Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City

by Nicole P. Marwell

When middle-class residents fled American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, government services and investment capital left too. Countless urban neighborhoods thus entered phases of precipitous decline, prompting the creation of community-based organizations that sought to bring direly needed resources back to the inner city. Today there are tens of thousands of these CBOs—private nonprofit groups that work diligently within tight budgets to give assistance and opportunity to our most vulnerable citizens by providing services such as housing, child care, and legal aid.

Through ethnographic fieldwork at eight CBOs in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, Nicole P. Marwell discovered that the complex and contentious relationships these groups form with larger economic and political institutions outside the neighborhood have a huge and unexamined impact on the lives of the poor. Most studies of urban poverty focus on individuals or families, but Bargaining for Brooklyn widens the lens, examining the organizations whose actions and decisions collectively drive urban life.

Genres: Nonfiction, Urban Planning, Sociology

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Jason]

A really outstanding sociological study.

[Morgan Allgrove-Hodges]

Honestly read this out of masochism I think. Wanted to learn a bit about Community Based Organizations and I guess I did. But the case studies are way too detailed without connecting much to theory or the central research question. Plus its pre housing crisis so it mostly out dated anyways.

[Greta Gilbertson]

I've sort of read two chapters so far. Really interesting book. One chapter compares two CBOs in Bushwick, one of which was spearheaded by Vito Lopez. It's a pretty laudatory profile of Lopez, and ironic given his despicable behavior and recent fall from grace. The second chapter looks at how the Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg were able to secure better housing than Latinos in the wake of deindustrialization and gentrification in Williamsburg.

[Katja]

Interesting reading, if not always very logically arranged.. but especially if you're interested in the history of Brooklyn, or citizen movements, or organizing affordable / equal opportunities housing, the content is still worth of the somewhat haphazard organization.

[James]

If you want to learn more about the dis/functions of Northern Brooklyn, this is a great book to provide context to current-day politics.