Doctoral Dissertation Research: Community Revitalization and Race Relations in Northwest Detroit

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This project will analyze the challenges of inclusive neighborhood revitalization in Northwest, a poor, depopulated, Black Detroit neighborhood. In the last five years Northwest has become a surprising destination for white urban farmers, who have bought cheap homes to fix up, and have converted vacant lots into gardens, parks and farms. Most recent scholars of neighborhood poverty have studied the benefits of moving disadvantaged families out of poor neighborhoods with subsidized housing vouchers - of moving the poor to opportunity. This project, by contrast, will highlight the promises and challenges of moving opportunity to poor residents. It examines whether and how green gentrification in one of the nation's most struggling neighborhoods, combined with federal, city, and philanthropic investments, can help improve neighborhood conditions and the lives of poor residents who remain in place. To answer this question, this dissertation will draw on multiyear ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews with residents, former residents and community leaders, and historical and quantitative data. The researcher will also conduct fieldwork at the Detroit Land Bank, a city institution that owns a quarter of all property in Detroit. Most previous research on gentrification has focused on working class neighborhoods with a high percentage of rental apartments, located near downtown in densely populated cities. Such research has shown that gentrification has a transforming impact on neighborhoods, but has rejected it as a viable mechanism for inclusive neighborhood revitalization. Northwest, by contrast, is a different kind of neighborhood than those in which gentrification has been studied. It is far from downtown, depopulated, and poor, with a high percentage of homeowners. By 2016 half of all properties in the neighborhood were vacant lots, and one third of remaining houses stood abandoned. If gentrification is such a powerful mechanism for neighborhood change, how and to what extent can this potentially be used to turn around disadvantaged, struggling neighborhoods? Dissertation chapters will draw on the ethnographic case study of Northwest to uncover the tensions between racial residential integration and social segregation in public and organizational life in the neighborhood. Chapters will also examine the potential of "greening" to turn around blight, how tax foreclosures shape ongoing displacements of low-income residents, and how the city helps shape the future of land distribution in the neighborhood. In conjunction, these dissertation chapters describe the interactional, organizational and structural challenges to inclusive neighborhood revitalization, as well as the potential that "farming hope" brings to Northwest Detroit. Drawing on this study, the researcher will make policy recommendations on how to move opportunity to depopulated, poor neighborhoods across the country.