Abstract
These two books, independently, but more effectively together, perform an important service for scholars of neighborhood change. They enhance our understanding of a complex urban dynamic. Not only do we need more concrete details and specific histories of neighborhood change processes, which these works provide, but we also need to be more rigorously critical in a multidimensional fashion. Both books examine how the interests of low-income people of color can be compromised by the movement of wealthier and often white people into their neighborhoods. But these books also show how the conditions that encourage this in-migration can occur unintentionally, even through efforts undertaken to defend these same longtime residents. The authors portray residents as actors, not just acted upon.
Goldstein further enhances his study by focusing throughout on the built environment. His study is a history of change in Harlem, discovered through carefully tracing the actions of institutions and individuals, with form always at the center of the story—how it was affected by the social and political commitments of those involved and the choices they made but also how considerations of form and the resulting interventions were integral to all of these efforts. While expected from an architectural historian, this approach distinguishes Goldstein’s work from much social scientific literature on neighborhood change.
Krase and DeSena do not ignore the built environment; some of the contrasts they draw between the neighborhoods and the stories they tell about them address differences in scale and style. This is a typical treatment of the built environment as context for change processes, rather than as process and mechanism itself. More important to their work are questions of activism. While “struggle” features in Goldstein’s title, resistance and organization might equally do so in Krase and DeSena’s. Their work is both an examination of resistance efforts—exclusionary and progressive, more successful, and less—and a retrospective reflection on the careers of activist scholars, much of whose knowledge derives from work with organizations that resisted change in Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Crown Heights, and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn.
Krase and DeSena’s book is less groundbreaking, more the collection and restatement of career-long experience in and attention to Brooklyn neighborhoods. It is a thoughtful and accessible book that will be useful for scholars of New York City and neighborhoods at the forefront of gentrification processes in global cities. Krase and DeSena’s book is an assemblage of data on a group of Brooklyn neighborhoods, an historical almanac or a handbook, while Goldstein’s novel and comprehensive monograph examines a less developed though rapidly expanding area of research.
Gentrification did not just happen to residents of Harlem; the residents played a crucial role in creating gentrification, if neither intentionally nor directly. 1 Harlem’s history, as told by Goldstein, follows a meandering path from idealism to commerce, through pragmatic approaches to the problems of poverty, racial segregation, and redevelopment. His story begins with liberal, professional responses to urban renewal, shifts toward self-determination in the context of Black Power, addresses the institutionalization of local influence in the rise of community development corporations (CDCs), then arrives at national chain stores by way of private investment. Goldstein labels the path’s changes in direction as “hinges,” tipping points (or not), and watershed moments. Recurring themes that emerge on the path are as follows: the subsidence of idealism into pragmatism, the dialectic relationship between professionalization and democratization, local resources versus outside funding, integration with broader markets, and the influence of private money.
The first two chapters of The Roots of Urban Renaissance are dedicated to the role of the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) in the mid through late 1960s. ARCH was founded by C. Richard Hatch in response to the local American Institute of Architects’ inability to constructively address low-income housing in a Harlem that had been substantially reshaped during the 1950s by urban renewal and the construction of public housing. In the 1960s, the then recent injustices of authoritarian “blight” clearance and the displacement of low-income residents were the key issues to which Harlemites were responding, but Goldstein acknowledges that these programs were neither simply evil in their origins nor strictly negative in their outcomes.
At the time, Residents subject to disruptive redevelopment plans sought the assistance of professionals who could support their activism with design expertise. Likewise, architects and planners like Hatch, who voiced a rejection of the top-down approach of modernist redevelopment from within the profession, sought opportunities to lend their expertise to the communities that renewal shaped. ARCH joined Harlemites in outlining a new, more humane role for urban renewal…[crafting] plans that benefited the existing low-income population…[making them] the beneficiaries of redevelopment, not its victims.
2
This first way, the liberal approach, struggled with what Goldstein calls the “paradox intrinsic to ARCH’s effort to democratize planning while retaining an intermediary role for professionals.” 4 With the rise of Black Power in the later 1960s, there was a shift away from professionals toward vernacular knowledge, existing in active, small-scale, integrated-use streetscapes, and toward direct neighborhood resident control of decision-making—self-determination. Goldstein argues that Black Power advocates and ARCH may have agreed that “Harlem could be both a thriving community and one that belonged to its low-income residents” but that “they disagreed about how to get there,” a “difference of means, not ends.” 5
Black Power’s increasing influence caused a shift in process and in the scale and intention of plans. The second way, the racial radical way, emphasized bottom-up, participatory planning, “a future for Harlem fashioned collectively by its residents acting on their own behalf.” 6 This emerging group of activists saw “Harlem’s segregated identity as a distinct source of power, even a point of pride,” 7 opposing integration for integration’s sake and external dependence. 8 Unlike the liberals they were supplanting, they idealized a “street-side dynamism,” 9 small-scale, neighborhood life in opposition to modernist urban renewal’s transformative superblocks.
