Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State

by Claire Dunning

An exploration of how and why American city governments delegated the responsibility for solving urban inequality to the nonprofit sector.

Nonprofits serving a range of municipal and cultural needs are now so ubiquitous in US cities, it can be difficult to envision a time when they were more limited in number, size, and influence. Turning back the clock, however, uncovers both an illuminating story of how the nonprofit sector became such a dominant force in American society, as well as a troubling one of why this growth occurred alongside persistent poverty and widening inequality. Claire Dunning’s book connects these two stories in histories of race, democracy, and capitalism, revealing how the federal government funded and deputized nonprofits to help individuals in need, and in so doing avoided addressing the structural inequities that necessitated such action in the first place.

Nonprofit Neighborhoods begins after World War II, when suburbanization, segregation, and deindustrialization inaugurated an era of urban policymaking that applied private solutions to public problems. Dunning introduces readers to the activists, corporate executives, and politicians who advocated addressing poverty and racial exclusion through local organizations, while also raising provocative questions about the politics and possibilities of social change. The lessons of Nonprofit Neighborhoods exceed the bounds of Boston, where the story unfolds, providing a timely history of the shift from urban crisis to urban renaissance for anyone concerned about American inequality—past, present, or future.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Cities, History, Urban Studies, Race, Sociology

351 pages, Paperback

Published June 23, 2022

Reviews

[James Steichen]

Fascinating deep dive into the mechanics of how nonprofit organizations intersect with governmental entities and the mixed results that these alliances have produced. Although focused on Boston as a case study the dynamics described are evident in almost every American city. As someone who grew up believing in the inherent value of “public private partnership” and as someone who has worked in nonprofit for most of my career this book gave me a lot of food for thought about the limitations of the nonprofit sector more broadly and how its work is beholden to capitalist rhetoric and structures. This book is also valuable as a way of revealing the less obvious channels through which systemic racism operates, since even as nonprofit entities appear to promote inclusivity and democracy they often reinscribe and reinforce existing inequalities and power disparities.

[Nick]

This book was hard to get through--it does not read anything like Kim Phillips-Fein's Fear City--but although a slow read, it is a masterful history of the neoliberal city, federal urban policy, and the nuances of both decentralization and the public vs. private question.

Decentralization has always been a political value shared by various competing groups--sometimes in pursuit of equal representation, and sometimes in attempt to weaken government and increase inequality. The outcome of decentralization usually ends up being the latter, yet officials are able to point to the former for political points. This book illustrates this perfectly.

When the 'urban crisis' became more recognized as something that needed to be addressed, and it was thought that there needed to be more 'renewal' and less 'removal,' policymakers thought that these communities could be given more targeted assistance if authority was given to organizations that resided in the neighborhood.

Receiving public funds meant submitting to control and surveillance from above, which meant that the American state was expanding and becoming more involved in communities, while simultaneously shrinking and shifting responsibility for service delivery onto private entities.

When the public dollars ran out, the institutionalization of this local governance structure meant that the neighborhood nonprofits that communities relied on were now dependent on philanthropic dollars and funding from for-profit businesses.

In America, federalism and metros being fractured into tons of separate municipal jurisdictions means that without an active federal government, that decentralization is going to produce a lot of different, unequal outcomes. The attractive idea of representation in decentralization doesn't live up to its promise. This book shows how privatization, financialization, and neoliberalism more generally tie into this situation, and what kind of role nonprofits play. This is important considering how ubiquitous nonprofits are in liberal politics.

It's also not just inequality between states, or between different municipalities within the same metro--the decentralization shown in this book illustrates how individual neighborhoods relying on nonprofits without the necessary power and resources will create serious inequalities across a single city.

I thought a lot during this book about what Brent Cebul calls 'supply side liberalism,' and how policymakers really thought that if you turn to nonprofits, local businesses, and community development corporations, then these groups could be a more representative and more efficient way to create thriving communities and solve inequality, by stimulating economic growth and prosperity. Relying on private organizations and private dollars, though, does not mean equal distribution of that prosperity, and decentralization means there is no safety net for the communities that do not succeed.

