Community Development and Housing Policies: The Roles of the State, Civil Society, and Non-Profits

Modern housing policies may be traced to the early and late New Deal (1930s to 1940s) when the state actively intervened in two major ways: 1) in the private sector through assuring protections for homeownership and guarantees for mortgage lending, and 2) in the public sector through providing subsidies for public and assisted housing. At the same time, the government issued neighborhood planning guidelines for purposes of approving federal loans and developers’ plans. The interventions, prompted by social, political, and economic concerns, were designed to reach broadly across society to reach the vast majority of people suffering from the Great Depression. Civil society embodied in charitable, religious, and civic organizations could not meet the breadth or depth of the need. New state bureaucracies at the national, state, and local level arose. Not everyone agreed with the resulting policies, which bypassed alternative organizational structures such as building societies and nonprofit cooperatives. A dual housing system evolved over the next six decades in which homeownership achieved status and conferred tax gains while the number of subsidized rental and cooperative housing units waxed and waned. In the 1960s the country declared a “War on Poverty,” but poverty was not eradicated, and in the late 1970s the United States witnessed growing homelessness and a lack of shelter beds and service facilities. By the late 1980s, in cities like Los Angeles overcrowding began to appear and for the first time since the 1930s, cases of tuberculosis began to be reported. In the 1990s it was acknowledged that experiments to renew the public schools and stimulate the ghetto and barrio economies were lacking. At the same time crime and the perception of crime became a major issue. The increasing recognition of a broad array of problems revealed that the housing problem laid in a bigger milieu. Inevitably housing policy was placed in the context of larger questions and framed as community development policies. Nonprofit organizations had started to become more visible in the 1960s, in part an outgrowth of the government-sponsored “War on Poverty,” in both housing and social service sectors, and in other cases an offshoot of organizations based on principles of self-help and sweat equity. Citywide nonprofits, with roots in community service movements, played a role in research and in some instances partnered with neighborhood development corporations to sponsor, own, and manage properties and facilities. Another tier of nonprofits and foundations at the national level provided technical assistance and funding. Religious organizations became more involved. Government funding for housing and community development was drastically cut, and community development corporations grew. Called a variety of names (community economic development, local economic development, local development), many of the leaders had roots in the housing and social service programs of the 1960s. The professionalization of nonprofits and the withdrawal of a national presence in housing and community development has prompted debates and raised a variety of questions, particularly in relation to the inner city. This course examines the historic and contemporary debates about future trends in housing and community development policies. This is framed through a series of questions about common assumptions made in this field.