House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America's Urban Neighborhoods

by Alexander von Hoffman

Not long ago, neighborhoods such as the South Bronx, South Central Los Angeles, and Boston's Roxbury were crime-ridden wastelands of vacant lots and burned-out buildings, notorious symbols of urban decay. In House by House, Block by Block , Alexander von Hoffman tells the remarkable stories of
how local activists and community groups helped turn these areas around.
For sixty years, federal policy has attempted with little success to solve the problems of housing and poverty in America's inner cities. Yet increasingly, local organizations are picking up where Washington has left off. In a series of dramatic and colorful narratives, von Hoffman shows how
these groups are revitalizing once desperate neighborhoods in five major New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The unlikely heroes the tough-talking Bronx priest who made apartment buildings for low-income people glisten in the midst of ruins and despair; the "crazy
white man" who scrambled to save Chicago's historic Black Metropolis from the wrecking ball; the Boston cops who built a task force that put the brakes on youth gangs. Thanks to locally-based, bootstrap efforts like these, in inner-city neighborhoods across the country, crime rates are falling, real
estate values are rising, and businesses are returning. Von Hoffman also shows that grass-roots work can't do it successful revitalization needs the support of local government and access to business and foundation capital.
Based on years of research and more than a hundred interviews, this book is the first systematic account of the dramatic urban revival now going on in the United States. House by House, Block by Block will be a must-read for anyone who cares about the fate of America's cities.

Genres: Nonfiction, Urban

320 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2003

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sure its just a collection of anecdotes, and the author has a maddening tendency to toss buckets of names into every other paragraph, but I doubt there's another book out there that can better describe the momentous sea change that took place in inner city neighborhoods in the 90s and early 00s.

While in the 1980s serious scholars were considering turning the South Bronx into a giant wildlife preserve, by 2000 a blizzard of programs, mainly from "Community Development Corporations" and the City of New York, transformed much of it into a stable working class community. The South Bronx landscape changed from one with "Islands of Hope in Seas of Despair," as an earlier writer put it, to almost the reverse. And Hoffman documents similar changes in inner city Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and LA, due to everything from tax code changes to new policing tactics. While the Low Income Housing Tax Credit of 1986 gets much of the credit for the former, and William Bratton gets much of the credit for the latter, Hoffman focuses on the thousands of small non-profits that made it all possible.

The problem here, like many books about urban development, is that Hoffman only considers one side of the ledger in evaluating these programs, the credits side. Hoffman doesn't try to evaluate whether the countless billions thrown at these problems truly were worth the cost, or whether they were just paving the way for gentrification and "gilding the ghetto." The continuing success of inner city neighborhoods in this decade, along with a frustratingly flat poverty rate, shows that visible success can mask invisible failure.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

My reading of this book is highly personal and likely not replicable. I don't think others would give it four (or even three) stars, but this is my field, these are my businesses, my neighborhoods. I already have the vocabulary so reading Von Hoffman was familiar, comforting, and educational. I already had a lot of brain hooks on which to hang the information he presented. The writing is fine, as is the book's organization, and I suppose a case can be made that this is a good primer on case studies of community development. It's a bit dated at this point, but it was so informative to see where some of today's still-active players came from, and to learn about some of those who didn't make it. Worth the read if you're in the 'new economic development' world. Otherwise, I'd recommend a pass.

[Lily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very interesting read, but parts of it was just too complicated for me to truly understand community organization. (Like what is a home equity?) I kind of know the gist of what happened, the general trends, the skeleton of how to turn a dying inner city economy or housing market around, but if you ask me to explain it...I couldn't.

Overall it was one of the more optimistic looks at the inner city that I've read. It as also not critical enough of gentrification for my taste.