Gentrification around the World, Volume I: Gentrifiers and the Displaced

Bringing together scholarly but readable essays on the process of gentrification, this two-volume collection addresses the broad question: In what ways does gentrification affect cities, neighborhoods, and the everyday experiences of ordinary people? In this first volume of Gentrification around the World, contributors from various academic disciplines provide individual case studies on gentrification and displacement from around the globe: chapters cover the United States of America, Spain, Brazil, Sweden, Japan, Korea, Morocco, Great Britain, Canada, France, Finland, Peru, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Syria, and Iceland. The qualitative methodologies used in each chapter—which emphasize ethnographic, participatory, and visual approaches that interrogate the representation of gentrification in the arts, film, and other mass media—are themselves a unique and pioneering way of studying gentrification and its consequences worldwide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Apr 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030413378

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2020

J. Krase, J. N. DeSena (eds.)Gentrification around the World, Volume IPalgrave Studies in Urban Anthropologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41337-8_1

1. Introduction

Jerome Krase¹   and Judith N. DeSena²  

(1)

City University of New York, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY, USA

(2)

St. John’s University, Queens, NY, USA

Jerome Krase (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Judith N. DeSena (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

GentrificationDisplacementSocial justice

Gentrification Around the World: Gentrifiers and the Displaced addresses the broad question of in what ways does gentrification affect cities, neighborhoods, and the everyday experiences of ordinary people. The editors have carefully selected a collection of scholarly, but hopefully readable, essays which analyze the process of gentrification in cities around the world through the lenses of various academic disciplines. In their call for chapters, we sought contributions that investigated the social, political, and economic significance of gentrification based on original research that had not been previously published. Topics, as they relate to gentrification in this volume, include but are not limited to: social class, development, im/migration, housing, race relations, political economy, power dynamics, inequality, displacement, social segregation , homogenization, urban policy, planning, and design. Because of the geographical bias in gentrification studies, especially valuable for readers are the chapters on gentrification outside of Western Europe and the United States of America. In this regard, we have included chapters, using various perspectives on gentrification and displacement in Brazil, Canada, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Spain, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, as well as the United States. Selections utilize primarily qualitative methodologies that emphasize traditional ethnographic, participatory ethnography, as well as visual approaches. We are certain that this volume will generate broad discussions of cross-national and comparative theoretical and practical issues. While this, first, volume in a two-volume effort focuses primarily on individual cases of gentrification and displacement, in the second volume to come will be more abstract and also will feature different ways of thinking about both gentrification and displacement.

The two integrated volumes are designed to provide a wide range of readers with innovative, cutting-edge, social scientific, and historical scholarship, as well as the way global gentrification is often discussed in contemporary mass media . They are also meant to contribute to the ongoing dialogue and, often contentious, debates regarding the negative as well as positive impacts of gentrification. In different ways, each volume pays special attention to the fortunes of ordinary people who, as C. Wright Mills noted in The Sociological Imagination are: Seldom aware of the intricate connections between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men [and women] do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men [and women] they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they may take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of [humans] and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them (1959: 3–4).

Central to our work on gentrification are issues of social justice that we discussed extensively in Chapter 5, Fostering and Fighting Displacement, in Race, Class, and Gentrification in Brooklyn: A View from the Street (2016). There we asked, rhetorically, what is the harm in gentrifying a neighborhood? Who could argue against increased property values for owners, better local shopping opportunities, and the increase in the local neighborhood’s political power due to the gentrification. Gentrification brings with it improvements in local city services, better public parks, schools, security and law enforcement. Certainly, it is better to live in a once poor and neglected community that has been thoroughly gentrified than its precursor (132).

The usual consequence of gentrification is the physical displacement (Cybriwsky 1978; Marcuse 1986; LeGates and Hartman 1986) or replacement (Freeman and Braconi 2004) of lower status people and businesses by those of higher status. This is due to basic economic factors such as people can no longer afford to stay. Also, local mom and pop stores are replaced by retail chains and upscale boutiques that sell products and services favored by the invading residential cohort. Since lower-status residents have fewer local housing choices, as affordable units disappear, so do they. Prior to physical displacement, locals can experience social displacement, when invaders gain … a dominant position at their expense (Chernoff 1980: 301). A good example of this was when bars, restaurants, and dance clubs catering to hipsters took over the working-class commercial streets in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (see DeSena and Krase 2016). During this process of social and cultural change, the sense of community for working-class residents is lost along with their ties to it. In turn, social and economic displacement contributes to geographic displacement by encouraging those who can, to leave their old neighborhood.

