March 15, 2005 | Volume 2, Issue 1
Book Review: House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America's Urban Neighborhoods, by Alexander Von Hoffman
America’s cities are sprawling, a trend particularly visible in the older former industrial cities of the northeast. This can clearly be seen in Pittsburgh, where a recent report by the Brookings Institution1 found that almost all population growth between 1990 and 2000 took place in outer ring suburbs while cities and boroughs lost population. Urbanized land area in our region grew by 42% between 1990 and 2000 while population grew by 2%. Employment is also moving to the suburbs: 57% of new jobs created in the Pittsburgh region between 1994 and 2001 were located at least 10 miles outside of central city business districts. As Americans and their jobs continue to consume land, moving farther and farther away from the urban core, what happens to the neighborhoods that get left behind?
House by House, Block by Block is the story of five inner city neighborhoods that have been reversing this trend, bringing development and stable community life back to the urban core. Though many people move away from the inner city, others are moving back. While the problems of the inner city have no lack of publicity, this book describes some of the rare success stories and brings hope to those of us who believe that a vibrant central city is a crucial component of a healthy and growing region.
The book begins in the South Bronx, which began as a thriving immigrant neighborhood. After World War II, many immigrant families began moving to the suburbs, and large highway projects destroyed neighborhoods and uprooted communities. Between 1950 and 1970, almost a half million people left the Bronx. Gangs and drug dealers became very active in the South Bronx, and by 1976 the head of New York City’s Department of Housing suggested that “the city should . . . remove the residents, demolish all the buildings and turn it into a national park.”
This did not happen. Instead, local community leaders began revitalizing small sections of the neighborhood, with the hope that the neighborhood could be resurrected house by house, block by block. These community leaders included Father Gigante, a Roman Catholic priest who helped save Hunts Point by renovating and maintaining large housing complexes, and Genevieve Brooks, founder of a group called the Mid Bronx Desperadoes that played a crucial role in fighting crime and cleaning up abandoned housing. Community leaders cooperated with government and nonprofits to bring housing and development to the Bronx, and while it is still a poor area, it is far from the dangerous gang war-zone that it was 30 years ago.
Similar revitalization has taken place in Atlanta, a city considered by many to personify sprawl. The 1996 Olympics offered Atlanta a unique opportunity to clean up its neighborhoods. While the Atlanta Project, a large nonprofit founded by Jimmy Carter with this goal in mind was not very successful, many smaller neighborhoodlevel projects did achieve major change. One inner city neighborhood was brought back to life by a developer who renovated a neighboring golf course. The developer created the East Lake Community Foundation, funded by revenues from the golf course, and replaced a neighboring housing project once described as a “war zone” with new mixed-income housing. The foundation also trained and hired underprivileged neighborhood youth to work at the golf course, built a new charter school, and created a school program centered on golf. The project has been widely hailed as a success. In the words of the developer, “Face it. Governments don’t know how to do this. It takes a developer to make things happen.”
Another case study is Los Angeles, where the city has adopted a cluster development strategy for economic development in inner city neighborhoods. Based on Michael Porter’s research on “the competitive advantage of the inner city,” economic development organizations in Los Angeles focused on key clusters including biomedical processing, toys, apparel and textiles, furniture, metalworking, and plastics manufacturing. These nonprofits held workshops so that firms could share knowledge and form relationships, and eventually assisted in the creation of trade organizations for inner city industries. Economic activity grew to the point where one development professional referred to L.A. as “the next frontier for development, period—not just inner city development.”
Does this book have lessons for Pittsburgh? One crucial difference between Pittsburgh and the case studies in the book is that Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Los Angeles are all large and growing while Pittsburgh is not. It may be easier to bring stability to inner city Boston, where population growth and high demand for housing have driven interest back to the inner city. Pittsburgh also lacks large immigrant communities, which often play a critical role in revitalization of inner city neighborhoods. However, the book does accentuate the role of local community groups and the nonprofit sector, and Pittsburgh, with higher per capita foundation dollars than any other city in the United States, is home to a plethora of nonprofit organizations focused on community and economic development. These nonprofits need to work with community leaders, developers, and the different levels of government to make Pittsburgh’s inner city neighborhoods thrive, drawing people back to our urban core. In fact, Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods have already made some progress along the lines presented here. The Penn Avenue Arts Initiative has spurred development in Garfield, Bloomfield and Friendship. Local government, developers and nonprofits worked together to bring Whole Foods to East Liberty. The store is now one of the highest performing in the country, and has brought customer traffic, stability, and development to this lower-income neighborhood. Activities like these offer good reason to believe that Pittsburgh is on the way to rebirth as well.
Contact Information
For additional information, or to set up an interview with a member of the Heinz School Review staff, please contact us by telephone at 412–268-1610, or by sending email to heinz-journal@andrew.cmu.edu.
1 The Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Back to Prosperity: A Competitive Agenda for Renewing Pennsylvania, December 2003, available at http://www.brookings.edu/pennsylvania.