Issue #172

Have we lost faith in our friends? Results driven standards killed a system meant to help in ways beyond the quantifiable. We need trust to revive the model.

We asked our readers why they thought housing development had become so central to community development. While over three-quarters responded that it’s because it transforms lives and neighborhoods, nearly half […]

Lessons from three decades of state CDC network formation.

To truly help a neighborhood you need a lead agency to organize, plan, and coordinate many actors.

How do CDCs transform—or not—along with the communities they serve?

Last November, we surveyed readers about what they thought the rise of high-capacity nonprofit housing developers meant for neighborhood-based community developers that use real estate as a tool in their […]

What do community development intermediaries do these days, and why do we need them?

High-capacity nonprofit housing enterprises that can achieve efficiencies of scale have an important role to play in addressing the affordable housing crisis and policy makers should help them do so.

CDCs and their support organizations consider what it takes to weather the recession—from business model changes to different funding streams to mergers.

Staying relevant in a changing economy will push CDCs to place importance on green initiatives, sustainability, and out-of-the box funding methods.

National organizations adapting to meet the needs of growing minority populations should throw their funding behind well-established grassroots

There is a narrative out there about how much of community development has lost its soul — community development has become too much about Development and not enough about Community, […]

Sometimes to understand our own cities and community development practices it is helpful to understand a radically different setting. In the slums of Mumbai one thing is immediately evident: the […]

If you think what’s wrong with CDCs today is their failure to “go to scale,” you are looking in the fundamentally wrong direction, asking the wrong questions. While I do […]

Q & A with Kimberley Burnett

For nearly half a century, community development corporations (CDCs) have been a tool of choice for organizing and implementing grassroots economic development programs. Emerging in the aftermath of the civil […]

The changing face of achieving equity in health, education, and housing in the United States.

Over the following pages, our authors explore many aspects of the community development field, and especially the role of community development corporations in it. But we know you have opinions too. To set the stage, last year we invited our readers to take a survey about how they understood the community development field and community development corporations. The survey was promoted through our weekly newsletter and social media. We got about a hundred responses.

Investing in What Works for America’s Communities, edited by Nancy O. Andrews and David J. Erickson. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Low Income Investment Fund, 2012, 419 pp. Free ebook.

What is a CDC? Many a meeting among those in the field has descended into argument about what is inside and outside the line. It was inevitable that in designing […]

Preventing the development of new affordable housing in close proximity to freeways isn’t a just solution to the health effects of LA’s air pollution.