Neighborhood Change And Neighborhood Action

This book is an examination of neighborhood mobilization and engagement from the perspective of several disciplines: psychology, social work, political science, planning, and education. The essays included in the work examine both internal and external factors related to the ability of neighborhoods to meet the human needs of their residents. They address the constraints put on neighborhood mobilization by the local and international political economy, but they also show how those constraints can, in a number of cases, be overcome by effective action. They treat neighborhood engagement as an educational process through which residents enhance their skills and knowledge as they participate. Taken together, these essays provide a comprehensive and multi-faceted view of the issues facing contemporary urban neighborhoods.

A journey to the front lines of the battle for the future of American cities, uncovering the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification -- and the lives that are altered in the process. The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don't realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance. P. E. Moskowitz's How to Kill a City takes readers from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised. Along the way, Moskowitz uncovers the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. The deceptively simple question of who can and cannot afford to pay the rent goes to the heart of America's crises of race and inequality. In the fight for economic opportunity and racial justice, nothing could be more important than housing. A vigorous, hard-hitting expose, How to Kill a City reveals who holds power in our cities-and how we can get it back.

Give your students a text that will help them improve the lives of not only individual clients, but of entire communities, with Promoting Community Change. This text addresses the real world issues facing Canadian social work, human services, and community health professionals who want to take the theoretical discussion of community forward and realize tangible community changes. Students will learn to identify the issues related to change and discover exactly how they can become effective agents of change. The author team emphasizes the role a strengthened community can play in preventing and solving the problems that individuals and families commonly experience. Promoting Community Change teaches students how to organize empowering local actions bringing clients, families, and other community members into an active role in building a healthier community for themselves, their families, and their neighbours.

This document has evolved over three years to meet the need for a more comprehensive understanding of how neighborhoods change. The Office of Policy Development and Research at HUD formulated policy alternatives to stem the rising tide of abandoned residential buildings. It showed abandonment as the last stage of a process, not a random or isolated phenomenon. The failure of programs to counteract and halt the decline of neighborhoods has stemmed mainly from an imperfect understanding of this process. There have also been political problems with acting in neighborhoods before the symptoms were painfully evident and from the tendency of program developers to deal with the house, rather than the people who own it, rent it, loan on it, or insure it. Few programs have recognized that those people were part of a total neighborhood rather than occupants of individual buildings. The process of neighborhood change is triggered and fueled by individual, collective and institutional decisions. These are made by a myriad of people-households, bankers, real estate brokers, investors, speculators, public service providers (police, fire, schools, sanitation, etc.) and others. It is a reasonable conclusion that if a concentrated effort is made to affect these decisions then neighborhood decline can be slowed, halted, or in some circumstances, reversed.

Urban renewal has been the dominant approach to revitalizing industrialized communities that fall into decline. A national, community-based organization, the Skillman Foundation sought to engage in a joint effort with the University of Michigan's School of Social Work to bring six neighborhoods in one such declining urban center, Detroit, back to positions of strength and national leadership. A Twenty-First Century Approach to Community Change introduces readers to the basis for the Foundation's solicitation of social work expertise and the social context within which the work of technical assistance began. Building on research, the authors introduce the theory and practice knowledge of earlier scholars, including the conduct of needs assessments at multiple levels, engagement of community members in identifying problem-solving strategies, assistance in developing community goals, and implementation of social work field instruction opportunities. Lessons learned and challenges are described as they played out in the process of creating partnerships for the Foundation with community leaders, engaging and maintaining youth involvement, managing roles and relationships with multiple partners recruited by the Foundation for their specialized expertise, and ultimately conducting the work of technical assistance within a context of increasing influence of the city's surrounding systems (political, economic, educational, and social). Readers will especially note the role of technical assistance in an evolving theory of change.

Every community has issues or opportunities that need to be addressed. The expert knowledge of community members could be the key to creating lasting change. By making community members into facilitators, Making Change: Facilitating Community Action suggests they can guide community members through the process of making change and to help them determine their goals and methods. The aim of this book is to enable facilitators to identify concerns and address, enable and foster change at the local level through effective facilitation. This book follows a six-stage model for creating change. Beginning with issue awareness, it continues through getting to know the team they are working with, seeking information on the issue and community, through facilitating the planning and community development through evaluation. This book focuses on the human side of the change process while also teaching the practical skills necessary for individuals to reach their goal. Making Change is for people interested in making change to improve their community, including students, community activists, local government and educational leaders.

Action for Neighbourhood Change (ANC) is a 14-month strategic research and learning project that will assess how locally-driven revitalization strategies can help citizens build strong, sustainable neighbourhoods. The project got under way in Febuary 2005. It will operate until March 2006 in selected neighbourhoods within the cities of Surrey, Regina, Thunder Bay, Toronto and Halifax.