All posts by Michael Tirado

Reading Response

Terrains of/for Action

The chapter by Tony Schuman introduced a totally new concept to me, self-help housing. I had never heard of this before and, as such, it took a while for me to understand that the self-help tradition could be applied to housing, since we have spent such a long time talking about how residents of communities are often incapable of making real change in the face of government and big businesses. Although in theory this idea is for the people by the people, like any proposal, there are shortfalls, and Schuman discusses these. Not only are the issues of wage levels and income distribution unaddressed in projects, the attitude of self-help homeowners is generally very elite even towards public housing, which can imply that the results of programs like these aren’t actually for the poor. However, it remains true that self-help organizing is an important activity for local housing activists.

 

The chapter by Seth Borgos discusses a protest method known as squatting, which is occupying a vacant property without permission in order to fix it up and make it livable. Borgos reports that squatting has assisted hundreds of low-income families with finding affordable housing. This ties in well to the discussion we recently had in class: We read an article explaining that there is a massive number of properties that are vacant that can be used for housing, but the government is certainly not quick to do anything about it or even present honest numbers to the public. Squatting seems like an excellent idea to carry out in the face of a government who won’t act.

 

The article by Desiree Fields discusses a movement for equal financing in the face of inequality that never happened but still should. She presents a shocking statistic; despite the nature of the 2008 recession, 05% of the post-recession development has gone to the top 1%. This was a very difficult article to understand as it used many terms I am not familiar with, but what I gathered is that a popular movement toward financial equality set in place by en educated public and taking from the top 1% would help to balance our economy.

Project Update

The Future of Major Private Development

At this point in the semester, we have come to a meaningful understanding of the issue our project is set to address, the historical context leading up to this problem of uneven development, and possible (although radical) changes that can be made to attempt to remedy the problem. We have learned that gentrification can have a very bad connotation and denotation in that although it may make neighborhoods shinier and “more livable,” it can mean rent increase, other inflation of prices in the area, or even displacement for current residents of low-income neighborhoods. We understand that the history of affordability has been tipped in the favor of those who have more money and, as such, away from those who have less, even in their own neighborhoods. And so, we understand that the best chance we have of making a difference in the face of those who control land use in East Harlem is arming the low-income residents with knowledge in order to ensure that they are capable of standing up for their own rights. We believe that public education is key in both raising awareness of issues and producing solutions, and that is something we will be taking into account strongly as we construct our popular education product.

Since our white paper is in the revisions stage and our ideas are starting to take shape, now it is time to start considering the various aspects of our product. As we discussed in class on Monday, crafting our popular education product to cater to a certain audience is important, and what is even more important is determining the characteristics of the certain audience we want to have in mind. Our target neighborhood is one with very low income riddled with social issues, so we do not want to make our product too difficult to understand for people who may not have had access to a quality education. At the same time, we want our product to draw in the audience with some kind of emotional appeal that keeps their attention and helps them to understand that their home is at risk of severe re-shaping. Of course, knowledge of the problem is important, but ideas for a solution are equally as important, so we want to keep possible resolutions in mind as well as we create our product so we are not simply informing residents of their impending doom. We can encourage residents to do something as simple as writing a letter to the community board, or we can inform them about the community land trusts that were discussed at the last El Barrio Unite meeting. We need to encourage publicization of land, as privatization is the enemy of low-income residents.

In short, our product needs to be understandable, concise, appealing, and informative. A lack of any one of these qualities could result in an ineffective advertisement that does not raise the right type of awareness that it needs to. Something like a poster that we can put up in East Harlem seems very accessible to most of the people living there. If we were to pursue the idea of a poster, we would need to make sure that there is something that draws the audience in, something that informs them of the gravity of the issue, and something that informs them of what they might be able to do to make even a small difference.

