Chicago Activist Convention Shifts Focus to Community Benefits Campaign
Standing on a truck in front of a group of several hundred protesters, Tom Gordon expressed a feeling shared often at the ONE Northside Convention in early May: city residents know what their communities...
Parking Lots to Craft Fairs
Nashville holds—and supports—a diverse, creative community that adds as much value to our city as the musicians and songwriters for which we are better known.
What Is the Future of the Black Urban Middle Neighborhood?
What does the future hold for urban Black middle and working class neighborhoods in cities, and is there any way to shape it?
Talking About Revitalization When All Anyone Wants to Talk About Is Gentrification
Strategies for turning the conversation back to places where gentrification is not only *not* present, but not impending.
Making a Pipeline for Vacant Building Rehab
Baltimore’s Vacants to Value program sparked revitalization block by block with a few key legal powers and partnerships.
The Gentrification Reality: A Response
We must continue studying and fighting gentrification, rather than abandon the concept altogether.
Will Columbia Take Manhattanville?
Balancing an Ivy League university's expansion plan with a Harlem neighborhood's needs is a tricky business, especially when eminent domain is in the mix.
The Place-Based Charter School?
What is the relationship between charter schools and neighborhoods—and what could it be?
Q: Is a Land Bank the Same as a Land Trust?
A: Nope. They are totally different, though complementary tools. This chart will walk you through the differences.
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...
So Fresh and So Clean
Poor people must not like Starbucks. I wonder about that each time I drive my borrowed hooptie through and around Cincinnati’s West End neighborhood.
Development is nigh. It’s in the form of cookie-cutter, peanut butter–brown...
Why Can’t Harlem Stop Gentrification?
In his May New York Times editorial, “The End of Black Harlem,” Michael Henry Adams portrays the historic African-American community as moving inevitably toward gentrification. ...
How Rent Control Helped Create East Palo Alto
The story of East Palo Alto’s incorporation is one marked by great contention among local stakeholders, but also provides valuable lessons for organizers in forging and mobilizing local coalitions.
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.
A D.C. Neighborhood’s Transformation From “Chocolate” to “Cappuccino”
To longtime residents of D.C., the findings presented in Derek Hyra’s Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City—that gentrifying neighborhoods’ racial and economic diversity does not translate into integration—is likely not surprising.
Safe Havens
Housing first, yes, but then services, recreation, education: These are all pillars to building strong communities, and most importantly, strong people.
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?
Keeping Gentrification From Following Green Space
LA organizers work with park professionals on policies to allow green space investment in neighborhoods that have lacked it without paving the way for displacement.
Land Banks Are Not a Silver Bullet
We were very excited to hear that after many years of organizing, Philadelphia succeeded in winning a municipal land bank. Karen Black wrote for us here about some of...
In Defense of Asian American Neighborhoods
How do you address a history of anti-Asian housing discrimination? Not by destroying Asian American communities.