What is Community Economic Development?


When we center the empowerment and capacity-building capabilities of poor working-class people of color, at its best, CED enables these communities to work within their neighborhoods to develop strategies that encourage economic, social, and political power, but at its worst CED is a social, political, and economic tool whereby corporations and politicians benefit more than the people themselves. Many times CED does both at the same time. As it is today, CED is not a a strategy that dismantles the racist and capitalistic society that perpetuates systemic poverty in poor communities of color, but it has the possibility to

Best Case Scenario: Ced empowers poor working class communities of color's capacity to work economically, socially, and politically flourish with the help of some outside government agencies.

CED has the possibility to dismantle capitalism, but as we see it today, it tends work within a racial capitalist system to encourage economic growth, within communities. It can provide specific individual support for individual communities but not for poor working class people as a whole.

Worst Case Scenario: cEd while seemingly a strategy to develop a community. It's actually goal is to economically develop the geographical area, but not necessarily the people in the area. In many cases, the corporations and politicians benefit more than the community residents themselves..

Ced approach focuses on all aspects of the community and the people living there: economic, social, political, and others.

Rooted in a "power-approach" to community development that centers the residents in the community and seeks to develop power and control for those community members

It is about building collective political capabilities. As David Harvey notes in "The Right to the City"

Community Organizing with Community Developing

Examples

Rooted in the Functionalist model "argues that society tends toward natural equilibrium and its division of labor develops through an almost natural matching of individual talents and societal needs" (Stoeker, 2001)

cEd approach which focuses on monetary transactions, increasing income of residents, and providing job opportunities for people who are in the neighborhood.

Benefits Politicans historically and contemporarily

History of Empowerment Zones

Hillary Clinton's empowerment zones

Public Housing "failure"--> Pruitt Igoe

Benefit corporations and has been benefiting corporations

Community residents and organizations can be harmed more by the actions of these CDCs

CDCs can be harmful.

Internal competition between community led organizations for money

CDCs can make other orgs look really radical

CDCs must work with corproatiosn to succeed, so dependnt on their money and their fiances . Therefore, corproations have influence in the CDCs

CDCs are also very popular with foundations and government sign that they are benefiting somewhat from this in terms of social capital

"people's need for a transformed economy providing a wealth of good jobs becomes replaced with training programs for people to compete for an extremely limited good job pool. People's need for affordable housing that is controlled by its occupants becomes replaced by a tradeoff between expansive home ownership and affordable rental housing. People's need for high quality health, daycare, and other services becomes translated into sporadic, overcrowded, and inefficient low quality stop-gap programs. Not only an a model emphasizing cooperation and denying class conflict not work to end poverty and oppression, its not even supposed to work "

“The community organizing model is much better suited for attacking the structural barriers that prevent poor communities from lifting themselves up. In a capitalist society, equal competitors make deals because each either has something to offer or something to take away. But when CDCs attempt to make deals with these power holders, they have nothing with which to bargain. They are in the powerless position of begging--for lower loan rates, reduced construction costs, more open hiring practices, etc. CDCs have little to offer as inducement for power-holders to say yes, and little to withhold if they say no. The community organizing model, however, substitutes the lack of money resources with people resources. The bargaining chip poor communities have is their cooperation. If they can collectively withhold their cooperation or, even more powerfully, can disrupt the activities of power holders, they have something to bargain with (Piven and Cloward 1979)”

"The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: It is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves, it want to argue, is one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights

Ownership

Community Land Trusts

Project Row Houses is just one example

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CDCs can be provide good too.

The Lawrence Community Works is a CDC in Massachusetts that has successfully worked for the community to develop affordable housing, parks, youth programs, and much more in collaboration with community residents

The goal may not always be to empower communities to control their own destiny. CED is its own industry with its own motivations