What do community-based, affordable housing developers do?
We know they build houses: bricks and mortar, glass and steel, places where people live. But that’s not all, is it? Since their early years, community-based organizations have been about change. The goal has been to reverse the decay and disinvestment of our poor inner-city and rural communities. While neighborhood destruction was most readily seen in crumbling housing, it was equally significant in the lack of jobs, poor schools, lousy city services, and dangerous streets. Every part of the community needed rebuilding. Such broad-based change was, and remains, a big job. Most organizations broke it down into parts and tackled perhaps the most important piece first; the one mostly likely to lead to rebuilt communities creating homes. After all, “[h]ome is where our connection to our community, our city, and our country begins,” says a recent HUD publication. “There is no better foundation for rebuilding communities and restoring self-sufficiency…” Doing More So while CDCs and other c
