Community action for the 1990s. - Review - book reviews

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by Louis Winnick

THANKS to its success and growth, the community-development approach to urban renewal is finally attracting serious scholarly attention. As documented in Urban Problems and Community Development, [ ] a volume of essays based on a Brookings Institution conference, the movement is long past its role as bit player, when George Sternlieb, former director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University, joked that the raison d'etre of grassroots development organizations was to warm the hearts and open the purses of credulous foundation trustees. Today, community-development programs are concrete, widespread, and effective. The movement's prime instrument is the Community Development Corporation (CDC), which takes the lead role in developing and restoring low-income housing in forsaken neighborhoods. The larger, more sophisticated CDCs have ripened into versatile real-estate entrepreneurs and mortgage brokers, and often provide such social services as day care, health clinics, and job training.

Community-based development takes many organizational forms. CDCs range from a score of blocks with a couple of thousand residents to large expanses containing over 100,000 people. The range of annual operating budgets is equally wide, from less than $500,000 to over $25 million. All ethnicities are represented, though blacks and Hispanics predominate. But despite their diversity, CDCs share a common thread: They are locally controlled, typically by a board of neighborhood residents, businesses, and social institutions, and they seek the improvement of a defined territory. What often began as a desk in the corner of a church has become a large-scale professional real-estate and social-service operation. Since 1970, the number of CDCs has grown from an estimated 200 to nearly 3,000.

Numerous factors account for the movement's astonishing rise, which began with the Ford Foundation's Gray Areas program. These pilot programs were later undergirded and multiplied by the Great Society's Community Action Program and later by Model Cities. The Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, once the CDC prototype, has spawned numerous counterparts throughout the nation. But the definitive factor in the spread and increasing influence of CDCs was the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. CRA generated a major flow of capital that eclipsed the comparatively thin and episodic support of private philanthropy. Federal tax credits further augmented these capital flows and extended investments to low-income housing. Banks and savings institutions, now required to restore mortgages and commercial credits to fallen neighborhoods, discovered quickly that the more firmly established community-development organizations were the most accountable clients, both as direct borrowers and as intermediaries, advi sors, and monitors. As a result, the Local Initiative and Support Corporation (LISC) and the Enterprise Foundation, community development's primary national umbrellas, have attracted billions in private capital.

THE meteoric growth of CDCs and related grassroots initiatives owes much to their appeal across the political spectrum. The antistatist Right saluted community development as a proxy for government, which might shield the succored poor from the dead hand of bureaucracy. For example, the experimental prototype of Neighborhood Housing Services, which began in Pittsburgh and was the model for nearly a thousand more NHSs that followed, was wholly funded by the conservative Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation. Scaife conceived the NHS as an instrument to spur private mortgage investment for low-income housing rehabilitation, thereby skirting all federal money and regulations. The confounding irony is that the overwhelming majority of NHS replicates ignored this strategy and eventually sought as much government subsidy as they could lay their hands on.

On the opposite end, of the ideological spectrum, radical activists envisioned community-based organizations as weapons of political empowerment, instruments to liberate the poor from chronic neglect. From the radical perspective, government subsidies, no matter how generous, are chains of oppression unless there is grassroots autonomy. Empowerment became the regnant buzzword, a term President Clinton deftly swiped by redubbing Enterprise Zones as Empowerment Zones. And so government programs came to occupy the middle ground between Right and Left, adopting community-based organizations as a convenient layer of administrative governance in dilapidated areas where government alone was destined to fail.

But the extraordinary political consensus favoring community development entities falls short of unanimity. For example, several essays in Urban Problems and Community Development rehearse the decades-long debate about whether the primary purpose of subsidies is to uplift the status of dysfunctional families or to restore the viability of dysfunctional neighborhoods. The volume recalls yesteryear's attack by John Kain and others against "gilding the ghetto" (an attack famously revived a couple of years ago by Nicholas Lemann in the New York Times Magazine). It is unforgivably wasteful, say the anti-gildists, to pump huge subsidies into broken neighborhoods, whose departed jobs and institutions are hopelessly irretrievable and where barely any semblance of social structure remains.