Community Development Finance and Economic Justice

This chapter reflects on the history of community economic development, community development financial institutions, and their relationship with law and legal scholarship. It describes the robust use of complex legal and financial tools in community development practice today and presents Maine-based Coastal Enterprises Inc. (CEI) as a window into the evolution of the field over the last four decades. Part II traces the wider history and context of community development finance and of the dramatic expansion in tax credit financing. Part III explores the implications of this trend for sustainability and local accountability, underscoring the distinction between community organizing and community development and some distancing of community development from its activist origins. Part IV mines connections between community development practice and the legal academy, from the proliferation of law school transactional clinics to an emergent body of applied scholarship that impacts policy and strategy in community economic development