Social Justice and the City
In the aftermath of the housing market crash, community development took on a new role by moving from organizing around specific geographies to organizing around people’s identities beyond neighborhoods.
2010
President Barack Obama signs the Affordable Healthcare Act into law
2010
Purpose Built Communities and the Network Model
In the aftermath of the Global Recession, metropolitan areas across America were struggling with abandonment, foreclosures, population shifts, and speculation. Community development began to focus on returning to comprehensive planning and service provisions, creating the Network Model similar to the Comprehensive Community Initiative of the Nineties. Based on the East Lake Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia, Purpose Built Communities shows how building solidarity between like-minded organizations – “organizing the organizations” – can produce successful community development. The organization does not provide direct financial support, but rather assists member organizations with grant-writing and networking opportunities. It emphasizes the necessity of local leadership and buy-in to produce successful projects. Bringing stakeholders together is essential to creating vibrant economies and social systems.
2011
Choice Neighborhoods Initiative
When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the term ‘community organizer’ entered the American lexicon. When his administration sought to create a successor to the HOPE VI program, its goal was to tackle poverty by providing competitive grants to fund the redevelopment and revitalization of neighborhoods with concentrations of poverty and/or publicly-subsidized housing. Embedded as a part of the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative (NRI), the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CHI) allowed applicants to self-identify their ‘neighborhood’ so that spaces could be more than just the subsidized housing property. Applications weren’t just restricted to housing authorities, encouraging the formation of coalitions.1
Image: Jersey City Housing Authority
Place-Based Activism to Community-Based Activism
Image: Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development
Activism and community organizing cannot be effective on a large scale if they exist in siloes. In the past, the default model for organizing was issue-based, and its critical flaw was that it disbanded as soon as the issue was resolved. Networks for organizers and activists to build learning communities and support groups have become a useful tool in recent years. Cooper Square Committee is a good example of an organization that started as part of a place-based effort, but managed to last for decades as it grew its mission and became a part of a network of other Community Land Trusts. Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development’s Center for Community Leadership is another good example of how grassroots leaders can be put together in cohorts that build infrastructure beyond the boundaries of singular neighborhoods or issues.2
2014
Promise Zones
Image: United States Department of Agriculture
Following up from the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, the Obama administration’s agenda focused on making substantial inroads to progress for high-poverty communities. Launched in 2014, Promise Zones designated 49 communities across the United States to receive preferential attention when applying for federal grants. The program also offered tax credits to companies that invested in the communities and hired from their populations. It was designed to foster collaboration between local partners who would then implement their own long-term community development plans. Despite its limited success in some areas with increased business creation, improved educational outcomes, and reduced crime rates, it was a top-down government program with a substantial lack of funding for progressive goals.
2016
Donald Trump is elected 45th president of the US
2019
The Joint Ownership Entity Model
One systemic challenge posed to both community design and development is competition over funding. The rising number of nonprofits and grants with strings attached means that there is a higher amount of competition for the same pool of resources. Moreover, funding is not always free from vested interests that could pose conflict with a group’s goals and practices. The Joint Ownership Entity Model presents a dynamic method to avoid those conflicts.
Image: CTA Architects P.C.
Community development groups have recognized the need for a return to dynamic creativity of 1960s policy experimentation. Founded by a group of New York City-based community development corporations, many of whom are also members of ANHD, the Joint Ownership Entity Model (JOE) was developed as a collaborative framework for partnerships between nonprofit community organizations and private/public entities to collectively own and manage affordable multifamily properties. JOE allows CDCs to pool resources like a Real Estate Investment Trust in order to create a funding stream for housing development while curtailing competition. The model emphasizes a commitment to protecting a community’s economic stability and listening to the needs of its residents. It also underscores the shift in how we now define the boundaries of a neighborhood with reduced rigidity in cultural and ethnic enclaves.
Displacement and Right to Counsel
Image: Ben Fractenberg via the City
Community displacement is not a new phenomenon. From the colonization of first nations to the Highway Expansion Act of 1956, displacement, caused by a variety of reasons, has been a key ingredient in how American cities have been settled since the country’s origins. The politically charged term gentrification is one of those factors most associated with the precarity faced by those lacking resources to be able to stay in their communities.
