James DeFilippis

The myth of social capital in community development

Abstract This article argues that contemporary interest in social capital by community development theorists, funders, and practitioners is misguided and needs to be thoroughly rethought. It argues that social capital, as understood by Robert Putnam and people influenced by his work, is a fundamentally flawed concept because it fails to understand issues of power in the production of communities and because it is divorced from economic capital. Therefore, community development practice based on this understanding of social capital is, and will continue to be, similarly flawed. The article further argues that instead of Putnams understanding of social capital, community development practice would be better served by returning to the way the concept was used by Glenn Loury and Pierre Bourdieu and concludes with a discussion of how these alternative theories of social capital can be realized in community development practice.

Alternatives to the “New Urban Politics”: finding locality and autonomy in local economic development☆

Abstract The New Urban Politics (or NUP) of local economic development has become one of the dominant themes in urban political economy in the last twenty years. But despite the volume of research this has generated, basic problems remain in the theories that underlie this academic and political work. This paper begins with a discussion of the understandings of the central concepts of locality and autonomy in the NUP. These understandings of locality and autonomy are then criticized for failing to recognize the relational and processual character of both of these constructs. Local autonomy is then retheorized as the capacity to control the production of place. In particular, the paper focuses on groups constructing institutions and relationships of local ownership. These organizations, it is argued, have combined the goals of local autonomy and local economic development, and in so doing have produced new localities in the places in which they are organizing.

Running to Stand Still: Through the Looking Glass with Federally Subsidized Housing in New York City

Research and policy on the geography of assisted housing is dominated by a powerful conventional wisdom: Project-based subsidies are presumptively bad because they anchor assisted households in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods, while vouchers are inherently good because they promote deconcentration and integration through tenant choice. Unfortunately, this consensus is based on geographical assumptions that have been subverted by the dramatic restructuring of cities with tight housing markets over the last generation. In this study, we use the case of New York City to analyze these spatial contradictions. Project-based subsidized housing is disappearing from yesterdays poor neighborhoods that have been remade by gentrification at the urban core, while recipients of Housing Choice Vouchers are concentrated in todays poor neighborhoods of color farther from the city center. If the policy goal is to break the link between housing assistance and the stereotypes of “projects” in the worst neighborhoods, then in the case of tight, expensive urban housing markets, voucher-driven deconcentration will be less successful than the preservation of the existing project-based housing stock.

Mapping Public Housing: The Case of New York City

In American popular discourse and policy debates, “public housing” conjures images of “the projects”—dysfunctional neighborhood imprints of a discredited welfare state. Yet this image, so important in justifying deconcentration, is a dangerous caricature of the diverse places where low–income public housing residents live, and it ignores a much larger public housing program—the

Learning from Las Vegas: Unions and post-industrial urbanisation

100 billion–plus annual mortgage interest tax concessions to (mostly) wealthy homeowners. in this article, we measure three spatial aspects of assisted housing, poverty, and wealth in New York City. First, local indicators of spatial association document a contingent link between assistance and poverty: vouchers are not consistently associated with poverty deconcentration. Second, spatial regressions confirm this result after controlling for racial segregation and spatial autocorrelation. Third, factor analyses and cluster classifications reveal a rich, complex neighborhood topography of poverty, wealth, and housing subsidy that defies the simplistic stereotypes of policy and popular discourse.

Place Matters, but Maybe Not in the Ways They Think It Does . . .

Las Vegas is often portrayed as the apogee of postmodern urbanism, but we argue that you cannot understand Las Vegas without understanding the role of unions in the City’s political economy. By focusing on the social relations surrounding workplace, class, and gender we highlight alternative versions of Las Vegas’ history. The Culinary Union, a UNITE HERE local, has introduced new institutional forms and played an active role in the local growth coalition. They have set standards around work intensity, training, and job ladders. Highlighting the ability of the union to affect these issues contributes to a counter-narrative about the City which stresses the agency of labour to actively produce Las Vegas’ cultural and economic landscapes. The postmodern narrative about Las Vegas hides these important lessons. Learning from Las Vegas can transform issues of signs and symbolism to issues of union organising and institutional structures in the post-industrial economy.

