Risen from the Dead: From Slumming to Gentrification (original) (raw)

The Deep Structures of Neighborhood Politics and Urban Development: Scenes

Presented to Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 2-5, 2009. This paper elaborates a critical, specific aspect of the New Political Culture: the rise of issue politics, consumption generally, and the arts and related cultural activities (in the sense of theatre, music, etc.) in particular. Dramatic changes in the economy, social arrangements and politics are changing the world in recent decades: globalization, the knowledge economy, post-industrial society, flexiblization and other labels have been widely used. _Cities vary by neighborhood and offer a unique opportunity to analyze these general processes: local cultural and socio-economic characteristics are linked to urban politics and development. We have coded over 700 amenities found in all 42,000 US zip codes, generating scores on 15 scenes dimensions such as egalitarian, self-expressive, transgressive, neighborliness. These are then analyzed in regressions. We codify results in propositions to interpret what is happening and include other specific findings from several major studies, including the World Values Survey, International Social Survey Program, various census sources, and more.

Constructive Gentrification - The Informal Housing Policy of West Woodlawn

While “gentrification” is used with much liberty to characterize the welcomed or unwelcomed nature of transformation, it has no practical application as a science. Lacking a consensus on definition and possessing no framework for measurement, it is, at best, an anecdotal or impassioned observation. Yet, it is a term that commands tremendous authority. It lies central to the ongoing and highly emotional discourse surrounding commercial and residential displacement. Because of its sociopolitical relevance, gentrification cannot be ignored. However, the need to rethink it as a science has never been more crucial. “Constructive Gentrification,” as presented herein, propose is a uniform framework within which project level, segment (social and economic grouping) and area-wide displacement can be measured. This framework can be extrapolated to both project and plan, while also serving as a tool with which one can gauge the often uncomfortable or disarming trade-offs required by any project, policy or plan that has displacement implications. West Woodlawn, as a case study, provides an unusually timely opportunity to demonstrate how such measurements and trade-offs can be articulated. Here one finds the unofficial but socially constructed segregation of the most impoverished quadrant of Chicago’s historic Woodlawn Community. Characterized by an alarming level of vacancy (Community Investment Corporation, 2013) resulting in part from disproportionate foreclosures (Metropolitan Planning Council, 2009), distressful and prolonged unemployment (U. S. Department of Labor, 2012), the emergence of opportunistic cash buyers (Institute for Housing Studies, 2012), a run-up in values related to Olympic 2016 speculation, and the implementation of an aggressive city-sponsored recovery strategy, it is both a microcosm of what happened to America during the 2007 mortgage crisis and an example of how stakeholder have responded. Here, the risk of “deconstructive gentrification” is very real and already advancing.

Gentrification and the Grassroots: Popular Support in the Revanchist Suburb

Most existing research on neighborhoods facing gentrification has portrayed residents as resistant or politically quiescent. Drawing from a year of fieldwork in Dundalk, MD, I argue that developers and the neoliberal state will probably find popular support for gentrification as they reinvest in the politically divided industrial suburbs of the United States. Local homeowners and community associations have emerged as gentrification supporters for three interrelated reasons. First, many of them have drawn from a resurgent national conservatism to explain decline as an effect of government subsidies and ''people from the city;'' their desire to reclaim suburban space-a ''suburban revanchism''-although avoiding accusations of racism makes gentrification-induced displacement appealing. Second, the rebirth of urban neighborhoods and other industrial suburbs provides visual evidence of gentrification's success. Third, the neoliberal state's retreat from social programs and its emphasis on private-sector redevelopment allay suspicion of government and enable collaboration between the local state, developers, and homeowners. The redevelopment efforts of two local organizations illustrate how residents have become indispensable partners in Dundalk's emergent pro-gentrification coalition.

Producing Space: Block-By-Block Change in a Gentrifying Neighborhood

2013

Gentrification of urban neighborhoods is part of an ongoing restructuring of the city, linked to the emerging occupational structure of the service economy and the remaking of built environments that were created for a production economy. It is the name given to processes in which commodification and reinvestment accompany the in-migration of professional and managerial workers, often displacing prior residents and giving altered spatial form to inequality.

The changing state of gentrification

Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 2001

Gentrification has changed in ways that are related to larger economic and political restructuring. Among these changes is the return of heavy state intervention in the process. This paper explores heightened state involvement in gentrification by examining the process in three New York City neighbourhoods: Clinton, Long Island City, and DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). We argue that state intervention has returned for three key reasons. First, continued devolution of federal states has placed even more pressure on local states to actively pursue redevelopment and gentrification as ways of generating tax revenue. Second, the diffusion of gentrification into more remote portions of the urban landscape poses profit risks that are beyond the capacity of individual capitalists to manage. Third, the larger shift towards post–Keynesian governance has unhinged the state from the project of social reproduction and as such, measures to protect the working class are more easily contested.

Revenge Of The Property Owners: Community Development and the Politics of Property

Journal of Urban Affairs, 1994

This study examines the conflict between inner city property owners and lower income tenants for control of neighborhood development agendas and community-based organizations. Utilizing a case study of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the authors investigated neighborhood conflicts over community revitalization. In a number of neighborhoods in the two cities, the community organization has come to be dominated by property owners espousing an "ideology of property" hostile to ajfordable housing. This has led to tension and conflict between neighborhood organizations pursuing owner interests and community development corporations focusing on low income housing.