Implementing Comprehensive Community Development: Possibilities and Limitations

Abstract

Over the past decade, private philanthropies have spearheaded a great deal of activity known in the field as comprehensive, community-building initiatives (for an overview of this field, see, for example, Eisen, 1992; Kubisch et al., in press; Stone, 1996). The public sector has also seen increasing activity of this type: The Empowerment Zone program, launched through federal legislation in 1993, is the most obvious example. These efforts, public and private, share a general approach to neighborhood development and the alleviation of the effects of poverty characterized by four crucial elements. First, they focus on geographically defined target areas, variously defined but almost always limited to a portion or portions of a city. Second, they provide support for a process of strategic planning based on a recognition of assets and available resources as well as needs. Third, they insist on community participation in the governance, planning, and implementation of development activities at the local level. Finally, they focus on comprehensive development, including an attempt to integrate economic, physical, and human development activities. This article focuses on the last element. We are particularly interested in exploring community-based attempts to interconnect development strategies for maximizing the effects of resources and extent of neighborhood change. The article outlines the rationale for comprehensive development and examines possible approaches to its realization, drawing briefly on the literature in an attempt to put the concept in historical and current practice perspectives. It then examines the attempt to operationalize the idea of comprehensive development in one effort, the Neighborhood and Family Initiative (NFI) sponsored by the Ford Foundation, which is currently being implemented in a neighborhood in each of four American cities. The analysis is based on data collected through ongoing fieldwork, including qualitative interviews and focus groups and observation of collaborative-sponsored meetings, events, and relevant neighborhood activities. It is also based on a review of site-produced materials, including administrative documents, results of local evaluation, correspondence, and minutes, as well as materials in the Ford Foundation archives. (For a more detailed analysis of the initiative's principles and approaches to collaborative planning and integrated development, see Chaskin, 1992; Chaskin & Joseph, 1995; Chaskin & Ogletree, 1993.) Rationale for Comprehensive Development The interrelationship among a number of social problems, such as joblessness, lack of education, low income, poor housing, and inadequate health care, is broadly acknowledged and has provided much of the impetus for efforts to address multiple social needs by integrating strategies. This is especially true of efforts that seek to alleviate conditions of poverty, given that low-income families and individuals are more likely than middle-income families to encounter many of these problems concurrently. Levitan, Mangum, and Pines (1989), for example, suggested that although nearly 93 percent of middle-class families face one or fewer obstacles to self-sufficiency, 81 percent of families in poverty face two or more such obstacles, and more than half face three or more. The concurrence of such disadvantages and social ills can be seen beyond the family level, clustered in particular, definable neighborhoods. Such neighborhood-level interactions are especially clear among poor, inner-city neighborhoods with populations of color, leading to what Wilson (1987) termed concentration effects. The recognition of this interaction of individual and family circumstances at the neighborhood level is one rationale for the current focus on community-based comprehensive development. The assumption is that because needs and circumstances are varied and interrelated at the neighborhood level, any effective attempt to address these needs must take into account the whole range of issues and circumstances and be framed in an equally comprehensive and integrated manner. …