Drake Writes

Theory Exam - Part B

Introduction

The debates surrounding race and urbanization can be dichotomized into two approaches: race as a socially constructed by-product necessary to sustain capital accumulation and circulation in the processes of urbanization or race as a social/biological force that shapes processes of urbanization to produce different effects on racial minorities (Omi and Winant, 1994; Manning Thomas, 1997; Fusfeld and Bates, 1984; Wilson, 2007).  Regardless of the approach to understanding the interaction between race and urbanization, what are apparent from the processes of North American urbanization are the severe political, economic, and social disadvantages of racial minorities that emerge during this process (Sugrue, 1996; Hirsch, 1998; Wilder, 2000).   The production of these disadvantages spark political debates and battles regarding the best way to mediate the effects of the past inequities toward racial minorities while still preserving the City as a site of capital accumulation (Woods, 2002).  This paper will discuss the debates around the ontology of race, the interaction between race and urbanization, and the strategies and goals of minority resistance to the devastating and unequal effects of capitalist urbanization.

Race Inequalities as a Cause of Patterns of Urbanization

The biological approach to the ontology of race was a major undertaking of the Enlightenment Age-philosophers, given the transformation of the European economies from feudal-agricultural to imperial-capitalist and the dynamics that occurred therein.  This biological approach was appropriated in the early studies of social science, with Park and Burgess attempting to explain the failure of African-Americans to conform to their race-relations model of “contact-conflict-accommodation-assimilation” (Burgess et al, 1925).  The notion that African-Americans were biologically inferior promoted similarly marginalizing effects on the processes of urbanization.  The inability for African-Americans, for example, to advance past the peripheral zones of Park’s concentric zone model of urban growth (Park, 1925) reinforced this inferior logic and justified the rationality of urban leaders in externally confining African Americans to these areas (Omi and Winant, 1994).  The existence of ghettos, the concentrated poverty within these ghettos, and the emergence of Wilson’s “hyper-“ and “glocal ghettos” (Wilson, 2007, 13) within the context of African-Americans receiving more rights and opportunities from the State (e.g., the Reconstruction-Era amendments, the Civil Rights legislation, the Great Society programs) further justify claims of biological difference between the races produce different (yet accurate) experiences from urbanization.

               Theoretical rationalization for differing African-American experiences in the industrial and postindustrial city advanced with Lewis’ cultural approach to the (primarily minority) problem of poverty in the cities.  Poverty is produced by the dominant political-economic system (the democratic capitalist State), and the values of marginalization are passed down to create a culture of poverty from which one cannot escape.  The culture of poverty was expanded in Wilson’s polemic work, The Truly Disadvantaged, in which he discussed the social, economic, and political deficiencies of the “underclass,” the low-income communities of African-Americans in urban areas across the country.  While Wilson did point to the external factors producing such inequalities, he suggested the lack of middle-class African Americans (and the political, social, and economic institutions their patronage supported) created cyclical effects of poverty in these underclass communities (Wilson, 1987).  Though far removed from the biological justifications of African-American experiences in urbanization, these theoretical approaches produced new ideologies for urbanization and race,  largely rooted in class tensions that emerge from the urbanization of capital.  This class-based approach to racial inequality diminished the role of race (and racism) in maintaining the existing power relations in the political economy, spurring policies that sought to deconcentrate and disperse (black) low-income residents into (white) middle- and upper-income communities (Goetz, 2003).  Programs such as the Moving to Opportunity Program, HOPE VI, and Housing Choice Vouchers demonstrate the class-based approach to solving racial inequalities is fallible, as these programs have produced varying and inconclusive results (Chaskin and Joseph, 2010; Goetz, 2003; Goetz, 2011; Hyra, 2006; Moore, 2005; Pattillo, 2003; Smith, 2002; Smith, 2006).   The failure of either class-based or biological approaches to race to explain the differences in racial minorities produced a wave of studies analyzing the processes of urbanization (and its political-economic history) in the social construction of race in the city (Sugrue, 1996; Hirsch, 1998; Manning Thomas, 1997).  These debates, and the policies they produced, are discussed in the following section.

Racial Inequalities as an Effect of Patterns of Urbanization

To understand the ontology of race is to understand the evolution of imperialism and capital accumulation in the modern world (Wilson, 2007; Omi and Winant, 1994).  The domination and extraction of resources from colonized nations by imperial nations produced a power dynamic that required the marginalization of colonized interests through the normative framework of imperial interests (Wallerstein, 1984).  This power dynamic was sustained and enforced through the imperial State apparatus (Foucault, 1991), and marginalized interests were frequently excluded from engaging with or shaping this apparatus.  Slavery, Jim Crow, Black Codes, and Ghettos are all modern examples of the subversion and marginalization of racial minority interests within the imperial capitalist-democratic State (Wilson, 2007).  In sustaining this State apparatus, the United States met substantial challenges once African-Americans were emancipated from slavery and afforded equal status of whites.  Adding to the challenges of the State was the simultaneous industrialization of American cities, which was producing its own tensions within the State to sustain the circulation of capital.  Thus, tracing the ontology of race in America is tracing the responses of the State to maintain the power relations between the colonized and the imperial.  What many perceive to be racism, and urban inequality, actually “evolved in defense of European-American power as one of its manifestations –African enslavement – took shape in a complex and contested social terrain” (Wilder, 2000, 20).  

Omi and Winant expand on this socio-political-economic construction of race in their theory of racial formation of the racist-capitalist state (Omi and Winant, 1994).  Within this framework, race is an evolving concept that allows for the capitalist State to sustain itself through the continual exploitation of socially-constructed raced labor.  As an example, during American slavery, whites invoked a Christian versus Savage dichotomy to justify their domination over African-Americans.  Per Weber, the Protestant work ethic that contributes to the Capitalist State uses work as a mechanism to get closer to God (Weber, 1978).  The marginalizing of African-Americans into menial labor positions was necessary to civilize them (under the ideology of biological superiority), and white prejudices and institutional discrimination against blacks fomented around this historically specific moment in the racist-capitalist state.  The dynamics of individual prejudice and discrimination and the systemic discrimination of African Americans are known as small and large racial projects, respectively (Omi and Winant, 1994).  The rolling out of these small and large racial projects are necessary to sustain the racist-capitalist State which is dependent on marginalized Black labor to sustain itself.  Under this theory, the racial inequalities of urbanization are a strategic necessity in the sustenance of the urbanization of capital, and the deployment of this strategy occurs at both the individual and the collective level (Omi and Winant, 1994).  Employment discrimination, the exclusion of African American-occupations from New Deal relief and Social Security in the 1930s, “Separate but Equal” Jim Crow facilities, and the prison industrial complex are all examples of the rolling out of large and small racial projects to sustain the racist-capitalist State. 

Examining the modern, inner-city “ghetto” is productive to understanding how these racial projects – in existence since American slavery – are sustained and how they affect racial minorities.  Wilson categorizes modern ghettos into three phases: ghetto (1880-1968, comprised of the menial industrial worker), hyperghetto and prison (1968-1990, comprised of marginal, service-oriented worker), and the glocal ghetto (1990-, comprised of the underground, service-oriented worker) (Wilson, 2007).  I will focus on the hyperghetto period  following the social movements of the 1960s (and the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act), as this marks a period when African-Americans were afforded the rights and opportunities of their white counterparts, yet remained marginalized and had disparate amounts of social, political, and economic capital compared to whites.  In the previous section, I described this hyper-ghetto as a justification of the biological differences in races.  I will now discuss how these externally created sites of difference are necessary for the accumulation and circulation of capital in the city.

