Circuits of Recognition
Community Wealth Building and the Politics of Field Formation
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).
Despite clear invocations to the model’s broader potential for systemic change (Guinan and O’Neill 2019), it is still too easy among practitioners on the ground to frame CWB in terms of projects – cooperatives launched, funds created, procurement pipelines established – rather than the fields of relationships and rules that make such projects viable and transformative. It becomes tempting to measure transformation in deliverables, without systematizing the work it takes to reorganize power relations and paradigms. Such a project-level view risks reproducing the very technocratic logic of urban development it seeks to transcend (Peck and Theodore 2015).
CWB’s transformational horizon depends on field-building and, more specifically, recognition in the field: the evolving configurations of actors, rules, and relations that decide who counts as a credible developer and what counts as legitimate development. I argue that CWB succeeds when stewardship, permanence, and collective control become intelligible within the institutional worlds of finance and public policy. Recognition creates the conditions under which these practices can subsequently acquire legitimacy, resources, and administrative support.
I treat community ownership (CO) — limited-equity housing co-ops, community land trusts, and related forms — as a laboratory for CWB. Drawing on 33 interviews and field observations from Chicago's emerging housing cooperative ecosystem, this essay shows how community ownership organizations build these pathways through adaptive organizational design, patchwork financing, and translation work that connects communities, finance, and the state. Empirically, field-building became visible when accommodations originally developed for individual cooperative projects were gradually embedded in funding opportunities and public policy. What began as project-specific exceptions increasingly became reusable precedents.
The lesson for CWB is that transformation depends not only on creating alternative ownership models, but on changing the standards through which development is recognized and supported, so that stewardship, permanence, and collective control become administratively and financially legible to capital and the state.
From Institutional Design to Circuits of Recognition
Community wealth building is a means of implementing economic democracy at municipal scales, centering ownership and control over capital and economic assets among workers and communities. An approach that demonstrates both predistributive and redistributive effects, CWB aims to shift decision-making power over investment away from distant owners and toward residents and workers. Yet because CWB emphasizes concrete ownership models, it is tempting to treat it as a problem of institutional design: create new cooperatives, land trusts, or public ownership vehicles and connect them to local markets.
This focus on design cannot explain why some efforts cohere into durable ecosystems while others struggle or disappear. It matters less whether an institutional alternative is democratic by design than whether it reconfigures the field of actors, norms, and power relations that define local economic development (Burawoy 2020; Fraser 2022). Across the U.S., community ownership models like land trusts or cooperatives produce very different outcomes depending on local context (Armeni and Lyon 2021; Beesing and Weber 2023; Louie 2016; DeFilippis 2004). Legal form and governance structure matter, but they do not alone determine whether these models become durable or transformative.
The missing piece is institutional recognition. Alternative ownership models must be understood as intelligible and actionable within systems originally built for conventional real estate development and finance. Community ownership organizations may enjoy deep legitimacy within their neighborhoods while remaining difficult for lenders, regulators, and public agencies to categorize, evaluate, and support. Their challenge is to become recognizable as development actors before they can acquire legitimacy, resources, and institutional support. Whether a cooperative or land trust becomes transformative depends less on its legal form than on its ability to move across these institutional domains.
Recognition operates differently across these arenas. Within communities, it is expressed through trust, belonging, and commitments to collective stewardship. Within finance, it appears as evidence of sound governance, reserves, repayment capacity, and organizational competence. Within the state, it takes the form of eligibility for programs, funding streams, and regulatory approvals (Honneth 1995; Fraser 1995; 2000). Further, recognition can also work in exclusionary ways. Long-standing hierarchies often persist because they are treated as natural or inevitable, making alternative actors and models harder to see, support, or take seriously (Bourdieu 1990; Parvez 2022).
Community ownership organizations must continuously move between these domains, forging circuits of recognition that translate community-based forms of recognition into forms that financial and public institutions can act upon. These circuits shape who counts as a competent economic actor and what organizational forms and development practices become visible as “real” development (Bourdieu 1990; Piroddi 2022).
