gabsalott13's review against another edition
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***Note: this is a book review/reflection for my course, City Planning (CPLN) 624: Readings on Race, Poverty, and Place.
John Arena’s Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization recounts the demise of New Orleans’ public housing, which occurred before and after Hurricane Katrina. This book moves away from our class’ previous study of “FUBU gentrification” by focusing on black politicians in the age of Chocolate City governance, private developers in the age of downtown redevelopment, and nonprofits in the age of diminishing state assistance.
Arena discusses how the “age of black mayors” coincided with the revanchist agenda, elites’ retaking of cities from their low-income inhabitants. At a certain point in New Orleans, this became centralized in public housing developments, which elites saw as obstacles to economic regeneration, standing in the way of redevelopment plans. This background helped me think critically about the sensationalism of public housing projects as “doomed sites.” Arena reminds us that many projects were in fact doomed because the state abandoned them, but like a lot of media coverage on black Americans, HANO’s explicit vacancy and maintenance schemes got left out of the news, so that the revanchist agenda seemed more noble, and public housing’s failures seemed inevitable.
Yesterday, I read about a new book on planners’ roles in gentrification, due to their facilitation of real estate interests at the local level. New Orleanian planners and preservationists pushed de-densification as a solution to inner-city problems, despite our knowledge of the inherent conflict between sprawl and equity. In the Irish Channel/Garden District, changing neighborhood names, successful avoidance of highways, annoyance with homeless-serving institutions, and reclamation of properties’ “historical glory” mirrors Society Hill’s development in Philly, and shows how design-centric approaches to planning can leave new urbanism inaccessible to the masses. Today, I think we’re nearing a discussion of how a professional field with an identity as “nice people” isn’t enough to solve entrenched, place-based problems—this, of course, is also true of the nonprofits taking center stage in this tale.
Sadly, I think Arena’s coverage of the nonprofit industrial complex is actually his weakest work. I understand his pessimism around the strategy of insider negotiations and professionalization of activists, but he leaves many questions about what should have been done. First, who should be in charge of public housing? So many people have a deep, warranted mistrust of the state, so it seems strange to argue against the removal of their power, unless activists are choosing the lesser of two evils, which is—get this—also selling out. Many times, Arena idealizes and overestimates the disruptive power of residents, and shames “former radical activists [who] had become realists and accepted the austerity and privatization agenda.” My second question: if they hadn’t, wouldn’t all of the residents just been displaced anyway, without any accommodations? Finally, I couldn’t tell if his oppositions to mixed-income development, would remain if it was carried out more equitably. Does he think something else should be the new strategy for 21st-century public housing? Arena’s anti-realist logic was hard for me to follow, so I’m hoping that Thursday’s discussion will help.
John Arena’s Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization recounts the demise of New Orleans’ public housing, which occurred before and after Hurricane Katrina. This book moves away from our class’ previous study of “FUBU gentrification” by focusing on black politicians in the age of Chocolate City governance, private developers in the age of downtown redevelopment, and nonprofits in the age of diminishing state assistance.
Arena discusses how the “age of black mayors” coincided with the revanchist agenda, elites’ retaking of cities from their low-income inhabitants. At a certain point in New Orleans, this became centralized in public housing developments, which elites saw as obstacles to economic regeneration, standing in the way of redevelopment plans. This background helped me think critically about the sensationalism of public housing projects as “doomed sites.” Arena reminds us that many projects were in fact doomed because the state abandoned them, but like a lot of media coverage on black Americans, HANO’s explicit vacancy and maintenance schemes got left out of the news, so that the revanchist agenda seemed more noble, and public housing’s failures seemed inevitable.
Yesterday, I read about a new book on planners’ roles in gentrification, due to their facilitation of real estate interests at the local level. New Orleanian planners and preservationists pushed de-densification as a solution to inner-city problems, despite our knowledge of the inherent conflict between sprawl and equity. In the Irish Channel/Garden District, changing neighborhood names, successful avoidance of highways, annoyance with homeless-serving institutions, and reclamation of properties’ “historical glory” mirrors Society Hill’s development in Philly, and shows how design-centric approaches to planning can leave new urbanism inaccessible to the masses. Today, I think we’re nearing a discussion of how a professional field with an identity as “nice people” isn’t enough to solve entrenched, place-based problems—this, of course, is also true of the nonprofits taking center stage in this tale.
Sadly, I think Arena’s coverage of the nonprofit industrial complex is actually his weakest work. I understand his pessimism around the strategy of insider negotiations and professionalization of activists, but he leaves many questions about what should have been done. First, who should be in charge of public housing? So many people have a deep, warranted mistrust of the state, so it seems strange to argue against the removal of their power, unless activists are choosing the lesser of two evils, which is—get this—also selling out. Many times, Arena idealizes and overestimates the disruptive power of residents, and shames “former radical activists [who] had become realists and accepted the austerity and privatization agenda.” My second question: if they hadn’t, wouldn’t all of the residents just been displaced anyway, without any accommodations? Finally, I couldn’t tell if his oppositions to mixed-income development, would remain if it was carried out more equitably. Does he think something else should be the new strategy for 21st-century public housing? Arena’s anti-realist logic was hard for me to follow, so I’m hoping that Thursday’s discussion will help.
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