            Fusfeld and Bates suggest the existence of modern hyperghettos “is seen as an exploited subsystem within a larger economy – its chief function is to supply low-wage labor to the more affluent, progressive sector.  It is kept poor by an economic process that continuously drains resources from the ghetto.  It is sustained by a constant flow of government transfer payments into the ghetto” (Fusfeld and Bates, 1987, xiv).  Ghettos, as a site of “fatal couplings of power and difference” (Gilmore, 2002, 15) are sites of oppression in the forms of violence, exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness and cultural dominance (Young, 1990).  Thus, not only are these hyperghettos externally constructed through the Racist-capitalist State to facilitate the processes of urbanization, but they are also sustained through the rolling out of large and small racial projects.  These large and small racial projects take the form of Young’s five faces of oppression (Young, 1990), and in doing so,  produce a political marginalization of hyperghetto residents that require non-normative approaches to political empowerment and legitimacy (Young, 2000).       

Race, Urbanization, and Resistance

The above discussion of ghettos is relevant to understanding the forms and grievances of the African-American resistance to the inequalities of urbanization. 

Castells’ states:

At the same time, the inner cities’ revolts sang again an old chant of the urban condition: the transformation of the space of exclusion into the space of freedom.  The ghetto territory became a significant space for the black community as the material basis of social organization, cultural identity, and political power (Castells, 1983, 67).

That ghettos were “both spaces of exclusion…[and]…spaces of freedom” (Castells, 1983, 67) suggests a dialectical relationship of urbanization and race: urbanization could not exist without marginalizing minority interests (politically, economically, socially, and spatially) and minority interests cannot exist without a normative framework exploiting  the accumulation and circulation of capital in the city.   The necessity of a marginalized race for the production of capitalist urbanization was explicated in the liberal/radical divide of the 1960s urban social movements.  Radical black movements (e.g., The Black Panthers) understood racism as a necessity in the political economy, and sought to make claims on the State through the establishment of 10 Points that would both liberate African-Americans from the effects of the racist-capitalist state and also reshape the distributive processes of the State to account for past inequities (Marable, 1988).  Liberal civil rights advocates, however, focused on gaining greater political access and legitimacy within the existing State apparatus, from where they could advance the interests of the African-American community to promote individual opportunity (Fusfeld and Bates, 1987; Countryman, 2007).  The division within the black urban social movement (which would eventually lead to its stagnation and depoliticization) explicates divisions in the ontology of race.    

            The grievances of the liberal civil rights movement embodied a lack of opportunity for African-Americans, and the passive role of the State in mitigating  the effects of capitalism on the African-American community.  The calls for technocratic solutions (Great Society Programs) and equal opportunity (Equal Opportunity Act of 1964) were rooted in the black middle class/white liberal ideology of the biological and class ontology of race.  While the liberal movement did not think Blacks were inferior per se, they did believe that racism and discrimination were the result of inferior values and misinformation regarding diversity (Countryman, 2007).  This approach to race as an external object of the capitalist State suggests their perspectives on race had biological and functionalist influences.

            The grievances of the radical civil rights movement – the Black Power Movement – revolved around the lack of community control, citizen participation, and racial self-determination (Countryman, 2007).  These grievances focus not so much on the marginalizing effects of urbanization on racial minorities, but rather on the processes that sustain this marginalization.  As mentioned earlier, the BPM viewed race as a necessity in the processes of urbanization and, as such, wanted only more control of the State mechanisms that controlled this process.

            A few conclusions from the above discussion: race plays a necessary role in the process of urbanization, and similarly, urbanization has a deterministic role on the ontology of race in the city.  From this process of urbanization, disparate social, economic, political, and spatial issues occur between minorities and Whites in the city.  The spatial disparities of African-Americans in the city are oppressively formed, yet provide sites of freedom from which residents can begin to challenge the fatal couplings of power and difference (the dialectic of race and urbanization).  The political approaches, grievances, and outcomes of these political challenges vary by the differences in ideologies on race in the city.  As the outcomes of the urban social movements suggest (liberal grievances embodied in Great Society programs, Equal Opportunity Act of 1964, Fair Housing of 1968, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, Community Reinvestment Act of 1977; radical grievances embodied in the Maximum Feasible Participation clause of the Community Action Agencies – under the Equal Opportunity Act of 1964), the liberal approaches to social movements, race, and the city are the ones that endure.  The programs that reflected the radical grievances were quickly dismantled after the civil disturbances ceased.  Thus, it appears the actually existing ontology of race is that it is a process external to urbanization, and State intervention would have little to no effect on racial inequality.  Further, the “rolling back” of the welfare state, the “rolling out” of market-driven entrepreneurial urban governance, and the “rolling-with” of the State in the non-regulated ideology of the free market in recent years (Keil, 2009) suggests the actually existing ontology of race is a result of the city transforming into an actually existing site of neoliberalism (Brenner and Theodore, 2002).  The response from African-Americans (and other minorities who have been marginally raced by urbanization) under neoliberalism is episodic, yet many embody the tenets of the radical movement of the 1960s (O’Neill, 2012).                    

Theory Exam - Part A

Introduction

The three central issues in planning and public policy revolve around the tension between the pursuit of the individual interest and the preservation of the well-being of the collective, best encapsulated as efficiency versus equality, respectively (Okun, 1975).  At its root, this tension arises from the dialectical relationship between the two issues: collective (which cannot exist without individuals) well-being allows for the pursuit of individual interests – the outcome of this pursuit is (ideally) for the promotion of the collective well being.  The tension emerges in the State’s provision of an equitable solution to absolve past inequities towards groups that does not infringe on the current opportunities of all individuals to pursue their interests equally.  The role of the State is to mitigate this tension (de Tocqueville, 2004; Dewey, 1954; Bentham, 1988; Mill, 2002), although the intent, forms, and processes of this mitigation vary over space and time.  To illustrate this tension, its origins, and its evolution, I will discuss three examples: from the classical literature, I will discuss the tension between State sovereignty and a centralized Federal government, from the planning literature, the characterization of property (land use, zoning models) and from the public policy literature, the distribution of rights and opportunity (embodied in civil rights legislation of the 1960s).  In discussing these three examples, I hope to explicate the centrality of this issue in planning and public policy throughout the nation’s history, and the ways it manifests into other relevant tensions in both fields.  I suggest that tensions between the individual and the collective embody these other relevant tensions allowing for it to be the penultimate issue in planning and public policy.      

States’ Rights and Strong Unions: Early Constitutional Tensions in the United States

            The formation of a society requires an eventual construction of a State apparatus to mitigate tensions between individual interests and collective well-being.  The formation of the democratic state in America, specifically, required the following fundamentals: the division and privatization of property and the equal dissemination of information to all citizens (de Tocqueville, 2004).  These attributes are necessary for the establishment and maintenance of a capitalist state (Jessop, 2002), under which democracy serves as an ideological necessity in order to control for capitalism’s destructive tendencies (Schumpeter, 1950).  Thus, the construction of a national capitalist-democratic constitution required the creation and enforcement of regulations over private property, economic exchange, defense, information, suffrage, and the freedoms from and liberties of the State and citizens within these domains (Hamilton et al, 1787).  The same tensions, which with the authors of The Federalist Papers wrestled, are frequently interpreted and reframed through the judiciary branch of the Federal government.  These reinterpretations of long-standing tensions create the variations over time between individual liberties and collective freedoms.

