Continued...

Where We’ve Been

To better understand the evolution of the field, one must look back to the early 1970s when the sector’s first trade association, the National Congress for Community Economic Development (NCCED), was created. Early community development corporations (CDCs), created by Title VII of the Office of Economic Opportunity in the mid 1960s, formed NCCED so they would have a common voice to maintain the federal funding that supported their organizations. As the CDC field started to grow, NCCED broadened its focus to initiatives such as the formation of new federal community development programs.

After the election of Ronald Reagan, the Office of Economic Development (OED), which had provided financial support to 40 to 50 CDCs for over a decade, was eliminated, as were several other key HUD programs. NCCED had received the lion’s share of its funding base from OED, so it had to scramble.

Also during the 1980s, an independent support system began to emerge for the field. The Ford Foundation, one of the earliest funders of CDCs, helped establish the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). LISC was capitalized in 1981 with $10 million from Ford and six other private funders to serve as an intermediary providing technical assistance and project-based support to a couple dozen CDCs. LISC grew rapidly and within a few years was able to raise money from hundreds of private and public institutions.

At the same time, real estate developer James Rouse, who had volunteered at Jubilee Housing in Washington, D.C., decided to establish his own intermediary, The Enterprise Foundation, now Enterprise Community Partners. Both LISC and Enterprise had powerful boards of directors and were well connected to private and public sector leaders at the national level.

In the late 1980s, the creation of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and the National Community Development Initiative (now Living Cities) enabled LISC and Enterprise to move to scale, supporting hundreds of CDCs across the country and offering them a variety of tools, from core operating support and capacity building grants to pre-development and project financing.

Another intermediary that grew significantly during this period was Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation (NRC), now NeighborWorks America, established by Congress in the late 1970s with a significant direct appropriation. By the mid 1980s it started supporting CDCs.

Between these four organizations, by the early 1990s a significant CDC support system had been established, largely focused on affordable housing production. The number of CDCs dramatically increased during this period, from under 500 in 1980 to 2,000 in 1991. In this period NCCED also experienced a rapid growth in membership and programs and helped establish over a dozen state CDC associations. For many in the field, NCCED was the public face of CDCs through its national census, conferences, publications, and policy work.

The national and regional intermediaries supported NCCED to varying degrees, but did not see NCCED as a major resource for CDC capacity building and training. Development Training Institute had emerged as the leading training resource for CDC practitioners in the 1980s and 1990s, and intermediaries were themselves able to offer both grant and loan programs and free resources (training, policy support) to CDCs. NCCED, on the other hand, charged membership dues, did not provide financing, and had difficulty delivering the same level of support.

During this same period, metropolitan and regional nonprofit housing organizations emerged out of public-private efforts to address housing needs. Unlike the CDCs, which were rooted in specific neighborhoods and focused on community change, these organizations were focused primarily on housing production. Additionally, several national service organizations, such as Volunteers of America, began to become active in affordable housing production. These national nonprofits operate on a much larger scale than traditional CDCs.