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 homogeneous 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.
Community Organizing: ACORN and National People’s Action
Neo-Alinsky ACORN
Community organizing, as it evolved over the next half-century, is not just knocking on doors and mobilizing a neighborhood to respond to perceived or real threats (highways, redlining, urban renewal). The 1970s’-style Neo-Alinsky community mobilization/ organizing wing employs neighborhood-level citizen mobilization as a vehicle to leverage national social, political and economic change. This is not Alinsky-style community organizing. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a neo-Alinsky movement, departs from Alinsky’s pure neighborhood mobilization for neighborhood-level goals in favor of larger, even national objectives. On the other hand, the seventies’ Alinsky iteration, the National People’s Movement (see below) seeks to mobilize neighborhoods for neighborhood change.
For Fischer, “Neo-Alinsky projects in the 1970s employed the ideology of the new populism—decentralization, participatory democracy, self-reliance, mistrust of government and corporate institutions, empowering low-income and moderate-income people … connecting [them] with the national political process” (Fischer, 1994, p. 146). Neo-Alinskyism broke away from its founder’s goals, borrowed from his popularity, but retained much of his style and techniques. Neo-Alinskyism was a social movement, a class-based social movement whose goal was “to develop mass political organizations rooted in neighborhoods, grounded in local concerns, and focused on winning concrete gains. The goal was to advance social and economic democracy, empower people, and challenge power relations within and beyond the neighborhood” (Fisher, 1994, p. 146).
Neo-Alinskyism followed a “majoritarian strategy” geared primarily to the needs of low–moderate-income people. It was not restricted to a single ethnic group, a particular neighborhood or a racial minority. Neo-Alinskyism used local organizing to fuse a national coalition for change at the municipal, state and, especially, national level. In such an overt political context, community organizing, using economic development and other concerns, is viewed as a political movement with a vital local ED/CD agenda, not an EDO. As an earlier example, we could have chosen the Community Services Organization, founded in 1947 to advocate for California Latino civil and economic rights. Future Congressman Edward Roybal, founder of Community Services Community Services Organization, received his training from the Alinsky-Industrial Areas Foundation. The Community Service Organization trained Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
Our poster child for Neo-Alinskyism was ACORN, founded in 1970 in Little Rock Arkansas by Wade Rathke. Rathke got his training from the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). NWRO, founded in 1967, also deviated from Alinsky’s reliance on existing neighborhood institutions (especially churches and unions), emphasizing instead a house-to-house, knock on the door, sit at the kitchen table approach to identify issues (not necessarily neighborhood-level concerns) that could serve to mobilize targeted individuals in participating in a larger class-based movement (Thompson, 2016). “For ACORN the neighborhood was a ‘training ground’ or staging area from which to mount larger campaigns for democracy, equity and justice” (Fisher, 1994, p. 148). Coalitions among neighborhoods, and then cities and states, could be forged to advance issues at higher levels of government, or attacks on corporations. Alinsky opposed any sort of state or national organization as “potentially fascist.”
In 1970 Rathke organized six Little Rock low-income neighborhoods, found an issue (poor people’s access to furniture) and took it up the line to get Governor Winthrop Rockefeller to bring in a furniture warehouse. From that victory ACORN skyrocketed, moving onto school lunch programs, welfare rights, anti-blockbusting, public housing and even to a ‘Save the City’ campaign. In 1975 ACORN branched across the river to Texas, and by 1980 had 25,000+ dues-paying members in 19 states. Two years later, ACORN claimed 50,000 members in 26 states (Fisher, 1994, p. 152). By that time ACORN was involved in electoral politics.
No longer a neighborhood-based interest group, ACORN over the next 30 years became a vibrant national, state and local player in elections, using its voter registration and GOTV strengths. Other movement-based groups—for example the Massachusetts Fair Share, Public Research Interest Groups and Philadelphia’s Consumer’s Party— followed ACORN’s lead and much of its model.
