Architectures of Hope examines how communal idealism, electoral politics, and low-income consumer markets made first-time homeownership a reality for millions of low-income Brazilians over the last ten years.
Drawing on a five-year-long ethnography among city planners, architects, street-level bureaucrats, politicians, market and bank representatives, community leaders, and past, present, and future beneficiaries, Moisés Kopper tells the story of how a group of grassroots housing activists rose from oblivion to build a model community. He explores the strategies set forth by housing activists as they waited and hoped for—and eventually secured—homeownership through Minha Casa Minha Vida’s public-private infrastructure. By showing how these efforts coalesced in Porto Alegre—Brazil’s once progressive hotspot—he interrogates the value systems and novel arrangements of power and market that underlie the country’s post-neoliberal project of modern and inclusive development.
By chronicling the making and remaking of material hope in the aftermath of Minha Casa Minha Vida, Architectures of Hope reopens the future as a powerful venue for ethnographic inquiry and urban development.
The editors and contributors to this volume are not willing to accept what is known as uneven development, where some cities win and some lose. They look at two practical consequences of urban growth: the change in residence patterns as neighborhoods gentrify, and the change in employment patterns, as factory workers lose jobs and white-collar workers gain jobs. The editors' goal is to highlight the alternatives to uneven development and to the growth ideology. They outline and advocate specific policies, including affordable housing, changes in taxation, and direct community participation in planning and zoning decisions.
Challenging Uneven Development begins with a rousing discussion of the pervasiveness of the community redevelopment ideology. The growth machine defines the language of the debate. The next group of chapters examine residence patterns--how communities have organized to fight gentrification, why residential integration is essential for good planning as well as morality, and what strategies can be used to achieve racial diversity. Another chapter emphasizes the role of lenders in regulating the flow of credit within communities. Disinvestment by credit providers causes decline, and opens the way for gentrification, which displaces local residents. The impact of taxes in stimulating the growth machine is also explained.
Later chapters move beyond gentrification issues to examine other problems of economic restructuring. They look at how blacks, Latinos, and women have been affected by the growth of service sector jobs. The final chapter serves as a strategic guide to those who wish to establish a progressive agenda for community-based economic development. The authors call for social change, not unimaginative reform.
The contributors to this volume are leaders or researchers from community organizations, civic groups, government agencies, and universities. In addition to the editors, they are Mel King, Teresa Cordova, Daniel Lauber, Jena Pogge, David Flax-Hatch, Arthur Lyons, Wendy Wintermute, Charles Hicklin, Jeffrey D. Reckinger, David Mosena, Charlotte Chun, Raymndo Flores, Luther Snow, Deborah Bennett, John Betancur, and Patricia Wright. They have presented "state-of-the-art" progressive policy solutions for urban problems.
Researchers often hope that their work will inform social change. The questions that motivate them to pursue research careers in the first place often stem from observations about gaps between the world as we wish it to be and the world as it is, accompanied by a deep curiosity about how it might be made different. Researchers view their profession as providing important information about what is, what could be, and how to get there. However, if research is to inform social change, we must first change the way in which research is done.
Engaging the Intersection of Housing and Health offers case studies of research that is interdisciplinary, stakeholder-engaged and intentionally designed for “translation” into practice. There are numerous ways in which housing and health are intertwined. This intertwining—which is the focus of this volume—is lived daily by the children whose asthma is exacerbated by mold in their homes, the adults whose mental illness increases their risk for homelessness and whose homelessness worsens their mental and physical health, the seniors whose home environment enhances their risk of falls, and the families who must choose between paying for housing and paying for healthcare.
From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years.
First, Vale highlights startling continuities both in the way housing assistance has been delivered to the American poor and in the policies used to reward the nonpoor. He traces the stormy history of the Boston Housing Authority, a saga of entrenched patronage and virulent racism tempered, and partially overcome, by the efforts of unyielding reformers. He explores the birth of public housing as a program intended to reward the upwardly mobile working poor, details its painful transformation into a system designed to cope with society's least advantaged, and questions current policy efforts aimed at returning to a system of rewards for responsible members of the working class. The troubled story of Boston public housing exposes the mixed motives and ideological complexity that have long characterized housing in America, from the Puritans to the projects.
The 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule was the most significant federal effort to increase equality of access to place-based resources and opportunities, such as high-performing schools or access to jobs, since the 1968 Fair Housing Act. However, in an effort to appeal to suburban voters, the Trump administration repealed the rule in 2020, leaving its future in doubt.
Furthering Fair Housing analyzes multiple dimensions of this rule, identifying failures of past efforts to increase housing choice, exploring how the AFFH Rule was crafted, measuring the initial effects of the rule before its rescission, and examining its interaction with other contemporary housing issues, such as affordability, gentrification, anti-displacement, and zoning policies.
The editors and contributors to this volume—a mix of civil rights advocates, policymakers, and public officials—provide critical perspectives and identify promising new directions for future policies and practices. Placing the history of fair housing in the context of the centuries-long struggle for racial equity, Furthering Fair Housing shows how this policy can be revived and enhanced to advance racial equity in America’s neighborhoods.
