A Neighborhood Divided

A Neighborhood Divided
Author: Jane Balin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2018-10-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501720821

When a nursing facility for AIDS patients is planned for a city neighborhood, residents might be expected to respond, "Not in my backyard." But, as Jane Balin recounts in A Neighborhood Divided, when that community is known for its racial and ethnic diversity and liberal attitudes, public reaction becomes less predictable and in many ways more important to comprehend.An ethnographer who spent two years talking with inhabitants of a progressive neighborhood facing this prospect, Jane Balin demonstrates that the controversy divided residents in surprising ways. She discovered that those most strongly opposed to the facility lived furthest away, that families with young children were evenly represented in the two camps, and that African Americans followed a Jewish community leader in opposing the home while dismissing their own minister's support of it. By viewing each side sympathetically and allowing participants to express their true feelings about AIDS, the author invites readers to recognize their own anxieties over this sensitive issue. Balin's insightful work stresses the importance of uncovering the ideologies and fears of middle-class Americans in order to understand the range of responses that AIDS has provoked in our society. Its ethnographic approach expands the parameters of NIMBY research, offering a clearer picture of the multi-faceted anxieties that drive responses to AIDS at both the local and national levels.

The Divided City

The Divided City
Author: Alan Mallach
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2018-06-12
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1610917812

In The Divided City, urban practitioner and scholar Alan Mallach presents a detailed picture of what has happened over the past 15 to 20 years in industrial cities like Pittsburgh and Baltimore, as they have undergone unprecedented, unexpected revival. He spotlights these changes while placing them in their larger economic, social and political context. Most importantly, he explores the pervasive significance of race in American cities, and looks closely at the successes and failures of city governments, nonprofit entities, and citizens as they have tried to address the challenges of change. The Divided City concludes with strategies to foster greater equality and opportunity, firmly grounding them in the cities' economic and political realities.

Cycle of Segregation

Cycle of Segregation
Author: Maria Krysan
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2017-12-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610448693

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed housing discrimination by race and provided an important tool for dismantling legal segregation. But almost fifty years later, residential segregation remains virtually unchanged in many metropolitan areas, particularly where large groups of racial and ethnic minorities live. Why does segregation persist at such high rates and what makes it so difficult to combat? In Cycle of Segregation, sociologists Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder examine how everyday social processes shape residential stratification. Past neighborhood experiences, social networks, and daily activities all affect the mobility patterns of different racial groups in ways that have cemented segregation as a self-perpetuating cycle in the twenty-first century. Through original analyses of national-level surveys and in-depth interviews with residents of Chicago, Krysan and Crowder find that residential stratification is reinforced through the biases and blind spots that individuals exhibit in their searches for housing. People rely heavily on information from friends, family, and coworkers when choosing where to live. Because these social networks tend to be racially homogenous, people are likely to receive information primarily from members of their own racial group and move to neighborhoods that are also dominated by their group. Similarly, home-seekers who report wanting to stay close to family members can end up in segregated destinations because their relatives live in those neighborhoods. The authors suggest that even absent of family ties, people gravitate toward neighborhoods that are familiar to them through their past experiences, including where they have previously lived, and where they work, shop, and spend time. Because historical segregation has shaped so many of these experiences, even these seemingly race-neutral decisions help reinforce the cycle of residential stratification. As a result, segregation has declined much more slowly than many social scientists have expected. To overcome this cycle, Krysan and Crowder advocate multi-level policy solutions that pair inclusionary zoning and affordable housing with education and public relations campaigns that emphasize neighborhood diversity and high-opportunity areas. They argue that together, such programs can expand the number of destinations available to low-income residents and help offset the negative images many people hold about certain neighborhoods or help introduce them to places they had never considered. Cycle of Segregation demonstrates why a nuanced understanding of everyday social processes is critical for interrupting entrenched patterns of residential segregation.

The War on Neighborhoods

The War on Neighborhoods
Author: Ryan Lugalia-Hollon
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0807084662

A narrative-driven exploration of policing and the punishment of disadvantage in Chicago, and a new vision for repairing urban neighborhoods For people of color who live in segregated urban neighborhoods, surviving crime and violence is a generational reality. As violence in cities like New York and Los Angeles has fallen in recent years, in many Chicago communities, it has continued at alarming rates. Meanwhile, residents of these same communities have endured decades of some of the highest rates of arrest, incarceration, and police abuse in the nation. The War on Neighborhoods argues that these trends are connected. Crime in Chicago, as in many other US cities, has been fueled by a broken approach to public safety in disadvantaged neighborhoods. For nearly forty years, public leaders have attempted to create peace through punishment, misinvesting billions of dollars toward the suppression of crime, largely into a small subset of neighborhoods on the city’s West and South Sides. Meanwhile, these neighborhoods have struggled to sustain investments into basic needs such as jobs, housing, education, and mental healthcare. When the main investment in a community is policing and incarceration, rather than human and community development, that amounts to a “war on neighborhoods,” which ultimately furthers poverty and disadvantage. Longtime Chicago scholars Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper tell the story of one of those communities, a neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side that is emblematic of many majority-black neighborhoods in US cities. Sharing both rigorous data and powerful stories, the authors explain why punishment will never create peace and why we must rethink the ways that public dollars are invested into making places safe. The War on Neighborhoods makes the case for a revolutionary reformation of our public-safety model that focuses on shoring up neighborhood institutions and addressing the effects of trauma and poverty. The authors call for a profound transformation in how we think about investing in urban communities—away from the perverse misinvestment of policing and incarceration and toward a model that invests in human and community development.

