Smart Strategies for Community Development in the 21st Century

• NCJ Number: 227054
• Author(s): Chris Walker
• Date Published: 2006
• Length: 23 pages
• Sale Source: The Urban Institute
• Publication Format: Document
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Downloaded May 27, 2009

Annotation

After identifying and analyzing factors that have impeded community socioeconomic development in urban neighborhoods, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing these issues.

Abstract

The single most important failing in community development nationally is the unwillingness or inability of public community and economic-development agencies to make investments that are sufficiently strategic and of a scale to achieve sustained market and social development. Three problems permeate this failing. First, in making investments in communities, governments lack the information needed to determine where their investments would have the most productive results. Second, even when agencies have attempted to make strategic investments, they have been unable to secure needed support from other public agencies, even when these agencies have a stake in the outcome; for example, public works, public safety (police and fire agencies), and schools have not been willing to participate in community-development decisionmaking. Third, even when community leaders have created visions for neighborhoods and developed plans to implement them, these efforts have had little influence on how public funds are spent. This paper proposes a four-pronged plan to address these impediments. First and foremost, the Federal Government must invest in the local implementation of state-of-the art community development performance-measurement models and the neighborhood information systems needed to make these models work. This Federal effort is needed in order to steer local government toward more strategic neighborhood-centered investments. Second, private foundations must change their historic aversion to the direct funding of public agencies and cooperate with them in pressing for local change under systems of accountability and performance measurement. Third, the nonprofit community-development industry must redouble its efforts to develop and use information systems in guiding and measuring neighborhood change. Fourth, all these parties involved in neighborhood change must cooperate in the further development and promotion of new models in public finance.