The materials are being published at the perfect time to debate the exciting current urban, suburban, and rural issues of housing, transportation, and community development.

Alinsky’s prescription for his country was that we practice democracy seriously. His democratic vision turned on his faith in the potential of ordinary people to partake in democratic practices of inclusion, information sharing, deliberation, collective assessment, strategy, joint action, and mutual accountability. the several strands of rebellious lawyering, cause lawyering, community lawyering, and mobilization lawyering join to form an emerging practice of “lawyering for democracy,” as co-citizens. This frame shapes the relationships of lawyer and community, and of law and organizing, as to the ends and means of the collaborative work and of the agency of the participants in that work. To lawyers working within this frame, clients are active partners in working to solve their problems. These lawyers work alongside clients— individuals, organized groups, and informal associations—and the allies they enlist, in multidimensional efforts to advocate for justice.

Urban land is being reclaimed from low-wealth residents by local governments through their active participation in the urban real estate market, through public/private partnerships rather than the exercise of constitutional police powers, with the purpose of engineering new urban territories and repopulating them with the wealthier classes. Although this social engineering is sometimes characterized, or justified, as a modern version of the pioneering that peopled the American plains with striving Europeans, the public policy to so restructure the territories of the central city wrongly allocates the costs of revitalization on the current residents, and distributes the benefits to others. This is the antithesis of governance for the general welfare.

The Article argues that public/private redevelopment of urban community space must be controlled by and directly benefit the affected city residents so that the displaced receive meaningful equity shares in the value-added redevelopment. I propose to recognize the meaningful claims of residents displaced by government-aided changes in urban land use patterns, through the allocation of equity stakes in the wealth generated by such city-supported urban redevelopment. This approach would update resident participation strategies in urban land use planning and regulation extant now for nearly sixty years, by recognizing with market value the legitimate interests of residents in the space they co-inhabit. This view is justified on three grounds: (1) the legal framework offered by property law recognizes numerous rights of persons residing in the path of municipality-assisted redevelopment, which currently are destroyed without acknowledgement or compensation, in the exercise of urban redevelopment powers; (2) important community interests of persons and communities are similarly destroyed, although they have yet to be recognized as interests in property, they could can and should be; and (3) equitable arguments of varying political stripes support claims for both recognition of property rights and development of appropriate remedies for the harms redevelopers inflict on present residents. Part IV proposes the creation of community equity shareholding to achieve community ownership, participation in decision-making, and material benefit from public/private urban redevelopment projects that displace long-term residents.

In this paper, the author provides a concrete description of the CUNY Program, and articulates the principles expressed by CUNY's extensive redesign of typical American legal education.

Since it began in 1983, the CUNY Law Program has been the subject of much scrutiny, in academic journals, bar publications, and the general press. Articles published in American law journals are indicated in the note on further sources, below.

The author was a member of the CUNY Law Faculty from 1984 until she joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in 1989. Special gratitude is owed to Howard Lesnick, principal conceptual architect of the CUNY curriculum, from whose papers a portion of this report draws.

This paper explores community-based equity shareholding in public/private redevelopment projects. Community Equity Shares (CES) embody three principles. First, community equity shareholding recognizes limited rights in an existing community, akin to land ownership, as the basis for both participation in the decision-making about the character of the redevelopment, and profit participation in the redevelopment projects that displace long-term residents. Second, by instantiating social and geographic community as ownership in the calculus of land-use, it is possible for residents in the district of a proposed redevelopment to parlay those shares for two purposes: for participation in the decision-making about proposed redevelopment, and for participation in the profits from the displacing redevelopment project. The third principle is the addition of a player, the special-purpose Community Equity Corporation, comprised of all the community equity shareholders and wielding their limited powers in common, as participants in the redevelopment deal-making that, otherwise unchecked, would impose undue burdens including displacement upon the long-term residents of the targeted district. Community Equity Shareholding can be effectuated through changes in local governments’ redevelopment and procurement procedures, to more equitably adjust the calculus when government uses or threatens to use its land use powers to displace low-income communities as it re-engineers urban environs in concert with private developers.