Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Gentrification And Nonprofit Activities For Neighborhood Development In Baltimore, Maryland And Houston, Texas, Jesseca E. Lightbourne, Aminata Sillah, Julius A. Nukpezah

Journal of Public Management & Social Policy

This study examines the role of community-based nonprofit organizations in neighborhood revitalization/community development and their impact on the level of housing services. The neighborhoods in the study represent certain universalities of gentrification in older communities, and therefore selected for the study. By going beyond the profitability of gentrification, this study examines the social costs associated with gentrification through the lens of nonprofit organizations using quantitative data from Baltimore, Maryland and Houston, Texas. Taking into account nonprofit organizations as important actors in the gentrification field, this study contributes to the understanding of the social cost of gentrification and how community-based nonprofit …

Fighting For The Heart Of The Mission District: Multiracial Community Organizing And Anti-Displacement Movements, Anachristina Arana

Master's Projects and Capstones

My research discusses the history of gentrification and displacement in San Francisco, which has been created through a legacy of intentional policymaking, city planning, and land-use decision-making across the city and state. This study centers the collective power and expertise of multiracial, multicultural community-based organizations and coalitions dedicated to the work of tackling these systemic issues in the Mission District of San Francisco. To learn about the impact of multiracial community organizing, I pose the following research question: How do multiracial community-based organizations work to disrupt gentrification and displacement, and create meaningful change to support impacted community members in the …

Property Pillagers: Effects Of Dirty Urbanism, Chase Wilson, Kayli Clark

Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

This podcast dives into American urbanism and its associated development targeting certain minority communities; the ill intentions to disrupt specific neighborhoods led us to refer to the practice as “dirty urbanism”. The pair of I-40 and Jefferson Street in north Nashville, alongside similarly treated areas across the United States, exemplify dirty urbanism. Exercising their raw power and ability to cover up to 90% of the costs, the federal government incentivizes the local governments to construct the highway system: a highway system used as a racially motivated tool to sever black-built urban fabrics. With the highways, vehicular space overrides …

Affordable Housing On Community Land Held In Trust: An Essential Component Of Sustainable Development, Kevin S. Tellez Ramos

Master's Projects and Capstones

This project summarizes an assessment of affordable housing development in Sonoma County - centered in an analysis of sustainability. The language of sustainability requires a new vocabulary for conversation on a broad topic. The sustainable development goals can be directed for the benefit of organizations that contribute to solutions that lack insight towards greater longevity for the at-risk members of the community (i.e., greenwashing, net-zero emissions, etc.). More recent sustainable development literature from the United Nations reveals new priorities: social, economic, and environmental sustainability. (This applies to developing nations of which the researcher believes Sonoma County, California and the United …

Neighborhood Reinvestment: A Changing Community In The Urban South, Jackson Nutt-Beers

Master's Projects and Capstones

Since the mid-twentieth century, public and private actors across the country have been identifying sources of potential capital accumulation in the United States. Shortly after the passing of the Civil Rights Act by President Lyndon Johnson in the mid 1960s, many White families across the country fled the urban core for the suburbs leaving neighborhoods in the city center abandoned and without capital. During this period, Black families and other racial minority groups were forced to live in the blighted neighborhoods of the urban core due to a variety of racialized discriminatory housing practices that lead to the disinvestment of …

The Housing Crisis And The Rise Of The Real Estate State, Samuel Stein

Publications and Research

This article — an excerpt from my book, Capital City, with elaborations on a number of key points — argues that the housing crises endemic to contemporary capitalism must be understood as a result of the concentration of global capital into real estate and the the re-orientation of state planning capacities around the demands of the real estate industry. The first half of the article explains the dimensions of the crisis in the US and the rise of "the real estate state." The second half explores policy alternatives to contemporary urban neoliberalism and the kinds of movements necessary to …

Who Wins And Who Loses? How Gentrification Caused By Public Transportation Is Felt Differently Across Race, Rosina Shipman

