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- Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences
- Community development, urban (x)
- National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities
National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities
Show moreA mixed-income development can be defined as a complex with housing and other amenities such as parks, schools and community centers that has the mixing of income groups as a fundamental part of its financial and operating plan. Mixed-income development is a housing policy that has been implemented in the U.S. and around the world to deconcentrate poverty, particularly in public housing developments. Mixed-income development engages private real estate developers to produce public housing and thus exemplifies the shift in the 1990s to a neoliberal approach to urban development and other social services. Mixed-income development has proven to be an extremely complex endeavor that has successfully promoted physical transformation and neighborhood revitalization but has failed to achieve social cohesion and integration or economic mobility for low-income residents.
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Show moreSeveral of the theories that drive the rationale for mixed-income development as a response to urban poverty and the problems of traditional public housing are directly concerned with children and youth. These include assumptions about the possible ‘‘role modeling’’ effects of living among working and middle class people as well as social capital arguments, in which children may act as a kind of ‘‘bridge’’ to foster relationships among adults with children. In spite of these assumptions, young people—particularly older adolescents and young adults—are often at the contentious core of how problems of social control and organization play out on the ground. This paper draws on research on the Chicago public housing transformation in the United States to investigate how young people are viewed by those working on and living in mixed-income developments being built to replace public housing complexes, and how young people themselves contribute to the dynamics of these new communities. We find that while there have been improvements in the lives of young people who have been able to move into these new mixed-income developments in terms of living in safer, more orderly environments, their overall experiences are not altogether positive and are proving to be problematic for the broader community. Residents of different income levels employ different parental management strategies that serve as a barrier to engagement and a sense of commonality among families with children. An overriding dynamic in these new communities is the perception among (mainly) higher-income residents that unsupervised youth are having a negative influence on the broader community. Our research raises concerns about the future viability and sustainability of these mixed-income environments in the absence of more intentional and effective investments in structured supports and activities for young people.
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Show morePublic policies supporting market-oriented strategies to develop mixed-income communities have become ascendant in the United States and a number of other countries around the world. Although framed as addressing both market goals of revitalization and social goals of poverty deconcentration and inclusion, these efforts at ‘positive gentrification’ also generate a set of fundamental tensions — between integration and exclusion, use value and exchange value, appropriation and control, poverty and development — that play out in particular concrete ways on the ground. Drawing on social control theory and the ‘right to the city’ framework of Henri Lefebvre, this article interrogates these tensions as they become manifest in three mixed-income communities being developed to replace public housing complexes in Chicago, focusing particularly on responses to competing expectations regarding the use of space and appropriate normative behavior, and to the negotiation of these expectations in the context of arguments about safety, order, what constitutes ‘public’ space, and the nature and extent of rights to use that space in daily life.
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