Community Benefits Agreements and the Limits of Institutional Citizenship in Urban Redevelopment

Abstract

This dissertation explores the potential for community benefits agreements (CBAs) to serve as instruments towards a more democratic approach to situating urban redevelopment projects into residential neighborhoods. To aid my analysis, I utilize the lens of democratic political theory to describe their most intractable shortcomings as well as prescribe reforms that can better enable them to bridge the oftentimes conflicting ends of economic growth and social justice. Moreover, I consider the conditions that are most favorable for residents to maximize their bargaining power against developers and the conditions where developers are least likely to negotiate with the locals. Drawing from a range of sources including interviews, audio recordings, documents, and investigative reporting, I illustrate their common failings by using three case studies of CBAs from major American cities. I find that the most recurring problem facing CBAs is their susceptibility to co- option by powerful political and economic elites who manage to subvert them into devices for private gain. Up to this point, municipalities have been largely reluctant to regulate them, and this lack of regulation has led to agreements being shaped more by informal networks of powerful interests rather than the wants and needs of everyday residents. This informality leading up to an agreement is a major contributing factor to their failings. Thus, in the absence of a structure that actively promotes inclusive and transparent procedures leading up to the forging of an agreement, residents lack the power to meaningfully influence its terms and conditions. This observation leads critics to contend that their vulnerability to elite influence should force us to rethink, and ultimately abandon CBAs as reliable instruments for popular control over the built environment. However, I argue that this conclusion is misguided; given their proliferation across American cities and increasing salience in land-use debates, a more effective alternative is to find institutional designs that curb the excesses of such projects while also making them more responsive to local concerns. If policy makers, activists, and residents are going to continue to look to CBAs to extract concessionary gains from developers, then it is crucial to devise safeguards that effectively minimize opportunities for abuse while also enhancing residential voice in shaping the resulting agreement.