In the last thirty years, the South Bronx has transformed from a national symbol of urban crisis and dystopia to a model for new forms of urban redevelopment. But the nature of this renewal, and who it benefits, is deeply contested. Capital is returning to the South Bronx, and some claim that community-driven "renewal without displacement" is producing a new, economically diverse South Bronx. But critics point to the area's continuing poverty and racialization, and some residents fear that renewal will lead to gentrification and displacement. This complexity poses challenging questions to the existing literature on gentrification and urban renewal. Accounts that rely on a dichotomy of gentrification and resistance to it cannot explain how reinvestment has emerged from simultaneously collaborative and conflictive efforts to fight disinvestment and displacement. Also largely unaddressed are the practices involved in transforming the spatialized racial and class difference of stigmatized areas to enable reinvestment. This research examines three field sites in the South Bronx to address the following questions: 1) How did reinvestment and renewal emerge out of the collapse of the 1970s and 1980s? 2) How has reinvestment been shaped by tensions and collaborations among developers, community organizations, and the local state? 3) How are processes of reinvestment shifting how race and class are lived, thought, and managed in the South Bronx? 4) What new spatial orders of ghettoization and/or gentrification have emerged out of processes of reinvestment in the South Bronx? In-depth interviews, participant observation, archival research, and "biographies" of buildings will provide data on the complex, contested processes of reinvestment shaping both the South Bronx and the production of raced, classed, and spaced identities. The investigators expect to demonstrate 1) that processes of reinvestment are continuously contested and this has produced a form of urban renewal that remedies some forms of inequality while reinforcing others, and 2) that an emphasis on class and economic diversity is used to rework spatialized racial, ethnic, and class difference.
The research analyzes the implications of urban renewal policies and practices, adopted in the aftermath of the urban crisis of the 1970s, and how this renewal is related to gentrification and displacement. This study will contribute to a simultaneously nuanced and critical view of redevelopment and gentrification by showing how collaboration and conflict among community groups, real estate investors, and local government have created a particular form of urban renewal in the South Bronx. Exploring these issues in the South Bronx is especially important because the South Bronx is increasingly emerging as a national model for urban recovery and life-among-the-ruins, despite the fact that New York City differs from many other cities in that its wealth and growth fuels a seemingly inexorable process of gentrification. By looking at how renewal in the South Bronx challenges inequality in some ways at the same time that it perpetuates it in others, this project has the potential to inform efforts to reduce urban inequality and poverty and produce more just renewal efforts. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will also provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
There are surprisingly few studies of urban revitalization in the period dating since the 1980s. Media accounts tend to simply celebrate the fact that areas devastated in the urban crises of the 1970s have experienced development without looking closely at the priorities and consequences of various strategies of development. And even within the academic literature there are few accounts of how revitalization and gentrification are related. My research is on the revitalization of the South Bronx and the northwest Bronx in New York City. There have been several strategies of revitalization, each based on a different model of growth. Each involves enticing a particular kind of capital to invest, or targeting a particular kind of person as the preferred new resident. New York City’s municipal government has been the driver of most of these shifts, but Bronxites also debate revitalization. Their views tend to be split between becoming a more "middle class" area by integrating more closely with the city and bringing in new residents with higher socioeconomic status, or empowering current residents to improve their lives on their own terms. I studied the complexity of revitalization through interviews with key players and attending real estate events and community meetings. While revitalization is not exactly gentrification, both are part of the larger phenomenon of the gentrifying city. Because it has been a place apart due to stigma and poverty, the Bronx has been somewhat insulated from gentrification-inspired speculation. But as revitalization efforts succeed in integrating the Bronx more closely into the city’s real estate market, some areas have become vulnerable to both swings in the market and exploitation by unscrupulous real estate operators. And because Bronx neighborhoods have essentially been under continuous threat since the 1970s, residents have organized throughout. The South and northwest Bronx diverged at the moment of crisis in the 1970s, and revitalization has taken quite different forms in each. As the South Bronx was devastated by arson and abandonment, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition organized residents to challenge the city, banks, and landlords, and they succeeded in physically preserving their neighborhoods. Rebuilding in the South Bronx in the 1980s this was centered around community development. Together, the city, local organizations, and and national nonprofits replaced the private capital that had abandoned the area. But while local organizations were crucial to this effort, the structure came largely from city agencies and the financing available. At the same time, private capital made a resurgence in the form of gentrification in certain neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Gentrification did not reach the northwest Bronx, but easy credit and speculation on eventual gentrification led to an unsustainable rise in prices in the early 1990s, foreshadowing the housing bubble of the 2000s. The boom of the early 2000s pushed revitalization in both the South and northwest Bronx closer to gentrification. In the northwest Bronx, private equity firms priced out of expensive Manhattan real estate paid high prices for run-down, rent-regulated buildings. In the South Bronx, the boom initially looked like the success of revitalization. In the 1990s, city policy had shifted toward supporting for-profit landlords and affordable housing developers, and changes in affordable housing finance facilitated the rise of a for-profit affordable housing industry. The 2000s bubble in affordable housing led to new mixed income housing developments, but developers later had difficulty filling many of these buildings. This was in part because the method of calculating affordability meant that even "low income" housing is more expensive than most in the South Bronx can afford. The collapse of the housing market in 2007-08 and the ensuing economic downturn revealed the tensions inherent in revitalization in a gentrifying city like New York. Movements arose out of this that critiqued the city and capital and pointed out the connections between revitalization and gentrification. In the northwest Bronx, the tenants of buildings abandoned by a California private equity firm organized, supported by city officials, to pressure the holder of their mortgage to take a loss so that a "responsible owner" could buy and rehab them. The buildings were eventually bought by a competent landlord known for steadily increasing rents. In the context of continued speculation on gentrification, the tenants felt that this was the best option they could get. This conflict brings into question what exactly a "responsible owner" is, and who exactly such owners are responsible to. In the South Bronx, Take Back the Bronx (associated with the Occupy movement) critiqued of affordable housing as gentrification, fostered by undemocratic processes at both the local and municipal levels. From the perspective of those excluded, the revitalization process had become gentrification. We must always ask, what does revitalization mean in this moment? Who is it for, and who is excluded? How is it shaped by capital and contestation?