In Reclaiming Public Housing, Lawrence Vale explores the rise, fall, and redevelopment of three public housing projects in Boston. Vale looks at these projects from the perspectives of their low-income residents and assesses the contributions of the design professionals who helped to transform these once devastated places during the 1980s and 1990s.
The three similarly designed projects were built at the same time under the same government program and experienced similar declines. Each received comparable funding for redevelopment, and each design team consisted of first-rate professionals who responded with similar "defensible space" redesign plans. Why, then, was one redevelopment effort a nationally touted success story, another only a mixed success, and the third a widely acknowledged failure? The book answers this key question by situating each effort in the context of specific neighborhood struggles. In each case, battles over race and poverty played out somewhat differently, yielding wildly different results.
At a moment when local city officials throughout America are demolishing more than 100,000 units of low-income housing, this crucial book questions the conventional wisdom that all large public housing projects must be demolished and rebuilt as mixed-income neighborhoods.
In recent years, almost daily media attention has been focused on the plight of the homeless in cities across the United States. Drawing upon experiences in the U.S. and Europe, John Gilderbloom and Richard Appelbaum challenge conventional assumptions concerning the operation of housing markets and provide policy alternatives directed at the needs of low- and moderate-income families. Rethinking Rental Housing is a ground-breaking analysis that shows the value of applying a broad sociological approach to urban problems, one that takes into account the basic economic, social, and political dimensions of the urban housing crisis.
Gilderbloom and Appelbaum predict that this crisis will worsen in the 1990s and argue that a "supply and demand" approach will not work in this case because housing markets are not competitive. They propose that the most effective approach to affordable housing is to provide non-market alternatives fashioned after European housing programs, particularly the Swedish model.
An important feature of this book is the discussion of tenant movements that have tried to implement community values in opposition to values of development and landlord capital. One of the very few publications on rental housing, it is unique in applying a sociological framework to the study of this topic.
No American metropolis has intervened in its housing market quite as aggressively as New York since World War II—and yet none is as burdened by the scarcity, poor quality, uneven distribution, and high cost of its rental housing stock. Why, after half a century of rent control, public housing programs, tax abatement, and land use regulation, is it so difficult for thousands of New Yorkers to find, rent, and maintain decent apartments?
Addressing issues that are hotly debated in the Big Apple and other cities across the nation, Peter Salins and Gerard Mildner analyze New York's policies and assess their largely detrimental effects on housing quality and availability. They show how programs that were instituted for the benefit of both investors and the poor—by directly and indirectly subsidizing housing construction and by capping rents—have instead caused misallocation of housing, exacerbated tensions between tenants and landlords, progressively stifled private investment, and resulted in building deterioration and abandonment.
Scarcity by Design is an object lesson in what governments should not do if they wish to improve housing and maintain communities. It also makes a strong case for a highly controversial solution: arguing from a free-market perspective, Salins and Mildner clearly demonstrate how transition to a fully deregulated and subsidized housing market would alleviate the social and economic woes of New York's tenants. They present deregulation as the essential stimulus of housing production, fair pricing, and good maintenance. The authors' crisply written analysis of New York's housing problems and their proposed solutions will enlighten citizens, city managers, investors, builders, and urban planners, and should spark discussions in academic as well as professional circles.
It is all too easy to assume that social service programs respond to homelessness, seeking to prevent and understand it. The Value of Homelessness, however, argues that homelessness today is an effect of social services and sciences, which shape not only what counts as such but what will?or ultimately won’t?be done about it.
Through a history of U.S. housing insecurity from the 1930s to the present, Craig Willse traces the emergence and consolidation of a homeless services industry. How to most efficiently allocate resources to control ongoing insecurity has become the goal, he shows, rather than how to eradicate the social, economic, and political bases of housing needs. Drawing on his own years of work in homeless advocacy and activist settings, as well as interviews conducted with program managers, counselors, and staff at homeless services organizations in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, Willse provides the first analysis of how housing insecurity becomes organized as a governable social problem.
An unprecedented and powerful historical account of the development of contemporary ideas about homelessness and how to manage homelessness, The Value of Homelessness offers new ways for students and scholars of social work, urban inequality, racial capitalism, and political theory to comprehend the central role of homelessness in governance and economy today.
In The War on Slums in the Southwest, Robert Fairbanks provides compelling and probing case studies of economic problems and public housing plights in Albuquerque, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix and San Antonio. He provides brief histories of each city--all of which expanded dynamically between 1935 and 1965--and how they responded to slums under the Housing Acts of 1937, 1949, and 1954.
Despite being a region where conservative politics has ruled, these Southwestern cities often handled population growth, urban planning, and economic development in ways that closely followed the national account of efforts to eliminate slums and provide public housing for the needy. The War on Slums in the Southwest therefore corrects some misconceptions about the role of slum clearance and public housing in this region as Fairbanks integrates urban policy into the larger understanding of federal and state-based housing policies.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press