If ACORN in my eyes is a political movement, not an EDO, one might wonder how it differs from chambers of commerce, or the Committee for Economic Development (CED). It would be hard, indeed, to argue that chambers do not represent class-based interests of the business community and CED the highest echelons of global capitalism. The nineteenth-century struggle against machines in our Big Cities also has to be thought of as class based, as was the chamber struggle against FDR’s New Deal. Our answer, probably unsatisfactory to many, is that chambers/CED created separate legal entities—such as civic reform clubs, PACs and industrial departments—and after the turn of the century endeavored to corral local partisanship through politically neutral staff professionalization. None of this was evident in ACORN.
Still, the line can be quite blurred, as evidenced in several western and southwestern postwar business “movements” (Abbott’s Neo-Progressives) that controlled city hall, pursuing a mostly ED agenda (Phoenix and San Antonio for example). Even in those instances, despite considerable overlap, chambers were legally and organizationally separate from the political movement organization. Neo-Alinsky community organizing, however, touches a rather raw nerve in that economic/community development not only extends into (local) politics, but also engages in activities/strategies that profoundly affect the operation and viability of the local policy system itself. While this history does not attempt to resolve this issue, others are welcome to try. That CD’s Neo-Alinsky movements add a new dimension to CD and maybe ED, however, is obvious.
Alinsky-style
Not all seventies’ community organizers were Neo-Alinsky. On Chicago’s west side, Alinsky-trained Shel Trapp and Gale Cincotta mobilized two neighborhoods by harassing real estate agents trying to create panic selling and confronting uncooperative public officials. Joining forces, they formed the West Side Coalition. Together Cincotta and Trapp established a national organization to support local neighborhood-based initiatives.
First they tapped a local network of financial backers, and then turned to Father Geno Baroni and his National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs. Earlier, Baroni had persuaded the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to create a Campaign for Human Development to organize low-income ethnic and African-American communities. Baroni used his contacts (the National Urban Coalition and Center for Community Change) to assist Cincotta in obtaining funding for a conference to bring together community activists across the nation (Domhoff, 2014, pp. 9–10). That conference was held in 1972, and attracted 2000 attendees from 74 cities. The conference founded National People’s Action (NPA), a nationwide organization for neighborhoods. In short order, the NPA founded the National Information and Training Center (NTIC) to train organizers in Alinsky-style actions.
Cincotta’s (Trapp, Baroni) efforts prove that, as early as 1972, whatever the wing, strategy or tool, neighborhood community development was cobbling together resources and national supportive networks that provided money, access and expertise which in turn permitted local CDOs to develop organizational power and impact. The NPA (which continues to this day) is only one example of many that could be cited. Earlier, this history asserted that by the early 1970s community development had already “evolved” a national organizational infrastructure composed of everything from CD trade associations and financing-networks to entities that bordered on “movements.” That this CD complex formed so rapidly and naturally, almost instinctively, deserves comment. Its contrast to the inner-focused American Economic Development Council (AEDC), the pre-1968 mainstay of classic mainstream economic development, is quite revealing and suggestive.
The Cincotta, Trapp, Baroni story does not end in 1972. Trapp, hired in 1973 by Chicago’s Catholic charities to engage in neighborhood organizing, pulled together a coalition of 20 neighborhood groups, called the Metropolitan Area Housing Alliance. Redlining was its first targeted issue. Together with the NPA, Trapp convinced the Chicago city council to approve an ordinance requiring banks lending in Chicago to publicly disclose their mortgage loans and deposits by geographic area. The gap between deposits and where banks made mortgages was quickly exposed. The Illinois state legislature passed similar legislation; by 1975, after lobbying by a network of organizations, Congress approved the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act that made national mortgage lending disclosure by medium and large banks compulsory. Northern Technologies International Corporation (NTIC) did the analysis from the data that followed, and a flood of neighborhood-based groups and formal organizations took advantage of its analysis and applied it to their neighborhoods. The author of this history did this in Buffalo (New York) in 1977. The pressure that followed led to Congress passing the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) (Squires, 1992).
CRA proved to be both a strategy and a tool for all CD wings in the decades that followed. Foundations, such as Ford and Charles Stewart Mott, provided financial support to community groups—the latter making over 218 community grants previous to 2002. Much of its success occurred in the 1980s, but the CRA is a platform neighborhood strategy that leverages any number of specific initiatives beyond redlining and community disinvestment. The methodology, analysis and data-driven CRA should be considered a CD tool. The strategy can serve different goals, such as ending racial discrimination, ending disinvestment in a neighborhood, leveraging other bank neighborhood involvement, commercial investment or neighborhood branch formation.