ARCH struggled to stay relevant. The organization experienced a leadership change in the summer of 1967, a kind of coup that installed radical black architect J. Max Bond Jr. as director and added many local black activists to the board, aligning their orientation with the rise of Black Power. ARCH shifted toward active protest 10 but also began to train black designers. This balanced the value of local knowledge against professional skills in pursuing the “possibility of a Black aesthetic” that depended upon the “fundamental conception of the ‘community’ as the genius loci of creativity.” 11
Racial radicalism arose in response to the inadequate successes of liberal integrationism, but radicalism’s practical failure was the difficulty of actualization. The third way—pragmatic community development—was a pendulum swing back past the critical position of liberal civil rights into local-elite-led and privately funded development. In his third chapter, “Own a Piece of the Block,” Goldstein examines the rise of CDCs from the late 1960s through the 1970s in Harlem. These organizations promised self-reliance and self-determination but depended on public support and consolidated reconstruction power in a select few moderate leaders who advanced a paternalistic approach. 12
Goldstein tracks the activities of the Harlem Commonwealth Council (HCC) and the Harlem Urban Development Corporation (HUDC) across this decade. These organizations initially seemed different—HUDC, a quasi-state actor, supposedly responsive to community desires but also “the last best hope of the urban renewal order”; HCC, radical, but focused on the acquisition of real property and commercial development, leading it away from small-scale, local resident funding—but converged over time. 13 The inchoate nature of earlier efforts, like ARCH, left residents vulnerable to changing ideology, liable to lose their influence entirely. CDCs, by contrast, suffered from a “fundamental ideological indistinctness” 14 that meant the principles that guided them might change, while the organizations survived. These newer, formal organizations embodied a new wave of professionalization and institutionalized their distance from grassroots interests, 15 at least until public support withdrew in the era of Reagan.
While the CDCs pursued big commercial redevelopment projects, the fiscal crisis of the early 1970s produced a new opportunity for grassroots efforts: homesteading (or squatting) and the rehabilitation of abandoned housing. In Chapter 4, “The Urban Homestead in the Age of Fiscal Crisis,” Goldstein explores how low-income homesteaders in Harlem transformed themselves from the “savages to be extinguished from the plains of the inner city” into the pioneers of yore. 16 Homesteaders emphasized the use value of the existing built environment, rather than the exchange value, and aspired to community control, learning skills through the investment of sweat equity. 17 Homesteading was distinct from contemporaneous “brownstoning,” which pursued the restoration of “authentic” historic buildings as preservation—a culturally distinct pursuit undertaken by culturally distinct actors, generally white and well-educated, if not wealthy. 18
Homesteading garnered support that enabled the simultaneous creation of low-income housing and jobs, but, like racial radicalism, may also have sown the seeds of its own demise. While homesteaders argued that “persistence amid abandonment deserved the reward of community control,” 19 the city’s involvement “diminished the radicalism of a movement that had grown out of the dramatic act of squatting” 20 but also led to auctions of abandoned property. Rather than a tipping point, Goldstein argues that the late 1970s were a high-water mark for homesteading, 21 quickly overshadowed, beginning in 1980, by Mayor Ed Koch’s “broader faith in middle class resettlement as the key to neighborhood revitalization.” 22 Between large-scale commercial development and explicit class integration of residential neighborhoods, Harlem had consolidated its third way—balancing public and private funding.
Goldstein opens Chapter 5, “Managing Change,” with the story of a failed bid for historic landmark designation for the entirety of Harlem. Preston Wilcox, who championed the effort beginning in 1988, was trying to address middle-class resettlement and physical dilapidation that characterized the end of the decade by marking Harlem as “a place apart.” 23 Goldstein calls this a “symbolic last gasp of the radical spirit.” 24 The story of this period was church-sponsored commercial development and economic integration, opposite the distinction or separation that Wilcox sought. 25
Harlem’s churches responded to the early 1980s crack and AIDS crisis by increasing “their commitment to redevelopment out of both physical and spiritual necessity.” 26 Churches began to broaden their responsibilities for larger stretches of territory around them, 27 seeing the pervasive physical degradation of the built environment exacerbated by these epidemics. Churches used CDCs, bringing together the scant remaining state and local funding for low-income housing with private sources “that increasingly played a role in housing development.” 28 These church-based CDCs were driven by a vision of “Harlem as a mixed income community, a principle with roots in both the new funding landscape in which CDCs worked and a social belief that placed tremendous faith in the ameliorative power of economic integration.” 29
Goldstein skillfully connects each social, political, ideological, and institutional moment in Harlem to interventions in the built environment. The early liberals at ARCH produced large-scale counter proposals to urban renewal plans, the racial radicals advocated small-scale urbanism, and the federally supported CDCs pursued large-scale commercial developments and assembled property throughout Harlem. The second wave of church-based CDCs, the apotheosis of Harlem’s third way, “made physical an approach to community development overwhelmingly characterized by its economic, political, and architectural pragmatism.” 30 Various organizations produced a range of moderately sized new and rehabilitated mixed income housing.
