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11 First Suburbs and Nonprofit Housing How Do Urban CDCs Develop Affordable Housing in Suburban Communities? JOANNA MITCHELL-BROWN F irst suburbs in the United States, older suburbs that experienced the bulk of their growth before 1960, currently face a host of problems conventionally associated with urban areas. Over the last several decades, problems associated with declining business districts, aging infrastructure, crime, obsolescent housing stock, population loss, and concentrations of high-needs populations have become prevalent in first suburban neighborhoods. The recognition of housing problems in the first suburbs has given rise to a new suburban role for nonprofit housing community-development corporations (CDCs), which originally emerged as community-based responses to social, economic, and physical distress in low- and moderate-income urban communities. Drawing on case studies of three CDCs (Cincinnati Housing Partners, Homestead and Urban Redevelopment Corporation, and Working in Neighborhoods ) in the Greater Cincinnati region, this research reveals the opportunities and challenges these organizations encounter while trying to promote neighborhood improvement in a new context. Studies of Cincinnati’s metropolitan area in 2001 and 2002 (M. Orfield and Luce 2001, 2002b) reveal the existence of suburban communities at risk of social and economic decline, indicating that firstsuburban communities could benefit from intensive community development. But although the Greater Cincinnati region has been recognized for its extensive history of nonprofit community development and citizen empowerment in the urban core (Rasey 1989), similar initiatives remained almost absent within the first suburbs until the mid-2000s. I first became interested in suburban CDCs in 2006, when Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) and Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission (HCRPC) hired me to develop housing plans and programs that would promote affordable workforce housing in first-suburban communities. (Hamilton County includes both the city of Cincinnati and its surrounding suburban communities.) Although I only held the position for a short time, several 186 JoAnna Mitchell-Brown obstacles quickly became apparent. Many Cincinnati suburbs had a history of resisting affordable housing, due to widely held beliefs that affordable housing would introduce an incongruous type of housing into the community (i.e., multifamily within a single-family residential neighborhood) or that where affordable housing is introduced, blight would soon follow (see Kirkpatrick and Gallagher , this volume). Few institutions and organizations were willing or able to assist in the promotion and construction of affordable housing. During the same period in which I sought to develop “realistic” strategies for the first suburbs in Hamilton County, inner-city CDCs began to partner with suburban communities. This presented an opportunity to study the potential of the suburban CDC model. I began by conducting a literature review on the history of CDCs and their role in promoting affordable workforce housing. I then conducted a year of research on three Hamilton County CDCs—I interviewed staff, boards of directors, and stakeholders; visited project sites; and completed a sociodemographic and economic analysis of the suburban community where each CDC operated. (This overlapped with my tenure as communitydevelopment director in one of these communities, the city of Silverton, between 2008 and 2010.) Throughout the project, the key question I sought to answer was, “How do CDCs adapt their practices to an inner-suburban context?” I concluded that CDCs working in Hamilton County first suburbs have focused more on promoting economic development through the production of affordable housing units than on addressing social development or community leadership and empowerment. The nonprofit housing CDCs try to perform this role in three ways: (1) the development of new infill housing and single housing rehabs in first-suburban communities; (2) marketing and homeownership trainings ; and (3) community partnerships with local government, civic/community groups and religious institutions, and other CDCs. Recently, CDCs have shifted from a neighborhood-based model of community development to a multilocal approach. In doing so, CDCs face obstacles, such as the lack of available funding for housing projects, the financial and physical unavailability of suburban land, and the foreclosure crisis. Despite these challenges, these CDCs remain committed to developing and promoting affordable housing in Hamilton County’s first suburbs. As such challenges are not unique to Cincinnati, these findings have significant implications for the role of CDCs in other first suburbs. What Are First Suburbs? “First suburbs,” “inner suburbs,” “inner-ring suburbs,” or “mature suburbs” are terms that are often used interchangeably and generally refer to communities that developed just outside the central cities and experienced the majority of their growth before 1960 (Hudnut 2003; M. Orfield 2002; Peiser, Schmitz, and Urban...

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