Community Wealth Building

Online Symposium

Scholars of urban politics have long debated the issue of what cities can and should do to promote the economic well-being of their residents. As the of election Zohran Mamdani illustrates, urban residents are increasingly demanding that city governments do more to address the increasingly exorbitant costs of housing, childcare, and transportation. One obvious solution is to raise taxes on the private holders of wealth. By the same token, his election has prompted handwringing on the right about the “inevitable” flight of capital out of New York City. Scholarship that runs the gamut from the public choice school associated with the “city limits” perspective (Peterson 1981) through to Marxian accounts (Logan and Molotch 1987) all recognize that the private ownership of wealth and the mobility of capital puts cities in a bind, especially in a context of highly circumscribed levels of federal urban spending. Though several scholars (Logan and Swanstrom 1990; Kantor and Savitch 1993; Schragger 2016) have demonstrated that cities have greater latitude to promote egalitarian public policies than these perspective allow, few would argue that the deep structural problems of economic and social inequality can be fully resolved by tax-and-spend liberalism (Imbroscio 2010).

Community wealth building (CWB) is an approach that both understands the dilemmas presented by the extensive private ownership and control of capital and seeks to circumvent it by transforming the underpinnings of the political economy. Rather than trying to work within the system to make the neoliberal political economy more equitable via redistribution, CWB seeks to “breach” the division of labor between the state and market that oft bedevils efforts to engage in egalitarian policymaking (Imbroscio 2010, 23).

As these essays show both in theory and, increasingly, in practice, CWB stands to reconstitute the fundamental structure of local political economies by transferring ownership and control of capital from private actors into the hands of democratically accountable community organizations and workers and through redeploying publicly held resources in ways that redound to the public benefit. Such concrete measures, which promise to tackle systemic urban problems, will be of interest to scholars and practitioners alike.

Timothy Weaver, May 2026

References

Imbroscio, David L. 2010. Urban America Reconsidered: Alternatives for Governance and Policy. Cornell University Press.

Kantor, Paul, and H. V. Savitch. 1993. “Can Politicians Bargain with Business?” Urban Affairs Review 29 (2): 230–55.

Logan, John R., and Harvey Luskin Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. University of California Press.

Logan, John R., and Todd Swanstrom, eds. 1990. Beyond the City Limits: Urban Policy and Economic Restructuring in Comparative Perspective. Temple University Press.

Peterson, Paul E. 1981. City Limits. University of Chicago Press.

Schragger, Richard C. 2016. City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age. Oxford University Press.

Introduction

Community Wealth Building

By Nairuti Shastry (Center for Economic Democracy) and Neil McInroy (The Democracy Collective)

As we write this introductory essay to the Community Wealth Bulding (CWB) special feature for the Urban Affairs Forum in the winter of 2026, we are deep in the throes of what Zen master and Indigenous Hawaiian activist Norma Wong (2024) calls “collective acceleration”: a sort of high-octane current whose bullish momentum drives us toward ever uncertain futures. In just the past year, we have seen the acceleration of climate events, an untenable rise in the cost of basic household items, a continued attack on the administrative state, and the ruthlesslessness of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in places from Minnesota to Los Angeles to our nation’s capital.

This context is a wider reaction to the polycrisis of climate, ecological, economic, social and democratic issues. And whilst universal, it is in the urban setting where these crises are most virulently experienced. As the crucibles of humanity that betray both the joys and ills of our world, cities bring to light the core of this crisis: an extractive political economy that concentrates wealth and thus power among the few at the expense of the many. The result? An economic system that degrades land, exploits labor, and extracts capital in unsustainable ways.

Theoretical Contributions

Community Wealth Building

Community Wealth Building Goes South

By Thad Williamson (University of Richmond)

What happens when the former capital of the Confederacy sets out to become a capital of community wealth building? This essay addresses that provocative question. First, I document efforts made in Richmond, Virginia since 2011 to develop and implement a coordinated strategy aimed at broadening socio-economic opportunity and reducing the city’s poverty rate, utilizing a “community wealth building” framework. Integral to this effort was the establishment of the nation’s first municipal Office of Community Wealth Building (OCWB) in 2014 by Mayor Dwight C. Jones, charged with leading “implementation of a comprehensive poverty reduction initiative for the City with the aim of improving access to educational and economic opportunities for residents of the city.”

