Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Investments in community development need to achieve a certain scale before they impact conditions at the neighborhood level (Pooley 2014). Unfortunately, federal funding for many federal community development programs have declined significantly. This has drawn policymakers to examine ways that other institutional partners can be engaged in community development, including “anchor institutions,” to make up for lost resources and to leverage their economic presence for community benefit. There is recent evidence that these partnerships can in fact be impactful at the neighborhood level (Ehlenz, 2018).

At the same time, anchor partnerships hold the potential for misaligned interests, including concerns that anchors will prioritize strategies that result in gentrification and displacement. Some authors have pointed to the need for on-the-ground community capacity, including political mobilization, to leverage community commitments from anchors and to implement community programs that advance equity-related priorities (Perry, Wiewel and Mendendez 2009). In other words, broad trends related to housing policy and politics that have exacerbated housing inequality at the national level (Schwartz, 2014, O’Connor, 2012) and which can contribute to the unequal outcomes in at the local level (Stone, 1989; Self, 2003) all have the potential to play out in relationships between anchor institutions and surrounding communities.

Accordingly, this paper asks two related questions: 1) what factors facilitate productive engagement between community and anchor stakeholders to advance local equity objectives, 2) what impacts come from intentionally-directed community revitalization strategies related to these partnerships.

To address these questions, the paper presents a mixed-methods case study of community organizing and community impacts in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Like many urban places in the 1990s, diverse neighborhoods in South Minneapolis experienced significant strains, including the highly publicized murder of a Honeywell employee in 1995. What followed was a sustained effort on the part of community organizations, the public and philanthropic sectors, and Twin Cities LISC to engage the health care organization Allina, and other major corporations. Using an Adjusted Interrupted Time Series Analysis (see Galster, Temkin and Walker 2004), we examined home loan values in census tracts that received substantial community development investments, and interviewed long-time residents and community practitioners.

There is evidence that partnerships influenced investment activity at the broader community level: controlling for other factors, the levels and slopes of local home loan values in focal tracts reversed their decline to catch up with broader citywide trends. Qualitative findings emphasize how sustained community mobilization, combined with the active support of elected and appointed officials, general alignment and trust among high-capacity community development actors, and culturally-resonant organizing with diverse communities contributed to neighborhood outcomes.

This case adds to the literature on community mobilization for equitable neighborhood change, and in particular how to engage “anchor institutions” to advance local equity goals, so as to make partnerships productive over the longer term.