            The Federalist Papers provides a detailed outline of the necessity of the union (Federal government), in lieu of a contiguous association of sovereign nations (State governments, see Hamilton et al, 1787).  Hamilton describes the purpose of the 85-article document is as follows:

THE UTILITY OF THE UNION TO YOUR POLITICAL PROSPERITY

THE INSUFFICIENCY OF THE PRESENT CONFEDERATION

 TO PRESERVE THAT UNION  THE NECESSITY OF A GOVERNMENT AT LEAST EQUALLY ENERGETIC WITH THE ONE PROPOSED, TO THE ATTAINMENT OF THIS OBJECT  THE CONFORMITY OF THE PROPOSED CONSTITUTION TO THE TRUE PRINCIPLES OF REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT ITS ANALOGY TO YOUR OWN STATE CONSTITUTION and lastly, THE ADDITIONAL SECURITY WHICH ITS

ADOPTION WILL AFFORD TO THE PRESERVATION OF THAT SPECIES OF GOVERNMENT, TO LIBERTY, AND TO PROPERTY (Hamilton et al, 1992).         

As the above quote illustrates, this purpose of creating a new government revolved around the central provision of securing the collective freedoms and individual liberties with regards to property.  Yet the very need for this new form of government suggests the tensions between the existence of sovereign states (individual, or States, rights) and a centralized, Federal government (collective, and its necessary freedoms) are mediated through the constitution of the United States of America.  The combination of exceptional State rights within the framework of a ruling central Federal government (de Tocqueville, 2004) provides a variation similar to the judicial branch in the resolution of individual and collective tensions.  This variation, however, is spatial, and not temporal – as State responses to Federal regulations are frequently applied in the path-dependent context of a State’s political economic history.     

The establishment of a central government, regardless of whether States remain sovereign nations, requires the States to cede power in order to sustain the collective.  This cessation of individual power, whether at the State-Federal or Individual-City/State level, and the redistribution of power amongst the collective, is primarily conducted through the mechanism of taxation.  This taxation is largely determined by the productive value (i.e., the exchange value) of land.  Taxation is the primary mechanism through which the centralized government coerces, creates, and redistributes power among the sovereign states.  The process of accumulating and redistributing power via Federal taxation and expenditures is frequently dichotomized into a “liberal” and “conservative” approach – both of which reflect the amount of power States cede to the Federal government.  Liberal approaches to taxation concentrate more power in the Federal government to promote the well-being of the collective.  Conservative approaches to taxation concentrate more power in state sovereignty, preserving a greater liberty to pursue State interests that would eventually benefit the well being of the collective nation.  The struggle over liberal and conservative approaches to taxation (and by extension, the power relations between States and the Federal government) has varied over time, typically depending on the status of the national economy.  In times of economic crisis, the government engages in a liberal approach to this tension, while during times of economic booms, the government engages in a conservative approach. 

            Contemporarily, State-Federal tensions manifest themselves in responses to new immigration patterns since the 1980s (Raphael and Stoll, 2010) and the recent foreclosure crisis of 2007 (Crump et al, 2008).  The influx of a bi-furcated immigrant labor supply in the United States has created tensions between States and the Federal government in the creation of a comprehensive immigration policy.  States that attract low-skill immigrants (primarily those in the South, Southwest and Western areas of the US) have created aggressive policies that restrict immigration and penalize employers who utilize illegal labor pools (Archibold, 2010).   Yet moves toward a comprehensive immigration policy are stymied as States that benefit from high-skill immigrant employees are less interested in restricting immigration.  Similarly, States largely dependent on the housing and construction industries are less interested in pursuing comprehensive housing policy that would assist borrowers affected in the foreclosure crisis.  Increased banking and lending regulation would tighten housing markets, and hurt State economies that are dependent on them (again, usually those in the South, West, and Southwest).  These contemporary State-Federal tensions, in which the benefits of sovereign states pursuing their interests are weighed against the costs to the strength of the collective union, are nothing more than new manifestations of the original constitutional tensions.

            These tensions appear in planning and policy education with regards to the implications on social justice in the city and social welfare policy, respectively.  The ideological shift to “entrepreneurial” governance through the 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA) has devolved social welfare from the Federal to the State level, which has greatly diminished the collective well being of minority interests.  The shifting power relation between States and Federal governments have created new roles for planners and policymakers, creating new debates on when and how planners should intervene (Campbell and Fainstein, 2003) and the sustenance of social welfare policy for minority interests in a restructuring political economy (O’Connor, 2001).  These tensions will appear in greater detail in the next two sections.    

Urbanization: The Struggle Between Use and Exchange Values in the American Industrial City

As mentioned earlier, de Tocqueville states the requirements for a democracy include the privatization of property and the equal dissemination of information to all citizens (de Tocqueville, 2004).  The former, property privatization, assumes the characterization of property is static across this newly formed public.  That is, the collective use value of land can be easily translated into apportioned lots quantified by an exchange value.  The assumption itself has an underlying assumption that the calculus used to quantify and the means to distribute property are static across the nation.  These assumptions, along with the characterization of property, are challenged and reinforced through urban political battles, and the outcomes of these battles determine the “production, management and use of the urban built environment” (Harvey, as quoted in Foglesong, 2003).  Thus, urbanization occurs in both the processes and outcomes of public discussion over the characterization of property (Krueckeberg, 1995).   

To understand the valuation and distribution of land, or property, is to understand the nature of power in the capitalist society.  While the valuation of land was first determined by use (e.g., European settlers determined their use of the land as more valuable than the use of it by Native Americans, see Krueckeberg, 1995), the construction of a land market for private property spurred the speculation on land, and the ability to profit from land as a commodity (Krueckeberg, 1995) using exchange valuation.  Very quickly, the concentration of land, wealth, and power created a “ruling elite” of bourgeois landowners; these very same elite went on to establish the constituting documents and mechanisms of the nation, as discussed in the previous section.  The protection of private property, or the protection of wealth and power, influences this constitution, and the State apparatus was constructed to protect and sustain it (de Tocqueville, 2004).           

            The challenges of urbanization are manifested in the effects of industrialization.  Cities, as the primary sites of the national economy during the US Industrial Revolution (approx 1820-1880), attracted significant populations who formed the fundamental unit of the national economy, the household (Foucault, 1991).  The Industrial City government required a new function in its State apparatus, one that would mediate the individual and collective tensions of land use in the industrial city.  The tension emerges over the effects of the individual use of the collective land of the government (the jurisdictional boundaries of the City), what Foglesong terms the “property contradiction” (Foglesong, 2003, 104).  The apparatus created to mediate these tensions to provide the maximum individual liberty over private property while maintaining the well being of the collective, public spaces and facilities is the local planning department. 

