Preface

The idea for this book did not suddenly spring full-blown into our minds. It was preceded by years of personal and professional evolution based on our experiences, our observations, and innumerable conversations over the years with scholars and practitioners. We recently calculated, with equal parts pride and embarrassment, that together we have been engaged in neighborhood work and scholarship for over ninety years, the greater part of it in struggling, often shrinking cities in America’s Northeast and Midwest. These experiences have colored our perspective on life and human behavior and left an indelible imprint on our thinking. This book also went through an extended, although not ninety-year-long, evolution before taking its final form.

As an undergraduate in the early 1960s, Alan joined the New Haven chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, spending many hours in African American neighborhoods that were about to be demolished to make way for urban renewal and talking to people living in homes already owned by the city and soon to disappear. Years later, while working in Atlantic City in the 1980s and in Trenton during the 1990s, he became deeply engaged with the struggles of America’s older cities and the challenges of their neighborhoods, which has been the principal focus of his subsequent life’s work. Since then, first with the Brookings Institution and for the last ten years with the Center for Community Progress, Alan has led efforts to address the challenge of housing vacancy and abandonment and, more broadly, the strangely contradictory crisis and revival of America’s legacy cities, the once-industrial cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh that have lost much of their population and still more of their economic base. In his book The Divided City, Alan brought both the crisis and the revival to wider attention, grappling with how urban decline continues in the midst of surging, if selective, urban revival.

In 1979, Todd moved to Cleveland to pursue his PhD and go to work for the urban populist administration of Mayor Dennis Kucinich. It was an exciting time for Todd, at the height of the era of what we call in this book “neighborhoodism,” the idea that many, if not most, of society’s problems can be addressed by empowering neighborhoods. Todd’s PhD dissertation and subsequent book, The Crisis of Growth Politics, profiled urban populism as confrontational organizing moved from the neighborhoods into city politics, mobilizing people around pithy slogans such as “invest in neighborhoods not downtown.” It was a hard time for older central cities, which were being devastated by deindustrialization and white flight, and as we describe, urban populism proved unsustainable, although it has many echoes in today’s battles over gentrification and racial justice.

After nineteen years in Albany at the State University of New York, where he worked with community development corporations and the local tenants’ union, Todd moved to St. Louis, Missouri, one of America’s fastest-shrinking cities. Blessed with a pool of resources that came with his endowed professorship at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, he first used those funds to help form the Community Builders Network, a coalition of about eighty organizations working to build better neighborhoods in St. Louis. Recognizing, though, that there were not nearly enough resources in the community development system to address neighborhood decline, he later directed his endowment’s funds to support the St. Louis Anchor Action Network, a coalition made up of the major institutions of higher education and medical services in St. Louis. What these anchor institutions can do to turn around the many declining neighborhoods in the city of St. Louis and in St. Louis County of course remains an open question.

The story of how our thinking about neighborhoods evolved into this book began in 2015 when, together with our colleague Brett Theodos of the Urban Institute, we organized a panel on neighborhood change in older industrial cities at an International Sociological Association gathering in Chicago. Reflecting the work that each of us had done separately, a central theme of the panel was our growing conviction that the hot-button issue of gentrification was distracting scholarly attention away from the more serious problem of neighborhood decline. Although we half-expected to be assailed by progressives for our seeming indifference to the threat posed by gentrification, the response to the panel was strongly positive and led us to start thinking about how we could build on the work we had already done.

One thing the three of us began talking about was how we could encourage scholarly research to more productively inform the work of people in community development, addressing neighborhood change on the ground. The next year we helped pull together a workshop in Washington, D.C., where about twenty scholars and practitioners came together to talk about how they could work together more effectively. Cosponsored by the Center for Community Progress, the Urban Institute, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the workshop brought home the fact that while social scientists were producing a large corpus of research on neighborhood change, this research appeared to have little or no impact on community development practice. It may not surprise the reader that part of the problem was the dense, barely comprehensible academic prose and the inaccessibility of the journals in which it was published. That was not the only problem, however. As we reviewed the research, we came to realize that with rare exceptions, it was all of a piece. Quantitative research using sophisticated econometric techniques to isolate the effect of individual variables—such as housing demolition and the greening of vacant lots—seemed oblivious to the complex interactions of economic, social, and political forces shaping neighborhood trajectories and the importance of local context, factors seen as essential by practitioners in both understanding neighborhoods and guiding action to change them.

