| This dissertation focuses on the relationships between community development corporations, social capital, and neighborhood investment in the inner-city neighborhoods of Atlanta.; Despite claims about the importance of CDCs, researchers have provided little empirical evidence comparing CDCs to other community development alternatives, and few studies have linked CDC outcomes to overall indicators of neighborhood improvement. To address these shortcomings, this study examines investment levels in comparable CDC and non-CDC neighborhoods during the late 1990s. Based on empirical evidence presented in this study, CDC neighborhoods do not have considerably higher levels of investment than comparable non-CDC neighborhoods.; Research on social capital has focused on declining group membership in the United States rather than whether social capital can be measured, or whether social capital actually improves societal conditions. This dissertation presents results from efforts to measure social capital through a survey distributed to residents living and working in the study neighborhoods. Evidence from this research suggests a positive relationship between social capital and all but one of the investment measures examined. In Atlanta, communities with higher social capital tend to have higher levels of investment than comparable communities with lower levels of social capital.; The dissertation also highlights the combined power of social capital and community development corporations. While CDCs can be a vital component of neighborhood investment, CDCs alone will not be completely successful without the presence of social capital in a community. In Atlanta, neighborhoods with the highest levels of neighborhood investment had the best CDCs, and the highest levels of social capital. In fact, the findings suggest that in certain cases, social capital may even be more important than the presence of a community development corporation in explaining neighborhood investment. |
