Restoring America's Neighborhoods
Restoring America's Neighborhoods
How Local People Make a Difference
What does it take to mobilize a grass-roots force dedicated to bringing new life into a decaying neighborhood? Can any one person or group successfully halt physical deterioration, drug-related crime, or the encroachment of clusters of factories, highways, and other noxious land uses? Michael Greenberg demonstrates in this book that it can and has been done against all odds.
Restoring America's Neighborhoods profiles twenty-four such cases from across the United States. It tells the story of people determined to make the blighted, crime-ridden urban enclaves in which they live and work a better place for everybody. These are people from many different walks of life: ministers working to bring jobs to their communities; city planners and federal employees trying to relocated residents of potential disaster areas; and locals taking matters into their own hands to create a healthier, more pleasing living environment for their children. Greenberg's is a heartening account of courage and unwavering resolve as well as of hope that individuals can make a difference, that violent criminals and uncaring bureaucrats need not carry the day. He calls them "streetfighters," a fitting tribute to their efforts to take back their neighborhoods, block by block and street by street.
As Michael Greenberg shows in this book, the troubling stories of urban decay, drug abuse, and poverty in America's cities are sometimes tempered by local people taking matters into their own hands in the fight against indifference and neglect. Greenberg calls these people 'street fighters,' and this book is a well-deserved tribute to their efforts. Informed by trenchant thinking and incisive writing, here is a timely resource for scholars, policy makers, and the general public alike.
Acknowledgements
1 Neighborhood Quality and Street Fighters
2 Life from Death: Public Housing in Chester
3 Joseph Garlic: Planting Seeds of Hope in Elizabethport
4 Neah Bay: Forward to the Past
5 Ground Zero: Concerned Citizens Fight Against Massive Poison Machines
6 Detroit's Arson Squad: Taking Back Neighborhoods from Fire
7 Coping with and Preventing Disasters: The Federal Emergency Management Agency
8 Planning for Love of Justice
9 A Vision of Environmental Justice and Sustainable Neighborhoods
Epilogue
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
