Community development, we have a problem with the metaphorical ledger, and it looks like the numbers have been off for quite some time.
On one side, we have racialized expenses dating back to before the United States’ founding, as wealth accumulated through theft of lands, forced Native displacement and genocide, and the long churn of chattel slavery. We kept accruing those expenses by redlining communities of color from investment and allowing for exclusionary distribution of FHA loans + GI Bill benefits. Community development may have formed to respond to these circumstances, but it hasn’t been able to keep pace with the compounding interest on these expenses. For community development practitioners working in communities of color, the costs of doing business remain high. Dominant narratives that suggest investing in communities of color is risky (even when the data would suggest otherwise) forces community development organizations to invest extraordinary resources in measuring, monitoring, and complying in order to assuage the fears of public and private funders and financiers.
On the other side of the ledger, we have racialized revenue. While we were purposefully withholding investment from urban, rural, and tribal communities of color, we built highways and cleared greenfields and otherwise subsidized exclusionary development in predominantly whiter and more affluent suburbs. We actively destroyed wealth accumulation, be it through broken treaties or “slum clearance” or “urban renewal” or a coordinated attack on Black Wall Street. Community development has ramped up its capacity to bring back some of that destroyed wealth, but earned income potential can distort sector decision-making, benefits can accrue to inadvertent (or purposeful) gentrifiers, and predatory lenders, developers, and retailers charge those poverty taxes and accrue the profit.
This is probably an uncomfortable accounting for community development practitioners fighting the good fight and who are likely underpaid themselves, but an accounting is exactly what we need. In this issue, we dust off the calculator to do some computations on the wealth we’ve lost and the wealth we can gain. ThirdSpace invites you to review our Core Characteristics report to review specific information about community development funding + financing and then join our writers and artists in exploration. What role can community development play in dismantling the financial risk narrative? What’s the current state of Community Development Financial Institutions and Minority Depository Institutions, and what do they need to be successful? What might a more purposeful approach to individual and collective wealth-building in communities of color look like?
The community development sector has a compounding interest in making the dollars and cents work out for all of us, so join us in accounting for our financial past and forecasting our financial future. Onward.
The authors in this issue are responding to the findings shared in the Anti-Racist Community Development Research Project, produced with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to increase understanding of structural racism in community development and pathways to racially equitable outcomes that promote health equity. The views expressed in these articles do not necessarily reflect the views of RWJF or ThirdSpace Action Lab.
© 2023 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation