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.

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Famous quotes containing the word purposes:

    A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.
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    I have been reporting club meetings for four years and I am tired of hearing reviews of the books I was brought up on. I am tired of amateur performances at occasions announced to be for purposes either of enjoyment or improvement. I am tired of suffering under the pretense of acquiring culture. I am tired of hearing the word “culture” used so wantonly. I am tired of essays that let no guilty author escape quotation.
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    What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
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