Community Benefits: Developers, Negotiations, and Accountability

By Jovanna Rosen

In Community Benefits, Jovanna P. Rosen explores a new pattern in urban development: local residents and community representatives leveraging large-scale development projects for agreements that promise dedicated local benefits, such as parks and jobs. In general, such development projects have not produced impactful benefits for local residents, and often have contributed to significant community harm, including gentrification and displacement. In response, community activists have launched a fight to control development, using benefits-sharing agreements to ensure that projects produced better outcomes for local residents. While such agreements now exist across the nation, the process of negotiating and enforcing them remains challenging. This book dives deep into four case studies—in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle, and Milwaukee—to answer the following questions: Who ultimately benefits from both the agreements and the projects in question? How do benefits get delivered, and who controls this process? What works for these agreements to successfully produce community outcomes?

Rosen shows that, without agreements that promote accountability, developers and other project proponents can walk away from the negotiating table once the agreement is signed and the development moves forward. This disregard for community benefits and priorities can leave community residents solely responsible for benefits delivery during implementation, but with few viable avenues to ensure that outcomes materialize. The cases reveal specific elements that agreements require to achieve success during implementation: community participation, managerial connections, effective partnerships, responsiveness, and vigorous oversight with accountability mechanisms. Although creating these conditions is difficult, sometimes impossible, and contingent on fragile processes, Rosen concludes the book with recommendations for both the agreement negotiation and implementation phases to ensure success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512824148

Jovanna Rosen

Jovanna Rosen, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Rutgers University-Camden. Her research integrates contemporary urban planning and geographical debates to examine the intersection of urban growth, urban development, inequality, and community development.

Book preview

Cover Page for Community Benefits

Community Benefits

The City in the Twenty-First Century

Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter, Series Editors

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Community Benefits

Developers, Negotiations, and Accountability

Jovanna Rosen

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2413-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2414-8

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

To my mom and grandma

Contents

Introduction

1. Nonresponsive Investment: The Atlanta Falcons Community Benefits Plan

2. Community Bypass: The Yesler Terrace Community Workforce Agreement

3. Managerial Disconnect: The Park East Redevelopment Compact

4. Fragile Accountability: The Metro Project Labor Agreement

5. Limits Learned: The Challenges and Opportunities of Benefits-Sharing Agreements

6. Toward an Accountable Future: Strategies for Community Benefits Delivery

Appendix 1. Benefits-Sharing Agreements: A New Frontier for Development Conflict

Appendix 2. Methods

Appendix 3. Westside Neighborhood Prosperity Fund Grants Funded by the Arthur M. Blank Foundation

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Driven by economic growth, urban development, and renewed interest in urban life, American cities have undergone significant transformations in recent decades. These dynamics and the potential for significant profits have motivated developers¹ to pursue large-scale urban development projects: multimillion-dollar and sometimes billion-dollar projects, from stadiums to new light-rail transportation lines to mixed-use residential and commercial projects. New development, in turn, has transformed the built, social, and natural environments of the cities, neighborhoods, and communities in which it takes place. This wave of urban investment has amplified a real estate boom that, combined with stagnant wages and real estate speculation, drives a growing housing affordability crisis unfolding across many American cities. As a result, new urban investment raises legitimate concerns of neighborhood change, gentrification, and displacement in cities throughout the nation.

Many projects take place in historically underserved communities, where residents already grapple with contemporary and historical injustice, racial discrimination, institutional failures, and disinvestment, as well as rising inequality, escalating housing costs, and low-quality jobs. These communities are often the same ones that suffered harm from and limited participation in local development projects during and after urban renewal, despite their (often active) resistance. Many of these communities face renewed threats from this current wave of urban investment. As in the past, new urban development projects exert enormous pressure on low-income residents as they threaten to gentrify communities, displace existing renters, and exclude many residents from the prosperity they promise.

Community residents and advocates frequently express concern that these projects, which often rely on public funds or subsidies, will worsen urban economic and racial inequality by benefitting the absentee wealthy, rather than the local residents who have long worked to attract jobs, businesses, and amenities to their communities. Conversely, many of these projects also offer hope—a chance to bring long-sought investment into underserved neighborhoods. The difficult opportunity that has emerged for many community activists, then, is how they can work to direct investment to better capitalize on the local economic potential of these projects while minimizing local harm.

