The Return of the Neighborhood as an Urban Strategy
208
The Return of the Neighborhood as an Urban Strategy
208Overview
The topics focus on sustainable capital and societal investments in people and firms at the neighborhood level. Proposed solutions cover a range of possibilities for enhancing the quality of life for individuals, households, and neighborhoods. These include everything from microenterprises to factories; from social spaces for collective and social action to private facilities; from affordable housing and safety to gated communities; and from neighborhood public education to cooperative, charter, and private schools.
Contributors: Andy Clarno, Teresa Córdova, Nilda Flores-González, Pedro A. Noguera, Alice O'Connor, Mary Pattillo, Janet Smith, Nik Theodore, Elizabeth S. Todd-Breland, Stephanie Truchan, and Rachel Weber.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252098024 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2015 |
| Series: | The Urban Agenda |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Return of the Neighborhood as an Urban Strategy
By MICHAEL A. PAGANO
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09802-4
CHAPTER 1
Neighborhoods Matter ... Neighborhood Matters
JANET L. SMITH
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO
Neighborhoods are real places where people live, work, and play. They also function as sites for investigating urban dynamics and launching policy interventions, providing a space to implement and study change — and hopefully improve things — over time. These are not mutually exclusive activities. Our frameworks for experiencing neighborhoods and interpreting what happens in them are shaped by many of the same social norms, historical moments, and cultural preferences, which in turn determine their significance to policy makers and academics at different points in time. In this chapter, I examine what is driving the current interest in neighborhoods, focusing on both the historical role they have played in urban policy and research, and contemporary forces that make neighborhoods a compelling space for investigation and intervention. Understanding the lineage of neighborhood based theory and practice is critical since it continues to shape our expectations for policy outcomes and, as I argue in this chapter, has also misled some of our current policy prescriptions.
Neighborhoods today are ground zero for several thorny policy problems, including foreclosures, housing affordability, education reform, economic mobility, and immigration.
• Foreclosure: The foreclosure crisis that hit in 2008 triggered awareness of whole neighborhoods in trouble as homes were abandoned when families moved out because they could not make their mortgage payments and lending institutions let them sit empty. Cook County is in the top ten for foreclosure filings in the United States, and in Chicago several communities, primarily African American and lower income, now have a disproportionate rate of "zombie properties" — foreclosed properties that have been sitting unresolved for three or more years.
• Housing affordability: Before the recession, housing affordability was a problem for a growing number of families of all income levels, but especially for lower-income renters squeezed by rising housing costs. Even now, as economic recovery continues, the United States is at the highest ever reported level of "worst-case housing needs": 8.48 million very low-income renter households, which is a 43.5 percent increase since 2007. This is due in part to the slow economic recovery from the recession, but more critically, the circumstances that produced the housing bubble in the first place including housing price inflation and wage stagnation.
• Public education: Many say our public education system is in turmoil, with traditional neighborhood schools closing while a shift toward privatization has generated new charter and contract schools. Over the last decade, the number of annual school closures has ranged from around 1,200 to 2,200 annually, mostly of "regular" public schools. In 2012, the closing of nearly two thousand schools affected 321,000 students. A year later, Chicago closed fifty schools affecting 12,000 students, one of the largest closures in the United States. The overwhelming majority of schools were in lower-income African American communities that had lost population the previous decade.
• Mobility: The abilities to move within space and up the income ladder are both tied to neighborhoods, the conditions of which can either hold residents back or move them forward. The ongoing debate this last decade has been over how best to help improve neighborhoods that are largely poor and have been so for some time; do you help people move out and disperse them into better neighborhoods, or do you focus on improving the neighborhood they live in? Both approaches generally aim to reduce concentrated poverty on the presumption that it will reduce a culture of poverty.
• Immigration: A different type of mobility problem, immigration can present a challenge to communities. Immigrants seek employment and need social services. At the same time, they trigger a rising immigrant civil society to help respond to these needs and also to weave newcomers into the local and national political fabrics. A major driver of growth in cities through the 1990s, many new immigrants are now bypassing them for the suburbs, where they can find employment and where second-generation families are buying homes.
