Revitalization With Palm Trees
The trendiest neighborhood in West Palm Beach is Northwood, a collection of historic districts, fading industrial areas, and blocks of small bungalows and grand Mission-style homes that is now hopping with cafes, boutiques, a...
Why Do Low-Income Residents Oppose Development Even When Displacement Risk Is Low?
There’s more than one way to be excluded from your community.
Can Banksy Make New York City Affordable Again?
Earlier this month Shelterforce posted a conversation about gentrification that posed many different questions about the term and its role in community development. One of the toughest issues for people working...
Golf Course Wars in Benton Harbor
Golf courses have been lightning rods and symbols for class struggle around the world, as in Morelos, Mexico, where a golf course sucking up the town of Tepoztlan as water led to deadly violent...
Revitalizing Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine (Part 2)
Last week I wrote the first installment of my miniseries about Cincinnati’s remarkable Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. As I wrote then, this distinct and historic quarter adjacent to Cincinnati’s downtown is full of promise but...
Saving The Village Pub
When a small U.K. village’s pub closed, a group that had formed to create affordable housing found itself launching a campaign to form a community-owned business and save a community gathering space as well.
Stop Talking About Displacement
A well informed community organizing effort with a targeted purpose should be the first line of defense in protecting opportunities for wealth building and access to opportunities for upward mobility in working class communities as they experience inevitable changes.
“My City’s So White, I Moved”
We sit down with Carlynn Newhouse, a spoken word artist, to discuss her latest poem on gentrification in Seattle and D.C.
Interpreting Segregation
The Poverty & Race Research Action Council has received a number of inquiries on the widely publicized report from the Manhattan Institute, “The End of the Segregated Century,” that looks...
Transforming Vacant Land Into Community Assets
Vacant land activities can be low cost and high impact; the price of failure is not steep, but the return on investment can be high.
Core and Periphery: “Trading Places”?
In a cover story for the latest issue of The New Republic, Governing Magazine editor Alan Ehrenhalt proclaims that the American city has reinvented itself by becoming the suburbs.
Ehrenhalt isn’t talking about the proliferation...
Down and Out in the Big Easy
“Homeless outreach!” calls out Mike Miller as he ducks through a busted wall to climb the steps of an abandoned house in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood. Torn drywall hangs in scraps and old clothes,...
The Soul of the Neighborhood
Why do we call community-based development an "industry" rather than a "movement" these days? "Industry" is such a satisfyingly hard-nosed word. It says, 'we are engaged in the pursuit of something tangible, quantifiable. We...
Seattle Takes Ownership of Its Displacement Challenge
Seattle is tackling displacement by aiming to reduce the systemic and structural barriers in connecting marginalized populations to opportunity.
Community Development and Hot Markets
At the People and Places Conference earlier this month, we organized a mini-track around “Community Control and Hot Markets.” On the kick-off panel, Malcolm Yeung from Chinatown Community Development...
Can D.C.’s Bridge Park Work for Everyone?
There is a decrepit old bridge extending from 11th Street in southeast Washington, D.C. and across the Anacostia River that will soon contain three football fields’ worth of public...
Hanging on to the Land
Community gardens and urban agriculture are crucial gathering places—and revitalizing forces—in neighborhoods with lots of vacancy and low values. But what happens to them when the market turns around?
The Tenacity of Dysfunction
The word resilience has different meanings in different fields. In the field of material science, it refers to the ability of a material to regain its shape after it has been stressed. A rubber...
First a Park, Then a Citywide Land Trust in D.C.
Douglass Community Land Trust began with a desire to prevent a new park from displacing neighborhood residents—but it soon got much bigger.
Revitalizing Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine (Series Conclusion – Making It Green)
This is the final installment of my miniseries (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) about Cincinnati’s remarkable Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, potentially a national model for smart, green revitalization. The reason that revitalizing Over-the-Rhine should...