The National Community Development Initiative (NCDI), formed in 1991, has invested over $150 million in CDCs and related community development activities in 23 cities. This executive summary highlights findings from an ongoing study of the impact of this investment on CDCs and the local systems that support them.
The study was conducted jointly by Christopher Walker of the Urban Institute and Mark Weinheimer of Weinheimer & Associates. To order a copy of the full report, please contact the Urban Institute Publications Sales Office at (202) 261-5687.
There are signs of rebirth in America's inner city. For a generation after the riots in Watts sounded the alarm on the crisis in urban America, poor neighborhoods hemorrhaged investment, jobs, and residents. For the people who remained, indicators of social health worsened—crime rates, teen pregnancies, infant deaths, and drug and alcohol use rose sharply. Trends seem to be improving; most dramatically, urban crime rates have dropped to levels not seen since the early 1970s. Banks, retailers, and others have turned serious attention to the untapped potential of inner-city markets; property values appear to be on an upward curve.
Seizing the new urban opportunities will require hard work, but there are assets to build on in helping further community change. Although some traditional community institutions—businesses, churches, voluntary associations—have lost considerable strength over the past 30 years, community-based entrepreneurs have created new organizations to keep the work of community renewal going. We believe that these community development corporations (CDCs), acting in concert with neighborhood and city leaders, have helped to create the conditions for sustained positive change.
CDCs in many cities are now the most productive developers of affordable housing for low-income residents, outstripping private developers and public housing agencies. In the cities examined as part of this study, CDCs have developed more than 90,000 units of housing since 1991. CDCs have also been active developers of commercial, office, and industrial space in neighborhoods that have seen jobs flee to suburban areas and low-wage countries; CDCs developed more than 23 million square feet of this space through 1993, according to one estimate.
CDCs are self-help organizations, governed by residents, businesspeople, and other leaders of the communities they serve. They plan improvements to solve local problems, building on neighborhood assets. The number of CDCs has grown steadily over the past 20 years, and CDCs are now located in every large and medium-sized city in the country. With support from private and public sources, CDCs have increasingly become involved in providing—or working with others to provide—an array of community-building activities such as job training and linkage, child care, youth counseling and programming, cultural arts projects, and community advocacy and organizing.
This summary documents the rapidly expanding capabilities of CDCs in the 23 U.S. cities included in the National Community Development Initiative (NCDI). The consortium was formed in 1991 by leading national foundations and corporations, joined later by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). NCDI has provided an unprecedented amount of funding to boost the ability of CDCs to effect community improvement and thereby demonstrate the promise of these groups. This report assesses how CDCs are doing today compared with how they were doing in 1991. It focuses on the changes in community development support systems in NCDI-assisted cities during that time.
Our findings reveal a surge in CDC capability, progress attributable to the rapid spread of new capacity-building programs, an influx of public and private money into community development, and the start-up and expansion of local collaborations among business, foundation, and city government leaders to promote community development and CDCs.
Over the next four years, NCDI will continue the work it began in 1991. As this assessment reveals, NCDI has demonstrated that national funders, working through strong intermediaries, can build community capacity through increased coordination among local public and private institutions.
We reached these conclusions after an impartial look at CDCs' successes and shortcomings. To the greatest extent possible, we have used quantifiable measures to make our assessments and specific examples to highlight our conclusions.
Note: The text above is a portion of the complete document. This chapter is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF). Summary | Full Report
Community Development in the 1990s, by Christopher Walker and Mark Weinheimer, is available from the Urban Institute Press (paper, ISBN 0-87766-695-4, $20.00). To obtain a copy call (202) 261-5687 or 1-877-UIPRESS.
