Health, Housing and Community

I recently spent most of a week with community development practitioners from the NeighborWorks America network. These are good people who mainly engage in community development through the building and rehabilitating affordable housing, some local economic development and financial education, and some work with community residents.

I always enjoy training at NeighborWorks' institutes because the workshops are filled with people from all over the country, rural and urban, and never less than three ethnic groups. I usually have seasoned veterans of community development and new AmericCorps Vistas in the same class. The diversity makes for a rich experience, regardless of the actual workshop topic.

In this context the issue of community organizing and community building is complex. Some see it as touchy feely. The implication of this phrase is always that people based community work is of lesser value than brick and mortar work. The implication is echoed in the funding world where the difference in funding available for physical construction and for social construction is measured by the number of zeroes in the figures.

Yet, anyone who has been around neighborhood revitalization and community development for more than a few years knows that community ownership, engagement and leadership are the difference for a project

For political support.

For long term sustainability of the project.

For the amount of ownership and care the neighborhood feels toward the project.

For the projects ability to leverage future projects.

For the financial relevance of the project.

The last one is the hardest to swallow for the number crunchers. The reality is that projects done by nonprofit CDCs are often not the most economically efficient model. That is true if one is only looking at the bricks and mortar, financing costs and efficiencies, and overall cost. The value of a CDC generated affordable housing or community economic development project lies in its ability to use physical construction to leverage social construction, transformation and reinvigoration. The keys to bridging the physical construction and the neighborhood revitalization beyond the walls of the project are held by people doing community organizing and engagement. Their work may seem touchy feely, but without them the physical improvements often are stale, without energy to spare, financially inefficient and meaningless beyond their own walls.

By connecting community development projects to the social fabric of a neighborhood or town, community organizers take the latent impact a new project can have on community health and bring it alive. Organizers can take a streetscape improvement and turn it into long term relationships between neighbors that reduce crime. They can take a homeownership and vacant lot program and build social connectedness and an economy of healthy food buy supporting the creation and ownership of community gardens. Community organizers can take a highly leveraged 200 unit low income housing project and turn its community center and computer lab into the center of the communitys positive afterschool options. And they do all this for the same amount of an overpriced market study.