Community Development

  1. Physical Geography
  2. Public Goods
    • Roads/parking, water, transportation, healthcare
  3. Capital Formation
    • Social, human, and resource
  4. Public Safety
Physical Geography
Infrastructure provides the foundation for community life and business development, and is built by common investment for the public good. However, our infrastructure is crumbling, neighborhoods "feel" blighted, and accessing the basics of daily life can be challenging (healthy food, laundry facilities, transportation to jobs). Resolving these impediments requires multiple approaches
  • Green spaces for family use, community events, and neighborhood beautification
  • Directing funds for low-income home repair and renovation
  • Dramatically increased investments into local public transportation
  • Community vegetable gardens
Public Goods: Roads/parking, water, transportation, healthcare
Public utilities are being sold to private businesses which lack democratic oversight. Whether schools, or other public goods, the institutions and structures that are for public use, and that were originally developed by public taxes, should never be transformed into a business venture. This anti-democratic process not only creates monopolies, but should be considered malfeasance, since it reallocates a system constructed with public funds into a system that isolates social resources for the profit of individuals. All such acts are short-sighted political choices and robs the public of money and democratic oversight.
Social, Human and Resource Capital
Local community development is critical for the the future growth of Indianapolis. Capital development is fundamental for this process, and involves multiple components:
  • Social Capital
    • Building networks with neighbors to organize and act
    • Building networks with businesses to attract jobs
    • Building networks with government leaders to create lobby power to demand resources and democratic voice
    • Building networks with organizations to facilitate each of the above
  • Human Capital: Generating job skills, improving education
  • Resource Capital: Funding for community projects
Public Safety
The long-term solution to crime is not about an increased assault on crime. We have utilized this approach since the Reagan years and all it has created is the largest, by far, prison system in the world, much of which has become a for-profit institition that warehouses black men. This system of injustice is not about crime itself--it is about a lack of legitimate opportunities for men in poor communities, and it is about discriminatory laws, both of which foster an adversarial relationship with the larger society. Community development, education, and the formation of capital resources are the long-term solution to crime. As we have learned from the last 30 years of the "war on drugs," there are no short-term to problems as complex as discrimination, poverty, addiction, alienation and deviance.

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