Community Wealth Building beyond the city

By Max Lacey-Barnacle & Siobhan Stack-Maddox (Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex)

Community Wealth Building (CWB) has begun to ascend globally as an international policy and practice movement promoting local development that advances economic democracy. At the heart of CWB lies five core pillars which inform a transformative political economy for broader economic systems change. These pillars are: [1] Inclusive and Democratic Enterprise, [2] Locally Rooted Finance, [3] Fair Work [4] Progressive Procurement, and the [5] Just Use of Land and Property. Place-based “anchor institutions” – such as local government, universities, hospitals, social enterprises, credit unions and housing associations – have a key role to play in advancing these principles by using their local and regional economic power to strengthen local supply chains, redirect procurement spend, and support cooperative and social enterprise ventures. Anchor institutions are large, established organizations with significant procurement budgets responsible for substantial local spending. They are also rooted and fixed in place by virtue of their organizational design. Using a CWB approach and drawing on the five pillars outlined above, anchor institutions can work with organizations such as local, grassroots and community enterprises to switch their service contracts and partnerships from multinational to local supply chains. Simultaneously, capacity is built up in local cooperatives and other types of social enterprises, with an emphasis on more democratic ownership of and engagement with the economy. The broader aim here is to democratize the economy with the long-term support of anchor institutions, recirculating wealth and diversifying ownership.

Circuits of Recognition

By Ahmed Mori (Johns Hopkins University/Community Ownership Learning & Action Lab, University of Miami)

Over the past two decades, community wealth building (CWB) has emerged as an anti-neoliberal development paradigm: democratize control over land, labor, and capital so that wealth is (re)produced in place rather than extracted. Formulated and popularized by The Democracy Collaborative (TDC) through its work in Cleveland and later adopted in cities around the world like Preston (UK), CWB takes the form of worker cooperatives, community-owned real estate, anchor procurement strategies, and forms of community ownership and governance of resources, such as municipal ownership of utilities, and public banking (Guinan and O’Neill 2019; Howard and O’Neill 2018). Many of the CWB model’s theoretical underpinnings derive from TDC co-founder Gar Alperovitz’s efforts to envision a “pluralist commonwealth,” which advocates for clusters of hyperlocal, ecologically minded, and cooperatively owned businesses, run by other community-owned enterprises or community-governed nonprofits (Alperovitz 2017; Alperovitz and Dubb 2013).

Community Wealth Building in Anytown

By Gillian Murray (Yunus Centre)

The Scottish Government’s commitment to a national Community Wealth Building (CWB) policy, including the passing of a CWB (Scotland) Bill in March 2025, has captured the attention of people working in Scotland’s social economy. Research exploring the potential for CWB in Scotland identified a common refrain among social economy practitioners, that they were “already doing community wealth building” (Mazzei et al. 2024). Elsewhere, the third sector support organization Scottish Community Alliance has showcased a series of case studies, This is Community Wealth Building, publicizing that “community wealth building isn’t new, Scotland’s been doing it for years.” This article explores these claims using writing on Scotland’s social economy past and present, arguing that engaging with these grassroots perspectives is crucial for CWB movement building in Scotland.

Mobilizing Academic Missions of Universities for Community Wealth Building

By Heather Hachigian & Todd Thexton (Royal Roads University)

Universities have a critical role to play in bolstering community wealth building (CWB), an approach to economic development that seeks to transform local economies by giving communities direct ownership and control of their wealth-generating assets (CLES 2019). As large, place-based organizations, these anchor institutions can leverage their significant economic assets and academic missions to strengthen their surrounding urban communities (Hodges and Dubb 2012). Although universities often engage their economic levers, such as purchasing power, hiring practices, and real estate development (Taylor, Luter and Miller 2018), they rarely deploy research and teaching as deliberate anchor strategies (Harkay and Hodges 2017). These academic levers play a critical role in economic systems change required by the CWB movement, such as by creating spaces to imagine alternative and better futures and building community capacity (Jeffrey 2024).

