Housing encompasses a bundle of characteristics that are integral to family well-being. This literature review demonstrates that, on a physical level, housing must be decent and safe, as well as present in a family's life. Housing is also critical because of the way in which it relates to its occupants, providing suf cient space so that the family is not overcrowded; being affordable; providing opportunities to create a positive sense of self and empowerment; and providing stability and security. The paper concludes with a brief proposal that would involve a signi cantly increased commitment to housing based on all recipients of housing subsidies entering into a reciprocal relationship with the government.

Community development corporations and other nonprofit organizations are increasingly responsible for producing and managing low-income housing in urban America. This article examines the network of governmental, philanthropic, educational, and other institutions that channel financial, technical, and political support to nonprofit housing sponsors. We analyze the relationships among these institutions and propose an explanation for their success. We then consider challenges the network must confront if the reinvention of federal housing policy is to succeed.Block grants and rental vouchers, the dominant emphases of federal policy, present opportunities and constraints for nonprofit housing groups and their institutional networks. While states and municipalities are likely to continue to use block grants for nonprofit housing, the viability of this housing will be severely tested as project-based operating subsidies are replaced by tenantbased vouchers. We recommend ways that the federal, state, and local governments should help the institutional support network respond to this challenge.

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R a n d y Stoecker's paper makes an important contribution to the literature on CDCs and to our understanding of the challenges facing poor urban communities. Critiquing the ways in which CDCs are negatively impacted by the structure of our political and economic systems, his argument goes as follows: CDCs purport to be community-based enterprises that focus on "bottom up" development and on community empowerment through a comprehensive approach to physical and social ills. Underlying this approach is a basic acceptance of the market economy, with CDC interventions largely focused on the supply side. "Poor neighborhoods are seen as 'weak markets'. . .requiring reinvestment rather than as oppressed communities requiring mobilization leading CDCs to work within existing economic rules."Stoecker argues that CDCs are caught in the middle (mediating between "haves" and "have nots") managing capital like capitalists, but not investing it for profit, trying to be community oriented, while funding is controlled by outsiders. In short, CDCs have internalized the contradiction between capital and community, resulting in three major problems. The solution, he argues, is to abandon the small, community-based CDC model in favor of a new model of redevelopment that "emphasizes community organizing, community-controlled planning, and high capacity multi-local CDCs" held accountable through a strong community organizing process.If one accepts the contradiction Stoecker articulates, that CDCs struggle to mediate the conflicts rising from the imperatives of the capitalist economy with the needs of building community, we can question the extent to which that contradiction causes as many problems for CDCs and the communities they are trying to assist as is being argued. Second, * Direct all correspondetice to: Rachel G . Brutr, Depcirrment of Urhun atid Environmentcil Policy. Tufrc Uniwrsity. Medford, MA 02155.

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