Nowadays policymakers readily and, often, uncritically embrace “resilience” as a key concept for dealing with unexpected phenomena ranging from chronic economic downturns to sudden high-impact weather-related or geologic events (e.g., hurricanes or earthquakes) but also catastrophes linked to riots and terrorist attacks or, perhaps, chemical spills and major traffic accidents. As opposed to the normative future-oriented concept of sustainable development - the dominating paradigm in planning for over three decades with its emphasis on mitigation and on conserving resources - resilience offers a more pragmatic approach, according to certain observers, that stresses adaptation to various threats. Other fundamental differences between sustainable development and resilience include ones relating to the two concepts’ varying assumptions, goals and methods. For instance, in sustainability the prevailing idea is that stability must be maintained at all costs whereas in resilience the element of unpredictability is ever-present (Lew et al. 2016). A fundamental problem associated with resilience is that it is unclear who the ultimate beneficiaries are. Importantly, despite emphasizing adaptation to threat, the resilience framework rarely endorses a shift from the status quo when it comes to power relationships. In fact, as Vale (2013, p. 194) stresses “resilience takes place across a highly differentiated landscape of risk and is intimately tied up with deeply political choices that are made by public and private leaders”. This means that under the resilience framework there are losers as well as winners. Simply stated, making one part of the community more resilient, usually in the interest of property owners, can have negative repercussions for other stakeholders. As Fainstein (2014) aptly puts it, the social justice implications of recommended actions performed in the name of resilience are regularly disregarded. In this paper, I present a critical perspective of the resilience framework as it is currently implemented in various communities. I contend that resilience thinking rarely extends beyond narrow solutions, which benefit only certain segments of society and question whether the framework can be extended to lead to more effective community planning.