The classification, use, and valuation of land are necessary given the “uniqueness of land as a commodity, namely the fact that land is not transportable, which makes it inherently subject to externality effects” (Harvey, as paraphrased by Foglesong, 2003).  These externality effects are best understood as “the tragedy of the commons” (Hardin, 1968), which explicates the difference between the private benefits of an individual’s use of land and the collective costs of that individual’s use.   These differences are exacerbated by the crisis tendencies of capitalist urbanization, which requires the State control of land to sustain the circulation of capital (roadways, infrastructure, public housing, and other collective goods).  Planners, designated mediators of these contradictions have two challenges: the State apparatus (which protects the interests of the ruling elite) is the framework from which they must mediate tensions between the landed and non-landed classes (Foglesong, 2003), which presents a challenge as these two interests typically have different perspectives of land valuation; and the necessity and extension of planners as interveners/activists to control for the property and capitalist-democratic contradictions presents a challenge similar to the liberal/conservative dichotomy described in the previous section.  These tensions appeared in challenges over slum clearance and gentrification in the city (the extent the State mitigates the effects of private land use on the ability of the collective to sustain the social reproductive functions of land) and the changing ideologies/ongoing debates of planners and citizen participation over the years (Campbell and Fainstein, 2003).  Planning education today focuses more on the “capitalist-democratic” tension of planning – what are the roles of planners in mediating the tensions of a capitalist state through land use and control, to what end should this mediation seek to achieve, and what groups are included and what processes are used to determine the nature and outcome of planning as an intervention?

Inclusion and Democracy: Privileges and Human Rights in US Civil Rights Legislation

The creation of the national constitution, the distribution of land, and the construction of the Capitalist State were normatively conducted by and for Protestant, white males.  Marable states,

More than any other modern nation in the world, with the possible exception of South Africa, the United States developed from the beginning a unique socio-economic structure and a political apparatus which was simultaneously racist, stubbornly capitalist, and committed to a limited form of bourgeois democracy: a racist/capitalist state (Marable, 1988, 2).

Religious, racial, ethnic, and gender minorities were all explicitly excluded from the rights and freedoms afforded through the formation of the United States.  Thus, political battles over this exclusive construction of the State (in both its institutions and processes) primarily revolve around creating a more inclusive State, which afford equal liberties and freedoms for all individuals (Young, 2000).  These battles are fought at local, State, and Federal levels of government, yet the successes at the Federal level are necessary for universal application.  The problem, which is itself an inherent weakness of the sovereign State/collective Federal government, is the relative weakness of the Federal government compared to its sovereign states (de Tocqueville, 2004).  That is, while the political success at the Federal level guarantees universal application to that particular political interest, the ability for the Federal government to enforce this application is challenged by the State’s sovereign right to resist or counter this application.  These challenges generally occur over the perceived minimization of State sovereignty through the further cessation of its power, or, a Federal challenge to a State’s status quo.  An example of this tension from Federal challenges to State power is the African-American Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s. 

 The struggle for African-American civil rights (suffrage, property, education, and employment rights) began immediately after the failure of post-bellum Reconstruction in the South.  Reconstruction, the ultimate ascension of the Federal will over State sovereignty, afforded equal civil liberties for recently emancipated African-Americans in post-bellum America.  Reconstruction produced the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments that guaranteed African-American equality in the United States.  However, the Compromise of 1877 effectively ended the Reconstruction Era, as the election of President Hayes was predicated on the removal of Federal troops from the formerly Confederate States, and the return of these States’ sovereignty.  The backlash of the brief decade of African-American equality by the former white planting elite was the institution of Jim Crow in the south, which constructed a series of State enforced limitations to the Reconstruction-era amendments.  The sharecropping system created a new form of servitude that the thirteenth amendment prohibited, Jim Crow segregation weakened the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment, and state poll taxes nullified African-American suffrage rights.  Thus, although African-Americans have had universal civil rights since the 1870s, the strong Federal enforcement to guarantee those rights was not realized until nearly a century later (Marable, 1988).

Affording minority groups universally guaranteed rights is challenging to the existing order of the sovereign mechanisms that create and distribute political and economic power.  The pursuit of expanding the rights of minority groups excluded from the capitalist State involves a process of inclusive (deliberative) democracy, which utilizes the inclusion of interest groups to democratically define “socially just outcomes” and create State mechanisms that would produce and sustain these outcomes (Young, 2000).  While the processes and goals of deliberative democracy produce a more equal collective, the trade-off of the efficiency of representative democracy is significant (Okun, 1975).                   

Housing the Poor Exam

yes, the “writes” portion of Drakewrites is actually happening people! housing exam - not too different from the race and UD exam - very confusing, but interesting to look at from a policy perspective

Introduction

            This paper will provide a historical analysis of housing-based social movements, framed around the ideological phases (and debates) of housing policy in the United States, with specific focus on private homeowner organizing  and the tenant councils of public housing developments.  I will examine the ways in which housing-based social movements are formed by and have effects on US housing policy.  From the male-dominated tenant councils of the 1940s that worked largely in accordance with the “benevolent state” (Marcuse, 1978) to the antagonizing dynamic between African Americans and white homeowners in the 1940s and 1950s, ideological shifts in Federal housing policy (Hays, 1995; Landis and McClure, 2010; Marcuse, 2001 Smith, 2006) have had direct implications on the form and function of housing social movements.  Similarly, the grievances of neighborhood organizing and urban social movements are reflected in US housing policy.  The ideological shifts are able to transform the activist response in public housing given the program’s marginalization within the scope of US social welfare policy.  This marginalization allows for public housing to be “more malleable in the face of ideological shifts than other parts of the welfare state in the United States” (Hackworth, 2005, 32).  Similarly, the shifts between conservative and liberal ideology in housing policy creates new issues within the longstanding homeowner movements (Hays, 1995).

The history of tenant organizing is rooted in the processes of urbanization in the industrial city (Engels, 1995).  The need for tenants to organize against private landlords (and to an extent, real estate developers, banking interests, and the local State) emerges during the inherent crisis tendencies of the capitalist economy (Marcuse, 1971).  The incoherency of US housing policy - with its contradictions, its privileging of homeownership as the ideal for housing tenure, and failure to address the housing question (Engels, 1995) of providing affordable, safe housing choices for the working class - provides radical spaces of resilience for low-income and working class residents (Dreier, 1982).  While other housing interests (real estate, banking, development, construction, private homeowners) had inserted themselves into the “growth machine” of US industrial cities (Logan and Molotch, 1987), private tenant organizing was episodic, appearing in moments where the crisis of the State (Jessop, 2002) was at its peak (Marcuse, 1971). 

            From this radical and confrontational history of tenant organizing in US cities, I will examine its effect on public housing organizing, via public housing tenant councils.  Public housing tenant councils are unique tenant movements as a result of their positioning in the political economy of housing.  Marcuse writes:

While technically the 2,800,000 tenants of public housing projects throughout the country pay their rents to more than 1,900 local autonomous housing authorities, their projects are built with federal funds, controlled by federal regulations, subsidized under federal formulas, and administered subject to federal standards.  The resources, the political sensitivity, the number of tenants, the visibility were all there.  (Marcuse, 1971, 51)

Public housing developments, particularly the high-rise towers characteristic of family-style buildings, are multifunctional spaces in the urban environment (Williams, 2004).  With the State as landlord, the actual space of a public housing building contains private individuals (residents), publics (tenant councils), and the State (the local housing authority).  The continuity of the space of the public housing development provides endurance for the public housing tenant council as a political movement, unlike their private counterparts (Marcuse, 1971).    

            Private homeowner movements are amongst the long-standing social movements in the United States.  Venkatesh equates property ownership with “Thomas Jefferson’s cradle of democracy” (Venkatesh, 2000, 13), a sentiment that is repeated in virtually all of the founding documents of the United States.  The longevity of homeowner movements in the United States is rooted in the effects of the two-tier housing policy – consistent and greater support for private homeownership combined with episodic “fixes” for the rental market (Hays, 1995).   