These dynamics and the struggle for community improvement launched a fight to control development. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, community advocates began to use their selective support for development projects, rather than resistance, to compel developers, labor unions, and local governments to meet at the negotiating table. Within a history of community exclusion and harm from urban development, community activists posed a simple but critically important question: Who would benefit from future local development? Communities sought to create tools to improve equity in the development process. They wanted to ensure that development projects dedicated local benefits, generated influential resident participation, and included effective oversight. In exchange, community activists offered their support for these often controversial projects. Their support could expedite development, which motivated developers and local governments to negotiate with communities.

These organizing efforts created the first negotiated local benefits distribution agreements, or benefits-sharing agreements, which have since become common across the country. Two main types have emerged: community benefits agreements (CBAs) and project labor agreements (PLAs) with community workforce provisions.²

A CBA is a documented bargain outlining a set of programmatic and material commitments that a private developer has made to win political support from the residents of a development area and others claiming a stake in its future.³ The first significant CBA, approved in 2001, governed the $2.5 billion Staples Center development in downtown Los Angeles. It included $390 million in public subsidies and tax rebates. In the agreement, the developer committed about $1.8 million in direct funding for job training, interest-free loans to affordable housing developers, and parks. The agreement also included provisions for local jobs, living wages, and affordable housing construction. In exchange for these local benefits, a coalition of community organizations supported the project during public hearings and through the environmental review process—a notoriously costly and unpredictable process in California.⁴

Since then, CBAs have become common across the country, governing projects such as the $11 billion Los Angeles International Airport expansion project, the $1.8 billion Yankee Stadium project in New York, the $321 million Consol Energy Center (now PPG Paints) hockey arena for the Pittsburgh Penguins, and the roughly $325 million Nashville Soccer Club stadium.⁵ Cities including Pittsburgh and Detroit have also considered laws to systematize and mandate CBAs on public or costly projects, a policy that Detroit eventually passed.⁶ The proliferation and expanded focus of CBAs demonstrates the extent to which these agreements and their benefits distribution goals have become central to contemporary urban governance.

PLAs are collective bargaining agreements between contractors, or owners on behalf of contractors, and labor unions in the construction industry.⁷ Relevant for this study are PLAs with community workforce provisions, or specifications within the agreement that dedicate local benefits, such as geographically or economically targeted hire. These agreements are sometimes called community workforce agreements.⁸

The first documented PLA to include community workforce provisions was the Port of Oakland PLA, formulated in the early 2000s. The agreement specified hiring local, disadvantaged workers, local contractors, and small businesses. It also included workforce training.⁹ Since this agreement, most PLAs now include at least one community workforce provision.¹⁰ Community workforce provisions frequently include geographically targeted hire (hiring local workers or workers who reside within a certain area), workforce development policies (e.g., skill-building policies such as apprenticeship requirements), helmets to hardhats provisions (to help veterans access construction careers), and disadvantaged business utilization requirements (to prioritize contracting with targeted businesses such as construction firms owned by individuals from minoritized groups). With the frequent inclusion of community workforce provisions, PLAs have become a prevalent regional organizing strategy.¹¹

Prominent PLAs now exist for multibillion-dollar transportation, housing, and school construction projects across the nation, including in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Boston.¹² Cities and public agencies are beginning to scale ad hoc PLAs to broader policies, in order to standardize agreement terms and oversight. For example, the City of Seattle Priority Hire Ordinance, approved in 2015, enacted a PLA for all city-funded projects above $5 million.¹³ Master PLAs, which govern all projects within an agency, similarly create PLAs on multiple projects simultaneously, such as the Los Angeles Unified School District PLA, first approved in 1999.¹⁴ Some research has examined these broader benefits policies, finding varying degrees of political support and community participation. Policies also produced different degrees of success in promoting equitable outcomes.¹⁵

Community Benefits: Developers, Negotiations, and Accountability draws evidence from four benefits-sharing agreements to respond to these important questions: What do benefits-sharing agreements produce, who benefits, and what factors lead to successful community benefits delivery? The stories of the studied development projects and the agreements that govern them—the Atlanta Falcons Community Benefits Plan, the Yesler Terrace Community Workforce Agreement in Seattle, the Park East Redevelopment Compact in Milwaukee, and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Project Labor Agreement—reveal the opportunities and limitations for using benefits-sharing agreements to foster community development through urban growth strategies. The book argues that these agreements risk falling short of their community benefits goals not just because of flawed agreement negotiations, but also because they are vulnerable to implementation failures. Rather, benefits-sharing agreements are often structured in ways that allow pro-development interests to move on before community benefits are realized. As a result, agreement implementation can become contested in ways that shape what these agreements deliver.

