The Community Economic Development Movement: Law, Business, and the New Social Policy.

• Author: Barron, David J.
• Position: Book Review

THE COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT MOVEMENT: LAW, BUSINESS, AND THE NEW SOCIAL POLICY. By William H. Simon. ** Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. 230 pp. + viii.

INTRODUCTION I. URBAN RENEWAL'S FAILINGS AND THE CED MOVEMENT'S RESPONSE II. THE CED MOVEMENT IN ACTION III. THE RELEVANT COMMUNITY: THE NEIGHBORHOOD OR THE METROPOLITAN REGION? IV. SOME CONCEPTUAL PROBLEMS IN ADOPTING A METROPOLITAN PERSPECTIVE CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION

In virtually every major American city, one finds an array of nonprofit and nongovernmental institutions--from community development corporations to community development financial institutions to limited equity cooperatives--working to bring about a type of urban redevelopment that seems ad hoc and piecemeal but is impressive nonetheless. This new approach to revitalizing distressed areas within metropolitan regions has attracted a great deal of attention. There is a strong sense that it is succeeding where prior efforts have failed. This is no small achievement. In the face of creeping fatalism that nothing can be done about the sad state of many urban places, these homegrown efforts cast an important ray of sunlight.

Much of the attention that this new approach has received, however, lacks a deep engagement with its rules of operation and underlying theoretical premises. William Simon skillfully supplies what has been missing in this book. (1) He seamlessly shifts from the details of specific legal materials to current best practices to broader theories of economic and social life. Simon shows how a disparate set of urban redevelopment practices, which collectively comprise what he calls the "Community Economic Development Movement," are related in ways that combine to offer a new means of bringing back those urban areas long in the grip of decline. Along the way, Simon offers detailed descriptions of how the movement's key institutions operate, and he provides useful analyses of how they derive support from state and federal statutes, such as the Internal Revenue Code and the Community Reinvestment Act. In addition, Simon explains how the movement looks within the urban community for hidden assets, such as a consumer market that is potentially vibrant but largely untapped or a nascent reserve of social capital that can be fortified to promote effective collective action.

The book is much more, however, than a sophisticated practice guide. It is a theoretically informed account of how this redevelopment movement differs from one that would rely more heavily on the private market or the public bureaucracy. Simon makes only occasional reference to the work of particular community development institutions and actors, and he does not purport to demonstrate, empirically, the efficacy of the movement's efforts to this point. He instead offers a thick, theoretically grounded depiction of the operational details and underlying economic, political, and social vision of the Community Economic Development (CED) Movement. The result is a book filled with insights into an approach to social policy that is too often hyped with unhelpful slogans such as "public/private partnership," (2) "place-based" economic development, (3) or "community empowerment." (4)

Simon's achievement is not entirely surprising given his own knowledge in this area. This knowledge is the product of Simon's connections to the movement's practitioners, his years of classroom teaching on the topic, and his extensive scholarly engagement with related fields of law, from real property to jurisprudence to the legal profession. Fortunately, Simon brings this knowledge to bear in a way that makes for a clear and readable analysis. As a result, those working in the field will find this book useful as will teachers who may assign it with confidence in courses on community economic development, local government law, community organizing, or new approaches to public law lawyering.

Important as these aspects of the book are, Simon's analysis is also of interest because it reveals some conceptual problems that shadow the CED Movement. The movement has achieved enormous visibility over the last decade. There are now thousands of community development corporations that collectively receive hundreds of millions of dollars in foundation support. (5) There is, in fact, a vogue quality to the approach championed by movement advocates. The rhetoric of holistic, community-based solutions that seek to improve disadvantaged (usually urban) places by increasing social capital is widely deployed. (6) But it is clear that the rhetorical emphasis on local control that gives the movement such force obscures important aspects of the problem that it seeks to address. The reality is that distressed communities are located within metropolitan environments that dramatically affect their situation. Thus, neighborhood solutions ultimately must be integrated into a reform program that attends to the metropolitan-wide relationship between distressed communities, the more prosperous jurisdictions that surround them, and the regional growth, transportation, and labor patterns that span them.

Although the question of how to achieve such integration should be of central concern to CED Movement advocates, it unfortunately has not yet received the attention it merits. The focus within the movement remains largely on what can be done within the boundaries of the particular places that are targeted for community-based development efforts. That narrower focus is no doubt the consequence of a sense both inside and outside the movement that a redevelopment strategy that promotes community-based solutions is in tension with an approach to urban redevelopment that pursues a metropolitan-wide focus. Simon himself takes pains to dispel the notion that community based economic development and metropolitan reform work at cross purposes. Nevertheless, his analysis reflects an underlying ambivalence as to whether the CED Movement can embrace a metropolitan perspective without giving up those localist aspects of its redevelopment strategy that have made it so attractive. The result is that Simon tends to oscillate between conflicting visions of the movement and its conception of the relationship between the communities that are its primary concern and the metropolitan areas in which they are situated. For this reason, Simon's analysis usefully reveals the conceptual difficulties that stand in the way of the CED Movement adopting a more metropolitan perspective.

On the one hand, Simon celebrates the CED Movement as an effort to free disadvantaged innercity areas to behave like prosperous suburbs by empowering them to exclude outsiders and thus take control over their own territory. Here, Simon emphasizes the importance of "rootedness" and the need to foster deep connections with a fixed urban community. He suggests that these aspects of the CED Movement represent its most significant contribution to thinking about urban redevelopment. Yet, at other points, Simon seems to embrace CED Movement strategies for the quite distinct reason that they will help to reconnect urban centers to the broader metropolitan area. He highlights the ways in which the CED Movement favors policies that would make distressed urban places newly open to outsiders by enhancing their capacity for collective action so as to make them attractive to those who have long shunned them. These outward-looking aspects of his argument are in some tension with one that emphasizes the virtues of a redevelopment strategy aimed at promoting "rootedness," internal control, and connectedness to a single territorial space.

Similarly, Simon at various points praises the CED Movement for its bottom-up approach to collective problem solving and its distrust of centralized policymaking. Once again, the emphasis is on the benefits of pursuing an inward-looking, territorially based approach. He praises the movement for promoting a means of social policy implementation that breaks with the conventional top-down, bureaucratic model--a model that advocates of metropolitan government and planning traditionally have embraced. At other points, however, Simon seems to sign on to efforts by recent proponents of Regionalism, who seek to curb suburban autarchy in order to enable urban spaces to compete more effectively with their surrounding jurisdictions. In these passages, Simon seems to agree with the Regionalists' tendency to press for greater state intervention into local affairs or even the creation of full-fledged regional governments to supplant existing municipalities. (7) Thus, the emphasis in these portions of the book shifts from a focus on the virtues of homegrown solutions to a recognition of the dependence of local actors upon externally imposed ones.

The result of these unresolved tensions within his analysis is that Simon leaves the readers without a clear idea of just what the CED Movement's redevelopment agenda is or should be. Is it to connect urban and suburban spaces in ways that the current fragmented organization of our metropolitan areas precludes? Is it instead to privilege the urban spaces that are now in decline over the suburban ones that are now succeeding? And what, in any event, would it mean either to connect urban and suburban communities or to privilege the interests of the former over those of the latter? Would the consequence of doing so result, ultimately, in greater community control or more centralization?

The purpose of highlighting these tensions within Simon's analysis is not to suggest that metropolitan-wide reform and more locally based urban redevelopment efforts of the kind the CED Movement champions are on an inevitable collision course. Simon's instinct that the two must be thought about together and joined in some way, as a matter of both theory and practice, seems exactly right. The purpose instead is to point out that the CED Movement, as it matures, must confront the...