The Urban NeighBorhood Its Analytical and Social ContextsHunter, Albert
doi: 10.1177/107808747901400301pmid: N/A
This introductory paper summarizes three analytical approaches to the study of neighbor hoods : (1) typologies, (2) stages of change, and (3) functions-which include economic, administrative, political, and social. A central characteristic of urban neighborhoods is seen to be their embeddedness in city, metropolitan, and national contexts. This, in turn, is hypothesized as leading to a newly emergent organization of neighborhoods into a "hierarchy of community." A central persisting dilemma for neighborhoods is seen to be that between diffuse "sentiments of place" and the more formal "organization of interests." The urban neighborhood is a unique locus of the convergence and clash of these elements.
Capital and Neighborhood in the United StatesMolotch, Harvey
doi: 10.1177/107808747901400302pmid: N/A
An attempt is made to solve the problem of how the existence of a natural ruling class in the United States determines the shape and character of locality, particularly the urban residential neighborhood. It is posited that the connecting link is the local rentier class, which prepares the ground for capital, on the one hand, and organizes the built environ ment and local ideological system on the other. This structure is illustrated through a number of historical and contemporary examples: the oil spill in Santa Barbara, racial change in old cities, the development of the contemporary Sun Belt and the emergence of big capital as a force in city building.
Financing Home OwnershipBradford, Calvin
doi: 10.1177/107808747901400303pmid: N/A
This paper traces federal housing policies related to single-family home ownership from their creation in the 1930s to the present. In particular, the article focuses on policies of the Federal Housing Administration and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and other federal regulators of financial institutions. The theme of the article is that the original policies of FHA and the financial institution regulators either directly prohibited (FHA) lending to minorities or other residents in minority or racially mixed neighbor hoods or discouraged lending in such neighborhoods. This helped lead to a situation where these neighborhoods were starved for credit. In response to civil rights and neigh borhood movements, FHA radically reversed its policies, underwriting almost any loan in older, minority, and integrated neighborhoods, while the regulatory agencies generally made no effort to reverse existing lending practices. The result was that these neighbor hoods became inundated with FHA lending, which was often subject to fraud and abuses leading to high concentrations of foreclosures and abandonments. Thus, the federal attempts to cure the problems of inner-city housing finance actually made the situation much worse.
Neighborhood Planning and Political CapacityCohen, Rick
doi: 10.1177/107808747901400304pmid: N/A
Physical-economic models of neighborhood change, popularly used by neighborhood planners, are beginning to give way to more politically oriented models. The experience of Pennsylvania's Neighborhood Preservation Support System prototype projects provides evidence of this shift. Such models do not call for blind community control, but for facili tating the development of neighborhood political capacities.
Networks, Neighborhoods, and CommunitiesWellman, Barry; Leighton, Barry
doi: 10.1177/107808747901400305pmid: N/A
We propose a network analytic approach to the community question in order to separate the study of communities from the study of neighborhoods. Three arguments about the community question-that "community" has been "lost," "saved," or "liberated"-are reviewed for their development, network depictions, imagery, policy implications, and current status. The lost argument contends that communal ties have become attenuated in industrial bureaucratic societies; the saved argument contends that neighborhood communities remain as important sources of sociability, support and mediation with formal institutions; the liberated argument maintains that while communal ties still flourish, they have dispersed beyond the neighborhood and are no longer clustered in solidary communities. Our review finds that both the saved and liberated arguments proposed viable network patterns under appropriate conditions, for social systems as well as individuals.