Some view gentrification and displacement as natural and are not stimulated to act. Others, who reject their inevitability, are moved to act. As urban scholar-activists, we reject these neoliberal and classic urban ecological responses to what we see as issues of social justice. For us, questions such as Who has a right to the city?, What is urban justice?, and What is a just city? require an affirmative response. Therefore, we feel some limited discussion of the social justice principles of John Rawls and David Harvey is necessary to understand our point of view. For a society to be called just, it must guarantee to all equal access to the liberties, rights, and opportunities it offers. However, members must freely accept the idea of a social contract to which Rawls believed people would ascribe. The principles of justice in the contract specify the basic rights and duties to be assigned by the main political and social institutions, and they regulate the division of benefits arising from social cooperation and allot the burdens necessary to sustain it (2003: 7).

Harvey refers to Rawls in his discussion of eight principles of territorial distributive justice to address the uneven distribution of urban resources and rights. From these he chose, in this order: need, contribution to the common good, and merit—that are sufficiently comprehensive to subsume many of the issues which could legitimately be raised under the other headings (1973: 100–101). He cautions, however, that territorial distributive justice is not all-inclusive but a principle for resolving conflicting claims—a just distribution, justly arrived at. Most relevant for this volume is Harvey’s principle of Need – Individuals have rights to equal levels of benefit which means that there is an unequal allocation according to need (100). Thusly, the editors see a global need for urban policies that are balanced, equitable, and complete. We assert that everyone has a right to the city.

Given these guiding principles of social justice have informed our selections for this volume as in the following descriptive paragraphs.

The Americas

In Chapter 2 Brooklyn Revisited: An Illustrated View from the Street 1970 to the Present, Judith N. DeSena and Jerome Krase argue that as to understanding gentrification and displacement, urban ethnographers must understand that while we look at things using close-up lenses, most policy-makers, on the other hand, employ wide-angle lenses to describe what is going on at that very same street level. Therefore, the authors attempt to provide a contrast between those views in the context of the radically changed public perception of the New York City Borough of Brooklyn. When they began their sociological research (and social activism) in the late twentieth century, the neighborhoods in which they were active suffered from the spread of middle-class (white) flight and urban blight. Today, in the first two decades of the twenty-first, the fortunes of these same areas have been reversed, but longer-term residents face new problems in the form of gentrification and displacement. They suggest that a view from the street can provide a better sociological understanding of the bigger picture.

In Chapter 3 Gentrification and Ageing in Montreal, Quebec: Housing Insecurity and Displacement Among Older Tenants Julien Simard discusses how in rapidly aging societies, the housing situation of low-income aging renters deserves more attention from urban anthropology, housing studies, and social gerontology alike. Her main objective is describing the experiences of a sample of aging individuals in handling situations of housing insecurity and displacement in four gentrifying Montreal neighborhoods. Her data were gathered through fieldwork conducted among housing committees in four gentrifying neighborhoods in central Montreal. Ten interviews were conducted with community organizers and 20 interviews with aging tenant. Housing insecurity, displacement, and social participation among housing committees can be understood as an interconnected phenomenon: One of the main justifications for participating among housing committees was the possibility of not only broadening but also taking control over residential choices.

Chapter 4 Forced Removals in Gentrifying Rio de Janeiro and San Francisco: Experiencing Displacement by Sukari Ivester explores displacement experiences in gentrifying areas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the Western Addition, of San Francisco, California. It aims to connect individual stories of displacement at the neighborhood level to the broader historical trajectories of urban development. In addition to residential displacement , changes in the commercial environment of the gentrifying neighborhoods are also considered. While the two cities are obviously quite different in many ways, they also have interesting similarities. Both are global cities (albeit on vastly different scales—e.g., Rio is seven times larger); both are port cities grew as a result of an historical gold rush; both suffered from turn-of-the twentieth-century plagues which impacted urban development; and both have seen significant twenty-first century economic growth with concomitant gentrification. More importantly, the two share a vision of their city which displaces poor, non-white populations to the geographic perimeter of the urban landscape, far from resources and opportunities to improve their lives. Cities across the globe act as though they have a mandate for the forced movement of poor populations out of central city neighborhoods, and in Rio de Janeiro and San Francisco, it is playing out in with a vengeance.

