The Politics of Community Economic Development

Abstract

In I967, three years after the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, the White House began to have second thoughts about its original emphasis on action and maximum feasible participation as a method for ending poverty. While the planners of the Act might have supposed originally that organized pressure by the poor could be accommodated by the system-as the system had accommodated so many interest groups-and conversely, that the organized poor would for this purpose abide by the rules of the game, the reality from the point of view of organization was quite different. Community action based upon maximum participation was more than a tactical concept. It was the release of a potentially great force, namely, territorially organized citizen power. No other interest group has that sovereign base. Thus, organizations based on this principle were quite extraordinary compared to the normal varieties of interest groups which pressure the government. It soon appeared to the government not that the poor would willfully break the rules of pressure politics, but that the government had endorsed a principle of organization that itself transcended the character of interest group politics. Mayors began to complain that the newly organized and funded neighborhood organizations were threatening the power of city government, and they sought to terminate these organizations and their funding, either directly from Washington or through the independent action agencies. As a result of the complaint, Congress passed the Green Amendment,' permitting mayors to get control of their cities' anti-poverty programs. The new arrangement enabled the government to withdraw funding from neighborhood organizations which confronted city power and to begin to fund antipoverty programs within a pro-city framework. This rearrangement, in the sensitive world of politics, required a felicitous adaptation of the theory of poverty to which the political intention of placing OEO powers in the hands of the city management would conform. The new theory was local economic enterprise, referred to as community economic development. But the capture of political control over OEO did not solve the mayors' poverty