The Community Reinvestment Apparatus

This dissertation asks how community-bank partnerships influence grassroots neighborhood stabilization efforts. Banks have partnered with community-based organizations since the 1960s to help stabilize the deteriorating conditions of low- and moderate-income urban neighborhoods. However, most of the empirical evidence of these partnerships was collected in the 1990s and has revealed little about their impact beyond bank lending. This dissertation attempts to fill these empirical gaps by considering community-bank partnerships as institutional arrangements that govern cities under racial capitalism. It takes an ethnographic and historical approach, studying the group of “community reinvestment agents” who have helped to form community-bank partnerships in the Austin area of Chicago since the 1960s. Chapter 1 reveals the contradictions of community-bank partnerships. By partnering with banks to address underdevelopment, they address immediate crises but avoid acknowledging financial institutions' important role in the underdevelopment of Austin and its people. These “workarounds” have reproduced dependencies on the institutions exploiting the neighborhood. Chapter 2 describes how national and multinational financial institutions have come to dominate the institutional arrangements that govern neighborhood stabilization in Austin. While many partnerships developed during the early years of the community reinvestment movement were assembled by powerful corporations, foundations, and federal agencies, frontline organizations in Austin also influenced the form and function of neighborhood stabilization in Austin through national coalitions. However, throughout the 2010s, many of these arrangements were repurposed to protect large banks from financial and reputational risk. Chapter 3 explores the discursive practices of community reinvestment agents. It finds that the broader need for community reinvestment has been shaped by officially antiracist needs discourses that obfuscate reinvestment and underdevelopment as primarily racial matters. The final chapter discusses the strategic implications for community reinvestment agents in Austin and other communities and proposes drawing from alternative sources of knowledge.