City & Community

Refugees in the United States are being resettled in low-income urban neighborhoods with long histories of housing instability and racialized poverty, and where struggles over inequality and belonging shape everyday experiences. While prior research emphasizes the structural challenges refugees face and their strategies of legal and social claims-making, few studies explore how these processes unfold within urban housing systems where race and space are deeply contested. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Syrian refugees in northern New Jersey, this study shows how refugees navigate racialized housing institutions and mobilize collective claims for improved living conditions. Newly arriving refugees, like their long-term minoritized neighbors, encountered persistent barriers to safe and affordable housing. With nonprofit support, refugee families pursuing legal claims against exploitative landlords built alliances with other marginalized tenants, resisting housing inequality and challenging their incorporation into racialized urban poverty. By tracing these everyday collaborations, the study reveals how interracial alliances emerge through shared struggles, reshaping race relations and creating spaces where refugees expand agency, build collective belonging, and contest the intertwined inequalities of race, space, and place. These findings uncover an alternative pathway to integration rooted not only in formal state resources but also in grassroots interracial collaboration within marginalized urban communities.

This article looks at the beautification efforts undertaken in South Central Los Angeles by TreePeople, an environmental organization promoting the creation of urban forests in public spaces. Based on a variety of primary sources such as memos, correspondence, documentary photographs, and newspaper cuttings, the article reveals how community organizers have crafted discourses on neighborhood management to a broader neoliberal agenda, for which crime prevention policies and the regulation of the social order in inner city neighborhoods are paramount. The tree-planting activity organized on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on Saturday, January 13, 1990, epitomizes the rationalization of public space through incentives concerned with the well-being, personal development, and character building of community members. In sum, the article demonstrates how community organizers promoted personal responsibility over government intervention to tackle an urban environment defined as inherently violent, while organizing the management and discipline of poverty through local politics of urban forestry.

In 1979, a group of men incarcerated in New York state (NYS) prisons analyzed the relationship between neighborhoods and incarceration, finding that 75 percent of the NYS prisons’ population came from just seven neighborhoods in New York City (NYC). Inspired by this study, we combine novel archival data with census tract imprisonment data to examine the geography of incarceration in more recent years. Our findings reveal a marked spatial deconcentration of imprisonment since the original study. By 2020, 75 percent of people imprisoned in NYS came from 1,551 census tracts—far exceeding the spatial area covered by the original seven neighborhoods containing about 300 tracts. Using spatial lag regression and cluster analysis, we identify over 20 cities with significantly high imprisonment rate clusters. Despite this geographic shift, some tracts within the original seven neighborhoods continue to have among the highest incarceration rates in the state. Our findings both challenge existing urban theories linking concentrated punishment to urban metros and highlight the durability of punishment vulnerability in place.