Book Reviews: Teresa Irene Gonzales, Building a Better Chicago: Race and Community Resistance to Urban Redevelopment

Abstract

Fighting poverty in urban communities has not been a policy priority in the United States for almost half a century. Nevertheless, the state and foundations occasionally launch time-limited programs that seek to encourage development and provide economic opportunities in low-income neighborhoods. How do these programs engage their target communities? Do they empower residents, or do they simply provide temporary relief? And how do these programs relate to grassroots initiatives that residents themselves may launch to improve their neighborhoods? Teresa Irene Gonzales asks and answers these questions in her book Building a Better Chicago: Race and Community Resistance to Urban Redevelopment. Building a Better Chicago presents findings from Gonzales’s qualitative study of community organizations in two Chicago neighborhoods—Greater Englewood and Little Village—whose populations are, respectively, majority Black and majority Latinx. At the time of Gonzales’s research, some community organizations within these neighborhoods received funding through the MacArthur Foundation’s New Communities Program (NCP), which sought to transform “distressed or vulnerable neighborhoods into areas that have jobs that provide a living wage, have successful business corridors, and are safe environments, with low levels of crime” (p. 31). The book examines the NCP and its local implementation, including its selective inclusion of resident input, and compares the NCP’s agenda and approach to local initiatives fielded by grassroots organizations that did not receive NCP funding. In this way, the book provides a comparative view of the NCP’s “development from above” and grassroots’ “development from below” approaches. The book’s first chapter familiarizes readers with Englewood and Little Village and the NCP and provides a theoretical framework for analyzing development initiatives in relation to issues of trust and social capital. While many developmental initiatives expressly seek to cultivate trust and relationships as part of their efforts of addressing local problems, Gonzales argues that residents and activists in low-income neighborhoods have good reasons to distrust politicians and other powerbrokers, including those that claim to have residents’ best interests in mind. Instead, activists are better off cultivating what Gonzales calls “collective skepticism,” an arm’s length way of relating to the powerful that allows for temporary collaboration while highlighting power differentials and competing interests. Chapter two describes the NCP and its organizational structure in more detail. Centrally administered by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (better known as LISC), the NCP selected neighborhood-based lead agencies that provided social services and further distributed funds to local service providers. To choose and design these services, the NCP did solicit resident input by holding community visioning meetings that created 1187703 CTYXXX10.1177/15356841231187703City & CommunityBook Reviews book-review2023