John J. Betancur

Gentrification and Community Fabric in Chicago

Critical authors of gentrification point to its deleterious impacts on displaced residents. Research on the nature or actual forms of impacts has not advanced much, however. This paper attempts to specify impacts on low-income racial/ethnic groups (Latinos in particular) in five Chicago neighbourhoods, with a particular focus on neighbourhood-based fabrics of support and advancement. Limited in their mobility and exchange value resources, lower-income groups depend on such fabrics far more than do the higher income. In fact, they have fewer choices and are most vulnerable to place-based shifts. The case seems especially challenging for minorities who, like European immigrants before them, depend largely on place-based platforms/social fabrics but, unlike them, confront the added factors of race and urban restructuring.

Labor-Force-Based Development: A Community-Oriented Approach to Targeting Job Training and Industrial Development

Efforts of community groups and local governments to gain jobs for a specific pool of unemployed workers often suffer from a limited and fragmented approach that does not give sufficient priority to the unique conditions, skills, and experience of the workers themselves. This article suggests a remedy. It documents the shortcomings of traditional frameworks for addressing the employment needs of specific pools of labor such as dislocated workers or segregated communities. In addition, the authors report on methods and strategies they are developing that enable policymakers and community groups to use skills and available training resources as an anchor for community economic development strategies. Three brief case studies that illustrate different applications of the methodology and strategic approach are also presented.

Where Downtown Meets Neighborhood: Industrial Displacement in Chicago, 1978-1987

Abstract Public and private officials promote downtown growth as the panacea for central cities battered by economic change. Cities have mobilized substantial resources to make that growth happen. The downtown growth strategy, however, increasingly is receiving criticism for ignoring neighborhoods and for producing negative impacts on nearby neighborhoods, residents, and businesses. In Chicago between 1978 and 1987 massive downtown growth produced industrial displacement–the forced relocation of businesses–alongside the new investment, jobs, and tax income. Studies of two Chicago industrial districts show that industrial displacement is widespread but has had different impacts on specific industries, sizes of firms, and owners or tenants, In one district, industries and their industrial council have resisted displacement by opposing loft conversions and proposing municipal zoning legislation to protect viable manufacturing areas. Although it is difficult to achieve effective community organizing and creat...

Gentrification in Latin America: Overview and Critical Analysis

This paper offers a critical review and interpretation of gentrification in Latin American cities. Applying a flexible methodology, it examines enabling conditions associated with societal regime change and local contingencies to determine its presence, nature, extent, and possibilities. Questioning the uncritical transfer of constructs such as gentrification from the Global North to the Global South, the paper advocates analyses of mediating structures and local conditions to determine their applicability and possible variations. Overall, the review questions the feasibility of self-sustained, large scale gentrification in central areas of the region’s cities today tying it to each city’s level of incorporation into global circuits and the role of local governments. Rather than an orthodox hypothesis testing, this is an exercise in interpretation that calls for nuanced approaches to the study of urban restructuring in cities of the global South.

Community Development in Chicago: From Harold Washington to Richard M. Daley

This article examines the transformation of community development in Chicago in the last three decades from a predominately grass roots movement for social change to a much smaller and fragmented one led by professionalized groups. It focuses on Harold Washington’s and Richard M. Daley’s mayoral regimes and the ways they helped to shape the context and implementation of community development. The major theme in the article is that this movement lost most of its capacity to be innovative and to contribute to progressivism (most evident under the Washington administration) when it lost its basic connections to grass roots leadership under the subsequent Daley administration. As a consequence, problems like poverty, homelessness, poor schooling, and greater racial and class divisions have resulted. The discussion and analysis is based on interviews of people involved with both regimes and a review of changes in policies and practices between the Washington and current Daley (Daley II) period. The article concludes with a sober overview of how community development has been absconded to serve the interests of progrowth and corporate interests rather than used as a tool to promote fairness, access, and equity in low-income neighborhoods.

Spontaneous Settlement Housing in Latin America A Critical Examination

Spontaneous settlements have been perceived by many authors as a solution to the housing problem in the underdeveloped world. This article contends that their descriptions of spontaneous settlements miss key variables and are often misleading. In particular it argues that calling spontaneous settlement housing a solution results in the legitimation of social segregation in planning and the inadequate formulation of the housing problem.