Europe

In Chapter 5 Gentrification Vernacular in Malasaña, Madrid, Fernando Monge notes that in Spain, as well as many other countries, gentrification is no longer merely an academic term. Rather it has become a popular and widely used concept. It can be heard everywhere and it struck him how little attention has been directed to the way people gentrifying these neighborhoods use this word. His chapter, therefore, focuses on the vernacular uses of the word gentrification in Malasaña, a gentrifying neighborhood located in the central district of Madrid. Malasaña has experienced major changes during the last few decades: from a derelict neighborhood having lost the university and the main industries; a fighting space for alternative democratic political and artistic movements against Franco’s dictatorship; a locale of the Movida (the Madrilenian Scene of the Eighties); a drug infested neighborhood in the Nineties; to a now flourishing and peculiar urban village reconfigured by the new microcultures of alternative groups, creative classes, hipsters, visiting suburbanites, and tourists. Monge’s chapter demonstrates how the vernacular use of the word gentrification helps us to both understand what is going on in the neighborhood and obtaining a more nuanced understanding of gentrification as an urban transformation process.

Chapter 6 Visualising the Contrary Logics of ‘Regeneration’ Through Arts Practice-Based Research by Fiona Woods notes that the social violence that Neil Smith identified as operating within processes of gentrification and regeneration (2010: 25) is often obfuscated by the official language of urban renewal. In this regard, hegemonic reports and vision documents dictate a particular narrative of regeneration, which may be at odds with the material conditions on the ground. Their chapter discusses a critical spatial practice in which collaborative, artistic research actions seek to excavate and to visualize the complex forces and contrary logics entangled in processes of regeneration. In turn, they point toward the impact those logics have on matters of socio-spatial justice in the city of Limerick, Ireland.

Gary Bratchford’s Chapter 7 Visualizing Gentrification in Ancoats , Manchester: A Multi Method Approach to Mapping Change explores how we can come to better understand global gentrification through a variety of visual processes. These include visual ethnography, social and spatial semiotics, and image analysis of developer hoardings, which in turn, can be read through a series of communicative scenes (Silver et al. 2011). Although the chapter limits its focus to two areas of the city of Manchester in the United Kingdom; Ancoats and the neighboring district of Miles Platting, his methods and theorizing have valuable insight for gentrifying neighborhoods around the world.

In Chapter 8 ‘We’re Not Moving’—Solidarity and Collective Housing Struggle in a Changing Sweden by Catharina Thörn, she notes that housing has historically been the object of struggle—a fight for the right to clean and healthy environment; for the opportunity for one’s children to have rooms of their own; and for wages to stretch to more than just paying the rent and surviving. Here, she addresses the fight against gentrification and renoviction in Sweden. The Swedish housing market has changed markedly in the last thirty years, and in the wake of several deregulations beginning in the 1990s, many tenants today are devoid of rights. Due to major and comprehensive renovations on their housing estates, residents may face rent increases of thirty to eighty percent. In addition, more than half a million flats are slated for total replumbing of the entire building. Most of these estates in need of renovation are home to households of below-average income. This chapter is based on interviews with tenants who fought against rent increases in their neighborhood; all of whom faced the risk of losing their home. It aims at showing how the Swedish housing system has changed and left tenants in a precarious situation. It also shows how the traumatic experience of risking being forced out of your home can turn into a collective struggle to defend everyone’s right to stay put in their own home and neighborhood.