In this way, the agreements described here illustrate how pro-development interests can use benefits-sharing agreements to facilitate development and co-opt community engagement, without necessarily producing community outcomes. Pro-development interests generally pursue benefits-sharing agreements to expedite development, including to secure project approvals, funding, or necessary public support. Once they achieve this goal, developers and the actors who support their activities, often including local governments and unions, may retain little incentive to produce community outcomes. However, community benefits are often the last outcomes to materialize. Communities generally have little direct influence during implementation, unless participants carefully structure both agreement negotiations and implementation to ensure accountability. Therefore, the leverage that communities initially hold over developers—which inspires benefits negotiations—can decline as the project moves forward and before benefits delivery. These conditions can undermine developer commitment to community outcomes delivery, enabling implementation to diverge from community goals.

The agreements described in this book show how, without accountability, developers and other project proponents can figuratively walk away from the negotiating table once the development moves forward. This disregard for community benefits and priorities can leave communities solely responsible for benefits delivery during implementation, but with few viable avenues to ensure that outcomes materialize. In response, communities can organize to attempt to gain leverage to influence implementation. However, beyond the inherent difficulty of community organizing against urban growth interests, community enforcement over benefits delivery comes at a significant cost for underresourced participants. Therefore, benefits-sharing agreements risk leaving underserved communities with the burden of policy implementation, but with few resources to successfully achieve results.

Altogether, the agreements described in this book demonstrate the importance of accountability during agreement implementation. The story of the Mercedes-Benz stadium in Atlanta shows how developers and local government used a toothless agreement to marginalize community opposition. Without leverage, community advocates struggled to keep the city and the developer accountable to their goals—the challenge of nonresponsive community investment. The Yesler Terrace Community Workforce Agreement in Seattle reveals the effects of community bypass, where the Seattle Housing Authority and unions pursued the agreement to advance their own goals, without significant community engagement. The fragmented and limited implementation that emerged reflects the relative indifference to community outcomes that characterized this agreement from the very beginning. In Milwaukee, stakeholders avoided the process flaws that limited outcomes in Atlanta and Seattle. However, the economic recession of the 2000s delayed land development by a decade, allowing a crucial managerial disconnect to emerge and undermine agreement implementation. As a result, many of the original agreement participants moved on to fight new political battles, leaving local government staff responsible for agreement implementation without critical information, oversight, and resources.

In contrast, the Los Angeles case demonstrates the potential for carefully structured agreements to deliver results, though implementation may still prove difficult. The Los Angeles Metro Project Labor Agreement illustrates how benefits-sharing agreements can achieve a fragile but persistent accountability that ensures that developers and local government remain responsive to community benefits delivery during implementation. The Metro agreement created an effective, although fragile, accountability structure around the studied Crenshaw Line project. This structure resulted from the combination of oversight from the Metro Board of Directors, penalties for noncompliance, dedicated leadership, motivated agency staff and union leaders, and vigilant community enforcement. As a result, the Los Angeles agreement has produced many of the promised outcomes.

Together, these agreements show how equitable and inclusive agreement negotiation represents a necessary but not sufficient condition to deliver results for communities. While academic research and practitioner efforts related to the community benefits movement have largely focused on organizing, building community-labor coalitions, and the fight to get agreements approved, formulation processes represent only part of the story.¹⁶ Rather, implementation is a critically important stage that influences what these agreements deliver, and who actually benefits. The cases further reveal certain elements that agreements require to achieve success during implementation: community participation, managerial connections, effective partnerships, responsiveness, and vigorous oversight with accountability mechanisms. However, as the cases show, creating these conditions is difficult, sometimes impossible, and hinges on fragile processes.

Throughout, this book shows how benefits-sharing agreements offer a fundamentally limited, though potentially beneficial, community development strategy: communities gain benefits in exchange for supporting impactful development projects, which often threaten to create more harm than dedicated benefits could possibly mitigate. Regardless, as explained in Chapter 5, the incremental benefits promised by these agreements may represent a significant and impactful victory given the existing, neoliberal urban political framework, which disproportionately favors the goals of urban elites.¹⁷ When successful, benefits-sharing agreements can deliver meaningful improvements for residents and communities potentially impacted by the changes that urban growth poses. Therefore, the final chapter concludes by specifying conditions to ensure that benefits-sharing agreements produce positive change for impacted residents.