This process unfolds within local development fields: structured environments in which community organizations, financiers, policymakers, and intermediaries compete to define what counts as legitimate development (Fligstein and McAdam 2012). Development fields are not neutral. Their routines, underwriting standards, funding criteria, and regulatory requirements privilege some organizational forms while marginalizing others – that is, when they come to be taken for granted as hegemonic (Gramsci 1971; Jessop 1997). Community ownership thus becomes transformative when it rewrites and expands the categories through which development actors, projects, and outcomes can be recognized and evaluated. [2]
Intermediaries—including cooperative developers, community development financial institutions (CDFIs), technical assistance providers, and foundations—often facilitate this process. They translate community priorities into institutional languages that lenders and public agencies can recognize. In doing so, they help build the relationships, precedents, and organizational infrastructure through which community ownership becomes a standing mode of development rather than a recurring exception. This work is double-edged. On one hand, it enables community ownership to circulate across domains, making it intelligible to bankers, policymakers, and regulators. On the other, this work risks reproducing dominant norms — such as efficiency, fiscal discipline, and growth — that community ownership, and CWB more broadly, seek to challenge (Laville 2023).
Field-building is therefore a political practice centered on the power to decide who and what can be recognized as legitimate economic actors and activities. When cooperatives, CDFIs, and legal intermediaries make stewardship, permanence, and solidarity legible to capital and the state, they can reshape the moral grammar of development itself. The Chicago case that follows illustrates how recognition moves from being project-specific to repeatable precedent – the central empirical marker of field-building examined in this essay.
From Recognition in Theory to Recognition in Practice: Chicago’s New Generation Housing Co-ops
Chicago has experienced a surge of activity under the banner of “community ownership” since the late 2010s, including community land trusts, commercial community investment vehicles, and housing cooperatives. Chicago's emerging housing cooperative ecosystem provides a useful setting for observing these dynamics because recognition remains unsettled. Unlike mature fields, where recognition is embedded in standardized financial products and professional routines, Chicago's cooperative sector is still actively constructing the relationships and precedents that make community ownership possible.
A handful of these new-generation housing cooperatives — Logan Square Cooperative, Pilsen Housing Cooperative (PiHCO), and La Villita Housing Co-op — provides a lens on how recognition circulates, stalls, and occasionally consolidates.
Logan Square Cooperative was founded in 2003 by residents who wanted an alternative to traditional homeownership. After visiting more than 25 buildings for over a year to secure a property, founders “literally begged” a community lender to approve the loan days before closing and had to bring in a second lender to make the deal work.
PiHCO emerged in 2016 in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, an area with a long history of Mexican-American organizing and a growing sense that investor ownership was reshaping the community. “Half the properties [on my block] are now LLC owned,” one founder noted. PiHCO created a scattered‑site model that lets it pool resources, grow capacity, and gradually expand its footprint. A single cooperative governs several properties through a mixed board of resident and non‑resident members. With the fourth acquisition, PiHCO added a “generator building” that generates $30‑35,000 a year for reserves, with potential for significantly more, to finance future members’ buy-ins into the cooperative.
La Villita Housing Co-op (La Villita), founded in 2023, emerged from years of anti-displacement and eviction defense work in Little Village. For its founders, co-op development was a shift from reacting to crises toward building a more permanent solution: “I got tired of just trying to deal with each individual who was getting evicted. I wanted to see if there was some kind of model that looked at root change, as opposed to just the Band-Aids.” La Villita is building a stewardship model in which the founding board remains in place through the second acquisition and members are selected with an emphasis on neighborhood rootedness, participation, and collective responsibility.
Unlike legacy HUD-era cooperatives, which operate through federally scripted financing, these co-ops emerged from anti-displacement struggles and mutualist aspirations in neighborhoods facing intense real estate pressure. Beyond financial survival, their central challenge has been institutional visibility – the effort to become recognizable as legitimate organizations within a development system oriented toward transactional value. Seeing how recognition is built helps clarify what community ownership must do to become field-transforming.
The Repertoires that Make Community Ownership Legible
The three cooperatives above confronted the challenge of becoming recognized by finance and the state through three repertoires, which function as mechanisms through which recognition moved across institutional domains.
The first is adaptive model design – translating community priorities into lender-recognizable organizational forms and governance structures. Co-ops must often adapt and iterate on models in response to the search for resources, i.e., making co-ops legible to funders, lenders, and other key actors, and attempting to do so without losing the trust of their communities and the co-ops’ self-determination. But in doing so, this dynamic of adaptive model designalso helped expand the organizational categories available within community development. PiHCO’s scattered-site model, for instance, combines elements of a land trust with a cooperative structure and portfolio ownership in ways that do not fit conventional expectations. Each building incorporates member-led decision-making, while all properties are connected under one co-op with a board that includes both residents and non-residents. This setup gives members real control on the ground while also meeting the expectations of lenders and other institutional partners. Initially, this structure required extensive explanation to lenders, funders, and public officials unfamiliar with its logic. Over time, however, the model became intelligible as a viable development form in its own right. Several interviewees described PiHCO's structure as a model for later cooperative projects, and city officials acknowledged looking to the model when evaluating other cooperative proposals. Adaptive design thus functioned both as an accommodation to institutional expectations and as a process through which new organizational forms became recognizable within development.
