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2020 May 22: Update

This analysis and visualization seeks to explore the geography and financial capacity of community development organizations in Baltimore City including both neighborhood-based and citywide organizations.

The primary questions that this map and analysis seeks to answer include:

Additional secondary questions include:

This analysis uses data from the Urban Insitute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics on reported income and assets by selected nonprofit organizations. The list of selected organizations is based on the Community Development Network of Maryland’s internal list of member and partner organizations with a mailing address in Baltimore city.(“NCCS Data Archive” n.d.)

I explored incorporating the list of organizations that recieved funding in 2019 from the Baltimore City Department of Housing and Community Development’s Community Catalyst grant program. However, the significant variation in the mission and structure of funded organizations suggested that this was not a useful comparison at this point in the analysis.

It is important to note that income and other measures of financial capacity are an imperfect proxy for the capacity of an organization to meet self-defined goals or to make positive change in a neighborhood. For example, while higher income is likely associated with a larger number of paid staff or contractors, income does not account for the number of volunteers or assess whether work by paid staff is effective at improving the wellbeing of residents in the area where the organization is based. This uncertainty and more comprehensive approaches to measuring organizational capacity are discussed in the following background section.

What is the existing research on the geography and capacity of community development organizations?

Research on CDCs, community-based development organizations (CDBOs), and nonprofit economic development organizations (NEDOs) reinforces the need for a cautious approach that incorporates more than one indicator for capacity. Responding to funders narrowly defining CDC capacity as the housing unit production, Glickman and Servon offered a framework that defined five elements of capacity: resource, organizational, programmatic, network, and political. While financial capacity could indicate or predict other elements of capacity (particularly the resource or organizational capacity as Glickman and Servon defined it) they are not the same thing.(Glickman and Servon 1998)

For example, in an analysis of NeighborWorks survey data from over 120 community-based development organizations, Wright found that financial capacity is not associated with a self-reported index measure of organizational effectiveness. Mission changes in the last three years, the educational level of the executive director, and technical assistance in the past year were also not associated with perceived organizational effectiveness but performance indicators, political capacity, board governance, and organizational age were positively associated.(Wright 2018)

Moreover, in neighborhoods with weak or declining real estate markets, the financial capacity of an organization may be determined by the difficulty in attracting private financing for development projects or by the perception of the market conditions by public and private funders. In Melissa Heil’s study of CDCs in Detroit, one community development leader explained this challenge clearly:

If [a CDC is in] a declining market, it’s hard to attract investment to the area. So they’re not getting a whole lot of attention. … What we’ve seen in the past years is a lot of the funding has been siphoned to particular organizations [in rising markets], and lo and behold, because they’re the ones that are getting funding, capacity increases. So it’s a bifurcation of capacity. So if you’re not on the favorite list, it’s really hard to climb up out of that hole.(Heil 2018)

What data is available for this analysis?

The locations for the selected community development organizations are based on address information provided by CDN, found on organizational websites, or other online sources. The list of addresses was manually geocoded using the U.S. Census Bureau Geocoding service (accessed through the Little Geocoder app). Google Maps was also used to manually identify locations for a small number of addresses.

The CDN of Maryland list of organizations included developers and private consulting firms that have offices and projects located in Baltimore city but do not have a specific focus on Baltimore city. These organizations (including New Ecology, Inc. and American Communities Trust) have been excluded from this analysis.

Detailed and current information on the service areas for community development organizations is somewhat limited. A Baltimore City GIS layer for community development organization boundaries includes sixteen organizations. While these boundaries are may be outdated, they are shown in the map below (excluding three organizations that work citywide). The excluded organizations are the Episcopal Housing Corporation, Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake, and AIDS Interfaith Residential Services (AIRS) / Empire Homes of Maryland.

The Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance included a map of community development organization boundaries as part of a web map of federal Opportunity Zones in Baltimore city. Unfortunately, these boundaries are not yet available for download.

What are the neighborhoods where community development organizations are active?

