Regional and Urban Design Committee

Next: A Resurgence of Community Development?

  • 1.  Next: A Resurgence of Community Development?

    Posted 06-10-2015 03:28 PM
    This message has been cross posted to the following Discussion Forums: Housing Knowledge Community and Regional and Urban Design Committee .
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    The big questions facing community development

    After the blue chip companies left town and with them blue and white collar workers, non-profits began to take their place, establishing headquarters in Baltimore. Maybe not a surprising transition, in a hard hit legacy city in a nation with growing poverty and shrinking government.
    Druid Heights CDC title image

    But the non-profits are not exactly flourishing. In the week after the Baltimore riots the community development corporation (CDC) located right at ground zero of the unrest changed its leadership. A smaller CDC in Sandtown folded long ago. A very successful CDC at Patterson Park went under when the recession hit. It is tempting to see this as an indication of a long standing and pervasive crisis in community development that the recent turmoil highlighted, especially because Baltimore's unrest originated in an area that experienced decades of community development-type intervention. The Atlantic's  CityLab brought to a point in a recent article with this question:
    Is it time to kick programs like Promise Zones and Choice Neighborhoods to the curb? Are these place-based initiatives, which funnel streams of resources to neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and racial segregation, futile in the face of rapidly expanding wealth gaps?
    Through all of the Monday morning quarterbacking about the Monday night Baltimore unrest, the spotlight is finally shining not only on the poor, disinvested neighborhoods in Baltimore and
    There are hundreds of diagram showing how
    community development is supposed to work:
    some too simplistic, some too complicated, all somewhat
    idealistic. (This from the State of West Virginia, no
    stranger to poverty)
     elsewhere, places that were as invisible as Freddie Grey, but also on the right method of help, or even better, self-organizing. Questions that community organizers, sociologists and policy wonks have been asking for some time now emerge from obscurity and occupy the top of the agenda:
    • Who pays attention to the poor neighborhoods? What causes poverty?
    • Does city government neglect poor communities
    Read full article

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    Klaus Philipsen FAIA
    Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
    Baltimore MD
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