Centering Neighborhood Priorities for Economic Inclusion
By presenting early outcomes and lessons from the field, this brief from LISC and Brookings, seeks to provide guidance for cities looking to enhance opportunity in their disinvested neighborhoods and test a new kind of economic inclusion rooted in the knowledge, strength, and collective power of community.
Introduction
In 2021, Brookings and LISC released a playbook for a new approach to advancing economic inclusion—one that centers disinvested neighborhoods as the locus for achieving inclusive regional economic recovery and growth. Inherently place-based and community-led in nature, this approach—“community-centered economic inclusion”—has been tested by the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, persistent racial injustice, and widening inequities in our nation’s most impoverished communities.
Today, as the economic challenges of the pandemic continue to change shape, muddle the conventions of economic thought, and disproportionately impact people and places that have long been disadvantaged, the value of equity-focused place-based economic development is as important as ever. But so too is understanding the effectiveness of these strategies during a period in which many place-based efforts have had to shift to focus toward meeting basic needs amid prolonged crisis rather than dismantling the long-standing root causes of economic inequity.
This brief presents early outcomes and lessons from five cities that have implemented community-centered economic inclusion for at least one year: Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Detroit, San Diego, and Philadelphia. It provides early insight into the questions: Can cities and regions meaningfully reduce economic inequity by growing more communities of opportunity? How can cities tell if they are on the right track to produce the kind of systems-level change needed to accomplish this? What lessons have emerged for cities looking to reduce economic inequity in today’s pandemic era?
By presenting early outcomes and lessons from the field, this brief seeks to provide guidance for other cities looking to enhance opportunity in their disinvested neighborhoods and test a new kind of economic inclusion rooted in the knowledge, strength, and collective power of community.