Community Benefits Agreement - Purposes

Purposes

Economic development projects are often heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars, but there is usually no guarantee that a project's “ripple effects” will benefit current residents. Developments can cause inner-city gentrification, pushing out low-income residents as housing prices rise, or they may create only low-wage retail and service sector jobs. As a result, many metropolitan regions continue to experience problems related to poverty and housing, despite major investments in economic development.

Responding to these problems, the CBA model was created in the late 1990s as a way for the communities most impacted by economic development projects to participate in the planning process and seek to ensure that development benefits will accrue to existing communities. For developers, negotiating with community representatives can be an attractive way to gain community support and help move their projects forward. Participating in CBA negotiations can eliminate surprises in the development approvals process and allow developers to work with a unified coalition rather than having to engage community organizations one by one.

Read more about this topic:  Community Benefits Agreement

Famous quotes containing the word purposes:

    What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.
    Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)

    The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

    To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.
    John Updike (b. 1932)