This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Moving Community Development Forward
Community development is many things to many people. Organizations that say they do “community development” work do an average of nine different things, according to the Grounding Values research released last year. Those things vary by the needs and priorities of their communities and constituents. Most do something with development and something with housing, but even that work can vary a lot, from weatherization to single-family construction, to rowhouse rehab and beyond. They also do a ton of other things—including provide services, conduct planning processes, support community building, and carry out advocacy.
That’s one of the reasons why community development has always been so hard to define.
The community development field is in an interesting and challenging spot right now. It is facing the threat of legal action from right-wingers, funders who are getting cold feet about race-explicit remedies, and competition for land and buildings from predatory financial firms. It will likely benefit from the new wave of support for increasing housing supply and dismantling exclusionary zoning, but at the same time it’s still struggling to get funding and attention to the equally crucial need to preserve existing affordable housing.
Those who work in the community development field are recognizing that the field is not immune to the forces of structural racism that pervade other facets of our society, and they are trying to figure out how to change their own processes and procedures to fix that, before it burns out the field’s leaders of color. They are trying to figure out how to work in an expanded housing justice landscape alongside tenant organizers, social housing advocates, resident-controlled housing models, housing supply advocates, and more.
In our new Under the Lens series—Moving Community Development Forward—we start to explore this moment in community development by looking at some recent research on the field. Then we’ll bring you a mix of reported stories and commentary from the field examining challenges, tensions, and promising approaches to questions of identity, alliances, and leadership.
We encourage you to weigh in! What does community development mean to you and/or your organization? Email us at [email protected] with your definition.
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5 thoughts on “Which Way Community Development?”
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Community development today must demonstrate expertise in public policy terms, at a metro level, with the ability to influence adopted policies, distinct from the conventional idea of funding programs, projects, and initiatives on a fiscal year basis. The field suffers from old practices based upon short-term gains rather than taking a long-term, strategic, policy-oriented perspective.
Furthermore, when it comes to the “forces of structural racism”, which has become the go-to reason for socio and economic disparities, completely ignores the role of “minority”, “people of color”, and “progressive” political actors holding office, passing policies which continue to negatively impact the communities they represent. Why is this reality missing from any analysis of community disparities, polarities, and displacement? I do not understand why we overlook this old practice, lacking transparency and accountability.
Can’t wait to see this series get rolled out!
Looking forward to it, but please include a piece by Miriam herself. Her experience and insights are invaluable.
One must always remember that is just not an issue of structural racism, it is an issue of who unregulated capitalism has left behind, which includes destitute whites. There is no question that Blacks and Browns are disproportionately homeless, but homelessness today must recognize that the crisis is due to relegating the underclass — white, Black or Brown — to lives that don’t matter. They are the detritus of surplus labor that is built into our economic system.
Absolutely. That is completely true. But it’s the racism that makes it so easy for us to politically ignore and criminalize the homeless–another example of how racism hurts everyone, including poor whites, and props up capitalism.