"Both the local Healthy Boston initiative and the federal Empowerment Zone program produced nonprofit neighborhoods, though of slightly difference varieties. Under Healthy Boston, the city extended agenda-setting, self-determination, and representative authority to coalitions of nonprofits often cutting across traditional city boundaries. Yet, without substantive resources behind such powers, the initiative did more to alter the governance infrastructure than to improve the lives of those living in poverty. In contrast, the Empowerment Zone efforts in Boston extended significant resources through nonprofits but limited the application of those resources to projects and services that aligned with the goal of expanding market access and the improvement of individuals. In each case, the local project reacted to decisions made elsewhere and suffered for lack of either resources or power. The persistence of the absences, counterintuitively, empowered neighborhood nonprofits to find niches for themselves in neighborhoods and, ultimately, obstructed them from meaningfully addressing the issues of racial and economic inequality in Boston....The concentration of federal aid and local attention within a relatively similar zone successfully directed resources to those most in need but left untouched all that occurred outside it as the city became more expensive and unequal by the day. Rather than remedies for racial and economic inequality, these federal grant making programs enabled segregation, poverty, and exclusion to persist in new forms, as marginalized populations continued to disproportionately live in nonprofit neighborhoods and rely on neighborhood nonprofits for public resources, representation, and rights....Perhaps no statistic captures the extremes of privilege and poverty better than life expectancy. In a city with world-renowned hospitals, residents of the Egleston Square neighborhood have in the twenty-first century a life expectancy of less than fifty-nine years, while those living less than half a mile away--two subway stops--in the Back Bay can expect to see their early nineties."

"Reams of paper in grant applications, reports, and audits have set and tracked benchmarks, and programs have been evaluated on the expectation that data would either confirm success or inspire a redesign. The rhetoric and details of redesigned systems have varied over time, but the general goal has remained. So, too, has the ideological basis behind these efforts, insisting that US political economy is basically sound and that opportunity need only be extended to those at the bottom of the ladder. The call for better or improved systems of social welfare and urban governance has been one of the most consistent themes of political and urban history."

[joe2436]

"Nonprofit Neighborhoods" is a thoroughly researched, comprehensive, and ethically charged commentary on the role that nonprofit organizations have played in American cities in the second half of the 20th century, using Boston as a case study. As someone who works for an 'urban nonprofit' and within the affordable housing sector of the 'nonprofit industrial complex,' I greatly appreciated Dunning's extensive research on the way urban nonprofits changed through waves of federal policy and political and social change. Alongside excellent scholarship, Dunning also manages to critique the moral shortcomings and ultimate ineffectiveness of these networks to address systematic change, both in the past and in the present.

The world of urban nonprofits is full of acronyms, grant applications, loans, federal, state, and local programs that exist in a dizzying mess. Many people who have worked within the space for years do not understand the full extent of it or how some programs originated. For example, many do not know that the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, a pillar program of affordable housing nationwide, was a neoliberal conservative policy approach born out of the height of the Reagan years. Dunning does a great job of parsing out the evolution of urban nonprofits, with new programs and approaches being added over the decades like layers. As a professional in the space, I greatly appreciated the chronology of events. This book helped me understand that the development of the urban npic was more nuanced and drawn-out than I had previously thought.

Dunning does not hide her true opinions of urban nonprofits: the War on Poverty and the neoliberal era created a system of neoliberal paternalism, where priorities of 'economic growth' and 'development' overshadowed the political enfranchisement of marginalized peoples and genuine social change. In a quote a found both brutal and true, Dunning calls this "the
practice of democracy at its fullest and hollowest." And Dunning is right: the urban npic seems like a quintessentially American democratic system, akin to Alexis De Tocqueville's vision of civic societies, but is really a hollow system that bypasses providing marginalized peoples with democratic representation. This fight is still fought on the sidelines, outside of the massive shadow of the NPIC.

Dunning's use of Boston is strategic and effective, though could sometimes be misleading. As she notes, Boston has been known for having one of the most robust, progressive, and innovative community development sectors in the country. In my opinion, this is inseparable from the generally robust civic culture which exists in Boston and Massachusetts. I won't say what city or region I work in, but it's a far cry from Boston. Interestingly, the major milestones in Boston mirror most other regions, and certainly other large cities. However, Boston always seemed to have a progressive edge and a more robust approach to this work. I sort of wish that Dunning had contrasted Boston with other cities more often to show how nonprofit neighborhoods were developing on a national scale. However, Dunning's use of Boston is effective because the outcome is virtually the same, if not worse, than other regions: Boston is a wonderful city, but a terrible one if you are poor or working class. Boston is aggressively gentrified, highly socially segregated, and totally unaffordable. The urban npic has accomplished something, but it certainly hasn't fixed the problems it set out to fix.