Chapter 9 Pacifying La Goutte d’or, Getting Paris More French: Grounding Gentrification in a Cosmopolitan Neighborhood by Maria Anita Palumbo focuses on the North-Parisian neighborhood called La Goutte d’or, an historical working-class neighborhood, which for more than a century has attracted migrants (Toubon and Messamah 1990). There, everyday life blends the density and diversity of its population that makes it one of the most cosmopolitan areas in Paris. La Goutte d’or, which is also called Barbès and/or Chateau Rouge, is known as a North and sub-Saharan African commercial enclave (Bouly de Lesdain 1999). The media has never missed a chance to confirm the exceptionality of this Parisian area, giving it a stigmatized reputation that reinforces the idea of it as an insecure in the need of renovation. Since the 1980s, a public urban policy (La Politique de la Ville) has focused on this area to improve local infrastructures and socioeconomic development. The arrival of middle-class residents, either as property owners or beneficiaries of a specific social housing program, has started a strong debate about gentrification. The latest urban renewal plan seems to have selected higher status future residents and is trying to rebrand La Goutte d’or as a more desirable residential location. Employing ethnographical approaches based upon a comprehensive study of the neighborhood over almost a decade (2006–2014), this Palumbo portrays the transformations and addresses Parisian gentrification in order to unpack the globalized concept of gentrification by questioning its limits in a local context.

Middle East and Far East

In Chapter 10 Residential Transformations Leading to Gentrification: Cases from Istanbul, Nil Uzun notes that many large cities in Turkey have been facing the problems of transformation as opposed to growth since the 1980s. Planners and policy-makers have been dealing with the impact of changes in residential areas. Gentrification in Istanbul has been significant since the late 1980s, leading to notable residential divisions based on socioeconomic status. Urban redevelopment projects, on the other hand, have been important tools for controlling the transformation of residential areas, especially in squatter neighborhoods. The chapter aims to demonstrate how different residential transformation processes resulted in gentrification in Istanbul. These examples provide insight into how a process, observed mostly in advanced capitalist countries, takes place in peripheral capitalist countries. The chapter summarizes residential development in Turkey and provides an introduction to Istanbul with background information about its urban development. Four case studies are then discussed in detail and concluded with a comparative evaluation.

Chapter 11 Tourism Gentrification of the Old City of Damascus by Faedah M. Totah discusses the tourism gentrification of the intramural Old City of Damascus. This began in the early 1990s with the conversion of traditional courtyard houses into fashionable spaces of consumption for the local middle and upper classes. However, boutique hotels began to appear in the mid-2000s as the Old City was becoming a tourist destination for international travelers. She notes the new trend in international travel coincided with several travel articles appearing in major British and American newspapers encouraging affluent travelers to look beyond the headlines and visit Syria. Travel writing contributed to the increase in the number of Western visitors to Damascus, and to the political and economic integration of Syria in the global community. As the gentrified Old City became an upscale global tourist destination, the political repression and social injustices in Syria became secondary to the luxury boutique hotels, fashionable restaurants, and historic sites. Moreover, travel writing continued to overlook the displacement of long-term residents. This chapter examines the rise of boutique hotels through the confluence of travel writing, politics, and tourism gentrification during the years immediately before the civil war. It concludes with a discussion of the ways gentrification adapted to shifting political and economic conditions during the war years.

In Chapter 12 When Ideology Replaces the Market: Gentrification in East Jerusalem, Ori Swed expands the common definition of gentrification by adding the motivation for gentrification into the debate, suggesting that while scholarship regularly ascribes economic intentions for gentrification this is not always the case. Ideological agendas are similarly powerful forces for gentrification and can lead to similar outcomes. The chapter introduces this ideological model by focusing on its effect on the actors involved and their tactics. Using the East Jerusalem urban renewal as a case study, Swed compares and contrasts the economic with the ideological model, thereby expanding the common definition of gentrification.