Planning and Decentralization: Contested Spaces for Public Action in the Global South

Rational planning has been challenged on various grounds. A critical question concerns the validity of general principles and solutions across contexts, spaces, and geographies. Such is the case with prescriptions of decentralization that entities such as the World Bank advance around the world. According to them, decentralization brings government closer to people to deepen democracy, makes decision making more inclusive and transparent, increases the efficiency of goods and service delivery, maximizes the use and reach of public resources, and increases social capital; in short, decentralization is a critical element of good governance. This reasoning is rather convincing, particularly when the prescription of fiscal decentralization includes the proper combinations of decision making, tax reform, new sources of income, and budgetary decentralization, with governance systems securing concerted partnerships among the public sector, the private sector, and civil society. Planning and Decentralization: Contested Spaces for Public Action in the Global South tests these propositions against actual experiences. Even when governments endorse the full package promoted by international forces, results differ by country. Examining cities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, the contributors to this book found a large variation in results that they attributed to national and local differences. For them, context and historical legacies mediate between policies and actual implementation and outcomes. National and local agendas, in fact, diverge in approach, intent, and results. The organizing capacity and readiness of local forces emerge as a major factor in appropriating opportunity and steering it in a desired direction. In some cases, opportunities for decentralization allowed social movements to steer the way; in others, they allowed opposing forces to counter populist national regimes. Analyses of cases throughout the global south suggest that under different environments, the same types of interventions may produce different results. Ultimately, reforms are as good as the ability of local forces to use them; reforms can be thwarted, producing unintended results. In their own assessment of cases, coeditors Beard, Miraftab, and Silver argue that planning is a rather complex and contradictory field, either because it operates in a framework of contending interests and contested spaces or because it may actually stir up dormant forces waiting for the opportunity to act. Only if reality were as straightforward as linear rationality could planning become a mechanical exercise of output maximization within clearly identified constraints. However, plans and decisions produce externalities or redistributions and, thus, become the sites of political, economic, and social struggle. In turn, the same democracy that decentralization allegedly seeks can become a basis of opposition when it disadvantages some, threatens the status quo, or gets steered in the direction of particular interests. Critical analysis of cases in this book suggests that the forces underlying reforms and the principles and priorities advanced can ultimately define the options. For instance, discussing decentralization in South Africa, Miraftab suggests that in Cape Town it reproduced spatial apartheid; similarly, Bond claims that decentralization of water in South Africa can be termed commodification. Similarly, in Thailand a tradition of central control made decentralization largely rhetorical. Yet, in Bolivia, although political forces tried to use decentralization to counter democratization, some local communities actually appropriated it for their own ends. Results in Uganda, Kenya, India, Chile, the Philippines, and Vietnam were mixed but sent encouraging signals of what different forces could gain from decentralization. Aware of the different agendas involved, the book editors warn about the need “to decouple the aims of efficiency and equity when assessing decentralized planning” (p. 216). This, in fact, seems to be a major finding: In some cases, progressive forces used decentralization reforms for redistributive or equity purposes at the same time that forces on the opposite end profited from them, passing on a higher share of costs to the vulnerable or creating conditions for privatization or deregulation. In short, the book is a great illustration of the nuances and challenges involved in decentralization drives in the Third World. Coming from different perspectives and examining different cases, the authors questioned the ultimate intent of decentralization. Were its proponent agencies legitimately concerned with issues of equity and redistribution? Or were they advancing neoliberal policies and agendas under rhetorics of democratization? The cases in this book suggest that it makes a difference which priority guides the forces appropriating or running decentralization. Decentralization does not address deeper issues of underdevelopment, poverty, inequality, elitism, or north-south inequities. Although the book focuses on Third World cities, it applies as much to the shortcomings experienced in the First World. Here, decentralization has been criticized for resulting in unfunded mandates, passing the buck on to the local level or forcing local governments to operate as businesses, often at the expense of the vulnerable and the needy. As some of the authors in this collection seem to suggest, avoiding this takes movements, committed leaders, and advocates for equitable change. Decentralization can be a starting point as it provides new tools. Its use or abuse is then a function of the forces and contexts involved. Ultimately, as sound as rational claims may be, analyses in this book suggest that contexts and local appropriations determine their feasibility, direction, and actual results.

From Outsiders to On-Paper Equals to Cultural Curiosities? The Trajectory of Diversity in the USA

This paper examines the genesis and trajectory of diversity in the USA. It argues that unfortunately diversity was more a product of market interests and differential processes in the recruitment of workers at different times and for different purposes than a smooth process of incorporation of immigrant groups from different cultures and continents. At the end, diversity assumed a highly hierarchical form with blacks at the bottom and whites at the top within a framework of manifest destiny and inequality. Confronting an unequal status, non-whites engaged in group-based struggles that transformed them into political communities and the process into a social struggle. The paper concludes with a call for European countries to learn from this experience and try to preempt it by moving to incorporate newcomers in such a way that they become fully contributing members of the societies they enter within a mutually transforming process

The Dilemmas and Contradictions of Economic Development for Blacks and Latinos in the United States

This review essay examines four books representing some of the main positions and proposed solutions regarding African American and Latino underdevelopment in the United States today. It summarizes and contrasts the various, often contending views, present in the books. The author argues that the debate reflects deep contradictions in American society and that the differing positions largely represent the views of the groups and interests in contention. While identifying weaknesses and possible research areas, the author introduces some of the elements for a progressive agenda emanating from the analysis. He insists that analyses that do not integrate class, gender, race/nationality, and socioeconomic system cannot grasp the complexity of minority underdevelopment in the United States. Finally, the essay emphasizes the need to add the variable of restructuring in an effort to understand the new dimensions of the problem and to develop solutions that respond to a globalizing economy and society.