Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), formed in 1984, is a community-based planning and organizing group in the low-income Dudley area of Roxbury, Boston, home to 24,000 residents. To ensure community control, DSNI is governed by a 35-member Board of Directors, which includes 18 adult residents and 4 youth, and provides equal representation to the community’s four major cultures: African American, Cape Verdean, Latino, and White. The nonprofit works closely with Dudley Neighbors Incorporated (DNI), the community land trust it formed in 1988 to develop the neighborhood’s comprehensive plan. DSNI currently has three strategic focuses: community empowerment, sustainable economic development, and youth opportunities/development.
East Little Havana CDC focuses on revitalizing commercial corridors and developing affordable housing in Miami’s East Little Havana neighborhood, where over 50 percent of residents live in poverty. Since its establishment in 1984, the CDC has developed 13 buildings, which include 569 affordable low-income residential units and 11 commercial units for small businesses.
Established by Clark Atlanta University in 1988 and reorganized in 1999 to support the broader Atlanta University Center Consortium, the University Community Development Corporation (UCDC) aims to create safe, vibrant, healthy, and sustainable communities in and around the Atlanta University Center (AUC) through economic and social development initiatives. Its housing development projects are credited with investing over $6 million in the AUC area, resulting in 25 new and 26 rehabbed single-family homes. In partnership with the city and community partners, UCDC is collaborating on a range of waste, energy, transportation, safety, and urban agriculture projects designed to demonstrate best practices in sustainability and result in more sustainable, resilient, and just neighborhoods.
Established by Clark Atlanta University in 1988 and reorganized in 1999 to support the broader Atlanta University Center Consortium, the University Community Development Corporation (UCDC) aims to create safe, vibrant, healthy, and sustainable communities in and around the Atlanta University Center (AUC) through economic and social development initiatives. Its housing development projects are credited with investing over $6 million in the AUC area, resulting in 25 new and 26 rehabbed single-family homes. In partnership with the city and community partners, UCDC is collaborating on a range of waste, energy, transportation, safety, and urban agriculture projects designed to demonstrate best practices in sustainability and result in more sustainable, resilient, and just neighborhoods.
Established in 1994, Beulah Land Development Corporation (BLDC) is a faith-based CDC working to eliminate blight and empower residents in New Haven’s urban neighborhoods. To do so, the CDC focuses on renovating New Haven properties and selling them at affordable prices to low and moderate income residents. Achievements include the development of 12 units of supportive senior rental housing and 20 units of tri-level townhomes.
This paper offers a roadmap to face challenges in the housing sector and secure the nation’s future. The Obama Administration’s new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, Affordable Care Act investments in health promotion, the recent Supreme Court victory for advocates challenging exclusionary housing policies, the deepening engagement of philanthropy, the growing demand for investments that improve sustainability and climate resiliency, and robust organizing by communities—all this adds up to the best opportunity in years to transform the nation’s housing infrastructure into an engine of health, opportunity, and prosperity for all.
This paper provides a review of the literature on U.S. central city growth and distress during the second half of the twentieth century.It finds that city growth tended to be higher in metropolitan areas with favorable weather, higher growth, and greater human capital, while distress was strongly correlated with city-level manufacturing legacy. The article affirms that distress has been highly persistent, but that some cities have achieved resurgence through a combination of strong leadership, collaboration across sectors and institutions, clear and broad-based strategies, and significant infrastructure investments. Finally, the article explores measurement issues by comparing two methodologies used to identify poorly performing central cities: comparisons across a comprehensive national cross-section of cities and comparisons within smaller samples of similar cities. It finds that these approaches have produced similar assessments of a city’s status, except in some cases where the city’s progress has been uneven across time or with respect to alternative criteria.
This perspective was created from Dorothy Stoneman’s address during a Center for Social Development 20th Anniversary event at Washington University in St. Louis on February 3, 2015. The Center for Social Development invited Dr. Stoneman to tell the story of YouthBuild and how it relates to the events of Ferguson.