            The incoherency of housing policy discussed earlier is a reflection of the multiple interests and effects of housing markets in the United States.  As it stands, there is no comprehensive federal housing policy, but merely a combination of regulations, guidelines, codes, and funding streams dedicated to controlling the effects of the housing market (Landis and McClure, 2010).  A crisis in the housing market translates into a crisis of the capitalist state (Engels, 1995; Marcuse, 1978, Foucault, 1991), thus housing policies are typically passed during times of economic crisis as a spatial or temporal fix (Schwartz, 2010; Hays, 1995; Jessop, 2003).   For simplicity, housing policies in this paper are classified as either “liberal” or “conservative,” a dichotomy that is frequently used in the literature (Hays, 1995; Marcuse, 2001).  The ideologies behind these “fixes” determine the ideologies of Federal housing policy.  Further, the shifting role of the State in housing provision has translated into shifting forms of organizing around housing.  Housing policy, as a macroeconomic, social welfare, or community development policy (Hays, 1995) creates institutional arrangements from which social movements emerge.  Per Fox-Piven and Cloward, the structure, uses, and processes of an institution form the grievances, membership, and resilience of a social movement (Fox Piven and Cloward, 1979).  Thus, I will examine the dialectic between US housing policy and housing-based social movements.

Tenant Organizing in the City and the Origins of US Housing Policy

            Tenant organizing in the city began immediately after the United States’ urban areas underwent industrialization.  The demanding pressures of capitalism on urban space created sprawling slums around industrializing areas (Schwartz, 2010).  State housing reform emerged from public health issues, as unsafe and unsanitary conditions destabilized the low-wage labor pool (Marcuse, 1978).  The private philanthropic efforts, later followed by bureaucratic social worker efforts, of tenement housing were paternalistic (an individualistic and moral ontology of poverty) and failed to address the structural issues (the crisis tendencies of capitalism) that led to substandard housing in the industrial city (Schwartz, 2002).  Tenant organizing in reform housing was top-down, professionalized, and encouraged to “Americanize” the highly ethnic, recently immigrated working-class population.  The efforts of “Housers” and other progressive reformers to improve working class housing conditions were realized in  the rash of tenement code restrictions and rent control laws across the nation.  Per progressive economist Edith Elmer Wood, restrictive legislation “may forbid the bad house, but it does not provide the good one” (Wood, as quoted in Radford, 2004).  However, tenant-driven organizing (i.e., grassroots) was limited to ethnic organizations in major cities (i.e., New York), and successes against the State were episodic (Schwartz, 2002).    

            A more structural, comprehensive approach to tenant organizing around housing and social issues occurred followed the arrival of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) during the State crisis of the Great Depression in the 1920s-1930s.  During this time of mass social unrest, radical community groups infiltrated ethnic organizations to mobilize the unemployed against the changing economy of cities. The Great Depression shifted the scale of social welfare policies from local to national due to the widespread effects of capital immobility in the nation.  Deindustrialization of urban areas limited profits and weakened the support for philanthropic reformist housing.  While both Hoover and Roosevelt initially responded to the Depression with public incentives to stimulate private investment and capital mobility, these policies largely failed and the economy continued to contract (Fisher, 1984; Radford, 2004).  The pervasiveness of the economic and social problems of the Great Depression shifted the ideology to a more structural ontology of poverty.  This “crisis” of the state required State intervention and the creation of a welfare state.  

The 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (creator of the Public Works Administration), the 1937 Wagner-Steagall Act (public housing), the 1933 Home Owners Loan Corporation Act are the earliest contradictions of Federal housing policy.  The Public Works Administration (PWA) started its Housing Division to bolster employment rates while simultaneously providing affordable housing.  The secondary role of housing stymied the longevity of the program, however the Housing Division’s effects on urban planning, public housing, and citizen participation are long standing (Radford, 2004).  Similarly, the Home Owners Loan Corporation Act, equally short in duration, has had longstanding effects on urbanization, housing finance, and residential segregation.  The Wagner-Steagall Act, the first official national housing policy, provided standards for local housing authorities to create, construct, and manage public rental housing.  While each policy had significant effects on the housing market - PWA built nearly 30,000 units of low-income rental housing, HOLC provided new home mortgages and capital for the secondary mortgage market and the Wagner Act produced thousands of housing units – their primary purpose was the curtailment of social disorder through the provision of steady and high-wage employment.  One aspect of housing policy remains consistent and comprehensive to the present: it is a two-tier strategy, privileging and disproportionately subsidizing private homeownership while marginalizing and underfunding rental and public housing (Radford, 2004). 

CPUSA created a new ideological shift in tenant organizing, shifting away from social and “patriotic” activities, and moving towards more political analysis and empowerment of working class communities.  The success of CPUSA, particularly its longevity in neighborhood organizing, stems from its political analysis of social problems in communities, in addition to its focus on translocal issues, which effectively liberated community organizing from the boundaries of a local neighborhood (Fisher, 1984).  The translocal emphasis shifted the burden of poverty from the individual to the collective, emphasizing the structural nature of substandard housing.  CPUSA’s “Bread and Butter” programmatic strategy of housing, social welfare, race relations, and translocal mobilization was largely successful due to the party’s ability to link workplace and community goals. CPUSA’s ability to foster national movements from different communities disembedded the local housing struggles to the national level.  Coupled with the “professionalized” community organizers’ (Housers/Progressives and New Dealers) focus on receiving greater assistance from the Federal government to mitigate social ills, the Second New Deal spurred policies that bureaucratized many of the radical community movements of the time.  The Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Works Progress Administration, Wagner-Steagall Act, and National Labor Relations Act bureaucratized (and de-politicized) CPUSA’s grievances against the State.  In spite of its less visible role following the successes of the New Deal and the rise of the Red Scare (Parson, 2005), CPUSA provided the necessary organizing skills, strategies, and grievances for another type of tenant organizing in the city: tenant councils in public housing developments.     

Housing Movements, 1937-1949

            Marcuse considers the production of public housing in New York City as a  “radical” political shift (Marcuse, 1986, 354) - not for its architecture, its social services, quantity of units constructed, or communal living - but for its provision of a public good (housing) for middle-class, working families.  The provision of housing by the government is the first shift in ideology for housing policy.  Prior to the Great Depression, the United States government had operated in a limited role, preferring to interfere only when the “free market” (private firms and individuals) was incapable of sustaining itself.  This notion of government intervention is considered a “conservative” ideology of State policy (Hays, 1995, 20), and coincides with a laissez-faire approach to the economy.  Following the Great Depression ( a virtual collapse of the economy, due to the instability of the housing and banking sectors), the government suspended laissez-faire and conservative ideology to form the liberal Keynesian Welfare Nation-State (Jessop, 2002).  Using Keynesian economic maxims of full employment and social safety nets, the Second New Deal provided a wealth of programs that would simultaneously provide employment and social welfare for “deserving” citizens (Katz, 1989).  It is important to note the caveat in who received aid during the New Deal: while recently liberated (white) women benefitted from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Social Security Administration programs, blacks were largely ineligible as New Deal programs did not include domestic and agricultural workers.  Both groups had recently been afforded suffrage rights (in 1913 and 1870, respectively), yet this suffrage had yet to translate into political power for African-Americans.   Given the racialized division of labor in the United States, these two occupational roles were the filled almost entirely by African-American women and men, respectively (Manning Thomas, 1997).  Thus, while the ideology of Federal policy had shifted to a liberal framework, the conservative racial ideology that marginalized African-Americans politically and economically remained.  This conservative racial approach has created severely unequal social, economic, and political outcomes for African-Americans (Omi and Winant, 1996).  These inequities manifest themselves in later decades within public housing tenant councils, as well as their surrounding (African-American) communities (Hirsch, 1998; Sugrue, 1996; Vale, 2002).