The Promise of Benefits-Sharing Agreements

Given the sincere hope and potential gain attached to community benefits organizing, it is crucially important to understand the fundamental challenges and unique opportunities associated with this strategy. Benefits-sharing agreements represent an important departure in organizing around urban development projects, in which community activists attempt to leverage urban growth and their influence in the land development process to promote community development goals through negotiated agreements. Community stakeholders generally intend for benefits-sharing agreements to intervene in urban development projects in two ways: (1) altered distributions of the project’s costs and benefits, toward greater community benefits and reduced community harm, and (2) more equitable power distributions, accomplished through influential community participation in project approval and agreement negotiations.¹⁸ Overall, community representatives seek to improve equity in urban development by creating new development processes and outcomes that explicitly advance the interests of affected residents, often from historically disinvested communities and neighborhoods.

These community development goals drove the efforts of early benefits-sharing agreement advocates, who explicitly responded to exclusion and inequity in urban development. Among these leaders, community activist Gilda Haas was instrumental in driving the Los Angeles Live agreement. Reflecting on this novel agreement, she emphasized that, "the goal of the CBA was community control over development, a goal that resides in a larger human rights development framework we call urban land reform—a people-centered development framework that establishes a right to the city for all."¹⁹ The community surrounding the L.A. Live project and local organizers sought a legally binding benefits agreement to alter traditional land use practices. They hoped to fundamentally change a system that too often produced concentrated harm for local residents, from direct project impacts and larger neighborhood change, without creating significant improvement. In response, the agreement dedicated local benefits to ensure that affected residents shared in the prosperity that the project promised, particularly given the risk that the project would amplify ongoing gentrification and neighborhood change.²⁰

Similar to each agreement discussed in this book, an organization affiliated with the Partnership for Working Families (PWF) helped develop and advance the L.A. Live agreement, in this case the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE).²¹ The PWF is a nationwide network of community organizations created to innovate and diffuse solutions to economic and environmental problems. The PWF and its affiliate organizations have driven the adoption of benefits-sharing agreements throughout the country, sharing information and expertise to promote widespread community benefits policy adoption.²² Even though I did not select agreements based on their affiliation with the PWF, each of the agreements studied in this book involved affiliated organizations in some capacity, underscoring the centrality of this organizational network to the emergence of community benefits organizing nationally.

Concurrently, PLAs with community workforce provisions emerged in response to the historical harm and lack of benefit that low-income communities experienced from adjacent development. These agreements were also intended to respond to the routine exclusion of workers of color and women from construction unions. Community activists saw the Port of Oakland redevelopment as an opportunity to foster equitable development practices through local workforce development and greater community inclusion in the development process. Their organizing efforts secured the first PLA with community workforce provisions, intended to leverage the redevelopment project to create quality jobs, explicitly distributed to historically marginalized workers. Similar to the Los Angeles Live CBA, a PWF affiliate drove the Oakland PLA: the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE).²³

The PWF network was critical for information sharing between EBASE and LAANE, demonstrating the interconnectedness of these two agreement types, which were launched as part of a coordinated strategy intended to alter urban development processes and redistribute project benefits.²⁴ Importantly, labor agreements leverage the historical role that unions have played in advancing urban growth priorities in order to achieve negotiated community development outcomes.²⁵ This tactic reflects a growing shift toward community-labor coalitions as a strategy to enact progressive labor policy, to achieve higher labor standards and union jobs, while being more accessible to local workers through community workforce provisions.²⁶

Community advocates like Gilda Haas and LAANE in Los Angeles pursued benefits-sharing agreements to demand (more) equitable development through dedicated local benefits and greater community influence over nearby development. These agreements build on the bargained development agreement model by inserting community interests and stakeholders into development negotiations. Advocates pursued these efforts to counter the historical exclusion of local residents from participating in and benefitting from nearby urban development projects. In this way, community activists have used benefits-sharing agreements to avoid repeating a planning history in which marginalized groups often faced immediate and cumulative harm from large-scale projects, including during and after urban renewal.²⁷ In theory, the final negotiated contract codifies these priorities, to govern how a development project proceeds. However, unlike development agreements, community advocates and unions primarily drive these new benefits-sharing agreements, with varying participation by local governments.²⁸

