Pathways to Social Empowerment in Chicago’s Community Wealth Building Initiative
Abstract
In 2020, the City of Chicago launched a $15 million community wealth building (CWB)
initiative to revitalize impoverished neighborhoods located primarily on the city’s south and west
sides. The initiative distinguishes itself from previous local development strategies by promoting
four models of collective ownership and democratic governance: worker cooperatives, limited-
equity housing cooperatives, community land trusts, and community investment vehicles. After
Cleveland, Preston, and other U.S. and U.K. cities, Chicago is the largest city to implement a CWB
strategy that uses collective ownership structures to empower residents of local communities.
This paper analyzes the extent to which Chicago’s CWB initiative stimulates movement
along complementary pathways to social empowerment. The framework of the analysis is Erik Olin
Wright’s theory of linkages between social power, economic power, and state power in the
allocation of resources and the control of production and distribution. Numerous experiments in
economic democracy have been analyzed within this framework, with insightful results concerning
their enabling conditions, viability, and limits. CWB, however, as a relatively recent and novel
approach to local economic democracy, has so far received limited scholarly attention. Most CWB
literature has been produced by The Democracy Collaborative (TDC) and the Centre for Local
Economic Strategies (CLES), two think & do tanks which have defined and advocated CWB since
the mid-2000s. This literature is useful to understand the general philosophy, design, and expected
outcomes of CWB projects. Nevertheless, independent empirical case studies and theoretical
analyses are needed to more completely understand how and why CWB strategies may or may not
succeed in generating more inclusive, collaborative, sustainable, and democratic economies.
Based on evidence from documentary analysis and semi-guided interviews, this paper
argues that Chicago’s CWB program fosters movement primarily along two pathways to social
empowerment: (1) direct social power over the allocation and control of Chicago’s housing, real
estate, production, and financial resources; (2) social power over the City of Chicago’s municipal
power to allocate economic resources. The first pathway deepens Chicago’s social economy, while
the second deepens its municipal participatory democracy. However, as the program does not follow
pathways that would increase social power over capitalistic economic power, it is likely to be
limited in its ability to achieve systemic social transformation.