This third way emphasized income mixing and used medium scale, making CDCs seem apolitical considering earlier efforts. Goldstein argues that, Leaders were political in the sense that they managed their relations with funding partners carefully and staked a middle ground. Their very ideological flexibility, openness to collaboration with all sectors, and professionalized approach defined their politics…. CDC leaders praised their funding partners, suggesting an alliance of interests, not a relationship of resentful dependence.
31
The moderate residential interventions of the 1980s were followed by large-scale commercial development in the 1990s. Just as the mixed-income residential development assumed benefits from integrating low- and middle-income residents, the commercial development worked to integrate Harlem with outside markets. 33 Harlem needed greater commercial diversity, but it also represented an opportunity for outside economic agents because Harlem was “untapped” as a market, commercially immature, “under-retailed.” 34 The federal government, under Clinton, encouraged this perspective through mechanisms like “empowerment zones” that “focused on stimulating private investment in high poverty neighborhoods.” 35
Goldstein highlights two projects that typify this moment but also show how far from the radical ideal of self-determination and community control Harlem had come, conceding that for-profit development would lead the process of community revitalization. Planning for the Pathmark supermarket, which opened in 1999, began at a time when there was no large-scale supermarket within Harlem. 36 Accordingly, it brought investment returns to local CDCs and fresh food to local residents but also resulted in the demonization of and threat to the small business people who had been serving the neighborhood and who felt overlooked by this kind of project and protested. 37
The second project Goldstein highlights, Harlem Center, a commercial development led by private investment, was still more remarkable: the strands of the 40-year history explored here came together: the long-standing hope that community-based organizations could shape the neighborhood’s physical form, the ascendant vision of commercial development in Harlem’s core, and the new pragmatism exemplified by the generation of church-based CDCs that emerged in the 1980s…however, so too did it raise new questions about the nature and distribution of power at Harlem’s grassroots.
38
Harlemites—grassroots and elites, radicals, moderates, and conservatives—persisted in reimagining and rebuilding their neighborhood. 40 The commitment to working for change through the built environment “prioritized the act of building over broad structural transformation.” 41 Ultimately, a neighborhood physically “revitalized” was a neighborhood ripe for gentrification. Goldstein notes this term often obscures more than it reveals, 42 and his book exposes how current displacement might be the result of diverse efforts in the past, many of them undertaken with intentions defensible from any ideological perspective.
Krase and DeSena’s book is a reconsideration and combination of their research over forty or fifty years in Brooklyn neighborhoods. Both have worked as academics and as advocates in various capacities in the neighborhoods in which they are expert—Greenpoint and Williamsburg for DeSena and Crown Heights and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens for Krase. The book consists of four chapters that each examine “then (pre-1980)” and “now (post-2000)” in each of the four neighborhoods, addressing history and demographics, ethnic segmentation and the defended neighborhood, community activism, and from “out” to “in.” 43 The last chapter is a response to displacement. A key difference between this work and Goldstein’s is that Krase and DeSena are discussing neighborhoods in which various phases of racial change occur, so the construction of difference by race and class occupies a more prominent place, as one might expect from sociologists.
In its methodical approach to documenting change across time organized by subject and neighborhood, the book works less well as a unified product or monograph than as assembled evidence for interesting claims about neighborhood change in a particular context. Two claims stand out: that the image of an urban area can be as important to its concrete reality as any other social processes 44 and that those who fight hardest against neighborhood decline are also often those who establish conditions for the changes that will ultimately threaten their interests, which is obviously closely related to Goldstein’s findings. 45
Krase and DeSena’s story of demographic change in Brooklyn involves the succession and convergence of internal efforts to manage change and external pressures to develop. The authors begin the chapter on a positive note that points to their idealism about community activism: Some neighbors working together on local issues, and through citizen action, attempted to integrate racially segregated neighborhoods. By the power of their own wills and inspired leadership they mobilized resources, and a stream of public and private investment began to flow to Brooklyn. They set in motion an economic, cultural, and civic flowering of modern Brooklyn that accelerated into the 1990s and continues to this day.