Neighborhoods have always been home to urban-policy solutions. The current focus in broad terms is on the role they play in reducing poverty through various strategies to bring different income groups together. At the national level, we can trace this policy trajectory back to the Clinton administration and its embrace of the HOPE VI program, which aimed to transform "severely distressed" public housing developments into New Urbanist communities with low- and higher-income families living side by side. The Obama administration's Choice Neighborhoods extends HOPE VI, promoting the rebuilding of whole neighborhoods struggling with the effects of distressed public and subsidized housing. Both cede control of the process and responsibility back to local government, relying heavily on public-private partnerships and more importantly private capital investment to redress and make whole deteriorating subsidized housing. Choice Neighborhoods considers schools, services, and infrastructure. To date, the results have been wide-ranging, and generally successful at improving housing quality but not necessarily at increasing income. However, this program is still a work in progress.
Mobility has been prescribed as the ticket to opportunity, to help poor people move out of concentrated poverty and into better (ideally middle-income) neighborhoods that offer better schools, positive social capital, and access to employment networks. While embraced by many liberals and conservatives, both mobility and the transformation of public housing also harken back to the urban renewal efforts of the 1960s, which is blamed for once again causing damage by uprooting people, often only to be resegregated in other racially concentrated low-income neighborhoods. In contrast, while there is broad recognition that investment in neighborhoods can potentially solve many problems, providing benefits to both the people and place, many are leery of this strategy as private investment has led to gentrification and displacement rather than incumbent upgrading. This includes a long history of public investment in "urban renewal" and a host of neighborhood regeneration schemes that historically have not been at a scale sufficient to make a positive impact, yet have been successful in pushing poor people out.
To begin my discussion of neighborhood research, policy, and practice, I offer a brief overview of how neighborhoods are conceived, delving into their significance in theory and practice, and in relation to community. I then review three periods in the United States, beginning with late modernity. I focus on the roles that urban sociology and urban planning have played in shaping our expectations for neighborhoods and in shaping debates about what makes them healthy and what makes them change over time. I close with a discussion of the limits to current approaches and propose reframing neighborhood research and policy to recognize neighborhoods as critical urban commodities. As spaces that have always in some way mediated social reproduction and capitalism, this current period presents specific challenges for neighborhoods and their occupants, who are now both consumers and the consumed.
WHAT IS A NEIGHBORHOOD?
This is not an easy question to answer. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something that we need to remind ourselves of." That is somewhat true here, too; to a certain degree, neighborhood is a term we use freely but rarely call for a precise definition. At a minimum, most would agree that a neighborhood is a place in which people live, or at a more personal level, it is the area surrounding one's home. Neighborhoods are also assumed to have some sort of boundary to differentiate one from another. However, these are not easily pinned down when asking people who presumably know, such as residents or researchers. Cognitive mapping exercises, for example, have shown that perceptions of neighborhood boundaries vary with each individual. A recent study suggests that even when the boundaries are fixed, perceptions of the size of a neighborhood will vary depending on the characteristics of the occupants and the neighborhood.
Researchers also have different views on what constitutes a neighborhood and how we identify them in studies. As a physical place, it is a unit of analysis — "the neighborhood" — made up of people and other smaller units of analysis that aggregate to constitute neighborhood characteristics. Social scientists have been producing neighborhood studies since the early 1900s using data the U.S. Census delineates by "tracts" as a proxy for a neighborhood. Then and now, the average size of a tract is about four thousand people, which can be a small or large geography, depending on the density. Planners around the same time assumed this size was sufficient to support a local school and other amenities expected in a neighborhood. More recently, employing walkability standards, it is assumed that these features should be within a certain walking distance (usually a half-mile radius), which then dictates a certain density and land use mix.
Census tracts were also "designed to be relatively homogeneous units with respect to population characteristics, economic status, and living conditions." For the most part, this continues to be the case; even as the United States becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, its census tracts do not. A hundred years ago, homogeneity was assumed to be a precondition for neighborhood stability and health. While this has changed over time and has more recently been challenged by policies and planning practice that promote "mixed" neighborhoods, homogeneity — and its presumed relationship to health and poverty — continues to be a highly problematic measure that is discussed throughout this chapter.