In Chapter 13 "Gentrification, Machizukuri, and Ontological Insecurity: Bottom-Up Redevelopment and the Cries of Residents in Kamagasaki, Osaka," Matthew D. Marr describes the redevelopment plans and neighborhood changes unfolding in Kamagasaki, Osaka’s declining day labor ghetto. In this chapter, he presents one of the starkest examples of gentrification in contemporary urban Japan. The administration of maverick mayor Tōru Hashimoto (2011–2015) initiated the Nishinari Tokku Kōsō (Nishinari Special Ward Initiative) in order to transform Japan’s largest concentration of poverty, homelessness, and welfare recipients, into a destination for families and tourism. Specific decisions about how the neighborhood would change, including the rebuilding and relocation of key institutions, were to be made by the local community through a transparent and inclusive process of community building (machizukuri). A critical juncture in this process involved a series of open meetings with thirty-five community leaders representing diverse and, in some cases, opposing views, who debated redevelopment decisions. However, he notes day laborers, welfare recipients, and people living in shelters and public spaces of Kamagasaki were largely absent from the meetings. His study shows, however, that this distancing of the less affluent does not mean these residents were indifferent toward changes unfolding in their neighborhood.

References

Bouly de Lesdain, S. 1999. Château Rouge, une centralité africaine à Paris. Ethnologie française 29 (1): 86–99.

Chernoff, M. 1980. Social Displacement in a Renovating Neighborhood’s Commercial District: Atlanta. In The Gentrification Debates, ed. J. Brown-Saracino, 295–304. New York: Routledge.

Cybriwsky, R. 1978. Social Aspects of Neighborhood Change. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 68: 17–33.Crossref

DeSena, J.N., and J. Krase. 2016. Race, Class, and Gentrification in Brooklyn: A View from the Street. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Freeman, L., and F. Braconi. 2004. Gentrification and Displacement: New York City in the 1990s. Journal of the American Planning Association 70: 39–52.Crossref

Harvey, D. 1973. Social Justice and the City. Oxford: Blackwell.

LeGates, R.T., and C. Hartman. 1986. The Anatomy of Displacement in the United States. In Gentrification of the City, ed. N. Smith and P. Williams, 178–203. Winchester, MA: Allen & Unwin.

Marcuse, P. 1986. Abandonment, Gentrification, and Displacement: The Linkages in New York City. In Gentrification of the City, ed. N. Smith and P. Williams, 153–157. Winchester, MA: Allen & Unwin.

Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rawls, J., and E. Kelly. 2003. Justice as Fairness: A Reinstatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Silver, D., T. Nicholas Clark, and C. Graziul. 2011. Scenes, Innovation, and Urban Development. In Handbook of Creative Cities, ed. E.D. Anderson, Å.E. Anderson, and C. Mellander, 229–258. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Smith, N. 2010. The Evolution of Gentrification. In Houses in Transformation: Interventions in European Gentrification, ed. JaapJan Berg, Tahl Kaminer, Marc Schoonderbeek, and Joost Zonneveld, 15–26. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Toubon, J.-C., and K. Messamah. 1990. Centralité immigrée. Le quartier de la Goutte d’Or. Paris: Ciemi—L’Harmattan.

Part IThe Americas

© The Author(s) 2020

J. Krase, J. N. DeSena (eds.)Gentrification around the World, Volume IPalgrave Studies in Urban Anthropologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41337-8_2

2. Brooklyn Revisited: An Illustrated View from the Street 1970 to the Present

Judith N. DeSena¹   and Jerome Krase²  

(1)

St. John’s University, Queens, NY, USA

(2)

City University of New York, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Judith N. DeSena (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Jerome Krase

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

BrooklynUrban ethnographyGentrificationDisplacement

This article is republished with the permission of Urbanities where it appeared as ‘Brooklyn Revisited: An Illustrated View from the Street 1970 to the Present,’ Urbanities 5 (2) 2015: 3–19.

Urban ethnographers must understand that while we look at things using close-up lenses, most policy-makers, on the other hand, employ wide-angle lens to describe what is going on at that very same street level. In this essay, the authors attempt to provide a contrast between those views in the context of the radically changed public perception of the New York City Borough of Brooklyn. When the authors began their sociological research (and social activism) in the late twentieth century, the neighborhoods in which they were active suffered from the spread of middle-class (white) flight and urban blight. Today, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the fortunes of these same areas have been reversed, but longer-term residents face new ‘problems’ in the form of gentrification and displacement. It is suggested here that a view from the street can provide a better sociological understanding of the bigger picture.