URBAN POLICY IN THE TIME OF OBAMA: INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM

This article discusses the new edition of Place Matters, and uses it to discuss two primary problems in the accepted liberal narrative of segregation and spatial inequalities in metropolitan areas. The first is the over-emphasis on public policies as the cause of segregation and injustices. Such a narrative of causality lets the private market off the hook, and thereby makes transforming the market in ways that make it more equitable and just much more difficult. The second problem is that the book conceives of space and place in ways that are too simple, and therefore its analyses and policy proposals are not up to the tasks of understanding or addressing the complex relationships between space and justice.

Immigration and community development in New York City

INTRODUCTION This is a remarkable moment for urban policy in the United States — or at least it should be. The country is still recovering from a housing crisis that has wrought extensive damage to both already struggling urban centers (such as Newark, Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore) and Sun Belt boomtowns (such as Las Vegas, San Diego, and Miami). The crisis of black unemployment, underemployment, and criminalization has also grown dramatically worse in the Great Recession, and local governments have struggled with the worst fiscal problems they have had since the “fiscal crisis” of the mid-1970s. Added to this context is the biography of the president. He is a political and intellectual product of New York, Boston, and, most importantly, Chicago, where he famously worked as a community organizer. As such, he is the first “urban” president the country has had for many decades. All this would point to a period of significant and very public discussions and policies about urban policy. To some extent, this has been the case. In February 2009, shortly after taking office, the Obama administration created the first ever White House Office of Urban Affairs to “take a coordinated and comprehensive approach to developing and implementing an effective strategy concerning urban America.”1 Also, several urban policies have been launched, including, but not limited to: Strong Cities, Strong Communities; Promise Neighborhoods; Choice Neighborhoods; and Immigration Action Roundtables. And yet, despite these initiatives, there is remarkably little substantive discussion of urban issues in American policy circles or, more generally, its public sphere. This lack of discussion is mirrored and magnified by the fact that these initiatives are all fairly small, modestly funded, and low profile. To some extent this is to be expected since the country officially gave up on “the urban crisis” 40 years ago. Since then, the country has only become more suburbanized and divorced from urban life, and much of the policy discussion has consciously and explicitly chosen to focus on the “regional” or the “metropolitan.” But the relative absence of “the urban” from public discussions is notable given the aforementioned contexts. Also, most public policies are not, in theory, specifically spatial, place-based or urban in nature. This has long been the case in federal policy. And yet, policies regarding education, immigration, labor, and many others are “urban” in the sense of having significant impacts on urban areas and urbanization processes. Accordingly, several articles here examine the ways in which a set of nominally aspatial policies in the Obama administration have been impacting American cities and are therefore “urban policies” even if they are not normally thought of as such. This Journal of Urban Affairs symposium is the result of a set of panels I organized with Amy Khare of the University of Chicago at the Urban Affairs Association’s annual conference in April 2013. The beginning of President Obama’s second term seemed an opportune moment to analyze and investigate the state of American urban policy.

Contested Community: A Selected and Critical History of Community Organizing

Community development corporations play a central role in the provision of affordable housing and social services in the contemporary American welfare state. This organizational form, however, emerged in the distinctive, historical political-economic context of the Black Power Movement and Americas Great Society. American cities are now very different places, transformed by immigration from spaces of Black–White separation to much more heterogeneous and diverse spaces. In this article, our central question is whether, and how, these vital service organizations are incorporating immigrants into their work. We find that the answer varies, and such variations indicate differential access, or “differential citizenship”—in the urban structure of the contemporary American welfare state.

W(h)ither the community in community land trusts

This chapter discusses the diverse ways community has been utilized and understood, mobilized and invoked over time, with lessons for current theory and practice. In a nutshell, the history of community initiatives in the United States reveals a complex past, one which if the lens is wide angle instantly expands understanding of the varied origins, goals, politics, and shapes community efforts take. The complex history and diverse forms result from a number of factors, chief among them the historical context. Community initiatives are shaped by and constrained by the broader political-economy and at times challenge this context. This chapter proposes that this history is a contested one because community efforts are fundamentally political and part of the central social struggles and movements of their time. By offering central lessons from the history of community organizing and doing so with an eye to periodization and contextualization, this chapter contributes to a broader and eclectic understanding of community and community organizing.