Politics Summer Fellows

When does a public good become harmful? And who does it harm? To tackle these questions I take a detailed look at how public transportation affects housing prices. Public transportation is a common good utilized by people of all different socioeconomic levels, but scholars have found that the presence of a new public transportation stop can be a catalyst for gentrification, raising housing prices and displacing previous residents. While this positive relationship between housing prices and public transportation is well documented, there is a lack of literature on how gentrification, caused by public transportation, affects neighborhood-housing prices across race. In …

Community Land Trusts: A Help Or Hindrance To Community Development In The United States, Andrew Kuka

Stevenson Center for Community and Economic Development—Student Research

The availability of affordable housing in the United States continues to be an issue for Americans who are on the brink of homelessness, rely on housing subsidies, or struggle to pay their mortgages or rents. These issues, as well as the gentrification threat that community development poses to low-income residents can have deleterious effects on democratic participation and community development efforts. One proposed solution to these problems is the implementation of more community land trust programs nationally. This paper will assess the practicality of CLTs, and what such an implementation would mean for individuals, government entities, community members, and community …

Visions For Waterville's Future: Perceptions Of Its Residents, Alex Wolansky

Honors Theses

Mills and factories in the United States have steadily been closing down as industry is outsourced in the globalized economy. Cities that were once prosperous face decay and often have no hopeful future outlook. Post-industrial towns face major unemployment and poverty and are not typically places for re-investment. But Rust Belt cities like Baltimore, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee and St. Louis are not the only post- industrial hubs that are struggling. Many small towns in rural areas once thrived from manufacturing and are becoming forgotten. Local governments, policy makers, urban planners, developers and scholars are working to figure …

Voices Of Cully: A Case Study Of The Living Cully Weatherization And Home Repair Project 2.0, Lucy J.T. Cultrera

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The Cully neighborhood is situated in the Northeast quadrant of Portland, Oregon. It is 2.75 square mile plot of land and home to roughly 13,000 people. In addition to being one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Portland, it is the most densely populated, with the smallest amount of parkland per capita. Over the last two decades, home value has increased 203% in Cully, compared to a 90% citywide increase. Amidst these development trends are stories of incredible resilience, resistance and activism from the affected community. My project is a case study of one anti-displacement initiative, which was developed and …

The Road To Gentrification

DePaul Magazine

Recent development in Logan Square have certainly bettered the general quality of life. But to others, including residents and housing market experts, such as the Geoff Smith, executive director of the Institute for Housing Studies (IHS) at DePaul, and Winifred Curran, gentrification expert and associate professor in the Department of Geography and the sustainable urban development master’s program, the influx of young, mostly white professionals is a warning sign of gentrification. It’s happening around the country—areas of disrepair are renewed and rebuilt, and people of higher socioeconomic status move in, driving up housing prices and rent rates and, perhaps unintentionally, …

Eating In East Harlem: An Assessment Of Changing Foodscapes In Community District 11, 2000-2015, Cuny Urban Food Policy Institute At The Cuny School Of Public Health And Health Policy, Nicholas Freudenberg, Melissa Fuster, Diana Johnson, Marissa Sheldon, Michele Silver, Apoorva Srivastava, Janet Poppendieck, Ashley Rafalow, Nevin Cohen

Publications and Research

The report analyzes changes in five domains -- food retail, food insecurity and food benefits, institutional food, food and nutrition education, and diet-related health conditions -- in East Harlem from before the election of Michael Bloomberg through the first two years of the de Blasio Administration. Its goal is to assess the ways in which food environments in East Harlem have improved, stayed the same, or worsened in this 15-year period in order to inform setting food policy goals for the next 5, 10 or 15 years.