A final point concerning seventies’ Alinsky-style community organizing was that it was not confined to northern Big Cities; nor was it the exclusive preserve of Progressive CDOs. Alinsky community organizing essentially boils down to community-based pressure group politics. It could be used by anyone, for any number of reasons. Fisher asserts that “traditional Alinskyism” was most effective in MexicanAmerican communities in the southwest and west. In these efforts, the Catholic Church (as it did in Alinsky’s Chicago) played a major role. Alinskyite organizations like Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio, United Neighborhood Organizations in Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Organization in Houston played a vital role in a larger economic development agenda in their communities (Fisher, 1994, p. 147).
During the 1970s anti-abortion, anti-busing, and even those resisting neighborhood change, adopted community organizing and CDO structures. Restore our Alienated Rights (ROAR) in Boston may be one example of how white, middle-income neighborhoods embraced with some success Alinsky’s methods. While CDOs of this genre generate bitter reaction within Progressive-leaning community development, this does not temper the reality that Neo-Alinsky and Alinsky tools/structures are not exclusively Progressivist and that Privatist versions can exist as well.
From Settlement House to Neighborhood Services
Much of what had happened to political machines happened to settlement house/social worker neighborhood nexus after the Great Society. The New Deal, professionalization, and the Second Ghetto also took their toll (Trolander, 1987). Urban renewal, highways, and immigrant suburbanization were definitely unhelpful. By the 1950’s neighborhood settlement houses were seriously stressed.
Neighborhood-based services did not disappear completely. At least until the late 1950s most inner city neighborhoods managed to sustain a diverse set of recreational and cultural programs for children and youth, public health nurses … vestiges of street corner social work with gangs … and schools continued to make sporadic efforts. (Halpern, 1995, p. 150)
Gray Areas and MFY funded settlement houses to conduct their experiments in contemporary community development—and then the Great Society waltzed into the neighborhood.
Neighborhood racial and ethnic change and the Second Ghetto isolated older settlement houses and furthered the gap social work (and education) professionalism had created. In majority-black neighborhoods, community action’s maximum feasible participation and community control essentially finished the job. CAPs assumed neighborhood service responsibility and it was not long before Head Start became a cornerstone neighborhood services program. In neighborhoods without a CAP, government bureaucracies assumed a greater role in providing services to low-income and underclass—the traditional clientele of the settlement houses. Professionally, government social work paid better than settlement house, and clinical social work beat out traditional social work. With government taking over the most desperate, settlement houses restricted their clientele to those who could pay and to those they could help. By the early 1970s for all practical purposes, CD-related neighborhood services had been taken over by HUD/CDBG-funded CDCs.
The neighborhood center of today is very different from the settlement house of the early years. Then a white, female college graduate, without an M.S.W. headed the typical house. She [and staff] probably lived in the settlement house. The surrounding neighborhood was likely to consist of poor whites. Advocacy … [meant] settlement workers speaking on behalf of the poor. In 1986 a black male with an M.S.W. heads the typical settlement house, now called a neighborhood center. He may live out in the suburbs … The center’s clientele is mostly black, and the poor insist to a certain extent to speak for themselves. (Trolander, 1987, p. 235)
At this point the provision of former settlement neighborhood services in majority black neighborhoods intersects with both community control and ghetto as colony seeking liberation. In such neighborhoods, services became mostly subsumed under “community economic development.”
The poor were no longer underserved per se, but acquired services from a fragmented, hard to fathom, confusing to access “system” that appeared incoherent to the user: “There were more entry points, service sites, categorical programs, and specialized roles” than ever (Halpern, 1995, p. 184). Slipping through the cracks could be catastrophic. On top of inevitable difficulties of providing health, education, police and social services was the need to coordinate them, evaluate them as an aggregate and keep track of the unfortunates making their way through the maze. Old-style CD “comprehensiveness” had become redefined into a Gray Areas/MFY coordination nightmare.
