Rebuilding Urban Neighborhoods

Reports on progress in the fight against the ingrained poverty and social problems of many of the USA's most devastated areas. Extensive case studies are provided from Atlanta, Camden, Chicago, Cleveland, East St. Louis, Los Angeles, Miami and New York City.

Rebuilding Urban Neighborhoods presents a timely look at some of the most troubled neighborhoods in eight American cities: Atlanta, Camden, Chicago, Cleveland, East Saint Louis, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City. The authors, W. Dennis Keating and Norman Krumholz, review past federal policies and early assessments of the latest federal initiative, the Empowerment Zone. They find some signs of revival even in the most distressed urban neighborhoods, but often as an overlay to persistent poverty and social problems. The case studies emphasize the important roles played by Community Development Corporations, and the book concludes with an analysis of the future prospects for distressed urban neighborhoods.

Our poorest urban neighbourhoods experience economic and social difficulties that uniquely affect the lives of those who live there. This volume examines the policies and initiatives now underway on both sides of the Atlantic to revitalize those areas. With contributors from the US, France and the UK the volume explains the nature of specific community building programmes and explores critical issues such as the role of partnerships and the importance of race and gender in urban regeneration.

Coming Home to New Orleans documents grassroots rebuilding efforts in New Orleans neighborhoods after hurricane Katrina, and draws lessons on their contribution to the post-disaster recovery of cities. The book begins with two chapters that address Katrina's impact and the planning and public sector recovery policies that set the context for neighborhood recovery. Rebuilding narratives for six New Orleans neighborhoods are then presented and analyzed. In the heavily flooded Broadmoor and Village de L'Est neighborhoods, residents coalesced around communitywide initiatives, one through a neighborhood association and the second under church leadership, to help homeowners return and restore housing, get key public facilities and businesses rebuilt and create new community-based organizations and civic capacity. A comparison of four adjacent neighborhoods in the center of the city show how differing socioeconomic conditions, geography, government policies and neighborhood capacity created varied recovery trajectories. The concluding chapter argues that grassroots and neighborhood scale initiatives can make important contributions to city recovery in four areas: repopulation, restoring "complete neighborhoods" with key services and amenities, rebuilding parts of the small business economy and enhancing recovery capacity. It also calls for more balanced investments and policies to rebuild rental and owner-occupied housing and more deliberate collaboration with community-based organizations to undertake and implement recovery plans, and proposes changes to federal disaster recovery policies and programs to leverage the contribution of grassroots rebuilding and more support for city recovery.

Neighborhood-based initiatives -ranging from settlement houses in the nineteenth century to the Community Action and Model Cities program of the Great Society to the Empowerment and Enterprise Zones of the 1990s -have been called on to help solve a variety of poverty-related problems. This book examines the history of these initiatives.

Disasters—natural ones, such as hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes, and unnatural ones such as terrorist attacks—are part of the American experience in the twenty-first century. The challenges of preparing for these events, withstanding their impact, and rebuilding communities afterward require strategic responses from different levels of government in partnership with the private sector and in accordance with the public will. Disasters have a disproportionate effect on urban places. Dense by definition, cities and their environs suffer great damage to their complex, interdependent social, environmental, and economic systems. Social and medical services collapse. Long-standing problems in educational access and quality become especially acute. Local economies cease to function. Cultural resources disappear. The plight of New Orleans and several smaller Gulf Coast cities exemplifies this phenomenon. This volume examines the rebuilding of cities and their environs after a disaster and focuses on four major issues: making cities less vulnerable to disaster, reestablishing economic viability, responding to the permanent needs of the displaced, and recreating a sense of place. Success in these areas requires that priorities be set cooperatively, and this goal poses significant challenges for rebuilding efforts in a democratic, market-based society. Who sets priorities and how? Can participatory decision-making be organized under conditions requiring focused, strategic choices? How do issues of race and class intersect with these priorities? Should the purpose of rebuilding be restoration or reformation? Contributors address these and other questions related to environmental conditions, economic imperatives, social welfare concerns, and issues of planning and design in light of the lessons to be drawn from Hurricane Katrina.