Hip-Hop and Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, and Law (original) (raw)

People Versus Place, People and Place, or More? New Directions for Housing Policy

Housing Policy Debate

Virtually all aspects of socioeconomic inequality in the United States are organized in space (Sampson, 2012). The spatial organization of inequality is, in part, simply a manifestation of inequality occurring at the levels of individuals, families, and groups that is mapped onto spaces through market processes. However, spatial inequality also is due to intentional efforts to organize physical space through state action in ways that maintain or reinforce inequality (Dreier, Mollenkopf, & Swanstrom, 2004). As a result of both sets of processes, there is tremendous variation in economic status, education and labor-market opportunities, institutions, environmental hazards, and social networks across city blocks, neighborhoods, municipalities, metropolitan areas, and regions. Well-documented trends in rising household income and wealth inequality are mirrored by trends in the degree to which low-and high-income families live apart from each other, as measured by economic segregation (Bischoff & Reardon, 2014). Although the growth of isolated affluent neighborhoods is an important contributor to the rise of economic segregation (Reardon & Bischoff, 2011), much of the concern about the issue stems from the long-term rise of concentrated poverty. Jargowsky (1996, 2003, 2015) has documented, in a series of reports, trends in the proportion of all Americans and poor Americans living in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of 40% or greater, showing substantial growth in concentrated poverty from 1970 to 1990, a decline in the 1990s, and a subsequent increase from 2000 to the most recent years in which data were available (2009-2013). Since 2000, the number of extreme-poverty neighborhoods has risen by over 75%, and the number of Americans living in such neighborhoods has risen by more than 90%, from 7.2 million to 13.8 million (Jargowsky, 2015). Many studies have measured the connections between an individual child or adult's exposure to concentrated poverty and a wide variety of subsequent negative outcomes (for recent reviews see Galster & Sharkey, in press; Sharkey & Faber, 2014). This literature increasingly supports the understanding that robust child development and adult opportunities for U.S. low-income households will be compromised in numerous aspects by the comprehensively deprived residential environments that they typically confront. For recent studies that provide plausibly causal estimates of the negative effects of neighborhood deprivation on many child and adult outcomes in the United States, see Chetty, Hendren,

The Gentrification Trigger: Autonomy, Mobility, and Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing

Brooklyn law review, 2013

Gentrification connotes a process where often white “outsiders” move into areas in which once attractive properties have deteriorated due to disinvestment. Gentrification creates seemingly positive outcomes, including increases in property values, equity, and a city’s tax base, as well as greater residential racial and economic integration; yet it is typically accompanied by significant opposition. In-place residents fear that they will either be displaced or even if they remain the newcomers will change the culture and practices of the neighborhood. Gentrification then is understood to cause a loss of community and autonomy – losses that have been well recognized in the eminent domain literature. This article focuses on gentrifying neighborhoods that were abandoned during the government sponsored suburban migration of the 1950s through the 1980s. Racially discriminatory practices of government and private actors often denied Black and Latino families the option either to join the m...

Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research-The Fair Housing Act at 50

2019

The Fair Housing Act (FHA) is a powerful tool in the civil rights arsenal and has achieved a great deal, but its promise to address structural inequities that have undergirded the U.S. housing system has yet to be realized. HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule is an important effort to do that, reflecting new learning and a refined approach to the core challenge of remedying ongoing barriers to fair housing that perpetuate disparities. This article aims to provide details on how and why that rule was created, building on the experiences of two Obama-administration appointees involved in the rule’s creation. After providing a brief background on the AFFH mandate of the FHA, this article explains the origins and theory behind the new rule and summarizes details of the rule and key initial critiques and experiences. It ends with some thoughts on how the approach embodied in HUD’s rule could assist in ushering in a new era of equity planning. Background: The Fair Hous...

Threading the Needle of Fair Housing Law in a Gentrifying City with a Legacy of Discrimination

Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law, 2018

This essay tells the story of an extended and complex conflict between San Francisco and HUD and the creative solution that emerged from their negotiations. The conflict concerned the application of a community preference to a proposed senior housing development that would be located in a traditional African American neighborhood in San Francisco and its potential violation of federal fair housing law. After a brief background discussion of some of the policy and legal issues raised by community preferences, the essay tells the story of the conflict and its resolution. The essay concludes with reflections on the potential value of the solution to other similarly situated cities in the context of ongoing gentrification and displacement.