The second – patchwork financing – converts relationships and social capital into viable capital stacks. As one Logan Square Cooperative founder noted, standardized financing for cooperatives remains the chief bottleneck for projects. “Sometimes the funds that emerge can’t support the need,” admitted one Chicago Community Loan Fund (CCLF) staffer, “but you make them work together.” All three cooperatives assembled financing through some combination of grants, CDFI loans, seller financing from sympathetic landlords (e.g., PiHCO’s first building), philanthropic support, and even personal bridge capital. Take La Villita, for instance. Their acquisition was made possible via grants from CCLF and the City of Chicago, but market-rate financing and later a conditional loan from Shared Capital – which required selecting and training members on governance before they acquired their first site – threatened the closing. One founder stepped in and issued a substantial personal loan to the project. Rather than flowing through a single institutional channel, capital became available only after multiple actors collectively validated the project. Recognition was thus assembled through relationships, experimentation, and repeated demonstrations of organizational competence.
The third is the labor of translators — trusted individuals attached to each project who translate between community goals and the technical languages of real estate, law, and public policy. These “superstars,” as one Logan Square member referred to them, make co-op projects recognizable to lenders and funders while keeping them grounded in community priorities. But they do more than facilitate individual transactions. Members of older cooperatives, such as Logan Square Cooperative, help explain cooperative models to newer cooperatives and nonprofit partners. These translators also adapt governance structures to fit financing requirements, and forge and secure partnerships with lenders, funders, and city actors that later co-ops can reuse. And they even advocate for resources and policy change at the local and state levels. For instance, one PiHCO founder secured a 1% allocation in the Illinois Housing Development Authority budget specifically for housing co‑ops through state legislative advocacy. These efforts transformed individual relationships into institutional precedents, reducing the amount of explanation required for subsequent projects and gradually expanding the set of actors capable of participating in cooperative development.
The City’s Middle Role
Recognition from the City of Chicago has been uneven but highly consequential. Through its $15 million Community Wealth Building pilot, funded by federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds distributed as economic relief stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Chicago’s Department of Housing and Office of Equity and Racial Justice began to formally engage with community ownership models. As one official put it, “We adapted infrastructure to fund those models more formally — $3.5 million to underwrite cooperatives and land trusts.” Another explained that city involvement “can push risk-averse funders to take a risk.”
Rather than fully absorbing co-ops into standard development programs or leaving them unsupported, the city played a middle role. It piloted new funding mechanisms, paused programs to gather feedback, revised share loan designs in collaboration with community partners, and invested in legal clinics, incubators, and intermediaries. These interventions altered the administrative categories through which community ownership could access public resources. Prior to the pilot, cooperative housing projects largely relied on piecing together support from mission-driven lenders and nonprofit partners because few municipal programs were designed around collective ownership. Through the Community Wealth Building initiative, the city created dedicated funding streams for cooperatives and community land trusts, revised share loan products based on practitioner feedback, and invested in legal and technical assistance infrastructure. In doing so, cooperative ownership shifted from being treated as a special-case exception to becoming an identifiable category within municipal development practice.
Field Dynamics and the Politics of Recognition
Across the cases, recognition followed a common trajectory. Initially, cooperative projects depended on personal relationships, ad hoc financing arrangements, and repeated explanations to skeptical institutions. Over time, recognition became visible when practices developed for individual projects began to reappear elsewhere in the ecosystem. PiHCO's scattered-site governance model, for instance, became a reference point for later cooperative development. City officials revised share loan products in response to practitioner feedback. State-level advocacy produced a dedicated cooperative allocation within IHDA. Municipal funding pools formally incorporated cooperative and CLT ownership models. In each case, what began as a project-specific accommodation gradually became a reusable institutional precedent. Recognition ceased to reside solely in relationships and became partially institutionalized.
The Chicago case highlights three practical lessons about how this shift happens:
First, change takes hold when exceptions become standard practice. Field transformation occurs when community ownership’s requirements and practices are written into underwriting criteria, program guidelines, and eligibility rules. The City’s cooperative underwriting pool formalized eligibility and documentation standards, turning one-off accommodations into reusable frameworks. Where Chicago’s co-ops have won, it is because practices (such as adaptive design, patchwork finance, translation) were inscribed as lender expectations and city program rules rather than remaining informal workarounds.