Neighborhood service CDCs were related to or derivatives of OEO’s War on Poverty. As OEOs came under attack in LBJ’s later years, it funded an association of CDCs under OEO’s Title VII. That organization, the National Congress for Community Economic Development (NCCED), was helpful in securing support to extend OEO’s existence—but at a cost of restricting membership in NCCED to fewer than 40 Title VII CDCs. In 1977, NCCED opened up membership. While initially successful, larger more diverse membership generated internal conflicts and membership turnover. Western state Hispanic and Native American groups spun off their own organization. By 1980 NCCED members still lingered about 40 groups. The organization teetered on the edge. In that year, however, Robert Zdenek became president with a mission to expand membership and deal with a variety of CD issues. When Title VII was discontinued, NCCED was instrumental in creating the Office of Community Services Discretionary Fund—a fund which continues to provide financing critical to CDCs.
Over the following decade NCCED helped develop a network of supportive organizations (such as Friends of Rural Development, Coalition for Low-Income Community Development, the Council for Community-Based Development, National Community Reinvestment Coalition and Religious Congregations as Partners). Membership grew to 700–800 organizations. Today it struggles with its role as a “trade organization” or an advocacy group—linking local CDCs with the vast array of foundations and policy institutes that currently exist. A network of state chapters provides an additional layer of networking and resources. A survey, Against All Odds, published originally in 1989 and updated in 1991 and 1995, describes through case studies accomplishments of CDCs in neighborhood services and neighborhood-level community economic development.
From Housing/Slum Removal to Neighborhood Revitalization
Our last CD neighborhood-based wing emerged from the shadows of UR, interstate highways and sixties’ suburban-induced Big City neighborhood decline. To me this new neighborhood CDO provided a home for a new generation that in earlier periods might have been CD housers, thirties’ neighborhood and recreational planners like Perry, and “lovers of place” who valued their home stomping grounds and were determined to protect and preserve memories of their home. These CDOs are not the homeowner associations of Privatopia to be found in Chapter 19; nor are they trying to save the world through social change. They want to “revitalize” their neighborhood and preserve its identity for future generations.
These CDOs are “neighborhood organizations that limited their focus to community development in a single low and moderate-income neighborhood and looked skeptically on projects to build new institutions or amass power for external uses … social change or a new political movement” (Fisher, 1994, p. 157). What they feared most was physical deterioration and neighborhood economic base weakness, often caused by thoughtless actions of outsiders—institutional, government and corporate—against which an unorganized neighborhood could not protect itself. They often rejected alliances with neighboring CDOs, and glorified in a Springsteen kind of way their “glory days”—yearning to bring about their return. They defined their relevant sub-municipal competitive hierarchy and tried to increase their standing in it. Such CDOs combined different activities (housing, traditional ED and neighborhood services) and functions (interest group and social networking) that chambers of commerce performed for the business community.
As an example, the Southeast Baltimore Community Organization (SECO), incorporated in 1970, actually starts in 1966 when the Baltimore City Council approved plans to put in a six-lane highway (Interstate 83), demolishing hundreds of homes in southeast Baltimore neighborhoods. Close to downtown and waterfront, SE Baltimore housed 95,000 second-generation white ethnics. It was not a slum or predominantly low income—rather, working and middle class. Activists including future Senator Barbara Mikulski (godmother of SECO) formed a loose coalition—the Southeast Council against the Road (SCAR). Eventually, I-83 was stopped by qualifying one neighborhood for the Register of Historic Places.
In the course of highway opposition, coalition members shared a variety of issues and concerns, ranging from urban renewal to redlining, a threatened industrial rezoning, declining social services and lack of new schools. Task forces were formed, research done and individual projects selected for action—keep a library open or set up a recycling center, for example. In April 1971, with more than 1000 present, 90 neighborhood organizations joined together to create SECO, an umbrella CDO. From the beginning, it was a coalition of block clubs, churches, union locals and ethnic fraternal organizations. When appropriate, SECO used Alinsky tactics, but its hallmark was not to burn bridges with city hall. SECO focused on issues, not institutions, politicians or enemies. It would work with anyone to solve a problem.
