Doctoral Dissertation Research: Landlord Abandonment and Mortgage Foreclosure in New York City Neighborhoods

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The economic crisis conditions of the 1970s fostered policies that emphasized free-market economics and the withdrawal of government from the provision of capital to localities. Amidst this transition, landlord abandonment of inner city real estate depleted housing stock and displaced poor and minority residents. After a long period of urban decline, landlord abandonment created the kind of conditions of underdevelopment that would make reinvestment in inner city locations possible and profitable. Inner city neighborhoods became an engine of economic growth for cities, and pivotal to the three decades of dramatic urban change and revalorization of cities that separate landlord abandonment from the current, ongoing mortgage foreclosure crisis. These seemingly distinct housing crises connect in that both are concentrated in low-income communities of color and have served as a means of extracting capital from these communities. The very incorporation of urban neighborhoods into circuits of capital presents challenges to political mobilization around foreclosure in that many previously oppositional urban social movements have become enmeshed in structures they previously resisted, e.g. real estate development. Doctoral student Desiree Fields, under the supervision of Dr. Susan Saegert in the Center for Human Environments at the CUNY Graduate School University Center, will explore the reproduction of urban inequality, and political mobilization to prevent and mitigate the effects of inequality, exploring these concerns through landlord abandonment and mortgage foreclosure. A comparison of the footprint of foreclosure filings from 2006-2008 with that of abandoned buildings seized by the NYC Department of Finance and transferred to city ownership between 1976-1981 will create a map of spatial co-incidence of historic and contemporary urban crises. Discriminate analysis will clarify differences in trajectories of neighborhood change between areas that experienced one, both, or neither of these crises. Interviews with key informants and focus groups within and across generations of activists will provide insight on the evolution of political mobilization in responses to urban housing crises since the shift to a neoliberal mode of governance.The results of this research will provide insight on how marginalized and vulnerable communities are multiply affected by crises rooted in urban land and housing, thus potentially enhancing policy efforts designed to stabilize neighborhoods. Moreover this research will contribute to literature on the geography of urban inequality, housing crises, and community organizing and development. Understanding how this inequality is reproduced thus requires an attention to the synergies and interactions between different phases of urban development as much as the ruptures that distinguish them.