Image: New York City Department of Social Services
In 2017, A coalition of neighborhood groups, community development corporations, legal assistance organizations, and organizers succeeded in getting a partial Right to Counsel passed in New York City. A first-in-the-country legislation, the bill provides tenants facing eviction or administrative proceedings access to free legal representation provided by nonprofit legal service organizations. Right to Counsel represents a significant achievement for tenant’s rights as well as the effectiveness of organizing. In 2021, the program was expanded to cover tenants citywide.3
2020
NYC public school system shuts down on March 15th to slow down the spread of COVID-19
Now
Organizing in Isolation:
The Post-pandemic Landscape
In many ways, Covid-19 launched a period of global self-reflection on what community means. Faced with isolation, organizers were forced to reflect on the fundamentals of organizing. As Elizabeth Yeampierre of UPROSE explained, so much of organizing depends on being present in the communities that, by definition, it cannot be done from behind a desk.
At the same time, the need for organizing and development became more important than ever. Minority communities faced unequal health impacts and housing insecurity compounded by the economic toll of losses in blue collar jobs. It became critical to have amenities and services within walking distance, yet we realized many communities lacked these assets.
Across the country, mutual aid efforts popped up in response to the slow deployment of traditional safety nets. The communal kitchens and food pantries came out of a grassroots response to solving the problems at a local level instead of traditional charitable sources. From Woodbine NYC in Ridgewood, Queens to East Brooklyn Mutual Aid in East New York, Brooklyn, local residents organized, donated, and supported efforts to directly deliver goods that became inaccessible due to the shutdowns. Some of these mutual aid groups expanded beyond delivering these goods to supporting local tenants against eviction and connecting residents with healthcare services.4 5
Image: Kelvin Taitt via the Brooklyn Paper
The Housing Crisis
The pandemic had fundamental impacts on the housing market in general. Tenants’ rights protections were enacted at the height of the shutdown, but these protections were hardly applicable to those who were already living in precarious housing conditions.
While some positive movements like Right to Counsel expanded to cover tenants city-wide in 2021, other protections like moratoriums on evictions were lifted and there was an overall return to the pre-pandemic status quo. Except, the supply-chain issues caused by the pandemic significantly altered the cost of housing further exacerbating the housing crisis of the last decade.
According to Freddie Mac, we were short 3.8 million units of housing in 2022 nationwide, while three-fifths of the country did not own their home. Households that owned their home had a median wealth of over $300,000, while renters had a substantially smaller median wealth of $4,000. Similar trends of inequality can be observed in other demographic statistics relating to racial, education, employment, and marital status.6
Image: Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development
New Activism
Despite major successes in fighting disinvestment in the past, poverty and inequality persists. According to Ron Shiffman, co-founder the Pratt Center, community development organizations need to adapt to a new world driven by immigration, displacement, and climate change, compounding the issues of rising inequality.
In face of this era of challenges, we have entered a new moment of racial and housing justice organizing. Since the George Floyd protests of 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement opened up more opportunities to acknowledge the interconnectedness between access to healthcare, the housing crisis, and our deep-rooted racial history. Students, blue-collar workers, and young professionals alike have been activated to challenge these systemic conditions in a social landscape familiar to those who witnessed the genesis of community development and organizing in the sixties and seventies.
Footnotes
- Matthew F. Gebhardt, Race, Segregation and Choice: Race and Ethnicity in Choice Neighborhood Initiative Applicant Neighborhoods, 2010-2012 (2014) ↩︎
- Melanie Breault, Moving Beyond Place-Based Community Organizing (2019) ↩︎
- Charles Lane, “Right to Council in NYC not only dodged cuts but gained $20 million in new budget,” Gothamist (2023) ↩︎
- “Organizing for Survival in New York City: Report from Ridgewood, Queens,” Commune (2020) ↩︎
- Arden Sklar, “A Year and a Half Into Pandemic, NYC’s Mutual Aid Movement at a Turning Point,” City Limits (2021) ↩︎
- Neil Bennett, Donald Hays, and Briana Sullivan, “2019 Data Shows Baby Boomers Nearly 9 Times Wealthier Than Millennials,” United States Census Bureau (2022) ↩︎