Thanks for everything (now get out) : can we restore neighborhoods without destroying them?

Auteur(s) :

Margulies, Joseph Découvrir l'auteur

Résumé

Margulies (Cornell Univ.), a civil rights attorney, takes on the practical issue of improving poor neighborhoods without driving out the poor. He uses Olneyville, an old industrial neighborhood in Providence, RI, that had declined into a slum, as a case study. His fieldwork shows how nonprofit-led revitalization did improve Olneyville's safety, business variety, and housing stock. As it became one of the city’s hippest neighborhoods, gentrification threatened. Margulies is extremely critical of neoliberal, for-profit housing policy. He is almost as critical of nonprofits—nearly all run by white, middle-class people from elsewhere. Though nonprofits really can improve neighborhoods, they do so with little input from, and no power to, the poor residents. Margulies’s solution: a community trust for urban land. The land remains the permanent property of the trust, but the residents—poor residents, by preference and control—own the houses the trust builds on the land. Homeowners can sell their houses like any other homeowners, and the land remains the property of the trust. This decommodification of land, coupled with intense local control, would, Margulies believes, give poor residents enough power to remain in their improved neighborhoods.