Second, recognition initially depends on people but lasts only when it becomes portable. In Chicago, much of the work of making community ownership legible has relied on individual mediators who carry relationships, explain models, and troubleshoot problems across institutions. This “people-infrastructure,” while fragile, is essential early on. Durable transformation depends on embedding recognition in tools that others can use without relying on the same individuals to broker every deal.
Lastly, recognition politics shows the potential to contest neoliberal “growth” logics with a moral code of responsibility, centering stewardship, permanence, and care as a new common sense of development. This shift can broaden inclusion, but it does not automatically produce redistribution. Unless field-building is intentionally designed to reach Black-, brown-, and working class-led groups – and linked to material supports such as public land transfer or dedicated cooperative finance—new standards risk reproducing inequality under a more inclusive label. The political stakes of CWB thus lie in deciding whose priorities are written into the templates that guide knowable, fundable development, because that is where hegemony is either reproduced as “inclusive responsibility” or bent toward democratic control.
From Community Projects to Field Consciousness
Viewing CWB through the lens of field-building clarifies both its promise and its limits. Practitioners often describe their work in infrastructural terms — ecosystems, pipelines, scaffolds — yet do not always stop to analyze the power dynamics embedded in those infrastructures. Politicizing field-building makes these dynamics explicit. Transformation may result from multiplying projects, but also from forging the circuits of recognition that rewrite and expand those infrastructures.
For practitioners, the implication is to cultivate field consciousness. This underscores an awareness that every project is embedded in, and helps reproduce, a wider configuration of power and meaning. Cooperative developers, funders, and policymakers alike act as field strategists whether they are conscious of it or not. Decisions about language, metrics, and partnerships determine whether the field stabilizes as an affirmative technocracy or transforms into a wellspring for transformation.
For scholars, treating CWB as a field-building process bridges the gap between micro-level institutional analyses and macro-level political economy. It repositions community development as a site where neoliberal governance can be reproduced through the rhetoric of inclusion or rearticulated through collective ownership and democratic control. In this sense, CWB is a contemporary form of what Karl Polanyi (1944) called the double movement – a social response to disembedded markets – but one mediated through civil society infrastructures rather than states or mass parties.
The challenge, then, is not only to proliferate cooperative and other community-owned institutions but to build the fields capable of sustaining them. This requires investment in intermediaries as political actors, long-term funding for stewardship rather than transactions, and critical reflexivity about how legitimacy is produced. Without such attention to field dynamics, CWB and other similar paradigms risk becoming yet another iteration of “inclusive growth.”
Community wealth building is rightfully celebrated for its pragmatic radicalism, the ability to anchor alternative ownership within the institutions of everyday life. But if we center pragmatism without politics, we risk yielding accommodation. To fulfill its transformative promise, CWB must encompass the struggle to reorganize the social, financial, and ideological infrastructures of urban development.
The illustrative case of cooperatives in Chicago reveals that transformation occurs not only when projects proliferate or scale, but when the meaning of ownership, risk, and value shifts across institutions. Community wealth emerges from projects and the field-level relationships, precedents, and institutional changes that projects make possible – the collective construction of a field in which community control becomes common sense. To build community wealth, then, is to build the field capable of recognizing it.
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Notes
[1] I want to thank the interviewees that lent their time and energy to our project, the Community Ownership Learning and Action Lab (COLA Lab), based at the University of Miami’s School of Education and Human Development. I want to also thank my partners in this work, De’Sean Weber, Gretchen Beesing, Dr. Scotney Evans, Carolina Fernandez, and Deborah Perez.
[2] In Fligstein and McAdam’s (2012) account, Not all fields are long-standing. New fields can emerge, often on the interstices of the old, although they may take years or even decades. Field “projects” convert to fully formed fields if a relatively fixed set of actors mobilize to create new lines of interactions with other actors, arrive at a shared understanding of what is at stake in the field and its rules, and internal governance units emerge to maintain order in the field.
Ahmed Mori is a PhD candidate in sociology at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of the Community Ownership Learning and Action Lab at the University of Miami. Grounded in experience with worker and community ownership, he researches how economic and extra-economic institutions and organizations impact cooperativism. Ahmed earned a JD from Columbia Law School and an MA in Political Science from Columbia University.