Inclusive Development
In partnership with community groups around the country, Advancement Project’s Inclusive Development program works to integrate low-income people and communities of color into decisions concerning their homes and neighborhoods. In urban areas throughout the country, low-income communities—predominately residents of color—are being displaced in the name of revitalization, losing their homes, livelihoods, and communities. For these residents, “community development” plans have meant uprooting families, breaking social networks, and destroying political power.
Advancement Project’s persistent advocacy on behalf of low-income communities displaced by Hurricane Katrina since the storm hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005 laid the foundation of the Inclusive Development program. From immediately after Katrina made its landfall, market forces, greed, and racism—couched as “reconstruction”—have presented barriers to predominantly low-income residents of color’s access to housing, health care, education, public safety, and employment. For example, the storm presented an opportunity for officials to remove New Orleans public housing residents from solid viable homes to make way for private developers. For Advancement Project and grassroots groups across the country, the systematic exclusion of people of color from rebuilding efforts in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast raised critical awareness that displacement in the name of development is a crisis in cities nationwide.
THE PEOPLE’S CITY PROJECT
Advancement Project’s work in New Orleans led the Right to the City Alliance (RTTC) to invite us into the alliance as a resource organization. RTTC is a coalition of base-building urban organizations and resource allies formed to build a united response to gentrification and the drastic changes imposed on U.S. cities (www.righttothecity.org). In this capacity, Advancement Project has expanded its Inclusive Development work to cities across the country, such as New York and Miami. Through RTTC, we have directed the research and writing of a national community-led report, to be released in April 2010, on the detrimental impact of modern-day housing policies on low-income families and communities across the country. This report is a unique and desperately-needed contribution to the housing policy debate, as it presents and places at the forefront the perspective of residents to show the impact of disinvesting in and deregulating public housing.
The People’s City Project also has undertaken the critical work of equitable economic recovery opportunities for communities of color. With billions of federal dollars being pumped into states and localities in the name of economic recovery, a significant opportunity has arisen to strengthen communities of color. This funding has the potential to provide much-needed pathways to progress for these communities—including improving infrastructure such as transportation and schools, making low-income homes energy efficient, and increasing employment and job training opportunities. In addition, there are opportunities for community-based organizations to access funding to increase community participation in community planning. With all of the potential good that stimulus funding could generate, the possibility of missed opportunities are also great. Advancement Project is working with state coalitions around the country to ensure economic recovery projects do not exacerbate racial disparities in poverty and wealth, but, instead, alleviate them, and help with efforts to create a right to a sustainable community and livelihood.
VISION MOVING FORWARD
Cities across the U.S. are in severe distress, showing that development that does not include the original community and its residents is detrimental to society as a whole. When communities at the grassroots level assert their right to equity in resource allocation, a decent quality of life, and decision-making power, everyone benefits. In partnership with community groups, Advancement Project’s Inclusive Development program strives to make the principles of stability, sustainability, and self-determination the core of U.S. urban development.