Gentrification: The Class Conflict Over Urban Space Moves into the Courts

Howard University School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series, 1981

Gentrification of inner-cities has resulted in a class conflict over urban space. An issue in the federal courts is whether the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) can build, sponsor, or subsidize low income housing projects within or near revitalized neighborhoods. In Stryker’s Bay Neighborhood Council v. Karlen, the United States Supreme Court held that HUD’s decision-making process relating to the placement of low income housing is beyond judicial review. This Article reviews recent litigation in Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston in light of Stryker’s Bay, and concludes that in order to protect federal efforts to maintain the integrated character of inner-city neighborhoods, HUD must amend its regulations to deal with the reality of gentrification. HUD should define gentrified areas and recognize that such areas are ideal for integrated housing, so that the federal courts do not have to step in, resulting in delay.

"A Statement about Who Deserves to Live Here": The Fair Housing Act Implications of Housing New York

Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems, 2019

New York City faces the twin problems of housing segregation and a shortage of affordable housing. In response, Mayor Bill de Blasio developed Housing New York, a plan to create or preserve 300,000 affordable units across a variety of income bands. As part of this plan, the City instituted inclusionary zoning policies and modified density caps in certain neighborhoods while targeting units for households in a range of income brackets citywide. Yet many residents and community advocates have long argued that homes developed under the plan are unaffordable to working-class, disproportionately affecting Black and Latino New Yorkers. This Note takes a first pass at analyzing the plan’s compliance with the Fair Housing Act of 1968 through the lens of the plan’s income affordability targets and its household targets (the latter being deciphered through the aforementioned changes to city policy on density and the number of bedrooms targeted in new housing units). It examines key neighborhood demographics for communities targeted for inclusionary zoning and argues that the plan’s income affordability targets and its household targets, taken together with the City’s existing community preference policy, likely have a disparate impact on Black and Latino New Yorkers by disproportionately denying members of these communities housing and by perpetuating segregation within and between neighborhoods. This Note then propose a non-comprehensive set of remedies that would fall within jurisprudential constraints on Fair Housing Act cases.

Neighborhood change in North Denver: Municipal regulation, cultural norms, and public space

The revitalization of distressed neighborhoods often disproportionately and negatively affects longtime residents of these urban areas. Not only do revitalization polices displace some residents from their residences, in surprising ways, well-intentioned planning and policy-making may also dislocate long-timer cultures from a neighborhood’s everyday public spaces. Though gentrification is well theorized in terms of the political economy, the land market and property values, and increased investment in transportation and entertainment infrastructure, ethno-racial neighborhood change on the ground, specifically in publicly accessible spaces, remains under-theorized. People reside in homes and apartments. They live in their neighborhoods. That is, they socialize on front stoops, walk down sidewalks, hang out in parks, and drive up streets. I put forth that dislocation from these everyday public spaces is a component of neighborhood change, and consequently, of gentrification. In order to test this claim, I construct a model of the production of space that captures not only public practice, but also the formal regulations and cultural norms that regulate public behavior. Drawing both from archival and ethnographic research, I closely examine four types of publicly accessible space in North Denver: vacant land, temporary spaces, neighborhood parks and city streets. Since neighborhood change works in at least two directions—the displacement of long-timers and the luring of newcomers—I conclude that the minutiae of municipal code and commonsensical cultural norms play salient roles in neighborhood change. In a word, changes to formal and informal regulation of public space impact who feels at home in neighborhoods, who feels uncomfortable there, and subsequently who moves from and who moves to them.

Affirmatively Furthering Neighborhood Choice: Vacant Property Strategies and Fair Housing

University of Memphis Law Review, 2016

With the Supreme Court’s Inclusive Cmtys. Project decision in June 2015 and the Obama Administration’s adoption, the following month, of the Final Rule for Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), local government accountability for ending segregation and resolving the spatial mismatch between affordable housing and economic opportunity has been placed on a more solid footing. Instead of being responsible only for overt, conscious attempts to harm protected groups, jurisdictions that receive money from HUD will now need to take a hard look at their policies that perpetuate the barriers to housing opportunity for economically marginalized protected groups. The duty to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing, although somewhat aspirational in its formulation, requires HUD grant recipients to engage with fair housing issues in a way that the threat of litigation, even disparate impact litigation, never has. In this paper, I examine how the new AFFH rule impacts local government efforts...

Successful protect-community discourse: spatiality and politics in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood

Environment and Planning A, 2004

Protect-community movements across America are alive and well. The authors examine one such movement in a Chicago working-class neighborhood—Pilsen. They focus on a discourse oppositional to gentrification that has effectively mobilized space and historicity to speak its truths. The results reveal that diverse mental spaces were constructed and used in discourse to offer two critical constructions: positive resident identities, and developers as villains. Such spaces, grounding medium in the discourse, framed, organized, and illuminated these constructions. This visual rhetoric, Henri Lefebvre's representation of spaces, was a key ingredient in discourse. With actual and threatened opposition to gentrification, many developers formed a sense of a ‘ready-to-rumble neighborhood’. Fears of virulent street tactics (that is, harassment of gentrifiers) most discouraged developers because they could make development projects risky.