Community activists encourage developers to negotiate benefits-sharing agreements by leveraging their influence with local elected officials and in the zoning and environmental approvals process, in which community opposition can jeopardize and delay projects, and drive up costs. Negotiated community benefits offer developers a means to expedite projects, which motivates them to come to the negotiating table.²⁹ Since large projects often include public subsidies or public contracts, the expectations and regulatory processes associated with public funding can further encourage developers to pursue benefits-sharing agreements as a means to demonstrate public support.³⁰ Negotiated agreements offer an opportunity for developers to address, at the outset, project opposition that may emerge throughout the development process. Instead, agreements can create support for controversial projects.³¹ In this way, benefits-sharing agreements offer a means for developers and pro-growth interests to expedite development, while allowing communities to specify and extract the price that makes a development project sufficiently equitable to gain their support—at least in theory.³²

In so doing, benefits-sharing agreements, and the organizing surrounding these policies, can alter urban governance processes. The agreements offer a means to either circumvent or supplement existing land use approval and policy formulation³³ procedures, in favor of deliberation³⁴ directly between stakeholders to create policies through consensus.³⁵ In theory, parties agree to a benefits distribution arrangement and a process that make the development acceptable to all signatories. After agreement approval, implementation—of both the project and the agreement—begins. Since early activists secured the first benefits-sharing agreements, communities across the nation have replicated this model, demanding that large-scale development projects produce targeted local benefits. While local governments and developers have bargained over development projects for decades, benefits-sharing agreements represent a new urban governance approach by explicitly attempting to cultivate influential community participation and outcomes during development negotiations, toward a more inclusive city.³⁶

However, when the rubber has met the road of agreement implementation, many benefits-sharing agreements have faced critique for delivering few community benefits, for limiting influential community participation, and for producing only partial implementation. Results have sometimes reflected negotiation process failures, such as when developers have sought community participation solely in order to secure additional government subsidies that require such input, with little concern for influential and inclusive participation. Other agreements have faced new challenges during implementation, in which shifting conditions and priorities frustrate benefits delivery, with consequential impacts for community beneficiaries.³⁷ And yet, other agreements appear to deliver important community benefits and involve community participants in ways that influence how development proceeds.³⁸

Even though outcomes and processes have varied widely, much remains unknown about what these agreements deliver, and for whom, and who controls benefits delivery. Regardless, benefits-sharing agreements have proliferated in urban governance, which underscores how important this strategy has become to planning, urban development, and community organizing for regional equity. As a result, these questions—who ultimately benefits from both the agreements and the projects in question, how benefits delivery occurs, and what works for benefits-sharing agreements to successfully produce community benefits—represent a critical inquiry for urban scholars, policy makers, and practitioners. Indeed, insight into these questions can help determine whether benefits-sharing agreements offer new opportunities for fostering equitable and inclusive practices in urban development, or whether these agreements simply offer another way for urban elites to advance projects to their disproportionate benefit.³⁹

Community Benefits: Developers, Negotiations, and Accountability dives into four case studies to examine these questions. Each agreement shows the promise, perils, and pitfalls of community benefits and project labor agreements as a community development strategy. Examining them individually and comparatively shows the ways in which, even after an agreement gets signed, and even following successful negotiations, community beneficiaries risk not receiving promised benefits. Rather, without provisions to ensure accountability, developers and other pro-growth interests lack a structural incentive to produce community outcomes. These agreements suggest that implementation and outcomes frequently reflect the relative indifference, and sometimes active resistance, of pro-growth interests to community outcomes delivery. Therefore, this work reveals the careful conditions that must exist during both negotiation and implementation for agreements to produce results.

