Christopher Niedt

Gentrification and the Grassroots: Popular Support in the Revanchist Suburb

ABSTRACT: Most existing research on neighborhoods facing gentrification has portrayed residents as resistant or politically quiescent. Drawing from a year of fieldwork in Dundalk, MD, I argue that developers and the neoliberal state will probably find popular support for gentrification as they reinvest in the politically divided industrial suburbs of the United States. Local homeowners and community associations have emerged as gentrification supporters for three interrelated reasons. First, many of them have drawn from a resurgent national conservatism to explain decline as an effect of government subsidies and “people from the city;” their desire to reclaim suburban space—a “suburban revanchism”—although avoiding accusations of racism makes gentrification-induced displacement appealing. Second, the rebirth of urban neighborhoods and other industrial suburbs provides visual evidence of gentrification’s success. Third, the neoliberal state’s retreat from social programs and its emphasis on private-sector redevelopment allay suspicion of government and enable collaboration between the local state, developers, and homeowners. The redevelopment efforts of two local organizations illustrate how residents have become indispensable partners in Dundalk’s emergent pro-gentrification coalition.

Who Are the Foreclosed? A Statistical Portrait of America in Crisis

Data from the National Suburban Survey from September 2010 permit the first statistical portrait of Americans displaced by the mortgage foreclosure crisis. The average person who has experienced home mortgage foreclosure since September 2007 resembles the average American but is somewhat likely to be younger, Latino, and a parent. The foreclosed are also more likely to report various other measures of financial distress, including recent job loss. The experience of foreclosure is associated with more problems in the neighborhoods where respondents currently reside, including such problems as crime, unemployment, and a lack of affordable housing. Respondents who have not personally lost a home, but who know the foreclosed, are also experiencing more economic distress and more neighborhood problems than those who have not. These descriptive findings suggest the human costs of the foreclosure crisis and the limits of informal social safety nets for addressing those costs.

Resisting devaluation: Foreclosure, eminent domain law, and the geographical political economy of risk

This article examines recent plans for US municipalities to use the state legal power of eminent domain to forcibly acquire “underwater” mortgages (i.e. those with negative equity), and to refinance them on terms more favorable to the homeowners in question, as a way of addressing in a socially progressive way the nation’s ongoing foreclosure crisis. The article makes three main arguments. The first is that insofar as the plan threatens to disrupt prevailing norms of value distribution and risk bearing, it represents a fundamental challenge to the existing political economy of urban financial capitalism in the US and the law’s mediation thereof. The second is that value, risk, and their mediation through law must be understood in the context of geographical unevenness and shifting scales of legal governance. The third is that the geographical political economy associated with the eminent domain plan is about discourses—of risk, of markets, and indeed of law per se—no less than materialities; and that the two are indelibly linked, with discourses having material effects when, through law, they structure value and risk for the manifold actors who operate within the sphere of housing finance.

Suburban Diversity in Postwar America

This essay introduces a special section in the Journal of Urban History that explores the concept of suburban diversity in the United States during the post-World War II decades. Recent scholarship has emphasized themes of suburban heterogeneity during the prewar and post-1970 periods, but the literature on postwar suburbia still revolves around the tropes of “white flight,” the urban–suburban divide, and the hegemonic middle-class cultural ideal. Through studies of community formation, the contributors to this forum examine the racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and political diversity of the postwar metropolitan landscape, with particular attention to the various meanings that suburbanites attached to their homes and neighborhoods. This introduction argues that making suburban diversity central, rather than exceptional, to the study of the postwar era requires scholarship that moves beyond the myth of white middle-class homogeneity and critically assesses the racialized binary of urban-suburban divergence. We propose a model of metropolitan diversity that highlights multiple dimensions of heterogeneity alongside the persistent patterns of neighborhood-level racial and class segregation in cities and suburbs alike.

The Politics of Eminent Domain: From False Choices to Community Benefits

Large-scale urban redevelopment projects catalyze moments of peril and opportunity. In the wake of the United States Supreme Courts Kelo v. New London decision affirming economic development as a public use under the takings clause of the Constitution, these perils and opportunities have again become a site of major contestation. An unusual alliance of libertarian property-rights ideologues and civil-rights organizations has joined forces to challenge the use of eminent domain in urban economic development. In this article, I analyze the history of these alliances and their implicit reinforcement of deeply reactionary constructions of property. I conclude with an evaluation of two emergent models—community benefit agreements and community equity shares—that provide promising community tools for alternatives to homeowner rule and neoliberal urban renewal.

Comment on Carpenter and Ross (2009)

In an October 2009 Urban Studies article, Dick Carpenter and John Ross present new research on eminent domain in the US. The authors study areas where local governments plan to acquire property via eminent domain and convey that property to other private owners. They show that area residents are disproportionately members of “less politically powerful populations†and situate their findings within critical urban theory. This response argues that, although Carpenter and Ross do make a useful empirical contribution to the literature, there is an unacknowledged dissonance between their theoretical and normative frameworks and those of most critical urban theorists. The latter understand redevelopment within the broader context of neo-liberalism and structural inequality, and advocate equitable and community-controlled redevelopment. While Carpenter and Ross’ position on neo-liberalism and community control is unclear, they are affiliated with an organisation that prioritises individual property rights rather than equity.

Analyzing segregation in mature and developing suburbs in the United States

ABSTRACT Over the past several decades, researchers have investigated segregation, differentiating between central cities and suburbs. However, suburbs have become more differentiated. Using Census 2000, Census 2010, and American Community Survey (ACS) data for 2007–2011, this article analyzes segregation in the 100 most populous metropolitan statistical areas in the United States, differentiating between central cities, mature suburbs, and developing suburbs. For each subgeography, we consider the racial and ethnic proportions, the dissimilarity index for each combination of racial and ethnic groups, and the isolation index for each racial and ethnic group. We find that Black–White and Latino–White dissimilarity levels in mature suburbs are closer to the corresponding levels in central cities. From 2000 to 2010, Black–White segregation indices decreased for all subgeographies in all regions and Latino–White segregation indices increased for all subgeographies in Census Region South. The findings for the dissimilarity indices suggest that finer-grained analyses of segregation could yield insights on local-level processes that may influence segregation in the 3 types of places and could suggest policy interventions to address segregation’s persistence.