Abstract

THE CDC MODEL OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT, a Reply to Randy Stoecker W. DENNIS KEATING* Cleveland State University Sociologist Randy Stoecker’s critique of community development corporations (CDCs) in the United States focuses on two primary issues. The first is the inadequacy of CDCs to overcome the decline of the urban neighborhoods in which they are based due to the enor- mity of the problems compared to their limited resources. The second is the emphasis by CDCs on physical development to the detriment of community organizing and the resultant negative consequences for community empowerment. Stoecker concludes that an alternative model is to separate community organizing from development, clearly leaving the latter role to CDCs. He supports community organizing which results in resident-guided comprehensive neighborhood planning. He points to such examples as Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis (Stoecker, 1994) and the Dudley Street Initia- tive in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood (Medoff & Sklar, 1994). To promote greater impact on distressed urban neighborhoods, he proposes the “high capacity multilocal” CDC. This is intended to allow for the greater capitalization of larger CDCs which could result in larger projects. Stoecker sees strong community controlled planning offsetting any undesirable influence by these large CDCs. While he does not