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CDN Organizational History and Background
The Community Development Network (CDN) is an association of nonprofit organizations working on affordable housing and community development in Portland, Oregon. CDN grew out of an informal organization called the Portland Rehab Network, made up of the handful of active CDCs in Portland in the late 1980s. With support from Portland’s Bureau of Housing and Community Development and the Neighborhood Partnership Fund, the CDN became a formal membership organization and hired their first staff in 1994. It achieved 501(c)(3) status as an organization in 1995. The voting membership is comprised of 20 nonprofits working on affordable housing and/or other community-based economic development and neighborhood revitalization activities. The 82 affiliate members include financial institutions, government agencies, insurance companies, educational institutions, foundations, advocacy and service organizations, construction companies, architectural firms, and other interested organizations and/or individuals.
CDN helped to found the Coalition for a Livable Future in 1994, and works in partnership with the Coalition to advocate for an integrated approach to the Portland metropolitan region's most pressing regional growth issues, including affordable housing and other issues of sustainability and equity. CDN staff heads up CLF’s policy work on affordable housing issues.
The Coalition has had strong successes over the last six years in focusing the attention of the Portland metropolitan region’s elected regional government, Metro, on issues of housing affordability, economic revitalization, and prevention of displacement, as well as strengthening the regional commitment to greenspace and natural resource protection, creation of a more balanced transportation system, and a compact urban form. All of these growth management initiatives can have positive impacts on low-income communities if, as the Coalition advocates, issues of equity are placed in the center of the debates about how they are created and implemented. The participation of the CDN in the Coalition’s work is crucial to the development of policy initiatives that address these equity issues. (For more information on CDN see attached organizational materials; on the Coalition, see their web site: www.CLFuture.org, or call 294-2889.)
CDN also works with other local housing advocacy groups on city-level housing policy issues. We worked with partners including the Community Alliance of Tenants, Northwest Pilot Project, the Oregon Law Center, Elders in Action and others to gain passage of Portland’s Housing Preservation Ordinance in 1998. These groups have worked together since then on a variety of issues, including the creation of a line item for affordable housing in the City budget, and advocating for the dedication of more tax increment funds to the preservation and development of affordable housing.
In 1999, CDN began the Industry Sustainability Project, focused on identifying challenges to the health of both individual CDCs and the community development industry as a whole and working collectively to address those challenges. With funding support from the Portland Neighborhood Development Support Collaborative, CDN has facilitated a two year process of assessing challenges in the areas of fiscal management, property and asset management and neighborhood relations/public relations. Work is continuing, but major accomplishments to date include the creation and adoption by CDN’s membership of the Industry Goals for Property, Asset and Fiscal Management, the incorporation of those goals as evaluation criteria by several key local funders, and successfully advocating for the inclusion of asset management fees in the development contracts negotiated with the Portland Development Commission (Portland’s housing implementation agency).
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