Despite our frustration with much of what we read, we continued to feel that there were ways scholarly research could be used to more effectively guide local action. For the most part we did not believe that the findings and conclusions of the research were wrong, although sometimes we believe that to be the case and point that out in the pages that follow. The reader will notice, in fact, that we repeatedly draw on the large body of quantitative neighborhood research. That research offers many valuable, even striking insights. The problem is not so much that the research is wrong but that it is fragmentary, lacking in a broader context or framework to ground it in the complex reality of neighborhoods, with their many interactions and feedback loops. It is almost as if the sheer amount of data available, along with the stunning increase in the power of computers and geographic information systems to store and analyze that data, has caused researchers to progressively narrow their field of vision. We were struck that neighborhood research from earlier eras often examined neighborhoods through a wider, more panoramic lens, drawing insights from different disciplines and integrating quantitative research with qualitative analyses and case studies that were more sensitive to neighborhood context and history.

The United States has a long and proud tradition, which can be traced back to the settlement house movement of the late nineteenth century, of using data and scientific methods, both qualitative and quantitative, to better understand neighborhood conditions and neighborhood change. For all its flaws, the Chicago School of Human Ecology at its heyday in the 1920s placed urban neighborhoods within the context of local, national, and even global trends. While the Chicago School is widely seen as discredited today, reflecting the ways in which much of its research was used to justify the racial discrimination of the following decades, its effort to grasp neighborhoods as a whole is still worthy of emulation.

A second burst of neighborhood research emerged in the 1970s that in many respects was a reaction to the failures and excesses of postwar urban renewal. This research stressed the importance of local knowledge, seeking to integrate resident perceptions and behavior into the analysis of the dynamics of neighborhood change. In contrast to the deterministic, even fatalistic, stance toward neighborhood change of the Chicago School, scholar-practitioners, such as Rolf Goetze and Paul Brophy, stressed the possibility of intervention and in many respects provided the intellectual basis for the community development movement in the United States that was emerging at the time.

Our initial idea was to focus on lifting up this rich body of neighborhood thinking, which led us to believe that an edited book that both highlighted and contextualized the best neighborhood research over the past century would be valuable. To that end, we began to talk with Michael McGandy at Cornell University Press about what form such an edited volume could take. As Michael kept pushing us on what we wanted to say with an edited book, our thinking gradually shifted and became more focused. When we realized that what we wanted to say could not be conveyed in an edited volume, we moved from that format to an original book that we would coauthor. As we did that, we came to feel that what we wanted to do went well beyond synthesizing existing research on neighborhoods or even putting that research within a broader framework and that the book should reflect our own thinking about neighborhoods and their place and prospects in American cities today. Fortunately, our thinking had evolved along largely parallel tracks, and despite the need to iron out many small differences, we shared a common perspective on the big questions we were trying to answer.

As the project took on increasingly ambitious dimensions, Brett, blessed with an overabundance of work and family obligations, wisely bowed out. The two of us soldiered on, unaware that we were about to embark on a four-year journey that would be interrupted by a global pandemic, medical challenges, and the loss of loved ones. This book is the product of that journey. It is a work of scholarship, but it is also one that is grounded in what neighborhoods have meant and continue to mean to those who live in them and, to the best of our ability, in their full complexity and variety.

Finally, a major challenge of writing a book about neighborhoods in twenty-first-century America is that it is easy to think of the subject as obsolete or even trivial. After all, with the technological changes of the last few decades and the enhanced transportation and communications networks that are part of our everyday life, most notably the handheld devices we all carry that enable us to connect to our social networks or play Final Fantasy XV, neighborhood social relations grounded in physical proximity are not nearly as central to our lives as they once were. While the two us of enjoy the neighborhoods we live in, we had to admit that we do not sit on the front stoop for hours each day schmoozing with our neighbors. Indeed, we have little more than a passing acquaintance with most of our neighbors. Our close networks of family and friends are widely dispersed.

Our acknowledgment that many, perhaps most, people today perceive neighborhood ties as marginal to their lives clashed with our conviction that neighborhoods were still important. Gradually, after many emails and conversations, we came to the realization that, ironically, it is precisely the coolness of neighborhood ties that makes them so important in modern society. We are not the first to observe that neighborhood social relations are distinctive. Sixty years ago, Jane Jacobs wrote about how urban neighborhoods can nurture social capital while still preserving individuality and privacy. Even as neighborhoods have become less central to our lives, the importance of neighborhood relations has grown. As our nation becomes increasingly divided by almost every social, economic, demographic, and cultural fault line imaginable, we believe that the weak ties nurtured in neighborhoods can help us bridge the intense polarization that bedevils our society and risks tearing it apart. We offer this book in that spirit in the hope that it will contribute to the important work of building or rebuilding better neighborhoods and in homage to those who have dedicated their lives to that work.