OUP - Abstract

Contested Renewal: The Rebuilding of the South Bronx

Dissertation School: Regents of the University of California

Abstract:

In the last 30 years, the South Bronx has transformed from a national symbol of urban crisis and dystopia to a model for new forms of urban redevelopment. But the nature of this renewal, and who it benefits, is deeply contested. Capital is returning to the South Bronx, and some claim that community-driven "renewal without displacement" is producing a new, economically diverse South Bronx. But critics point to the area's continuing poverty and racialization, and some residents fear that renewal will lead to gentrification and displacement.

Urban renewal has taken a new and unique form in the South Bronx, and the purpose of this dissertation is to investigate and analyze the causes and consequences of this renewal. The complexity of renewal in the South Bronx poses challenging questions to the existing literature on gentrification and urban renewal and to housing policy. Critical accounts that rely on a dichotomy of gentrification and resistance to it cannot explain how reinvestment has emerged from simultaneously collaborative and conflictive efforts to fight disinvestment and displacement. Also largely unaddressed are the practices involved in transforming the spatialized racial and class difference of stigmatized areas to enable reinvestment. The intellectual merit of the research is that it will develop a nuanced and critical view of renewal and racial dynamics, showing how collaboration and conflict among community groups, real estate investors, and local government have created a particular form of urban renewal in the South Bronx. I expect to demonstrate that: 1) processes of renewal are continuously contested and this has produced a form of urban renewal that remedies some forms of inequality while reinforcing others; and 2) renewal has necessitated renegotiating the position of the South Bronx in the city, often by attempting to manage class, racial, and ethnic difference within the South Bronx.

The rebuilding of the South Bronx has been fundamentally shaped by a shift in housing policy toward community involvement and increasingly market-oriented subsidy programs, and for this reason the proposed research is especially relevant to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD's) strategic goals. As evidenced by the recent proposal of the Preservation, Enhancement, and Transition of Rental Assistance Act, HUD continues to explore new ways of involving the private market with public and assisted housing. This project will investigate the results of these kinds of relationships in the recent past.

The project asks the following questions: 1) How has a particular form of urban reinvestment and renewal emerged out of the rebuilding of the South Bronx? 2) How has the raced, classed, and historied terrain of the South Bronx shaped renewal efforts, and how has renewal reshaped difference in the South Bronx? The research methods used to answer these questions will include interviews, archival research, ethnographic methods such as observation and participant observation, "biographes" of selected redevelopment projects and buildings, policy and document analysis, and historical and statistical analysis of the siting of affordable housing in New York City over time.

Exploring these issues in the South Bronx has broader impacts because the South Bronx is increasingly emerging as a national model for urban recovery, despite the fact that New York City differs from many other cities in that its wealth and growth he1 seemingly inexorable processes of development and gentrification. The renewal of the South Bronx is not fully understood by either its critics or its advocates By looking at how renewal in the South Bronx challenges inequality in some ways at the same time that it perpetuates it in others, this project has the potential to inform efforts to reduce urban inequality and poverty and produce more just renewal efforts.

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