 

 

Reading Response

The Right to the/Just City

I have consistently found the points at which city planning crosses over into social theory to be the most interesting parts of our readings.  So, when I read the following quote, I thought for a while:  The city is “man’s most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire.  But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live.  Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.”  This quote from urban sociologist Robert Park is aptly discussed by David Harvey – he explains that this raises several moral questions, such as what kind of people do we want to be? And what kinds of relations will we cherish?  This helped me to understand that society and culture truly are inherent within a city and part of its character.  Another theoretical aspect that jumped out at me later in the reading was the mention of bourgeois conquest (and of Engels).  In approaching city planning with an economic sociological perspective, we might cite the work of Marx and Engels in explaining how the little people are pushed aside in favor of those who control the means of production.  The little people in our cities, or the proletariat, are the working class in this case.  When a city takes form, those who hire others to work for them are the ones who shape the city to fit their “heart’s desire.”  We’ve seen this countless times, we even see it in the bourgeois’s lame attempts to cater to the needs of the proletariat such as De Blasio’s housing plans for Brooklyn that will actually displace more people than it will house.  The domination of the upper class is a consistent theme in out city’s history, as the working class never seems to be fully supported by what they are given.

The Fainstein reading discusses three important aspects to urban justice.  Democracy, the first, is essential for communication between classes, between those who have practical desires and those who have the power to make those desires real.  Diversity is a somewhat problematic one, as one may believe that it contributes to tension, but diversity in fact inspires the acceptance of others but also the “social composition” of places.  The final aspect, equity, is the most difficult to obtain in policies for housing, and diversity contributes.  Fainstein explains that these three qualities can work in harmony to promote the maintenance of a city that is shaped around all its members.

Discussion:  How can diversity have both positive and negative effects on urban policy and planning?

Reading Response #3

Community, Part 2: Organizing and Planning

After reading and learning much about failed and misplaces attempts to plan a community with the public in mind, it was refreshing to read sources that have a clear understanding that community planning needs to be based in a collective understanding of what community is.  As explained in DeRienzo’s pages, if we do not work from a grounded premise, we may find that we are in fact working to the detriment of those who we claim to be working for.  Essentially, we need to have a clear understanding of how and who we are helping in order to keep our efforts relevant to the issues at hand.  The goal is to be precise, not sloppy.  An extremely important point i found in the article is that the outside funders or protagonists in the case of community planning are likely to believe that the world just “is the way it is” and the only thing for communities that need rehabilitation to do is to learn to survive – but once these people lose their homes, they will understand that where they lived was not a community but just a housing cluster that had no interdependence.  I feel that this point emphasizes the importance of understanding how community works from the bottom-up rather than attempting to understand it “top-down” from the outside in order to make any real beneficial changes.  Another interesting bit DiRienzo notes is that it is possible to gauge a community’s health by how many institutions within it are controlled by the community and by whether the community feels a constant need to organize.  Additionally, the second type of community organizing he cites is exactly the kind that my group is dealing with in our project – the type in which a community organizes in order to discuss a specific issue that threatens to enforce political dynamics that made the proposal possible in the first place.  I found DiRienzo’s writing to be extremely well-organized, clear, and accurate in descriptions of things we find in our society.

Angotti’s chapter does well to explain the sources and bases of the issues of housing at hand before delving deeper.  He explains the value of tenure when it comes to housing and what displacement really is (when living in a home becomes impossible, dangerous, or otherwise due to various causes such as natural disaster but more importantly and predominantly unaffordability).  As I looked at Angotti’s chapter after reading DiRienzo, I had DiRienzo’s theories in mind as I observed Angotti’s discussions of urban renewal projects.  He asks an important question that may in fact be answered by some of DiRienzo’s explanation of community dynamics:  What knowledge and analysis will help community planners in developing their plans and linking them with political strategies?  This seems extremely relevant to our project in that we aim to investigate just that – how people inside of a community can use their perspectives to make a difference in community planning in their own areas.

