ABSTRACT

Community wealth building can occur through a wide range of legal forms, including employee, nonprofit, and public ownership. A key goal of community wealth building is to increase the proportion of capital held by actors with a long-term commitment to a given locality or region. Further, community wealth-building strategies aim to achieve neighbourhood revitalization benefitting existing residents rather than moving people around. A dramatic illustration of the community wealth-building approach has been developed in Cleveland, historically one of the leading cities of American capitalism. A prosperous community wealth-building economy in Detroit needs to be linked to new forms of regional and national planning that bring community resident strategies together with regional and national economies and goals. A key principle underlying a community-oriented industrial policy must be the preservation of existing communities, their in-place infrastructure and community capital, and their productive capacities on a long-term basis.