46
In Crown Heights, federal programs in the 1960s and 1970s stemmed decline somewhat, while the neighborhood flipped from majority white to majority black. As an example of the less desirable kind of community activism, the remaining white population “was concentrated in the large apartment houses that had been ‘successful’ in excluding nonwhite tenants.” 48 The racial divide in Crown Heights was compounded by a religious one—most of the remaining whites are Orthodox Jews. 49
Krase and DeSena write about Prospect-Lefferts Gardens that “although the racial composition of the area changed, it maintained its segmented but largely middle- and working-class residential profiles…” 50 Most of this chapter is dedicated to the role of an older, relatively upscale, single-family home development within Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, called Lefferts Manor, which functioned as a stabilizing element for the neighborhood but is the site of some intense struggles over ethnic and racial transitions.
In the Manor, “social rejection” has been followed by “gradual acceptance.”
51
While with each shift, mostly from white to integrated, some of the longest-term Manorites have left, an emphasis on class distinction from the rest of the neighborhood has been maintained: “an important part of what they had attained through social mobility was the ‘right’ to social distance.”
52
The Manor is at the center of a more nuanced process of neighborhood defense than in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. In recent years new defensive groups have appeared on the scene…Among them are tenants fearing displacement, homeowners near areas potentially rezoned for high-density housing or large commercial development, and long-term black residents fearing the loss of “their” community to gentrification, displacement, or simply the invasion of whites.
53
In the past, the focus…was on neighborhood stabilization…This was done with a vision toward improving the quality of community life for ordinary people. Presently, the heart of community activism has shifted to an emphasis on entertainment and leisure, recreation, open space, and beautification. It has transitioned from preservation and maintenance to consumption.
55
In considering how their Brooklyn neighborhoods have become popular over time, the authors suggest that gentrification should be analyzed as a political–economic process but is best described as an ecological one. 57 Using concentric circle metaphors, they imagine a big gentrification splash in Prospect Heights in the 1990s (itself an overflow from Park Slope), with ripples outward into Crown Heights and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. 58 As noted previously, Greenpoint and Williamsburg responded more directly to Bloomberg’s rezoning. Gentrifying neighborhoods often encourage social mixing, but Krase and DeSena see this as overwhelmingly temporary. 59
Like Goldstein, they see the defenders of neighborhoods often establishing the conditions that ultimately result in gentrification and note the irony of former Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz’s vilification for causing displacement in neighborhoods he was previously celebrated for saving.
60
They conclude this discussion on an interesting aesthetic note, consistent with many of their observations on the transformation of the built environment: Gentrified neighborhoods seem to have a certain look about them. Although the causes of gentrification might be different, there is something about gentrification as a symbolic semiotic activity, or aesthetic practice, that is visible.
61
The authors document extensive protest against gentrification but struggle to find concrete and successful policy responses to displacement. 64 At least some of this should be understood in the context of the many ramifications of gentrification. As Krase and DeSena note throughout, it is not simply displacement that is the problem but concerns about the loss of a community’s “soul.” 65 If Goldstein is right that even explicit efforts to protect Harlem’s soul gave rise to conditions that fostered displacement, that essence or “soul” will prove difficult to safeguard.
Krase and DeSena are typical of progressive scholars of neighborhood change in their critical stance but also in not adequately elucidating outcomes. In other words, they seem to confound the fear of change, visible commercial gentrification, and residential displacement. They lean on their readers’ sympathies and intuitively plausible mechanisms, without actually giving a clear sense of how many people leave gentrifying neighborhoods against their will. As various scholars have pointed out, Freeman 66 foremost among them, studying people who are not there is hard and collecting data at the level of specificity that would be necessary to attribute moves to gentrification may be impossible, given the multiplicity of factors affecting low-income city dwellers.
Without letting Krase and DeSena entirely off the hook, though, I want to suggest that this criticism overlooks something essential, something that they have already brought to our attention: image or discourse. While the inability of critical scholars to provide unequivocal evidence of displacement undermines our power to shape policy and persuade pro-market thinkers of the problem of gentrification, the fear of displacement is a phenomenon of contemporary urban life that deserves attention. Whatever Krase and DeSena do or do not elsewhere in their work, they succeed in pointing to this fact and placing this fear in a continuum with the racist fear of neighborhood change that motivates discrimination and harassment documented in their work (and others, like Thomas Sugrue). 67
I began by saying that these books further complicate our understanding of an already complex phenomenon. They agree that longtime residents of neighborhoods that gentrify are often part of the process that ultimately produces that gentrification. This should not leave us, neither scholars nor advocates (let alone both), with the sense that any neighborhood preservation effort is hopelessly treacherous, a potential betrayal. Rather, it should point to the need for further inquiry of the kinds that both these books represent, so as to better enable policy responses that protect the interests of the most vulnerable within the realities of our political–economic context.