Asset-Based Community Development

The failure of the Urban Renewal, Community Action, Model Cities and Planned Variations Programs to revitalize economically distressed communities in post–World War II America prompted many grassroots activists, institutional leaders and municipal officials to question the efficacy of centrally planned and administered anti-poverty programmes. Inspired by the subsequent success of the Bed-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in New York City and Hough Avenue Development Corporation in Cleveland in the mid-1960s, residents living in communities struggling with the effects of deindustrialization, outmigration and disinvestment undertook a variety of ‘bottom-up’ planning and development initiatives.

By 2010, neighbourhood leaders seeking to revitalize ailing urban communities, often with the support of local faith-based organizations, philanthropic foundations, municipal agencies and national intermediaries, such as the LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation), Enterprise Community Partners, National Reinvestment Corporation (NeighborWorks), and SeedCo, had succeeded in establishing nearly 4,000 community-based development organizations, commonly referred [Page 66]to as CDCs. In many severely distressed neighbourhoods, these community-based development organizations eclipsed private developers and municipal governments as the primary agents for neighbourhood stabilization and community renewal.

These organizations played a central role in establishing neighbourhood crime watches and community policing programmes; constructing hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units; creating millions of square feet of new retail and commercial space; providing job readiness, training and placement for long-time unemployed and underemployed workers and offering entrepreneurial individuals committed to establishing local businesses financial planning assistance. In the early days of the community development movement, the executive directors and board chairs of these organizations used detailed needs assessments, highlighting their communities’ many individual, organizational and institutional shortcomings to make a compelling case for outside funding and technical assistance.

Over time, this deficit-based approach to community development came to be viewed as having a number of rather serious drawbacks. First, this externally oriented approach to neighbourhood revitalization tended to minimize the many extraordinary assets local residents, their informal associations and their institutional networks possessed in terms of knowledge, skills and social capital that could be mobilized to address critical community needs. Second, the bleak picture of the community that needs-based plans and proposals tended to project often reinforced the negative stereotypes held by outsiders, reducing the likelihood that they would invest in the community. Third, the emphasis that need-based plans and proposals placed on the self-defeating attitudes and behaviours of poor and working-class individuals tended to obscure the role that structural factors such as local and state economic and community development policies play in generating and maintaining income, wealth and power disparities. Fourth, the privileged position outside leadership, funding and technical assistance are afforded within the typical needs-based plan reinforces the psychological, organizational and financial dependency residents of low-income communities have on external organizations. Finally, the effort needs-based planners devote to securing outside investment and technical assistance often leaves little time to enhance the organizing, planning, development and management capacity of community-based development organizations, thereby undermining their long-term sustainability. This entry will discuss the history of Asset-Based Community Development, review some of the key characteristics of this approach and the key steps in the process and finally consider some of the lessons learned from using this approach.

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