Detroit’s Community Benefits Ordinance: Lessons Learned About the Community Engagement Process and Its Outcomes
This paper discusses Detroit’s community benefits ordinance (CBO), situating it in the city's political economy and examining some of its successes, shortcomings, and lessons learned. It provides recommendations to strengthen Detroit's CBO, and lessons for policymakers and other stakeholders beyond Detroit looking to engage communities meaningfully. The paper includes interviews with representatives from community-based organizations in Detroit, members of neighborhood advisory councils (NACs) for different projects, and some city officials.
In 2016, Detroit adopted the first community benefits ordinance (CBO) in a major US city to secure benefits for local communities from “high-impact” development projects. The ordinance requires developers of projects investing more than $75 million, and receiving significant subsidies from the City, to negotiate additional benefits for the communities where a project is to be sited. Nearly a decade later, Detroit’s experience can provide valuable insights for communities and policymakers searching for effective strategies to conduct meaningful community engagement and share benefits with local communities to advance an equitable energy transition.
Key Findings:
- Detroit’s first-of-its-kind Community Benefits Ordinance (CBO) offers lessons for governments, developers, community organizations, and others planning or already undertaking a community benefits process.
- A set of stakeholder interviews and a literature review of CBO documents, CBO meeting recordings, scholarly articles, and print media revealed that Detroit’s CBO has started to level the playing field between communities and developers by giving community members a seat at the table in conversations on development.
- However, a CBO is not a silver bullet for addressing decades of disinvestment, austerity, and racial and economic inequality in Detroit and elsewhere, and interviewees from community-based organizations and neighborhood advisory councils (NACs) voiced several concerns about the CBO’s community engagement and benefits agreement processes and outcomes. Many of these concerns have been corroborated by the literature review.
- To strengthen Detroit’s CBO and provide for equitable economic development and a just energy transition, we recommend sufficiently resourcing communities to negotiate with developers, building representative coalitions, ensuring that agreements have robust monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to hold developers accountable, incorporating environmental justice and racial equity frameworks to assess project impacts and benefits delivery, and undertaking analysis of public ownership of key infrastructure projects to serve the public good.
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