Abandoned Housing Research

Education, employment, and home ownership have long been considered stepping stones to the middle class. But in Abandoned Families, social policy expert Kristin Seefeldt shows how many working families have access only to a separate but unequal set of poor-quality jobs, low-performing schools, and declining housing markets which offer few chances for upward mobility. Through in-depth interviews over a six-year period with women in Detroit, Seefeldt charts the increasing social isolation of many low-income workers, particularly African Americans, and analyzes how economic and residential segregation keep them from achieving the American Dream of upward mobility. Seefeldt explores the economic and political obstacles that have altered the pathways for opportunity. She finds that while many low-income individuals work, enroll in higher education, and attempt to use social safety net benefits in times of crisis, they primarily have access to subpar institutions, which often hamper their efforts to get ahead. Many of these workers hold unstable, low-paying service sector jobs that provide few paths for advancement and exacerbate their social isolation. Those who pursue higher education to gain qualifications for better paying jobs often enroll in for-profit schools and online programs that push them into debt but rarely lead to secure employment or even a degree. And while home ownership was once the best way to establish wealth, Seefeldt finds that in declining cities like Detroit, it can saddle low-income owners with underwater mortgages in depopulated neighborhoods. Finally, she shows that the 1996 federal welfare reform and other retrenchments in the social safety net have made it more difficult for struggling families to access public benefits that could alleviate their economic hardships. When benefits are difficult to access, families often take on debt as a way of managing. Taken together, these factors contribute to what Seefeldt calls the “social abandonment” of vulnerable families. Abandoned Families is a timely, on-the-ground assessment of hardship in contemporary America. Seefeldt exposes the shortcomings of the institutions that once fostered upward mobility and shows how sweeping policy measures—including new labor protections, expansion of the social safety net, increased regulation of for-profit colleges, and reparations—could help lift up those who have fallen behind.

Abandoned properties are a plague across the United States, from rust belt cities like Detroit and Buffalo to small towns like Lima, Ohio, and Waterloo, Iowa. Even in Sunbelt cities such as Houston and Las Vegas, abandonment is a major problem, as investment flows to the periphery, leaving the older, inner neighborhoods behind. In Bringing Buildings Back, Alan Mallach provides policymakers and practitioners with the first in-depth guide to understanding and dealing with the many ramifications that this issue holds for the future of our older cities. Combining practical suggestions with a thoughtful exploration of policy, Mallach pulls together insights from law, economics, planning, and design to address all sides of the problem, from how abandonment can be prevented to how best to bring these properties back into productive reuse. Focusing on the need for sustainable reuse and revitalization of America's cities and neighborhoods, Bringing Buildings Back shows how finding solutions for individual buildings can and must be tied to the larger process of making our cities economically stronger and environmentally sounder places to live and work. The book is replete with examples of how cities, community development corporations, and others have come up with creative, effective solutions. Written by a distinguished urban planner and practitioner with three decades of experience, Bringing Buildings Back provides both a detailed toolkit and a call to rethink the way America carries out urban redevelopment. It is a book that should be on the desk of every mayor, city planner, community developer, or neighborhood activist, and used in every course on urban redevelopment or neighborhood revitalization.

This book provides a multidisciplinary approach for the study of the “abandonment” problem at the inter-section among urban studies, neo-institutionalist perspectives, and social ontology. An analytical framework (based on descriptive and operational issues, factors, reasons, policies) has been built to interpret the phenomenon of abandonment and possible ways of intervening. The work considers the Italian situation in general terms and examines the case study of Milan in depth. This case is interesting because it triggered public discussions on the problem of abandonment in a non-shrinking context. Moreover, recently, specific policies to cope with abandonment problem have been introduced. The purpose of the book is to show that the problem of the “abandonment” of urban buildings should be understood as a social fact and not as a brute fact. Thus, in this work the “abandoned” state of buildings is considered as not directly related to certain physical variables; rather, it entirely depends on human evaluations. Crucial information in this regard is how institutional frameworks (e.g. sets of rules of conduct) influence individual behaviour and actions through time. In this view, we may identify abandonment as a phenomenon intertwined with the actions of both private and public entities. The neo-institutional approach helps to highlight how the problem of abandonment is articulated with respect to property rights, formal constraints, reasons behind policy decisions, intervention strategies and implementations.