Suchergebnisse

The physical redevelopment of Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) communities has been accompanied by efforts to remake the people who live in them. Through a variety of community and supportive services (CSS) programs, residents are offered job training, homeownership classes, and support to develop savings accounts with the goal of moving them toward fuller participation in the private housing market. By examining how CSS have been offered in Nashville and Atlanta, we make the claim that HOPE VI has had limited impacts in its people-based goals fundamentally because the overall CSS concept focuses on driving residents to participate more fully in labor and housing markets. Supportive services are insufficient in scope and resources to buffer the effects of the market on residents, except for a small number who come into the program already well positioned to succeed. As such, HOPE VI's failures are not a problem of implementation but of design and conception.

Fertilizer application has many known environmental impacts, and household use of fertilizer for lawn cultivation contributes a significant amount toward these impacts. Previous study provides a compelling narrative of the social, political, and cultural factors that drive fertilizer application; however, the psychological factors involved are not well known. This article examines factors that motivate fertilizer application using surveys among a sample of 194 residents within an urban watershed. Measures included aesthetic preferences, financial concerns, social norms, and environmental concerns. A principal components analysis (PCA) revealed four orthogonal factors. Among them, individual interests and social pressures positively predicted fertilizer application, as did the likelihood that children and pets play on a resident's lawn. Environmental concerns were not predictive. These data contribute to an evolving storyline suggesting that households make tradeoffs between lawn aesthetics and concern for the environment and exposure to chemicals in part due to strong social pressures surrounding lawn maintenance.

Between 1993 and 2010, the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) Program sought to transform public housing by demolishing large spatially concentrated developments and replacing them with mixed-income housing. Drawing on postcolonial geographical thought, this article interrogates HOPE VI as a colonial project. Through the displacement of public housing residents, the razing of the development in which they lived, and the rebuilding of mixed-income housing, including new public housing units, HOPE VI projects seek to revitalize neighborhoods by attracting higher-income homeowners to relocate in these areas. Proponents of HOPE VI and other mixed-income housing strategies contend that socioeconomic mixing will provide a range of benefits for low-income residents in these environments. Yet, there is a growing body of research suggesting that income mixing itself can be a problem for public housing residents because the neighborhood social relations operate to marginalize them. Using a case study conducted in a midsized southern city, we build on this prior work by examining the sociospatial narratives that neighbors surrounding the HOPE VI site use to identify themselves. The article focuses on how new homeowners, residing in a self-contained development right across the street from a HOPE VI site, construct themselves as a community by situating public housing residents as their other. We conclude that these sociospatial distinctions are integral to the broader, state-led effort to colonize and transform this low-income neighborhood situated next to the downtown business district.

Encouraging neighbourhood social mix has been a major goal of urban policy and planning in a number of different countries. This book draws together a range of case studies by international experts to assess the impacts of social mix policies and the degree to which they might represent gentrification by stealth. The contributions consider the range of social mix initiatives in different countries across the globe and their relationship to wider social, economic and urban change. The book combines understandings of social mix from the perspectives of researchers, policy makers and planners and the residents of the communities themselves. Mixed Communities also draws out more general lessons from these international comparisons - theoretically, empirically and for urban policy. It will be highly relevant for urban researchers and students, policy makers and practitioners alike