Brooklyn’s Image Then and Now

The image of Brooklyn as a whole, as well as its most well-known individual neighborhoods such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Flatbush, and Coney Island, has always been a powerful independent force in creating and maintaining its concrete reality. Forty years ago these place names were stigmatized. Today, in 2015, Brooklyn and these areas are by all accounts in the popular media decidedly an ‘in’ places. The Borough of Brooklyn currently occupies an elevated status as a gem in the crown of New York City as a Global City, and it is fast becoming a popular tourist destination in its own right. By almost every measure the ‘Borough of churches’ has moved far beyond ‘renaissance’ and ‘revival’ to enjoy a hard-earned, successfully promoted, chic and hip image that is presented to the rest of the world. As opposed to the ‘bad old days’ in the 1960s and 1970s the major challenges likely to confront local community and political leaders in the twenty-first century arise from such ‘problems’ as the rising cost of housing resulting from upscale gentrification by which investors compete for any available development space. A few decades ago the problems were exactly the opposite. No one at that time could have ever imagined a hip travel guide, Lonely Planet, would name Brooklyn as one of the top world destinations for 2007 (Kuntzman 2007). In 2015, the travel guide giant Fodor’s advertised the first guidebook devoted only to the borough with this as its teaser:

Brooklyn is the most talked about, trendsetting destination in the world. Fodor’s Brooklyn, the first comprehensive guidebook to New York City’s most exciting borough, is unlike any we’ve ever published. Written and illustrated by locals, it’s infused with authentic Brooklyn flavor throughout—making it the go-to guide for locals and visitors alike. (http://​www.​fodors.​com/​brooklyn/​, 10 July 2014, 12:07 p.m.)

The Bad Old Days

As did the rest of New York City, Brooklyn barely survived the Great Depression and then prospered during World War II, but by the 1950s the size of Brooklyn’s population and its enviable position as a national and international industrial center had peaked. The borough’s decline began slowly and then accelerated, as business and industry looked elsewhere to invest. For many the bottoming out in Brooklyn was in 1957, when after winning the World Series for the first time only two years earlier the Brooklyn Dodgers left for Los Angeles. The loss of the beloved ‘bums,’ the closing of the premier borough daily newspaper, the Brooklyn Eagle, and the closure of the Brooklyn Navy Yard were the most visible symbols of Brooklyn’s decline that continued into the next three decades.

In The New York Times, Gay Talese announced: ‘Ebbetts Field goes on the scrap pile’ (1960)

Iron Ball Begins Demolishing Dodger Home and Raises clouds of Nostalgia…

1,317-family middle income HOUSING PROJECT IS DUE ceremony catching the spirit of the old Brooklyn… ‘About 200 spectators, a brass band and some former Brooklyn Dodger players gathered to watch a two-ton iron ball hammer against this arena where, between 1913 and 1957, baseball was played in a manner never before imagined or recommended.’

At the end …

‘Then the big crane headed with the speed of Ernie Lombardi into centerfield. When it reached the 376-foot mark, the workman swung back on this iron ball painted white to resemble a baseball. It came spinning toward the wall and, after a few shots, there was a hole the size of Hugh Casey. It will take ten weeks to destroy Ebbets Field.’

Many years later Corey Kilgannon wrote the end of the Brooklyn Eagle as a metaphor for the beleaguered borough: ‘Folded But Not Forgotten, Brooklyn’s Leading Daily’:

When the paper finally folded -- six months before the Dodgers finally won a World Series in 1955 -- newspapers were on the decline in New York, Mr. Hills recalled.

It occurred to me I was working in a dying industry, he said. "We heard there were guys with Ph.D.’s working as copy boys at The New York Times, so it was discouraging. I went into P.R."

They pored over the last edition of The Eagle, from Jan. 28, 1955. Its front-page lead headline was ‘Landlady Beaten to Death. The story, about a 58-year-old Borough Park woman, began: Her skull and face bones battered and crushed by repeatedly brutal blows.

Another story was titled Tot Survives 11-Story Tumble.

There was a publisher’s note informing readers of the folding of The Eagle, calling it the last voice that is purely Brooklyn.