Dunning makes a comment that I often make to people about this industry: if you create housing for one hundred people, you've done a good thing because one hundred people are now housed. This is just like if you feed five hundred people, it's five hundred people who aren't hungry. However, if one hundred people have quality, affordable, housing, and 5,000 people don't, you're not fixing the problem. You're just participating in altruism. Churches and community groups do this stuff all the time, and they should be commended for it. But it's not political systematic change, and altruism and paternalism often go hand in hand. This is how I see the urban npic: working long hours, putting money in the hands of investors, talking a lot of talk about helping people, to only house one hundred people. It's self-serving neoliberal altruism, not democratic social change. And now, if you're a working-class person trying to make a living, you're better off in Texas than you are in Boston. That's not meant to be a politically charged statement, just an observation that the current system has not succeeded in its goals. It also shows that a weakness of nonprofit neighborhoods is ignoring what is happening in the world outside of them.

I'll wrap this up, but it's clear that I really appreciated both the scholarship and the social commentary in this book. I'd highly recommend, before your read this, or after, to read "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded," which is the book that created the concept of the NPIC and is sort of the ideological foundation for this book. If you are interested in community development, cities, or nonprofits, I'd highly recommend giving this one a read.

[Lawrence Grandpre]

Pretty easy read, minus the alphabet soup. This argument reflects concerns of grassroots organizations for years, the nonprofits, rather than serving as a tool of community representation, have become gatekeepers and alternative to addressing root causes in a manner that reflect the community control demands of the 60s and 70s. The text discusses the negotiation of black grassroots community advocates trying to use nonprofits strategically to gain some degree of power, but falling into neoliberal and top-down federal infrastructures that led subtly to cooption. The role fo federal incentives in shaping reporting, and disciplinary status upon grassroots nonprofits is an essential part of the story and is good to see it in print. It is a case study of one specific city, and a larger analysis of these dynamics, specifically one told from the perspective of Black grassroots organizations, would be an essential addition to the analysis this book presents, but I fear that the American academy lacks space for such a frontal attack on white liberalism this text would provide, so texts like this will suffice until we gain the capacity to produce this text through black controlled academic spaces.

[Katrinka]

An incredibly interesting book: extremely well researched and engagingly written to boot.

[Jessica]

Granular but reinforced the concepts via case study that I teach in my undergrad nonprofit course.

[David Sogge]

This incisive history, focused on Boston, chronicles the disheartening career of late 20th century anti-poverty efforts supposedly led from below, yet confined and ultimately neutralized from above. Progressives welcomed nonprofits as expressions of empowerment. Political and business interests saw them as convient vehicles of self-help. Lauded on the left and on the right, community organisations ultimately found themselves captive to strategies and monies controlled not in the streets but in the suites: philanthropic and governmental grant-makers seeking grantees, corporations seeking local ‘partners’, mainstream politicians seeking 'results'. Yet all these powerful interests sought ways to minimise redistrbutive claims on public resources, that is, to frustrate the pursuit of genuinely equitable development.

Actual outcomes for poor Bostonians were meagre. But a more serious verdict of this book is that neighborhood nonprofits were counterproductive. Their voluntary, people-centred exteriors were attractive, yet their presence helped predation, exclusion and discrimination to continue largely as before. Indeed, those ugly structural realities tended to get worse. In the USA, relatively equitable social contracts of the kind seen in Western Europe (in various states of disrepair these days) have retreated yet further over the horizon. Fundamental changes are wholly off the agenda. This book tells, from several standpoints – the nonprofit grantees, neighborhood residents, municipal and philanthropic bureaucrats, bankers, corporations and coalitions embracing them all – how inequality has been kept in place.

Enthusiasm for NGOs and other nonprofits began to draw scepticism already in the 1980s. In our own book of 1996 I wrote that “mainstream non-profits are gaining stature. The public gets an impression that ‘something is being done’ …. But there are real risks that what is being conjured up is a smokescreen, a cheap and expedient way for public authorities to sidestep basic obligations.” Nonprofit Neighborhoods confirms these apprehensions, and with far more concrete detail. The author makes little use of political or sociological concepts, but her empirical findings may help extend or improve those that exist. Social scientists have, for example, put forward the concept of ‘placebo policies’ - half-measures conjured up to demonstrate concern, but which lack real curative power and weight. This history of anti-poverty policies 'lite' helps us understand the continuing non-achievement of emancipatory change.