Based on a case study of six community organizations in the Gulfton neighborhood in Houston, Texas, this paper proposes that community organization models need to consider that highly diverse and often contentious community efforts within a single community represent well the context of life in contemporary heterogeneous urban neighborhoods. Despite reservations, we find this diversity of organizational efforts and even the tensions among them generally positive, as they often reflect the most vibrant forms of public life in our otherwise privatizing world. Rethinking the diversity of community organizations as multiple publics in a privatizing context provides new openings for the importance and value of community organization within schools of social work and the larger society.

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