After excluding organizations that have a mission of working citywide, the primary office location for each organization was matched to the neighborhoods where it is located. The following map shows these locations, a table showing the number of organizations per neighborhood, and a map showing the number of organizations per neighborhood. These visualization suggest that the organizationsare clustered in Central Baltimore, East Baltimore, and West Baltimore with fewer organizations in the city’s more outlying neighborhoods.

Community development organizations with a citywide scope of work
name address
AIDS Interfaith Residential Services (AIRS) / Empire Homes of Maryland 1800 N. Charles Street
Baltimore Community Lending 875 Hollins Street
Community Housing Associates 2918-B Glenmore Ave.
Episcopal Housing Corporation 3986 Roland Avenue
Greater Baltimore AHC 1501 St. Paul Street
Green & Healthy Homes Initiative 2714 Hudson Street
Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake 3741 Commerce Drive
Healthy Neighborhoods 2 E. Read Street
Baltimore Housing Roundtable 1 N Charles Street
Innovative Housing Institute 22 Light Street
Maryland Department of Disabilities/Maryland Partnership for Affordable Housing 217 E Redwood Street
Neighborhood Design Center 120 W North Ave
Neighborhood Housing Services of Baltimore (NHS Baltimore) 25 E. 20th Street
One House At A Time 3553 Chestnut Avenue
Public Justice Center 1 N. Charles Street
Rebuilding Together Baltimore 5820 York Road
St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center 321 E. 25th St. 

## although coordinates are longitude/latitude, st_within assumes that they are planar

Community development organizations by neighborhood
neighborhood neighborhood_count
Abell 1
Arlington 1
Barclay 1
Belair-Edison 1
Better Waverly 1
Broadway East 2
Canton 1
Canton Industrial Area 1
Central Park Heights 1
Charles North 4
Concerned Citizens Of Forest Park 1
Druid Heights 1
Easterwood 1
Ednor Gardens-Lakeside 1
Ellwood Park/Monument 1
Franklin Square 1
Garwyn Oaks 1
Glen 1
Greenmount West 1
Hamilton Hills 1
Hollins Market 1
Radnor-Winston 1
Spring Garden Industrial Area 1
NA 1

How much income do different community development organizations take in each year?

I initially used the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer to match the names of the organizations identified in the initial list to the corresponding EIN (Employee Identification Number) for each organization.

I then switched to look at the data available directly from the Urban Institute, National Center for Charitable Statistics. The NCSS Core data covers each year between 1989 and 2016. IRS Business Master files are available for most of those years and from 2017 through 2020. This preliminary analysis only looks at the 2016 data which excludes any organizations that were incorporated in 2016 or later. An expanded analysis could include more recent data and look at change over time.

This data does have several limitations. Fiscally-sponsored organizations, for example, do not have a unique EIN. If an organization is a private business (e.g. an LLC) the organization does not have an EIN and is not required to publicly report income or assets using a IRS 990 form. Finally, there are some organizations where community development activities are conducted by a unit within a much larger nonprofit organization. The overall income and assets reported for these cannot be meaningfully compared to those for organizations where a large share or all of the income and assets are related to community development activities. Lifebridge Health, for example, has been excluded from this analysis for this reason.

References

Glickman, Norman J., and Lisa J. Servon. 1998. “More Than Bricks and Sticks: Five Components of Community Development Corporation Capacity.” Housing Policy Debate 9 (3): 497–539. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.1998.9521306.

Heil, Melissa. 2018. “Community Development Corporations in the Right-Sizing City: Remaking the CDC Model of Urban Redevelopment.” Journal of Urban Affairs 40 (8): 1132–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2018.1443012.

“NCCS Data Archive.” n.d. Accessed May 21, 2020. https://nccs-data.urban.org/index.php.

Wright, Nathaniel S. 2018. “Transforming Neighborhoods: Explaining Effectiveness in Community-Based Development Organizations.” Journal of Urban Affairs 40 (6): 805–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2017.1360727.