Like anything else, tension, conflict, and chaos need to be balanced with collaboration, cooperation and systems so I appreciate the questions and sentiments that both of your raise. My sense is that sometimes those of us in the community development and affordable housing fields sometimes fall into “group think” where we fail to challenge ourselves and each other. So yes everything need not devolve into “disagreement and failure” but in any healthy system there must be some of both or else we are not pushing ourselves. And affordable housing development must certainly be about “fairness and inclusion and balancing development with environmental preservation,” but we can’t wait for total community consensus before we take action or we might never get anywhere and old models of financing need to be reexamined in light of new realities.

One question this discussion raises for me in the CDC context is — do the solutions that work for innovation (i.e. small business developemnt) also work for housing development? Capitalism needs freedom and even ‘creative destruction’, some argue. But affordable housing development is more about fairness and inclusion, and balancing development with environmental preservation.

Our reality does not have to result in disagreement and failure – here I disagree with you a little, Joe. We shouldn’t be comfortable with these things. They are a call to a different kind of leadership. For many organizations it means taking a collective ‘time out’ to examine the current forces at play and how perceived threats or failure can be re-framed as opportunities. Identifying strengths and moving to build on them will reposition our organizations to be more sustainable. Not long ago, we did this as a practice every bunch of years as part of strategic planning but perhaps now we need to retreat and engage in this reflection more frequently.