November 2015
Study assesses outcomes of community benefits agreements for low-income neighborhoods
Can low-income neighborhoods share in the profits of a big development project by signing a private contract with the developer? Some urban planners say yes, but Nicholas Marantz, an assistant professor of planning, policy and design at the University of California, Irvine, challenges that notion in a study of the project surrounding the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
Writing in the autumn issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association, Marantz analyzed the Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) between the developer of Staples and a coalition of community groups, some representing nearby neighborhoods.
Under that CBA, the developer agreed to provide a range of benefits—from better jobs to affordable housing—to nearby low-income communities in exchange for a formal community endorsement of the project, support which helped to secure official approval for the development.
But Marantz’s research suggests the neighborhood groups and nonprofit agencies that signed the CBA may have fared equally well without the CBA. For starters, Marantz found that some of the benefits reports required by the CBA were not available, making it difficult to truly know the effect of the CBA on the low-income community.
Second, Marantz found that some of the promised benefits, such as a neighborhood park, can substitute for requirements that the developer would have to pay for anyway to comply with existing laws. Third, some of the promised benefits, such as providing living wage jobs, were already required under city law.
In the end, although community participants technically received many of the benefits promised in the CBA, it was unclear whether the developer would have provided the same benefits regardless of the CBA, Marantz concluded. Still, he notes that the low-income neighborhoods did receive some funds that they might not have without the CBA. And the groups were allowed to coalesce around important goals. Marantz suggests that, as CBAs become larger and more complex, it will be very difficult for community groups to monitor how well the developer has delivered on the promised benefits or how much more they have achieved by signing a CBA. So a CBA may not be as good a deal as it looks.
Marantz received his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and J.D. from Harvard Law School. He joined UCI’s School of Social Ecology in 2014 and focuses his research on the economic and social aspects of land-use regulation.