Although East Harlem is blessed with a multitude of organizations and individuals dedicated …

Encouraging Low-Income Households To Make Location-Efficient Housing Choices, Andrée Tremoulet, Ryan Dann, Arlie Adkins

TREC Final Reports

The purpose of this project is to develop and evaluate tools to assist Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program participants in the Portland, OR, metro region with considering transportation needs and options when making decisions about where to live. The project consists of two elements: development of a set of tools in collaboration with the four metro-area housing authorities, and an evaluation of the effectiveness of the tools. The four housing authorities conceptualized and initiated this project, and then selected our team to fully design and complete it. Transportation costs are typically a household’s second-largest expense after housing and, on average, …

Uneven Development Of The Sustainable City: Shifting Capital In Portland, Oregon, Erin Goodling, Jamaal Green, Nathan Mcclintock

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Portland, Oregon is renowned as a paradigmatic "sustainable city". Yet, despite popular conceptions of the city as a progressive ecotopia and the accolades of planners seeking to emulate its innovations, Portland’s sustainability successes are inequitably distributed. Drawing on census data, popular media, newspaper archives, city planning documents, and secondary-source histories, we attempt to elucidate the structural origins of Portland’s "uneven development", exploring how and why the urban core of this paragon of sustainability has become more White and affluent while its outer eastside has become more diverse and poor. We explain how a "sustainability fix" – in this case, green …

Investigating The Housing Market For Student Tenants Surrounding An Urban University, Olivia M. Dobbs Ms.

Honors College Theses

The private housing market for students around Wayne State University, an urban campus in Detroit, Michigan, stands in a fast-changing period. The area has grown economically from institutional and medical center investment in the past few years, causing occupancy and rents to rise. This follows years of disinvestment that allowed rent rates to fall to comfortable rates for students. The University has published its interest in developing the “campus life” including more off-campus private market housing for students, while developers see potential for even higher rents for young professionals. This study assesses the current perceptions of a sample of rental …

Young Professionals As Ambivalent Change Agents In New Orleans After The 2005 Hurricanes, Renia Ehrenfeucht, Marla Nelson

Renia Ehrenfeucht

After the 2005 hurricanes, newcomers arrived in New Orleans to help rebuild the city. The influx of one identifiable group, young professionals and postgraduates, raised hopes and concerns that New Orleans would gentrify. Based on semistructured interviews with 78 young and mid-career professionals, this paper examines how the young professionals approached an ambivalent situation where they were working to rebuild a better city while retaining its distinct cultural qualities, given that their presence itself contributed to the cultural change. They reconciled these tensions with an appreciation for localism that, for newcomers in particular, was expressed through knowing and responding to …

Community Land Trusts And Rental Housing: Assessing Obstacles To And Opportunities For Increasing Access, Maxwell Ciardullo

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are an affordable housing model based in the principles of community control of land and housing, as well as the permanent affordability of home ownership. Because of their membership-based governance structure and limited-equity formula, they are uniquely positioned to target reinvestment in communities of color and low-income communities without perpetuating cycles of displacement. Though focused on home ownership, many CLTs have adapted the model to include rental housing. This addition has the potential to expand affordability and opportunities for community governance to lower-income renters; however, it also challenges CLTs as organizations with little experience developing or …

Healing Earth, Helping Neighbors: Using Brownfield Remediation Projects To Advance Environmental Justice [Outline], Willie Shepherd

The Climate of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock (March 16-17)

Presenter: Willie Shepherd, Chairman and Co-Founder, Kamlet Shepherd & Reichert, LLP

2 pages.

"Presentation Outline"

Two Cheers For Gentrification, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The very word "gentrification" implies distaste. Advocates for the poor and ethnic minorities see affluent whites bidding up the prices for urban housing to levels that force poor families out, depriving them of affordable housing, perhaps rendering them homeless, and changing the character of a neighborhood from one that reflects distinct ethnic and class needs and cultural traditions into a bland emporium for expensive consumer goods. Sometimes historic preservation laws are indicted as particular culprits in setting this dynamic in motion. A result of these perceptions is that the legal literature on gentrification, in general, and historic preservation both reflect …