Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities

Abstract

while displacing the poor in the name of modernization. Saito demonstrates the pervasiveness and longevity of these practices as they directly provided the political and economic scaffolding for gentrification well into the 2000s. Local political officials directly underwrite the development of private projects that favor affluent communities, placing the “burden of redevelopment” on the poorest in the city and perpetuating long-standing histories of displacement (p. 41). Saito’s third contribution identifies a pivotal political opportunity in the 1990s under a changing political and demographic context in the city that helped give rise to a growth-with-equity coalition, a progressive force that unified labor unions, community organizations, faithbased groups, and residents in pursuit of equitable development. The coalition introduced a strategy that organized downtown communities threatened with displacement into the local political process of development. At the same time, the coalition mobilized to pressure developers receiving public subsidy to build with the needs of the communities they were displacing in mind, while scaling up their demands to pressure city officials to make equitable development a citywide standard. From these collective efforts grew the first community benefits agreements in the United States along with a broader policy framework and prolific community organizations, like Strategic Action for a Just Economy and the Los Angeles Community Action Network, that continue to shape progressive politics in Los Angeles today. This book speaks to multiple audiences, including scholars and practitioners working across disciplines and professions. It fills a gap in the history of downtown urban development, demonstrating how racial–spatial formation shapes the political landscape through which development plans are materialized and struggled over by various local actors. It complicates normative conceptualizations of the nature of redevelopment and the role of municipal policy in ongoing processes of racialization. For all audiences, this text calls us to critically interrogate development projects, especially those underwritten by public dollars, as well as corresponding narratives of modernization. It calls us to ask who such projects serve and who shoulders the costs of progress in gentrifying cities.