Reading Response #2

The Capital of Capital, Part 2

Before reading Samuel Stein’s article, I looked into his background, which turns out to be specifically grounded in labor and housing and the relationship between the two.  This helped me to understand where the article’s arguments were coming from and definitely contributed ethos appeal.  While reading the first two sections, despite the title of the article, I felt hopeful for the future of low-income affordable housing in the city being improved with Mayor De Blasio’s plan.  Stein made it seem as though De Blasio was taking a significantly different approach to inclusionary housing than Bloomberg did, specifically in that his is more wholehearted.  However, Stein brings this fantasy to the ground with unfortunate realism in the next section.  He describes it as extremely flawed – it seems that De Blasio’s plan simply fails to address the problem as well as it may believe.  Stein explains that inclusionary housing will in fact displace more poor people than it will save, and no one will mourn this displacement because the only visible results will be showcasing the few who gain housing.  Ultimately, what I gathered from this article is that the attempts of the rich to share their resources in a top-down fashion are doomed to fail.  What the city really needs to do is start from the bottom and build up, because so much of it is already devoted to those who have money that it will take a fresh, new frontier to serve solely the poor.

Not surprisingly, I found support of my claim in Larson’s chapters.  When discussing the narrative of threat, he explains that a popular method of pushing a development project forward involves arguing that it is vital and essential for the city.  But who in the city would these developments serve?  The answer is that they would likely serve those who have the power to put them in place and those who are already well off.  This argument relates to the De Blasio plan described in Stein’s article explaining that mass inclusionary housing would actually benefit those who have money and that rents in the low-income housing developments would eventually rise.  A project to provide housing for poor people needs to be shaped and focused entirely on them without any loopholes allowing the rich to slip in and reap the benefits.

Reading Response

Roots of Community Planning

The phrase “urban renewal” itself has a very positive connotation – so Fullilove’s “Root Shock” article immediately provided me with an interesting perspective of how it actually affects people.  Additionally, I also have a better understanding of how and why ghetto neighborhoods have formed and why there are elements worth preserving in the face of urban renewal – or “Negro removal,” as the article mentions.

According to the article, segregation limited African Americans’ choices of living areas so greatly that they were confined to entry-level neighborhoods fit for immigrants beginning their lives in America.  These areas were generally very crowded and poor.  However, cultural flowering ensued and the ghettoes became places that although problematic, were bustling and artistic.  Individuals here gained a strong sense of community.  That is, until the Urban Renewal Act of 1949.

The Urban Renewal Act took the ghetto areas and made them even more segregated by removing living space and forcing closer quarters.  Indeed, African American communities were disproportionately targeted with this action.  Fullilove then goes on to provide an interesting argument for the value of the long term consequences of urban renewal on African Americans and specifically the health risks of the practice.  She closes with discussing political effects and ethical issues.

The chapter on The Roots of Community Planning harks back even further in our history to the time of the slave to describe the gravity of slavery in the first couple pages.  Upon seeing this, I immediately understood that the plight of African American living areas is deeply rooted in our history and stems from several causes.

However, as expected, the main focus of the chapter is community planning.  Angotti cites four important events in New York City history that shaped the practice of community planning today.  They are the following:  Slave Rebellions, Henry George’s running for mayor accompanied by populism at the time, tenant movements and the rise of labor, and the organizing of jobs and housing during the Great Depression.

Slave rebellions often occurred because African Americans were frustrated that they were banned form certain parts of the city and constantly being displaced because of their lack of control over where they could live.  Henry George, a mayoral candidate in the second half of the nineteenth century, voiced the popular opinion of discontentment with the “rule of real estate.”  He wanted to bring down the fruitful market of real estate so that it would no longer contribute to poverty and exclusion.  Laborers and tenants fought eviction and eventually were able to inspire the creation of rent laws which limited it.  Finally, the New Deal was able to indirectly create jobs and public places in the city where there were none prior to the Depression.

One of the most interesting things I found about both readings is the effect of displacement on community planning.  It seems that in many instances, it has been a fight over living space between the working class and the government – and to see that people have made a difference with their endeavors in pushing for equality and fair chances of survival in neighborhoods could inspire hope.

Discussion:  What is one way that slavery has shaped community planning?