Community Participation: A Critical View

Abstract

Since the problem of urban poverty was discovered and began to receive significant public attention in the early I960's, much has been written about the various strategies and tactics by which the conditions of life of the urban poor might be improved. In this substantial body of literature there are wide areas of agreement. Perhaps the principal area of consensus is the view that an essential first step in any successful ghetto improvement program is the creation of jobs for ghetto residents and the development in the ghetto of business enterprises which are locally owned and operated.' These two allied objectives are in several significant respects quite distinct. The creation in the short run of large numbers of jobs for ghetto residents is a task which could probably be best accomplished by having existing manufacturing enterprises establish facilities in ghetto areas. Accordingly, the goal of immediate jobs in the ghetto2 suggests programs, such as tax incentive arrangements, that would induce established businesses to operate in the ghetto. The focus of these programs would be on protecting employers against the special risks and higher costs attendant on ghetto operations;3 the tactic would be to make ghetto operation profitable for them. Proposals for the development of black-owned and operated businesses in ghetto areas reflect a different order of priorities. Here the aim, expressed variously by different writers, is to redress the inequality of the economic opportunity structure and to build a black middle class. It is obvious that this effort would be successfulif at all-only over a longer period of time, while the number of ghetto residents directly benefited, at least initially and probably even in the long run, would be considerably smaller. The two approaches are mutually complementary, and both can be pursued simultaneously. Mutual interference occurs only to the extent that resources devoted to one are necessarily denied to the other. Since the resources that we are prepared to devote to alleviating poverty are limited (and may be in-