            Within the framework of a liberal housing policy, we return to the formation of tenant councils in the early public housing developments, prior to the 1949 Housing Act.  Due to the targeted, functional purpose of housing policy (as primarily macroeconomic and secondarily social welfare, see Hays, 1995), the selection process for tenants was limited to working class ethnic whites, war veterans, and defense workers (Radford, 2004).  Tenant councils worked in concert with the State during this period towards a process of Americanization and citizenship.  Citizen participation was encouraged, similar to the programs of the PWA Housing Division program.  The activities of the early public housing tenant councils were an important first step towards the spatial assimilation of ethnic white residents.  Parson frames this era of planning and housing production as “community modernism” (Parson, 2005).  This brief era is a liberal approach to housing policy, where housing as a community development and social welfare policy take priority over housing as a macroeconomic policy (Hays, 1995; Parson, 2005).             

            The experiment of “community modernism” ended shortly before the 1949 Housing Act (Parson, 2005).  The pressures of integration were overwhelming in major cities as African-American populations continued to grow.  The nationwide failure of public housing integration (as witnessed in the Sojourner Truth and Airport Homes’ riots), created a new pattern of black urbanization.  Instead of engaging in the political battles and communal riots to expand their place in the City, African-American residents were contained and isolated into the new vertical Black Belts of industrial cities.   These vertical Black Belts were the public housing towers constructed following the 1949 Housing Act.  The “racializing” of public housing (and poverty) intersects with the marginalization of the program in the scope of housing policy.  The contradictions of the 1949 Housing Act suggest a return to the conservative ideology of housing policy in the United States.  When combined with the conservative ideology towards race and poverty – public housing becomes a marginalized program filled with marginalized people.  As the Golden Age of 1950s prosperity creates new patterns of growth (suburbanization, see Beauregard, 2006), African-Americans in the city attempted to push the boundaries of the Color Line that divided the private housing market.  These battles over property and race were formative in both the liberal 1948 repeal of restrictive covenants in property titles (Shelley v Kraemer), and the conservative local administration of mortgages.       

Communal Riots: African Americans Toe the Color Line

The communal riots over access to neighborhoods, public space, and housing (Hirsch, 1983) created social instabilities the Federal government was forced to address through various legislative action and programmatic implementation.  However, during the lag between Federal decision-making and Federal action, the private market intervened and exploited this tension to create a profit.   

   As African-Americans spilled out of the boundaries of the “Black Belts” of cities, realtors took advantage of the rising fears of nearby white areas attempting to protect their color line.  The practice of “blockbusting” involves realtors soliciting homeowners in all-white neighborhoods to sell their homes (typically well under the value of the property) utilizing the threat of African-Americans moving in.  Per the conservative ideology of race relations, African-Americans within the boundaries of a neighborhood could restrict capital into that neighborhood, thus decreasing the value of the property.  Upon making the sale, realtors would either convert the home into a “kitchenette” style of apartment (multiple rooms with shared kitchen and bathroom facilities) or “sell” the home to an African-American on contract (Satter, 2009).  The creation of the housing contract was the beginning of the exploitation of the differing economic markets between whites and African-Americans.  As banks were not lending to African-Americans (as they were not deemed credit-worthy), they were unable to obtain FHA guaranteed mortgages and experience socioeconomic mobility.  For those who were able to save enough for outright purchase, they too were excluded from the modern housing market, as amortized home financing (via the thirty year mortgage) and the mortgage interest deduction (from the Internal Tax Code) had greatly inflated housing prices.  Therefore, the majority of African-Americans looking to purchase a home had to do so on the contract market.  

Real estate speculators held contracts, as they were typically the same individuals who engaged in blockbusting (Satter, 2009).  The realtor held the deed to the property and issued a contract to the “homeowner”, setting up a payment plan (inclusive of interest payments) the homeowner would pay until the balance was settled, wherein he or she would receive the deed to the home.  In the interim, homeowners were expected to make their own repairs, and were subject to any number of fees and increases in payments and interest rates.  This market was unregulated, and any disagreements were settled in civil court.  Consequently, contract-holders were able to procure large profits from properties they helped to devalue, as African-Americans poured out capital while failing to build wealth.  Contracts compounded the problems of the inner city, as families took in boarders to augment their household incomes to make contract payments.  The overcrowding of the housing stock (which, as a result of restricted capital flows, had not been properly maintained in some time) expedited the deteriorated homes in urban areas, further devaluing properties, and increasing public health and safety issues.  The deteriorating homes, located in predominantly African-American areas, fueled the association between blacks and property devaluation, causing greater social tensions (communal riots) over housing in urban areas.  

The Supreme Court intervened in housing policy through the Shelley v Kraemer decision of 1948, which ruled residential covenants as unconstitutional and unenforceable (Satter, 2009).  However, the institutionalized racism from the 1934 Housing Act (which predicated the issuance of FHA-guaranteed mortgages to areas with restrictive covenants that prevented integrated communities) perpetuated in local real estate and lending practices (Satter, 2009; Sugrue, 1996; Hirsch, 1998).  These communal riots for access to open housing, and the tensions between African-American and white homeowners would continue throughout the 1960s in the North and Midwest.  These battles for open housing and access worked in concert with the anti-Jim Crow battles in the South.  Together, these movements would coalescence in the 1960s as African-Americans across the nation conducted a series of “commodity riots” against white-owned (and black-occupied) business and residences.  The contradictions of the liberal social policies and conservative racist ideology in the United States created new institutional spaces of resilience for African-American housing-based social movements.  And this strategy allowed them to make claims on the State in the 1960s.  However, the immediate response to communal riots, integration tensions, and housing shortages was the passage of the 1949 Housing Act.

Housing Movements: 1949-1960

            The 1949 Housing Act was the shift to the conservative ideology of housing policy.  Title I (slum clearance), removed the equivalent elimination clause of the 1934 and 1937 Acts, which replaced demolished slum housing with a new unit.  Title III provided funding for the construction of 800,000 units of public housing.  However, due to active propaganda from the “landed interests” of the real estate, banking, and development industries, very little public housing was built in the 1950s as the “Red Scare” had rebranded the communal modernism experiment of active public housing developments into “hotbeds of socialism” (Parson, 2005, 28).  Further, Title II provided increased funding for the FHA.  As mentioned earlier, the FHA during the 1934 Housing Act had explicit guidelines that enforced residential segregation through the provision of mortgages to neighborhoods/properties with residential covenants.  In spite of the removal of this language through the Shelley v Kraemer ruling, this conservative housing policy did nothing to ameliorate the pass inequities of the earlier act.  In fact, the failure of integration attempts in public housing, as well as the explosive violence of communal riots in the North and Midwest, likely led to the race-neutral language of the 1949 Housing Acts, and later acts, which would perpetuate these residential inequities.    