Chapter 1 describes the Atlanta Falcons Community Benefits Plan. Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank’s foundation and the City of Atlanta used a toothless agreement to marginalize opposition to the new $1.6 billion Mercedes-Benz stadium for the professional football team, funded with $200 million in public subsidies. They promised $30 million in direct investment to the neighborhoods surrounding the stadium. This problematic negotiation process extended into implementation. The Blank Foundation and the city implemented the agreement under a philanthropic model, where the foundation and the city managed benefits delivery by awarding grants. The grantmaking process lacked transparency and community influence. Both the top-down grantmaking process and the outcomes produced drew outcry from community activists. Even though community activists strategized to influence grant allocation, they had limited success, with the city and the Blank Foundation proving often nonresponsive to community pressure. This conflict illustrates the limitations for using benefits-sharing agreements to transform local relationships, distributions, and outcomes when powerholders use agreements as tokenistic or limited gestures. Therefore, the chapter reveals the challenge of nonresponsive community investment, where the community lacks influence over the way in which benefits-sharing agreements undertake local investment.

The Yesler Terrace Community Workforce Agreement, concerning a $1 billion public housing redevelopment project in Seattle, takes center stage in Chapter 2. Under this agreement, union construction jobs produced by the Yesler Terrace project were targeted toward public housing residents and local residents economically eligible for public housing. Specifically, the agreement was intended to bring new individuals into the construction trades and to create high-quality career opportunities for low-income public housing residents. The Seattle Housing Authority primarily pursued the agreement to demonstrate community inclusion on a controversial project and to improve the agency’s public reputation. However, residents were more concerned with influencing how the impactful redevelopment project would proceed than with capturing the jobs produced. Therefore, agreement deliberations bypassed intended beneficiaries from the outset.

To ensure outcomes, unions targeted hiring to low-income workers who were already union members, to produce results consistent with the agreement terms. However, this strategy avoided the spirit of the agreement: to draw new, targeted workers into the trades and employ them on this project. Similar to the agreements in Atlanta and Milwaukee, the Yesler Terrace agreement illustrates how uncoordinated, toothless implementation can undermine outcomes. In this case, the Seattle Housing Authority and unions lacked a vested interest in hiring local workers in a manner that advanced the spirit of the agreement. This relative indifference, combined with the community bypass that continued into implementation, left no one focused on community outcomes delivery, consistent with the original agreement goals. Agreement implementation reflected this disconnect.

Chapter 3 tells the story of the Milwaukee County Park East Redevelopment Compact (PERC). Approved in 2004, the PERC has received significant attention in academic research because it was the first CBA codified as a local land use policy that governed more than one project. However, prior research stops short of examining what the lauded policy has actually delivered. In the decade after PERC approval, implementation fell largely to the county employees who administered the policy but lacked essential resources. In theory, the county board of supervisors has overseen agreement implementation. However, county representatives focused on fighting political and policy battles with conservative leaders, including former county executive and later Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. As a result, as development picked up after the recession, county representatives took a passive role in PERC implementation. Therefore, even though the PERC deliberations process produced an enforceable, ambitious policy, a crucial disconnect between agreement administrators and their oversight body emerged during a critical time in agreement implementation, which limited oversight and enforcement. Evidence reveals instances in which developers exploited this managerial disconnect to minimize their obligations under the PERC. These events show how, similar to the Atlanta case, Milwaukee development interests actively avoided delivering the community outcomes to which they agreed, absent enforcement pressure and vigilant oversight.

Chapter 4 details the story of a benefits agreement that was the most successful for the community in this book: the Metro PLA in South Los Angeles. The agreement governs $40 billion in transportation spending in Los Angeles County, including the $2.1 billion Crenshaw Line in South Los Angeles. The Metro PLA provides an important contrast to the other three examples. The Metro agreement on the Crenshaw Line has met or exceeded most outcomes. Community activists maintained vigilance during implementation by monitoring construction sites and reporting their findings. This watchdog effort, combined with strong leadership from elected officials on the Metro board of directors, motivated agency staff and contractors to remain focused on delivering community outcomes, under threat of penalties. This pressure, driven by community organizing and political oversight, forced all parties to remain focused on community outcomes delivery, even after their original, individual interests had been met.

The Metro case illustrates how carefully structured implementation, including community enforcement, responsive elected officials and local government staff, and structured accountability such as penalties for noncompliance, can encourage all actors to deliver on their original commitments. However, even with this effective implementation structure, the Metro PLA achieved only a fragile accountability. This accountability structure produced important results but required continued vigilance and dedication from both elected officials and underresourced community activists during implementation.

Chapter 5 synthesizes the lessons learned from these four case studies. The chapter draws from urban studies, planning, and public administration theory to establish how and why benefits-sharing agreements may systematically fail to produce community outcomes. In so doing,