Jobs and Economic Development in Minority Communities

Community economic development offers a promise of greater employment, but job opportunities have been slow to develop in minority neighbourhoods. After decades of efforts to combat poverty, wages are low, benefits are scarce, and employment is unstable in these communities. The structural forces that have created impoverished neighbourhoods are likely to become even more powerful as globalization intensifies, economic and spatial restructuring continues, and the ethnic composition of the population changes. Planners and policy makers need to rethink and reformulate community economic development in ways that account for the particularities of different minority groups. A problem as pervasive and entrenched as structural unemployment cannot be approached with a fits all strategy.