Community Development Corporations

Community development corporations (CDCs), a U.S. phenomenon, are largely inner-city nonprofit businesses controlled by neighborhood residents who work to give local communities a voice in urban development strategies. CDCs vary in size and program. Noted for the production of nonprofit housing, CDCs also create social, educational, and political infrastructures that build community from the ground up. In 1999, Urban affairs and public policy experts Ross Gittell and Margaret Wilder reported that between 1991 and 1993, there were more than 2,200 CDCs, and that they existed in all fifty states. They also reported that 1,046 CDCs (77 percent) each received a $50,000 federal grant, while 150 CDCs each received $1 million in equity for housing developments. City and regional planning experts Spencer Cowen, William Rohe, and Esmail Baku reported that in 1999 the median CDC staff size was four persons, and the median budget was $134,000. Relatively small in size and impact, CDCs network local and foundation funding to provide sites of transformation, hope, and promise.

The evolutionary nature of CDCs makes it difficult to historically pinpoint its origins. The black community points to the black church as a critical originator of community development activities. In a case study that characterized the historical driving force behind black community building (1895–1910), Shirley J. Portwood found that community development activities were sustained by the strongly held and deeply rooted African American sensibility that “when the community calls you, you say yes.” Other historians point to the Ford Foundation's Gray Areas Program (1960), urban redevelopment programs of the Kennedy and Johnson administration (1966) and Nixon's new federalism (1970) as critical stages in the evolution of CDCs. CDCs continue to advance integrated and democratic social and economic opportunities as part of the ongoing battle against racism. Historians such as Portwood argue that the disrupting factors of class, skin color, and gender—divisions used by black elites to undermine black community solidarity—cannot be left unexamined.

The westward expansion of the nineteenth century, the explosion of urban populations in the twentieth century, the Great Depression, and the suburban expansion of the 1940s–1960s left urban centers without middleor upper-class support. The housing demolition of the 1960s—theoretically to make way for new, better housing that often never came—left cities with a housing crisis that continues today. In response to this situation, exacerbated by poverty and crime, The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 created the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which financially supported CDC bottom-up development strategies. Federal funding of CDCs peaked in this decade. From their inception, CDCs faced great obstacles, as the era was one in which regulatory social institutions were being dismantled and the consequences of failing to share the benefits of the U.S. economic system with minorities was becoming painfully evident. In spite of that, substantial white resistance to minority economic development continued.

The CDCs persevered, and by the 1980s an expansive community development knowledge base was producing handbooks on community-based development and guides for obtaining technical assistance. The mid1990s found the CDC movement with sufficient programmatic history to begin to assess its history. By 2000, those assessments, largely ethnographic in nature, found them to be effective, and they favored continuous improvement processes aimed at building capacities and at retaining skills in the community. CDCs remain popular development tools, as they are seen to correct defects in the U.S. capitalist system. International development success with economic cooperatives suggests a promising expansion of CDC activity into the international sphere.

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