The marginalization of African American communities, and its residents, was the result of the 1954 Housing Act and the Urban Renewal program.  These conservative programs privileged landed interests, particularly commercial and residential real estate developers in the deindustrializing city.  This policy was intended to create new spaces of investment by “renewing” (demolishing) the less profitable and marginalized areas in and around the Central Business District (CBD).  It is in this act we see the end of housing production as a social welfare policy, as this marks the first turn away from US housing policy’s attempt to solve the “housing question.”  The program cleared hundreds of thousands of homes in predominantly African-American communities and re-segregated this group into marginal, isolated areas in the deindustrializing city.  Unlike previous slum clearance/public housing relocations, this transition did not allow the relocated group to make claims on the State through newfound citizenship.  The effect, in the case of African-Americans, was quite the opposite.  While both African-Americans and the ethnic whites that inhibited the slums in both rounds of slum clearance lost the use and (partial) exchange value of their homes, the PWA and early public housing developments were planned within the liberal ideology of community modernism (Parson, 2005).  Thus, even as the ethnic, working-class whites were losing their homes, they were advancing towards the American concept of “citizenship” – active participation (patriotism through engaging with the State), equal access to public amenities and goods (residential rights), and gainful employment (individual achievement).  The public housing developments that would become the “second ghetto” - or contiguous tracts of impoverished, African-American communities (Hirsch, 1998) – would have none of these citizenship programs.  Thus, in racializing public housing, African-Americans were made invisible to the State, as marginalized as the land on which their communities were rebuilt.  This marginalization from the conservative policy of the 1954 Housing Act transformed the purpose of African-American political struggles, and was finally manifested in the social movements of the 1960s.   

Housing Movements: 1960s-1970s

            During the 1960s, public housing had already begun to deteriorate in the major cities.  Physical conditions of high-rise towers reflected the social and economic conditions of the surrounding neighborhoods.  Tenant councils organized to conduct rent strikes – an economic protest against the State as landlord, and a return to the more radical tenant organizing in the industrializing city (Marcuse, 1971).  The most successful rent strike, the 1964 strike in the Pruitt-Igoe development of St. Louis, lasted nearly nine months and resulted in rent caps for tenants that reduced the rent burden for low-income families.  These rent caps were later codified in the 1969 Brooke Amendment that capped public housing rents at 25 percent of tenant income.  In spite of this success, immediately after the end of the rent strike, the housing authority began depopulating the towers inhabited by protesters as a decade of deferred maintenance had rendered the development inhabitable.  In 1972, the recently formed Department of Housing and Urban Development would demolish all thirty-three towers.  The implosion of Pruitt-Igoe remains one of the most enduring images of public housing in the United States, and is largely symbolic of the trajectory of the program – popularly supported, marginalized into failure, and eventually destroyed.   

            While failures to integrate public housing in the 1950s created segregated public housing developments, the population underwent substantial demographic changes, in a process similar to what was happening in all US cities.  Whites were leaving the city and obtaining private homes in suburban areas (Beauregard, 2006).  Weakened tax bases in urban areas contracted the local housing authority funds available to maintain the rigorous background checks, maintenance standards, and staffing requirements to attend to building structural and social conditions  (Vale, 2003).  These problems spilled over from the inner city, as contracting public services and increasing unemployment accompanied the nation wide urban deindustrialization process.  Social disturbances erupted in major cities across the nation in the early 1960s, in the first wave of “commodity riots” (Hirsch, 1998, 4) of African-American residents against white-owned businesses and property in their neighborhoods.  To counter this new crisis of the state (see Sugrue, 1996), the State responded with a wave of liberal urban programs and reforms: The 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, and the 1969 Brooke Amendment .  These policies had a direct effect on not only the form and legitimacy of African-American housing movements, but also on the demographic makeup of the public housing tenant councils (Hays, 1995; Parson, 2005).  Public housing tenant councils, after the Great Society programs, created poorer, female-dominated tenant councils.  This combination of marginalized groups (the poor, African-Americans, women) greatly impaired the legitimacy of public tenant councils (Williams, 2004). 

            Maximum Feasible Participation (MFP), part of the Economic Opportunity Act’s Community Action Agency (CAA) is the immediate impact of the success of the urban social movements.  The liberal ideology behind these programs were the opportunity for African-Americans to finally get their “New Deal” from which they were excluded from in the 1930s.  The programs, created to de-politicize the social movements by using the form and grievances to create bureaucratic extensions of the State, formalized the ability for African-Americans to make claims on the State.  Similarly, the grievances of the commodity riots that expressed the tightening labor market in urban areas were de-politicized through the creation of formal job training programs VISTA and Job Corps.  However, as discussed earlier, the deindustrialization and restructuring of the metropolitan economy minimized the impact of these programs.  Following centuries of labor market exclusion and discrimination, these liberal policies provided outdated skills and menial work.  The continued marginalization of the African-American labor force through Federal policy manifests into decreasing social and economic capital in these areas, and presents a significant obstacle to claims of citizenship.           

            The 1968 Housing Act contained Section 223(e), yet another attempt to liberalize the conservative housing policies of the past thirty years.  Section 223(e) contained explicit language that would allow for the issuance of FHA mortgages in areas considered blighted within urban areas (Hays, 1995).  While this policy did provide substantial freedom for middle-class African-Americans to enter the private housing market, there was little capital for home purchasing in the domestic markets due to a tightening national economy due to a rising trade deficit (Stein, 2010).  Similar to the inadequate provision of social programs for inner-city communities to the restructuring urban economy, these policies were ill suited for advancing the social and economic status of African-Americans, and transformed liberal policies into token policies.  The ineffectiveness of this, and the Fair Housing Act, translated into the passage of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), and the 1988 Fair Housing Amendments.  These liberal policies were more reflective of the restructuring of the local state and home lending industry.  Citizens were extended the rights to participate in bank merger approvals (CRA), provided standardized information on lending in their neighborhoods with which they could challenge bank mergers in CRA hearings (HMDA), and extended the force of bureaucratic administration, (Foucault, 1991) through the establishment of an enforcement agency for fair housing (Landis and McClure, 2010).  In spite of these liberal attempts to counteract residential segregation, these policies all fall short in their goals (Sidney, 2003).  This shortfall has translated into new forms of social movements around housing, primarily one that is inclusive of legal and financial experts, as opposed to primarily planning and community development experts (Sidney, 2003).  These technical approaches (as opposed to radical) are reflective of (and reflected in) the “shifting mottos” of contemporary social movements (Mayer, 2009). 

The 1969 Brooke Amendment created demographic changes to public housing populations (Vale, 2003).  The Brooke Amendment capped tenant rent share at 25 percent of their household income.  White working class residents, no longer protected by the rent regulation of fixed rents, left public housing to the extremely low-income.  Similarly, black working class families, liberated from the discrimination of the private housing market following the 1968 Fair Housing Act, also left public housing.  Changes in AFDC and public housing admissions increased the number of female-headed households in public housing developments.  The racialization and feminization of poverty that emerged from the 1960 housing policies marked the beginning of the end of popular support for tenant housing.  The onset of the 1970s, full of stagflation, tax revolts, and increasing distrust of the Federal government, created the perfect storm for a conservative shift in Federal housing policy, and the return to a laissez-faire economic ideology (i.e., neoliberalism). 

