The Art of Revitalization

is a tome by Sean Zielenbach, published in 2000, and is about revitalization in low and moderate income neighborhoods. It's based on a study of a set of neighborhoods in Chicago, and includes comparison case studies of the Englewood and North Lawndale neighborhoods. The book has been recommended to me by a colleague for a number of years, and since this particular copy was on sale at the Chicago Architecture Foundation bookstore when I was there earlier in the month, I picked it up and read it the next week.

At the time of the study, while most neighborhoods in Chicago were declining relative to the suburbs, North Lawndale declined at a lesser rate, and improved by comparison to other neighborhoods.

The biggest factors of success were proximity to Downtown, proximity to other high demand neighborhoods, revitalization opportunities, outward looking community leadership, connections with organizations beyond the neighborhood, and coherent social and organizational capital able to be tapped in a revitalization effort.

Here are some quotes from the book that I thought were particularly good:

(p. 249) City officials by themselves simply cannot address the problems of poor neighborhoods. The physical and economic regeneration of certain communities requires a significant influsion of resources, and municipal governments have a limited pool of funds from which to draw. The monies must support the provision of basic city-wide public services such as fire prevention, policing, education, and garbage pickup, services that maintain both a city's economic activity and its general quality of life. Obtaining the monies to meet other needs proves problematic. Cities already tend to have higher property tax rates that their surrounding suburbs, in part because of the broader rant of services they provide and because of the proportionally higher concentration of tax-exempt nonprofit and governmental property in the downtown area. If public officials raise taxes much more, they risk driving individual and corporate residents out of the muniicpality, thereby reducing many sources of revenue (property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, user fees, and so forth).

(p. 251) Resource constraints prevent agencies [...] from targeting all of Chicago's needy neighborhoods for development. They therefore must be strategic in the communities they do target, concentrating on areas whose inherent regional and locational advantages and existing social and institutional base offers the greateest potential return on the City's monies. For example, certain neighborhoods within Chicago are more suitable for retail development than others because of their higher population densities, existing commercial activity, land availablility and so forth.

(p. 253) The political structure of Chicago militates against attempts to promote substantial neighborhood change. With limited city resources, new endeavors implicity involve trade-offs and reductions in other programs; targeting additional resources to a community requires the diversion of funds from another locale and/or the expansion of the revenue base, both of which prove highly problematic ventures. The city's inter-ethnic and inter-neighborood tensions have hampered attempts to establish and maintain the broad coalitions necessary for inter-neighborhood projects, to say nothing about initiatives tailored to a single community. The continued dominance of the mayor in the development of city-wide policies has caused more policy-oriented alderman to opt for positions [of higher political office]... The prevailing acceptance of the status quo, a legacy of the Machine and a product of American politics in general, has effectively marginalized reformers.

(p. 263/4) This book defines revitalization of a low-income community as both the reintegration of the neighborhood into the market and the improvement of economic conditions for existing residents. Such a focus combines the traditional physical redevelopment and private investment aspects of revitalization with an anti-poverty component. Some may argue that the two are antithetical, in that economic improvements in a neighborhood have little positive effect on the poor. They feel that increases in property values, private investment, and the number of more affluenct residents in a community leads to the displacement of low-income residents of the neighborhood; in short, all revitalization is a form of gentrification. Others believe that the two may go hand-in-hand. They cite examples of incumbent upgrading and adaptive reuse, in which local residents spearhead the physical redevelopment of an area for their own benefit. Inner-city development and poverty alleviation may or may not be synonymous--that is an empirical question--but the improvement of low-income urban neighborhoods is essential for the betterment of their residents. Individual opportunity and achievement depend in large part on environmental factors. People who live in stable, safer, and more affluent neighborhoods typically fare better socially and economically than individuals who live in areas of high crime and high poverty. Communities that are better integrated in the urban and metropolitan markets typically attract more outside resources and therefore increase the opportunities available to their members. The book's focus on the benefits for existing residents not only addresses the issue of poverty reduction but also differentiates revitalization from gentrification. In the latter process, improvements generally benefit more affluent individuals living outside the community and can often lead to the displacement of the neighborhood's present population.

(p. 264) The study found that although they are positively correlated, changes in a neighborhood's level of private investment have generally operated independently of changes in a neighborhood's per capita income. ...

Part of the explanation for the discrepancy bgetween the two components of revitalization may lie in the time period under consideration... The various aspects of economic change may not move at the same rates. ... More likely, the factors that promote private investment in inner-city neighborhoods are not entirely the same ones that improve individuals' economic well-being. As will be highlighted in more detail in what follows, increased private sector activity in a community largely results from factors characteristic of that particular area. ...

(p. 266) The qualitative analysis found that no single factor accounted for economic change in these low-income, overwhelmingly black neighborhoods. Revitalization resulted from the interplay of numerous local individual, institutional, and organizational decisions, in concert with the locational characteristics of the community and the economic and social forces affecting the city and the broader metropolitan region. The skills and motivations of particular individuals (factors that defy easy quantification) played instrumental roles in catalyzing and shaping economic improvement. The social capital within the community greatly affected the decision-making of these individuals and their institutions, as well as the impact of those decisions on the broader community.