Neoliberal Urban Policy and New Paths of Neighborhood Change in the American Inner City

Abstract

After decades of disinvestment, population flight, and housing abandonment, a number of very-low-income urban neighborhoods became sites for reinvestment in the late 1990s, suggesting that a new process of neighborhood change was at work. This reinvestment bears much in common with what is traditionally or popularly thought of as gentrification: inmigration of higher income residents, transformation of neighborhood culture, and potential displacement of existing residents. Yet this new reinvestment process differs from conventional gentrification in important respects. In particular, high crime rates, and a lack of locational advantages or an attractive housing stock make this reinvestment all the more surprising and worthy of further investigation. Our goal in this paper is to explore this process of neighborhood change that emerged during the course of the 1990s, using as our illustrative case the West Side Park neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey (figure 1). We undertake a close analysis of this change, examine its context, the agents that initiated it, and the policy and political frameworks that support it, and we suggest possible implications.We argue that a nexus of forces have come together over the last decade to create this new process of neighborhood change in distressed cities such as Newark. In particular, a neoliberal policy regime, emphasizing poverty deconcentration, mixedincome neighborhoods, homeownership support, and reliance on the private market rather than the state, has played a key role in spurring new construction and a corresponding influx of eligible moderate-income, minority households. The local state

“Weathering” HOPE VI: The Importance of Evaluating the Population Health Impact of Public Housing Demolition and Displacement

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Land Ownership, Rent-Seeking, and Rural Gentrification: Reconstructing Villages for Sustainable Urbanization in China

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