Its first formal program in 1974 was a youth program, but during the seventies it won zoning changes, kept open a public nursing home, got a residentially friendly traffic pattern approved; secured better city services; housing inspection teams; a school program; a neighborhood health program; and an anti-juvenile delinquency program. Eventually it got a Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) program and moved into housing development, building hundreds of units using a housing development subsidiary (SDI). SECO established a community-controlled arts and crafts company that sold goods made by elderly and disabled residents, and founded a primary health care facility that served 3000 patients a month. It also founded a neighborhood-based commercial revitalization CDO, the Highlandtown Revitalization Corporation. In 1971 SECO had one paid staff member; six years later 41 (Fisher, 1994, pp. 157–61). Probably each Big City (and many second tier) in the North and Midwest formed a CDO similar in style, organization and activities to SECO. By the seventies’ end there were hundreds.
These neighborhood CDOs got their start as a “defensive mobilization” against an outside intruder that threatened negative impacts. Once the initial confrontation was over, these informal coalitions followed a number of paths. Many closed up shop; others like SECO started small and built themselves into a neighborhood CD conglomerate, combining activism, services and neighborhood-level mainstream physical, economic and community development. Our assessment is that the seventies were the high point for mainstream, business-assistance/ED tools and strategies. Commercial revitalization and asset-based community development (starting factories, stores, businesses as subsidiaries) were hallmarks of this period—less prevalent in future decades.
By the 1980s more CDOs fixed upon some form of housing development as their core competency. Housing had always been a CD priority, and by this point a considerable body of knowledge, expertise and tools had been assembled. Housing was visible, and with reasonably sophisticated management, investment was easier. Housing was less risky, more predictable and attracted more and more CDOs into its orbit. The prototype neighborhood housing CDC was the NHS. During the decade several critical and highly important tools and programs developed from individual initiatives in several cities. Each of these tools or programs started from a single initiative and over time evolved, in two cases with profound federal involvement, into a national system able to be tapped into by CDOs, neighborhoods.
NHS
The first started from Pittsburgh’s Central Northside block club led by Dorothy Mae Richardson. Its campaign to obtain housing loans for low-income neighbors attracted local bank and foundation support. A first ever program was founded to provide home loans to non-bankable applicants and provide counseling and technical assistance to sustain homeownership and maintain a quality home. The new program was called Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS). The NHS innovation was picked up on by the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB), and in 1973 the FHLB joined with HUD to create a task force whose hope was to take the Pittsburgh experiment nationwide. The task force added a key element, a secondary market, where these low-income mortgages could be sold to investors as a way of creating a revolving mortgage fund for new mortgages. They launched the program and by 1978, 60 NHS programs had been established. Congressional legislation transformed the task force into the National Reinvestment Corporation (subsequently renamed NeighborWorks America) that branched out into rural communities (its first being in West Rutland VT). Over the next four decades, NHS expanded to 240 communities.
Community Land Trust
In a similar vein, learning and copying from a diverse variety of international projects/experiments,1 Ralph Borsodi, Robert Swann and Charles Sherrod founded the first American “community land trust” (CLT), New Communities Inc., in 1969 near Albany Georgia. The goal of New Communities was to secure good land for future African-American farmers. New Communities purchased a 5000-acre farm and platted it for lease (ground leasing) to homesteads and cooperatives. New Communities operated for about 20 years; in the 1970s about a dozen rural CLTs started.
A CLT is a nonprofit 501© (3) that acquires land in a target area with the intention of retaining control over the land forever. Any asset on the land, for example a building, can be sold, but the land is only leased to users so long as acceptable to the purposes for which the CLT was incorporated. The CLT retains extensive rights and can preserve quality of structures and enforce compatible uses. In the event of lease default, the CLT can reacquire control. The CLT board of directors is composed of leaseholders, neighborhood residents and institutional representatives from entities responsible for the founding and subsequent operation of the CLT. The model was extended into urban areas/neighborhoods as a solution to such problems as affordable housing, gentrification and displacement. The first urban CLT, the Community Land Cooperative of Cincinnati (1981), dealt with displacement of low-income blacks. Perhaps the best known CLT, founded in the mid-1980s, was an element of Boston’s Dudley Neighborhood Initiative.
