Strengthening the Connection: Community Development and Historic Preservation

Community Development Corporations (CDCs) are nonprofit organizations that work to strengthen the physical, social and economic fabric of communities by catalyzing neighborhood revitalization and building community wealth. Through a wide range of resident-driven programs, CDCs effect positive, sustainable change by empowering individuals to invest in their communities and improve quality of life. Current reports estimate that 4,600 CDCs exist nationwide, operating in communities large and small across the country.

All are defined by several key characteristics:

• ▪ CDCs focus efforts on revitalization of their local communities, which are typically low-income, underserved neighborhoods that have experienced significant disinvestment.

• ▪ CDCs invest capital through redevelopment of residential and commercial property, establishing roots as valued community stakeholders with real voices in policy and planning.

• ▪ CDCs are nonprofit and mission driven, taking a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach by filling at least one-third of their governing boards with community residents. This ensures grassroots participation in decision making and enables residents to advocate for real change.

Working in urban neighborhoods filled with historic building stock, many of these CDCs are rehabilitating historic buildings to accomplish their housing and revitalization goals. Melissa Jest, manager of the National Trust’s Historic Properties Redevelopment Program, reported on four such CDCs in the Fall 2014 issue of Forum Journal: Mission First Housing, based in Philadelphia; Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC); Innovative Housing, Inc., in Portland, Oregon; and Heartland Housing, Inc., in Chicago. Furthermore, the National Trust has, for decades, partnered with CDCs through its Main Street Program and the former Community Partners Program to help communities turn neglected historic properties into affordable housing.

While collaborations do exist between CDCs and preservationists, the National Trust is committed to expanding and strengthening these relationships. Recently, the National Trust supported research, conducted through the Collaborative Learning Center at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), to identify areas of common ground and best opportunities for partnership. The SCAD students’ findings are revealing and inspiring, and the study is serving as a valuable resource for the National Trust’s property redevelopment initiatives.

This article explores how perceptions about preservation, both positive and negative, are guiding CDCs’ use of historic property redevelopment as a revitalization tool. Findings from the study can help preservationists make the case to their community development colleagues that preservation strategies, far from being obstacles, can be valuable tools for meeting mutually beneficial goals. Armed with greater understanding of each others’ missions and methods, preservationists and community developers can better share and employ the knowledge, tools and resources needed to successfully save historic buildings and build community wealth.

HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT

CDCs have been around since the 1960s, born out of the anti-poverty and civil rights movements and funded early on by the Ford Foundation’s Grey Areas Program and the federal government’s Special Impact Program, an amendment to the Equal Opportunity Act of 1964. Senator Robert Kennedy, a key figure in the creation of the Special Impact Program, promoted the important role of community involvement in economic development, and in 1967 he helped establish the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC), the nation’s first CDC. According to Kennedy, BSRC’s effectiveness was based on its ability to “combine the best of community action with the best of the private enterprise system.”

Interestingly, BSRC’s early actions were founded in preservation principles. Rather than embracing urban renewal planning models and demolishing the Brooklyn neighborhood’s historic buildings for high-rise modern housing towers, this CDC championed the benefits of rehabilitating existing structures. It adaptively used an old milk factory as both its headquarters and a mixed-use commercial development. Realizing the significance of the community’s brownstones, BSRC established a program to restore facades and rehabilitate interiors, which led to the neighborhood’s historic district designation as a New York City Landmark in 1971.¹

Successes of early CDCs such as BSRC inspired the formation of others, with about 100 CDCs operating in major cities by 1970. The numbers grew throughout subsequent decades, fueled by foundation and government funding, eventually expanding to the approximately 4...