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- Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences
- Mixed-income neighborhoods (x)
- National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities
National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities
Show moreAs an urban-redevelopment strategy, the goals of mixed-income development are often talked about in terms of building “community”—the shaping of environments, opportunities, and social arrangements that promote healthy neighborhood life, particularly for the low-income people who live there. This article explores the strategies engaged, expectations for, and early responses to efforts to build “community” in three mixed-income developments being built on the footprint of former public housing developments in Chicago. In doing so, it investigates the expectations among residents and stakeholders, distills and explores three major strategic orientations being engaged by developers and their partners, and examines how these strategies in particular—and the building of community more generally—is playing out across sites, including the dynamics and conditioning factors that promote or inhibit participation, engagement, interaction, and the shaping of social cohesion and social control
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Show moreIn many cities, public housing has come to exemplify concentrated urban poverty and the social problems associated with it. One major policy response to addressing these problems is the demolition and redevelopment of public housing complexes as mixed-income communities. Several theoretical propositions that lie behind this policy are based on assumptions about the ways in which living among higher-income residents can lead to relationships and interactions that may benefit poor people. Based on in-depth qualitative research in two mixed-income developments in Chicago, this paper explores the dynamics of social interaction in an effort to better understand the processes and factors that influence such interaction on the ground, the differential experience of residents from different backgrounds, and the factors that contribute to their decision-making about and interpretation of social relations with their neighbors. This analysis helps to better interpret the findings of earlier studies and craft more informed expectations about such interactions and their likely effects.
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