Detroit CDCs dig in for the fight

Community Development Corporations (CDCs) normally ignite a neighborhood's development. So what do CDCs do when a city is shrinking? This article takes a look at community development groups working on the ground in here and in Clevelend, where our Rust Belt friends are feeling a similar loss of population. As this article notes, our CDCs have been imagining Detroit as a smaller city long before the Detroit Works Project -- and they're leading the way to transform meta ideas on strategic framework into practical plans to revive neighborhoods.

Excerpt:

Meanwhile, Detroit's CDCs have not been idle. Once the CDAD report came out, its members turned to the tough task of figuring out how to bring the framework down to the ground. During the past year, a CDAD working group led by Sam Butler, former executive director of Creekside CDC on Detroit's East Side and now part of the Detroit Vacant Properties Campaign, partnered with Data-Driven Detroit (D3) to develop indicators of neighborhood conditions that could be used by CDCs and neighborhood groups to evaluate their own conditions. "We're trying to make information accessible," says Butler. "We need to give residents a way to talk about their neighborhoods, to empower them to think strategically."

Read the rest of the article here.