South Shore Bank
The last example of a seventies CD program/tool is Chicago’s South Shore Bank. South Shore Bank is valuable as an example of seventies’ CD, but also for its business model that challenged a CD core principle. As frequently noted, much of post-Great Society CD is uncomfortable with “capitalism” (for lack of a better word). An important CD explanation for distressed neighborhood decline is disinvestment—by various profitseeking entities. Bank lending and anti-redlining, as already discussed, were early on and core post-Great Society CD strategies. South Shore Bank demonstrated how capitalism can be used, albeit reshaped a bit, into “community capitalism” (Taub, 1988) to promote neighborhood revitalization.
The reader might be aware South Shore Bank commenced operations in 1972—and went into receivership in 2010. A consortium of private and public investors supported a takeover by Urban Partnership Bank, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) picked up 80 percent of its losses ($347 million). The bank has reopened and the multi-city network of “Shore Banks” has been spun off and continues independently. The default was caused in part by the 2008 financial collapse; a post-2000 weakness in lending standards; a sustained decline that seems related to post-2000 job losses and declines in household income; and a bit of being “too big for its britches” taking management’s eyes off the ball. The bank operated successfully for the better part of three decades; its business model still, in my eyes, constitutes a useful model for future generations.
Community organizing anti-redlining applies pressure through CRAs to encourage/ require existing bank investment within city neighborhoods. South Shore Bank used a different model: it created “a self-sustaining [bank with an] independent capital base, and the discipline of the profit motive … a bank that could be tough-minded about loans … satisfy bank examiners, make a profit, and still transform an inner-city neighborhood without [gentrification] (Grzywinski, 1991, p. 88). Three knowledgeable, concerned professionals blocked the bank’s move to the suburbs in 1972. Shortly after, they acquired the bank. The old South Shore had seriously disinvested in its service area in response to neighborhood and racial transition. The goal of the new owners was to reverse disinvestment so residents could invest in their neighborhood.
Acknowledging that neighborhoods compete for everything—resources, businesses, people, skills (a sort of neighborhood competitive hierarchy)—they wanted to ensure South Shore could compete. To compete, neighborhood deterioration could not be pervasive and extensive—recognizing that distressed neighborhoods are not identical and that a minimum level of viability was required if neighborhood revitalization was to be achieved. South Shore recognized its most viable asset was its housing stock. Accordingly, it turned to housing rehabilitation, encouraging and financing a series of rehabilitation entrepreneurs to restore neighborhood housing.
Using their bank holding company, they set up subsidiaries, including a CDC that bought apartment buildings in targeted areas and rehabbed them, while funding entrepreneurs to rehab neighboring buildings. The CDO initially rehabbed three buildings and Shore Bank-financed housing rehabbers finished up 17 more. Attracting large foundation investment to finance new acquisitions to rehab, more buildings were tackled. Alongside this strategy, a variety of patient, risk-insensitive deposits, which for the most part paid competitive interest rates, ensured the bank had sufficient capital to both lend and for reserves to satisfy bank examiners. They also recognized that small deposits were too costly, and took steps to ensure their deposits made them profits. They reached outside the neighborhood for socially conscious investors attracted to their purposes—but they paid competitive interest rates. Their strategy was to reverse disinvestment, but also to restore neighborhood competitiveness. Over the following decades, their model expanded to Cleveland and Detroit. The eventual bank failure, however, suggests a South Shore Bank model alone cannot revitalize a neighborhood, and strongly points to neighborhood’s economic base, its jobs, occupations and income generation as critical elements of a sustained revitalization.
CDFI
The bank’s mission was amplified in the summer of 1992 when a guy named Clinton visited on his way to the White House. He pledged, if elected, to fund 100 South Shore Banks (and 1000 microenterprise centers). A coalition of CD loan funds, banks and credit unions, microenterprise lenders, community venture funds and CDCs thought this was an idea worth living up to, so they formed the Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Coalition in the same year.2 In July 1993 Clinton submitted to Congress legislation that, among other features, established an agency, the CDFI Fund. The bill passed in 1994; the agency was located in the Department of the Treasury. The CDFI Fund is a federal market-based approach to support financial institutions in economically disadvantaged communities. Its goal is to inject capital into neighborhoods lacking sustained access to (residential/commercial) investment capital.3
Ron W. Coan 