Accepting the notion that a neighborhood is of a certain size and scale, a mix of residential and other uses, and bounded in some way, social scientists and planners have debated how to interpret homogeneity and the degree to which it is intentional in the United States. For many, neighborhoods are places where proximity matters; whether by choice or not, living as neighbors is a form of communing. At a minimum, there is a common experience of being in a place — whatever the conditions — that is shared and affects all living there in some way. However, more commonly, it is assumed that there is some synergy between the place and the people, and that what is in common is neither arbitrary nor a coincidence. In other words, the reason we are likely to find people with the same characteristics, economic status and living conditions sharing space is because people seek out other people like them to live among and, in some manner, will act collectively as a community to maintain the status quo of that space over time.
While highly debated, planning practice and urban theory have reinforced this image with years of research, which subsequently has shaped how we think about the relationship between neighborhood and community. It began with the rise of human ecology and the neighborhood unit in the 1920s and has been sustained to a certain extent by political economists and geographers in their efforts to reframe urban dynamics beginning in the 1960s. And both periods continue to influence our thinking about neighborhoods today and our expectations for them in solving urban problems.
NEIGHBORHOODS IN THE MODERN CITY
A hundred years ago, human ecologists assumed neighborhoods were natural areas where people of similar social, ethnic, or demographic background lived together. They were microcosms of our larger society that provided windows into the social relations that were needed for modern cities to function. This image prevailed for several decades, until political economists and geographers (among others) challenged the underlying logic for the organization of urban space and its commodification as the United States began shifting from an industrial to a postindustrial economy. As this section outlines, even as our understanding of neighborhoods and how they function as urban spaces has evolved, the human ecologists' conceptualization has endured, in part because planning and urban policy have continued to reproduce its logic and assumptions about why people live where they do, why neighborhoods change, and what makes them healthy.
The Neighborhood as a Microcosm (1900s–1950s)
In the early 1900s, social theorists believed that differentiation or spatial sorting into smaller groups — whether by race, ethnicity, or class — was a "natural" process. As opposed to social stratification, which sorts hierarchically, differentiation was considered by many to be essential to the functioning of the modern city; without it, there would be disorder and social dysfunction. For human ecologists at the University of Chicago (the Chicago School), the modern industrial city had a particular order to it, with neighborhoods organized in concentric rings radiating out from the central business district (CBD), which was the economic engine and heart that sustained the organism's metabolism. Immediately surrounding the CBD was the zone of transition, which was the port of entry for new immigrants to the city. These neighborhoods, often a mix of industry and poor-quality housing that allowed workers to live nearby, were considered transitional because people generally would leave them once they had sufficient resources to move to a better neighborhood. The "derelict" behavior found in these neighborhoods was assumed to be the result of the poor people living together, usually new immigrants with limited resources and social capital not yet assimilated to U.S. culture. In contrast, residents at the Hull House, which was in Chicago's zone of transition, viewed these poor living conditions as social problems that were not solely the fault of the people living in them.
The Chicago School's depiction of neighborhoods prevailed even as new explanations of urban spatial formation and change were developed. The zone of transition was a functional way station, necessary for economic growth but dysfunctional for communities, as evidenced by the high rates of poverty, crime, and mortality, and directly attributed to the mix and type of people living there but also the transient nature of the space. In contrast, neighbor hoods in the surrounding zones were viewed as functional communities in which people with similar backgrounds — usually race or ethnicity, but also class — lived together not only because they chose to but because others chose not to live there. Likening this sorting and self-selection to the natural process by which a plant species would invade and take over the space of another plant species, human ecologists described the dynamics shaping city space as a process of invasion and succession. They believed it was natural that people from one group moving into a neighborhood occupied by another group would eventually push the original occupants out, who subsequently were expected to do the same wherever they moved. Not only did this sorting process validate differentiation, the collective behavior — the act of moving together — was evidence of community cohesion because whole groups of people moved together from one neighborhood to the next.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Return of the Neighborhood as an Urban Strategy by MICHAEL A. PAGANO. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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