Site-specific community benefits agreements (CBAs) ensure that particular projects create opportunities for local workers and communities. Often, however, these projects change the city's development paradigm: when decision makers realize what well-considered projects with specific benefits attached can bring to the community, the City enacts community benefits policies that set the stage for lifting thousands of people out of poverty. Multi-parcel development standards and community benefits standards are two types of these policies.

Multi-Parcel Development Standards
Local governments can proactively guide future growth by applying community benefits principles to large parcels of land slated for development. If the land is government-owned, officials can incorporate community benefits into requests for proposals.

Multi-Parcel Standards in Effect

Park East Redevelopment Compact (PERC) (Milwaukee, WI): A broad-based coalition of community, labor, environmental and faith-based entities worked to get the PERC passed in 2005. This County ordinance requires any development on a large tract of county-owned downtown land to meet job quality standards and hire local residents. The PERC also establishes a separate fund that will finance affordable housing development using money from the sale of county land.

Atlanta Beltline (Atlanta, GA): In 2005, Georgia Stand-UP succeeded in attaching community benefits language to a City ordinance authorizing almost $2 billion in public funding over a 20-year period for transit-oriented development. Georgia Stand-UP is now working to ensure that this development creates high quality jobs, hires residents of adjacent low-income neighborhoods, and ensures that these residents have mechanisms to stay in their homes as property values increase.

Community Benefits Standards
Community benefits policies attach standards to all subsidized development. Living wage ordinances, targeted hiring requirements, and mixed-income housing requirements are examples of community benefits standards. These policies make the development process more predictable by making the community's expectations clear to all stakeholders and reducing the need to articulate community benefits on a per-project basis. More information is available from the Community Benefits Law Center.