All the other Brooklyn newspapers fell by the wayside years go, the note read. The borough seems doomed to be cast in Manhattan’s shadow. (Kilgannon 2005)

The devastating impacts of deindustrialization and disinvestment during the period were compounded by mortgage and insurance red-lining which further undermined local housing markets, and contributed to the rapid destabilization of many residential neighborhoods, especially those peopled by minority groups. Manufacturing and blue-collar jobs that once supported Brooklyn’s solid working- and middle-class families slowly escaped powerful local unions and fled to the American South, and abroad. One prime example was the closing of The US Army Terminal in Bay Ridge and Sunset Park in 1961 with the loss of 40,000 well-paying jobs. Along with economic problems such as lower wages and unemployment came increased poverty, crime, and accelerated middle-class flight into the next decade and beyond.

The nadir of The Big Apple coincided with the Mayoralty of Abraham Beame and the New York City Fiscal Crisis which forced a virtual bankruptcy on the onceproud, now demoralized citizenry. The headline October 29, 1975 of the New York Daily News ‘FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD, Vows He’ll Veto any Bailout.’ This Presidential announcement was shortly followed by the New York State takeover of the City’s financial affairs by the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which lasted until 2008. The financial future of the city looked so bleak that Mayor Beame’s Housing and Development Administrator, Robert Starr, suggested that rather than cutting citywide services, a ‘Planned Shrinkage’ policy be tried. The neighborhoods to be cut off from city services to save money were populated primarily by non-whites in The Bronx and Brooklyn. According to Joseph P. Fried (1976) in many Brooklyn neighborhoods increasing urban blight was correlated with the inflow of minorities, especially African Americans. One source of hostility to these new invaders is more racially militant blacks. Today, complaints about gentrification and displacement dominate the scene, but they had a parallel in the 1960s and 1970s. An interesting analysis and description of the ‘negro removal’ process is provided by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward:

Other federal programs, such as urban renewal, were turned against blacks; renewal projects were undertaken in most big cities to deal with the black invasion through ‘slum clearance,’ by reclaiming land taken by the expanding ghettoes and restoring it to ‘higher economic’ use (i.e., to uses that would keep whites, and businesses in the central city)….

…seventy percent of the families thus uprooted were black…. But with local blacks becoming more disorderly and more demanding in the early 1960s, local government began to make some concessions. Urban renewal provides one example. By the 1960s, black protests were mounting against ‘Negro Removal’ in the guise of ‘slum clearance.’ (1971: 241–242)

What we currently refer to as ‘displacement’ was also taking place at the time, although in much more limited way. According to a 1978 report of the National Urban Coalition, if you are elderly poor, or working class and live in an area undergoing rehabilitation, or in a suddenly fashionable neighborhood, you are a prime candidate for displacement by well-to-do suburbanites longing for the city life they left behind. The Coalition’s study of forty-four cities showed that over half of the rehabilitated neighborhoods had higher minority populations before rehabilitation began. (‘Study Finds Suburbanites Displacing Poor in Cities,’ The New York Times, August 2, 1978.)

Many of the most respected urbanologists of the time strongly criticized these mislabeled ‘urban renewal,’ and related programs (see, for example, Frieden and Morris 1968; Gans 1968; Greer 1965; Lupo et al. 1971; Norwood 1974; Piven and Cloward 1971; Bellush and Hausknecht 1971).

We had hoped at the time of our most extensive community involvement in Brooklyn neighborhoods, essentially ‘under siege’ that our academic work would also provide the basis for a better understanding of the tenacity of some urban neighborhood residents to preserve and protect their communities, and conversely the willingness of others to destroy them. This was particularly important then given the well-publicized predictions of the inevitable physical and social deterioration of virtually all of the Nation’s cities. This expectation at first was limited to Northeastern ‘Rust Belt’ metropolises, but expanded into all urban areas of the country including the ‘Sun Belt.’ At the time, the consensus on the point of eventual or even inevitable urban decay was so wide in scholarly circles that common-sense definitions of the time, inner city, transitional and decaying neighborhoods had become synonymous terms.

A powerful statement demonstrating this taken-for-granted notion of urban decay and hopelessness was given in 1967 by Eleanor Wolf and Charles Lebeaux. But it is just as relevant today. Not only did they see the inevitable devastation