Community Economc Development in the US

• In Event: Local Politics and American Political Development

Abstract

The community economic development movement in the United States is now, especially after the creation of the Community Development Institutions Fund (CDFI Fund) in the early Clinton Administration, now a $10 billion industry active in all regions of the country. \ The CDFI Fund now grants about $235 million in grants to some 1000 CDFIs in the U.S. as well as administering nearly $3.5 billion in tax credits (through the New Markets Tax Credit (MNTC) program targeted to low and moderate income communities. A recently published monograph Community Economic Development in the United States: CDFIs in Distressed Communities (Palgrave, 2017) is the first scholarly treatment of the community development movement in the U.S. This monograph traces the roots of the CDFI movement in the “Grey Areas” project created by the Ford Foundation in the mid-1950s that created the Community Development Corporation (CDC) as a neighborhood based development model to address the burgeoning urban.
An important contribution of this paper will be to demonstrate that CDFIs, in their loans and investments, as well as agents of the NMTC program, especially when compared to the lending activities of mainstream financial institutions, but also other tax expenditure programs, have successfully allocated resources to communities across the American landscape that are, by any measure, highly economically distressed. These findings will be demonstrated both for the Northeast region of the U.S. as well as nationally.

Author

• James Greer, CDFI Fund, U.S. Department of the Treasury