There Goes The Hood

How does gentrification affect residents who stay in the neighborhood?

From one of America’s most admired sociologists and urban policy advisers, There Goes the Neighborhood is a long-awaited look at how race, class, and ethnicity influence one of Americans’ most personal choices—where we choose to live. The result of a three-year study of four working- and lower-middle class neighborhoods in Chicago, these riveting first-person narratives and the meticulous research which accompanies them reveal honest yet disturbing realities—ones that remind us why the elusive American dream of integrated neighborhoods remains a priority of race relations in our time.

Bill de Blasio's campaign rhetoric focused on a tale of two cities: rich and poor New York. He promised to value the needs of poor and working-class New Yorkers, making city government work better for everyone-not just those who thrived during Bloomberg's tenure as mayor. But well into de Blasio's administration, many critics think that little has changed, especially in terms of land owners' and developers' profits. Despite the mayor's goal of creating more affordable housing, Brooklyn and Manhattan sit atop the list of the most unaffordable housing markets in the country. It seems that the old adage is becoming truer: New York is a place for only the very rich and the very poor. In The Creative Destruction of New York City, urban scholar Alessandro Busà travels to neighborhoods across the city, from Harlem to Coney Island, to tell the story of fifteen years of drastic rezoning and rebranding, updating the tale of two New Yorks. There is a gilded city of sky-high glass towers where Wall Street managers and foreign billionaires live-or merely store their cash. And there is another New York: a place where even the professional middle class is one rent hike away from displacement. Despite de Blasio's rhetoric, the trajectory since Bloomberg has been remarkably consistent. New York's urban development is changing to meet the consumption demands of the very rich, and real estate moguls' power has never been greater. Major players in real estate, banking, and finance have worked to ensure that, regardless of changes in leadership, their interests are safeguarded at City Hall. The Creative Destruction of New York City is an important chronicle of both the success of the city's elite and of efforts to counter the city's march toward a glossy and exclusionary urban landscape. It is essential reading for everyone who cares about affordable housing access and, indeed, the soul of New York City

Hunted by his former comrades and labeled a traitor after he refuses to murder an innocent Afghan family, Mason Kane works to unravel a conspiracy that reaches all the way up to the highest levels of the government.

During the civil rights movement, epic battles for justice were fought in the streets, at lunch counters, and in the classrooms of the American South. Just as many battles were waged, however, in the hearts and minds of ordinary white southerners whose world became unrecognizable to them. Jason Sokol’s vivid and unprecedented account of white southerners’ attitudes and actions, related in their own words, reveals in a new light the contradictory mixture of stubborn resistance and pragmatic acceptance–as well as the startling and unexpected personal transformations–with which they greeted the enforcement of legal equality.

Despite being the centerpiece of rural educational reform for most of the twentieth century, rural school consolidation has received remarkably little scholarly attention. The social history and geography of the movement, the widespread resistance it provoked, and the cultural landscapes its proponents sought to transform have remained largely unexplored. Now in There Goes the Neighborhood David Reynolds remedies this situation by examining the rural school consolidation movement in that most midwestern of midwestern states, Iowa. From 1912 to 1921, Iowa was the center of national attention as state and local education leaders attempted to implement a new model of rural education, intended to be emulated throughout the rest of the Midwest. As part of the Country Life movement—whose leaders sought to create a more modern future for farm families, an alternative form of rural community that combined the advantages of both city and country—the initially successful model collapsed in the early twenties, not to be revived until after World War II. Reynolds focuses on how and why rural school consolidation was so vigorously resisted in most of Iowa, why it failed in the twenties, and what its lasting consequences have been. Combining social and oral history, modern social theory, historical geography, and ethnography, There Goes the Neighborhood is the most authoritative analysis to date of the politics, geography, and social history of rural school consolidation in any state.

In the spring of 1992 the African American neighborhoods of Los Angeles — Compton, Watts, Gardena, South Central — were irrevocably transformed by the greatest domestic disturbance of this century: the “Uprisings,” as they were then described on the streets. In the aftermath of the violence emerged a powerful spirit of reconciliation and change, as gang members who had once fought each other for years came together in an attempt to rebuild their homes, businesses, families and most importantly themselves. This new sense of peace and cooperation continued to thrive in the inner city, and now, with uprising, thirteen former Crips and Bloods give voice to their fresh hopes for the future.What these men reveal is both provocative and profound: the rites of initiation, the pressure to commit crimes, the bonds of gang brotherhood, the significance of gangsta rap, the need for self-empowerment, and the durability of racism in our culture. But Uprising has a timely moral mission as well: Mean streets similar to those of L.A. can be found in cities across the country like Chicago, Baltimore, New York, Atlanta, and Newark. Gang warfare is escalating, spreading to the heartland — and here Yusuf Jah and Sister Shah’Keyah proclaim that lives and communities must be saved. An intricate mosaic of a nuanced and often turbulent world, Uprising defines issues that confront all Americans. It’s message cannot be ignored. Uprising is a powerfully raw, intimate history of gang life in South Central L.A. In detailed interviews, gang members of the Crips and Bloods open up on a wide range of issues, including the bonds of the gang brotherhood, the significance of gangsta rap, the despair of welfare, and the scourge of drugs. "Moments of brutal clarity…One finishes the book convinced of its authentic depiction of gang life." — The New York Times Book Review

The black ghetto is thought of as a place of urban decay and social disarray. Like the historical ghetto of Venice, it is perceived as a space of confinement, one imposed on black America by whites. It is the home of a marginalized underclass and a sign of the depth of American segregation. Yet while black urban neighborhoods have suffered from institutional racism and economic neglect, they have also been places of refuge and community. In A Haven and a Hell, Lance Freeman examines how the ghetto shaped black America and how black America shaped the ghetto. Freeman traces the evolving role of predominantly black neighborhoods in northern cities from the late nineteenth century through the present day. At times, the ghetto promised the freedom to build black social institutions and political power. At others, it suppressed and further stigmatized African Americans. Freeman reveals the forces that caused the ghetto’s role as haven or hell to wax and wane, spanning the Great Migration, mid-century opportunities, the eruptions of the sixties, the challenges of the seventies and eighties, and present-day issues of mass incarceration, the subprime crisis, and gentrification. Offering timely planning and policy recommendations based in this history, A Haven and a Hell provides a powerful new understanding of urban black communities at a time when the future of many inner-city neighborhoods appears uncertain.