Case Studies

Community Wealth Building

Chicago’s Community Wealth Building Initiative

By Stacey Sutton (University of Illinois-Chicago)

In September 2022, the City of Chicago announced the Community Wealth Building Initiative (CWBI)—a $15 million federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funded program to support community-owned and controlled businesses, land, housing, and commercial property, particularly in historically disinvested Black and Latine communities across the city. Although modest compared to former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s $750 million INVEST South/West initiative, or the city’s nearly $2 billion ARPA allocation, the CWBI represents a substantial ideological, epistemological, and methodological departure from conventional economic development which have consistently failed to deliver economic benefits to Black, Latine, and low-income residents. Chicago’s CWBI offers a replicable framework for enabling community wealth. It is part of an ascendant movement for equitable development and solidarity economies that aims to expand the power of cooperative enterprises, normalize community ownership and control of neighborhood assets, and promote democratic governance and collective decision-making as viable alternatives to the extraction of neoliberal racial capitalism. After decades of public and private sector disinvestment from Chicago’s Black and Latine communities on the South and West Sides of the city, community wealth building (CWB) – through worker cooperatives, community land trusts (CLTs), permanently affordable housing cooperatives, community investment vehicles (CIVs) – is creating meaningful pathways to economic democracy, housing stability, revitalized commercial corridors, shared ownership, community planning and power building.

The Role of the State in Advancing Community Wealth Building

By Benjamin Tsai (Nexus), Sarah Wang (Center for Economic Democracy), and Nairuti Shastry (Center for Economic Democracy)

Within any social movement, achieving its political goals may involve different levels of engagement with the government apparatus, or the state. When it comes to Community Wealth Building (CWB), we know that the support of local and state governments is especially critical for the long-term success of CWB efforts. Not only can the state pass legislation and provide financial resources to create a more enabling environment for CWB activity, but local governments can also exercise soft power by convening key stakeholders and preserving institutional memory of projects past.

Community Wealth Building in Scotland

By Fiona Scott (NHS Tayside), Gerard McCartney (University of Glasgow), Neil McInroy (The Democracy Collaborative), and Margaret Douglas (University of Glasgow)

Economic policy and activity are key determinants of health and health inequalities. They shape the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age, as well as the distribution of income and wealth across society (McCartney et al. 2019; WHO 2024). Economic policy and development activity can improve population health through income, employment status, and job quality (Naik et al. 2020). However, it is increasingly recognized that traditional extractive models of economic growth and the resultant patterns of wealth do not deliver prosperity for all (Mazzucato et al. 2022).

In this context Scotland has adopted a “Wellbeing Economy” approach as a new economic system that prioritizes human and planetary needs rather than economic growth (WEAll n.d.). This recognizes that accelerating economic growth has adverse consequences including ecological crises and inequalities (Hensher et al. 2024), without necessarily improving health (Brook et al. 2024). Community Wealth Building (CWB) has been proposed as a means to realize a wellbeing economy in Scotland (Scottish Government 2022c) and as such positively improve health impacts. In February 2026 the Scottish Parliament passed the Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Bill which will place legal duties to embed CWB in public sector bodies in Scotland.

Future Directions

Community Wealth Building

The Art of the Possible

By Nairuti Shastry (Center for Economic Democracy)

The Community Wealth Building (CWB) movement in the United States, while innovative, lacks a cohesive analysis of, and agenda for, political change. Among practitioners—from Denver to Se attle to St. Louis —there has been significant work advocating for a legislative agenda that enables various elements of CWB. However, despite significant wins over the past century—from the establishment of collective bargaining for private sector employees (i.e. National Labor Relations Act of 1935) to the more recent legislative fight led by the Coalition for Worker Ownership and Power (COWOP) in Massachusetts to make the state’s Center for Employee Ownership a permanent line item in the budget (S.B. 261 )—this work falls short on two fronts.