May/Jun 1996
Issue #87
Soul of the Neighborhood
Since their early years, community-based organizations have been about change. The goal has been to reverse the decay and disinvestment of our poor inner-city and rural communities. While neighborhood destruction was most readily seen in crumbling housing, every part of the community needed rebuilding. CDCs and other community-based housing organizations have been rebuilding the “social fabric”—strengthening families, building neighborhood associations and networks, empowering residents to take charge of their neighborhoods by teaching them how to organize, interact with government, and manage their buildings. Articles in this issue discuss CDCs from a few perspectives. Alice Shabecoff and Paul Brophy think it’s time for CDCs to speak up and be clear about the role they’ve undertaken. Randy Stoecker argues that CDCs dance to the tune of bankers, foundations, and government programs and cannot be responsive to the community. CDCs are so poorly funded and staffed that they rarely have the professionalism and capacity to make any significant physical impact on their communities.
Empowering Redevelopment: Toward a Different CDC
The community development corporation (CDC) has crept relatively quietly into the struggle to rebuild cities in the last 30 years. CDCs have built housing, started small businesses, and provided social […]
Citywide CDCs: Chicago CDCs Increase Efficiency
It’s time for community-based CDCs to think strategically about how they can survive the onslaught of challenges currently facing them.
Shelter Shorts
The Rich Get Richer Still… The Census Bureau recently found that the gap between incomes of the most affluent Americans and everyone else was wider than since the end of […]
Organize! Shedding Some Light on Fighting the Right
Draconian cutbacks in health, welfare and housing services, attacks on the civil rights of people of color, gays and lesbians, immigrants, and the reproductive rights of all women has solidified […]
Habits of the Heart
Habits of the Heart, by Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. 1986. Berkeley, California, University of California Press. Updated with a new introduction […]
Washington News and Views
National Advocacy Groups Write to Leach, Banking Committee Democrats On CRA By Allen Fishbein Twelve national community reinvestment and housing development groups have written to House Banking Committee Chair Jim […]
Community Building Finds a Home
What do community-based, affordable housing developers do? We know they build houses: bricks and mortar, glass and steel, places where people live. But that’s not all, is it? Since their […]