were founded primarily by community activists … out of African-American social movements [or] ethnic organizing movements including Latino … many had religious roots … They tended to be large multifaceted organizations with a broad array of programs and large projects … Although many engaged in some form of housing development, they were more oriented to business and work force development than CDCs that began later. (Stoutland, 1999, pp. 196–7)
CD’s “comprehensiveness” concept embraces activities/programs from many policy areas as relevant to people-based community development. Schools and education, health and crime, recreation, policing and housing are just a few of the more common. Is a neighborhood housing entity a CDO? Is a CDC mental health clinic a CDO? Is a community nonprofit that operates a Head Start program, a sports league, lead-based paint removal program, a truancy program, a single mothers’ assistance program, a day care center, a furniture factory, a grocery store or an abortion counseling clinic a CDO? For most community developers, the answer to each question is likely yes—so long as it is community-controlled and located within a “distressed” neighborhood.
How is that measured? Chiefly by the number of board members who live in the neighborhood? Community participation has been a longstanding and exceedingly troublesome issue in community development, and a persistent concern in the CD literature. From its get-go with War on Poverty “maximum feasible participation,” it has not gone well. Governance often involves some tenuous imbalance among staff, city hall staff, funders, professionals in divergent disciplines and professions, community leaders, politicians, heads of key neighborhood institutions (often non-resident) and neighborhood residents. Good luck with community control if policy is made by this cattle stampede.
CDCs necessarily must possess one defining characteristic—they must serve a defined neighborhood or neighborhood-like geography (West Side). Their boards can be filled with domineering professionals and silent, even hostile residents; but if they provide people and/or physical or business-relevant services, they fit our bill. However, in this history when such an entity engages in political or social change or electoral– partisan action, they are defined as a “movement”—and move outside our definition of a CDC. Most community mobilization (organizing) organizations are not considered CDCs in this history.
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IN THE SEVENTIES
Community development exploded during the seventies. This history makes a concerted effort to distinguish between wings/movements in that the purposes of each are noticeably different, even though they serve the same low-income/distressed neighborhoods. The first wing combines two “sub-movements”: ACORN (the example discussed below)—labeled as “Neo-Alinsky” to differentiate it from Alinsky-style community organizing also prominent in the seventies. The next wing (Settlement Houses to Neighborhood Services) follows a path initially bushwhacked by social reformer Jane Addams’s settlement house which, post-Great Society, developed into a “comprehensive community services center CDC” often found in racially/ethnically homogenous neighborhoods. The final wing (From Housing/Slum Removal to Neighborhood Revitalization)
might be described as CD-lite in that it follows CD principles, uses CD tools and operates out of a CDC; but it typically pursues pure neighborhood revitalization as perceived by its residents—shorn of any meaningful social change or class consciousness.
Ron W. Coan 