Property Tax Revolts: Annexation and the Lakewood Plan in California

            While much of this paper focuses on housing social movements for African-Americans, I would not like to minimize the power of the (largely white) suburban homeowner movement, which reached its frenzy in 1970s California (Davis, 1991; Self, 2003).  These property tax revolts reflect many of the changes in US housing policy, as well as the contraction of the economy in the 1970s.  Further, as this paper has shown, the active privileging of white, homeownership as the “cradle of democracy” (Venkatesh, 2000, 13), and its close ties to citizenship, has provided these movements with a great deal of power and legitimacy within US housing policy.  This movement is also characterized by its longevity, and substantial control over land use (both formally and informally).  Formally, many leaders of the suburban homeowner movement enter directly into local and State politics. At the local level, they participate in growth machines that direct capital to create the highest and best use for land through a return on investment mechanism. (Logan and Molotch, 1987)  Informally, these groups control local land use through legal and illegal tactics to prevent racial and ethnic minorities from entering their private enclaves (Davis, 1991).  Before the tax revolts of the 1970s, these groups actively resisted integration and fair housing – for similar reasons of ethnic, working-class whites in the 1940s North.  Not only were they losing their claims to citizenship through perceived property devaluation from homeownership in an integrated neighborhood, but the use of Federal policy to achieve such an end spurred the ideological shift in this movement to keep government out, and keep social welfare decisions to local government (Davis, 1991; Miller, 2003).  Thus, the Great Society programs of the 1960s, in their failures, created new forms and strategies for both African-American (urban) housing-based social movements and white (suburban) homeownership movements.  I hesitate to call the latter a “social movement;” per Castells, social movements make claims on the State to actively change the existing State institutions.  From my interpretation, I would suggest these suburban movements are more interested in maintaining their power and privilege within the State.  They are examples of the practice and maintenance of “actually existing democracy” (Fraser, 1990)

            The suburban homeownership movements produced two significant contributions to housing policy, and the ideology behind it during the 1970s.  As mentioned above, the ideology during the 1970s movements was to prevent the inefficiencies of the Keynesian Welfare Nation-State through annexation (i.e., the Lakewood Plan, see Davis, 1991) and fixed property tax rates (the 1978 Peoples Initiative to Limit Property Taxation, Proposition 13 of the California Constitution, see Davis, 1991; Self, 2003).  To understand the translation of suburban politics into the ideological shift to neoliberalism, entrepreneurialism, and privatization at the Federal, State, and Local levels, I refer to Miller:

First, their politics have been overwhelmingly conservative in many countries (e.g. Walks, 2004). In most of North America and Great Britain the suburbs have become the ‘bourgeois utopias’ (Fishman, 1987), a realm characterized by withdrawal from public life and emphasis on private familial relations. Suburban conservatism has surfaced not only in electoral politics, but also in reactionary and exclusionary social movements(McGirr, 2002). Second, the rise of conservative suburban politics has been based not on a politics of collective consumption and use value, but on the promotion of private consumption and exchange value. This emphasis on private consumption and exchange value represents a dramatic political shift. And third, the growth of the conservative suburbs has provided the electoral base for a broad neoliberal politics, one that has had devastating effects on central cities, social programs, public infrastructure, public space and the public realm generally….under neoliberalism we are seeing a fundamental shift away from communicatively rational, democratic forms of social action coordination based on the model of the (urban) public citizen, toward more instrumentally and strategically rational forms of social action coordination based on the model of the (suburban) private consumer (Miller, 2006, 209-210).

 As this (extensive) quote illustrates, the suburban movements (rooted in the open housing resistance of the 1940s and 1950s) provided the temporal fix the Federal government required to extract itself from the crisis of the 1970s Keynesian Welfare Nation-State. Providing support for the “broad neoliberal politics” (Miller, 2006, 209) allows the retrenchment and devolution of the welfare state and the facilitation of “entrepreneurial” governance to the local level.  These policies were “rolled out” directly into urban areas – Nixon enacted the 1973 moratorium on the construction of public housing, and passed the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974.  The HCDA included Section 8 (now Housing Choice Voucher) program that transferred the burden of the housing question to the private market with generous subsidies.  While not wholly out of the housing business, the creation of Section 8 marks what Smith calls “the neoliberalist turn in public housing policy” (Smith, 2006, 28).  The effects of this neoliberalist turn on the form and strategies of housing-based social movements are discussed in the next section.

Contemporary Housing Movements: Gentrification and Foreclosure

The retrenchment of the national welfare state signaled an ideological shift from Keynesian redistribution to Schumpeterian entrepreneurialism (Jessop, 2003).  The devolution of social welfare to the state and local level amidst an overall contraction in available capital fostered a policy environment that encouraged communities to compete for newly available global capital via multinational corporations.  As mentioned, these ideological shifts were supported by the suburban politics of the 1970s, and enforced through the growth machine populated by these suburban interests (Davis, 1991).  Similar to the First New Deal, the Federal government provided supply-side incentives for communities in response to capital scarcity.  Empowerment Zone legislation and HOPE VI program (established in 1993 and 1992, respectively) were two supply-side initiatives that fueled the entrepreneurial attraction policies of cities during this time.  The two policies allowed for a select number of cities to redevelop via the return of high-wage, high skill employment and the deconcentration of high-poverty housing developments.  Each policy, administered by HUD, suggest a number of ideological shifts in housing policy.  The ideological shift is both conservative and entrepreneurial, while also reorganizing the scales between local, state, national, and global.  This ideological shift of entrepreneurialism (HOPE VI “revitalizing” inner city public housing to attract high-wage service workers of the new economy)  and restructuring of scales (federally-funded Empowerment Zones in declining urban neighborhoods to attract global capital in the form of multinational corporations), suggest housing policy had an active role in creating sites of “actually existing neoliberalism” in cities (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). 

The community response to these neoliberal policies was fractured, largely along home tenure status: urban homeowners welcomed the increases in property value and urban revitalization, while renters were largely displaced and deconcetrated due to these rising property values.  For years, African-Americans communities and their social movements reflected the outflow of capital from their communities.  These movements differed in that they were largely resisting the influx of capital.  The poverty dispersal policies that accompanied the social welfare policies of the 1990s (HOPE VI, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, and the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998) effectively dispersed a political interest group that linked economic and social problems (high urban unemployment rates and disinvested public housing).  The return of high-wage employees and dispersal of the poor throughout urban areas commenced a flood of capital into disinvested cities.  However, minority resistance to poverty dispersal has been effective, yet episodic.  Public housing tenant councils have participated in the discussions to sell public housing to private developers  (Bhattacharjee, 2012), as well as resistance to processes of fortification, exclusion, and surveillance in around developments (O’Neill, 2012).  These changes in both the grievances of tenants and the antagonist of these grievances reflect the rearrangement of urban space and the restructuring of the local state (Brenner and Theodore, 2002).  It is within this new institutional framework that we see the materialization of new forms of social movements in urban space (Mayer, 2006). 

The recent housing crisis did not just affect suburban and exurban developments; cities too were harmed in the over speculation and aggressive risk management in the lending industry (Crump et al, 2008).  The response to the overwhelming foreclosures that, while more devastating to African-American and minority communities,  affected the nation en masse, has been more in line with the reactions to widespread foreclosures in the 1920s.  Supply side policies were rolled out in the form of bank bailouts, quickly followed (after significant public backlash) by the establishment of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program 2 (NSP2).  The NSP2 marks a shift back to housing policy as social welfare and community development policy (Hays, 1995).  The administration of this program, particularly at the State and local level, will determine how this ideological shift translates for marginalized residents.    

Race and Urban Redevelopment Exam

yeah buddy - one down, three to go.

Theory Exam Question - Draft

Question 1:

In what ways have the ideological developments of racial theory affected the forms and strategies of urban politics? That is, in what ways have racial minorities been able to assert their citizenship (through urban social movements directly effecting the structures and processes of urban governance) in practice that have had a direct impact on the ontology of race in the city?