Preserving Community through Radical Collaboration: Affordable Housing Preservation Networks in Chicago, Washington, DC, and Denver

Abstract

ABSTRACTCollaborative planning efforts to address complex problems such as affordable housing and climate change traditionally manifest as government-led processes meant to gain legitimacy and engage with multiple types of expertise. These types of processes, however, can leave nonprofit actors constrained by the policy priorities of government-led collaborations due to their ability to reproduce existing power relations. Using a qualitative case-study approach of affordable housing preservation networks in Chicago, Washington, DC, and Denver, we argue that preservation of affordable housing can benefit from what we call radical collaboration. We define radical collaboration as an animated network of actors working towards a shared frame of collective action. It is an approach, often led by community-oriented non-governmental organizations, that seeks to transform the ways disadvantaged groups access the city. Actors in the collaboration bring diverse resources that include funding, data, regulatory power, and portfolio-wide information to solve building-level and broader policy challenges.