How to Kill a City

How to Kill a City
Author: PE Moskowitz
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1568585241

“An exacting look at gentrification.... How to Kill a City elucidates the complex interplay between the forces we control and those that control us.”―New York Times Book Review 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. In the new preface, Moskowitz stresses just how little has changed in those same cities and how the problems of gentrification are proliferating throughout America. 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. A vigorous, hard-hitting exposé, How to Kill a City reveals who holds power in our cities and how we can get it back.

Overlooking the Border

Overlooking the Border
Author: Dana Hercbergs
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2018-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814341098

An ethnographic tapestry of personal and institutional narratives about Jerusalem’s social history. Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalemby Dana Hercbergs continues the dialogue surrounding the social history of Jerusalem. The book’s starting point is the border that separated the city between Jordan and Israel in 1948–1967, a lesser-known but significant period for cultural representations of Jerusalem. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book juxtaposes Israeli and Palestinian personal narratives about the past with contemporary museum exhibits, street plaques, tourism, and real estate projects that are reshaping the city since the decline of the peace process and the second intifada. What emerges is a portrayal of Jerusalem both as a local place with unique rhythms and topography and as a setting for national imaginaries and agendas with their attendant political and social tensions. As sites of memory, Jerusalem’s homes, streets, and natural areas form the setting for emotionally charged narratives about belonging and rights to place. Recollections of local customs and lifeways in the mid-twentieth century coalesce around residents’ desire for stability amid periods of war, dispossession, and relocation—intertwining the mythical with the mundane. Hercbergs begins by taking the reader to the historically Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, whose streets are a battleground for competing historical narratives about the Israeli-Arab War of 1948. She goes on to explore the connections and tensions between Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians living across the border from one another in Musrara, a neighborhood straddling West and East Jerusalem. The author rounds out the monograph with a semiotic analysis of contemporary tourism and architectural ventures that are entrenching ethno-national separation in the post-Oslo period. These rhetorical expressions illuminate what it means to be a Jerusalemite in the context of the city’s fraught history. Overlooking the Border examines the social and geographic significance of borders for residents’ sense of self, place, and community, and for representations of the city both locally and abroad. It is certain to be of value to scholars and advanced undergraduate and graduate students of Middle Eastern studies, history, urban ethnography, and Israeli and Jewish studies.

At the Edge of the Wall

At the Edge of the Wall
Author: Hanno Hochmuth
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2021-03-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789208750

Located in the geographical center of Berlin, the neighboring boroughs of Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg shared a history and identity until their fortunes diverged dramatically following the construction of the Berlin Wall, which placed them within opposing political systems. This revealing account of the two municipal districts before, during and after the Cold War takes a microhistorical approach to investigate the broader historical trajectories of East and West Berlin, with particular attention to housing, religion, and leisure. Merged in 2001, they now comprise a single neighborhood that bears the traces of these complex histories and serves as an illuminating case study of urban renewal, gentrification, and other social processes that continue to reshape Berlin.

A Street Divided

A Street Divided
Author: Dion Nissenbaum
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2015-09-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1466884894

It has been the home to priests and prostitutes, poets and spies. It has been the stage for an improbable flirtation between an Israeli girl and a Palestinian boy living on opposite sides of the barbed wire that separated enemy nations. It has even been the scene of an unsolved international murder. This one-time shepherd's path between Jerusalem and Bethlehem has been a dividing line for decades. Arab families called it "al Mantiqa Haram." Jewish residents knew it as "shetach hefker." In both languages, in both Israel and Jordan, it meant the same thing: "the Forbidden Area." Peacekeepers that monitored the steep fault line dubbed it "Barbed Wire Alley." To folks on either side of the border, it was the same thing: A dangerous no-man's land separating warring nations and feuding cultures in the Middle East. The barbed wire came down in 1967. But it was soon supplanted by evermore formidable cultural, emotional and political barriers separating Arab and Jew. For nearly two decades, coils of barbed wire ran right down the middle of what became Assael Street, marking the fissure between Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem and Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem. In a beautiful narrative, Dion Nissenbaum's A Street Divided offers a more intimate look at one road at the heart of the conflict, where inches really do matter.

Surrogate Suburbs

Surrogate Suburbs
Author: Todd M. Michney
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2017-02-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469631954

The story of white flight and the neglect of Black urban neighborhoods has been well told by urban historians in recent decades. Yet much of this scholarship has downplayed Black agency and tended to portray African Americans as victims of structural forces beyond their control. In this history of Cleveland's Black middle class, Todd Michney uncovers the creative ways that members of this nascent community established footholds in areas outside the overcrowded, inner-city neighborhoods to which most African Americans were consigned. In asserting their right to these outer-city spaces, African Americans appealed to city officials, allied with politically progressive whites (notably Jewish activists), and relied upon both Black and white developers and real estate agents to expand these "surrogate suburbs" and maintain their livability until the bona fide suburbs became more accessible. By tracking the trajectories of those who, in spite of racism, were able to succeed, Michney offers a valuable counterweight to histories that have focused on racial conflict and Black poverty and tells the neglected story of the Black middle class in America's cities prior to the 1960s.

Lush Life

Lush Life
Author: Richard Price
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2009-03-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780312428228

When a cocky young hipster is shot by a street kid from the "other" Lower East Side, the crime ripples through every stratum of the city, in this brilliant and kaleidoscopic portrait of the "new" New York.