Defending Community: The Struggle for Alternative Redevelopment in Cedar-Riverside

Notes

Notes Chapter 1: Capital, Community, and Cedar-Riverside 1. There seems to be no particular preference among activists for one or the other label. More recently arrived residents tend to refer to the area as the West Bank; older residents call it Cedar-Riverside. It is interesting that the main resident planning organization in the neighborhood is referred to as the "Cedar-Riverside Project Area Committee," while the development organization , which became a political rival, is called the "West Bank Community Development Corporation." 2. In mid-1992 the co-op board voted to sell the store to a private grocer to retire the store's accumulated debt. 3. Capek and Gilderbloom (1992) also advocate the integration of these two perspectives, and they provide the first attempt to accomplish that goal. Although they probably err on the side of emphasizing social movement theory over new urban sociology, they have gone farther than anyone before them in bringing the two perspectives together. 4. Cox (1981) and Capek and Gilderbloom (1992) refer to the conflict between use values and exchange values as "commodity" versus "community." Since commodification is the result of the actions of capital, however, rather than a source of the conflict, I believe the conflict is better portrayed as a struggle between capital and community. 5. Growth coalition, like all catchy terms, has become a disputed item. Mollenkopf (1978) used the term pro-growth coalition to refer to those urban elites who organized to back specific urban development projects. When Molotch (1979) and Logan and Molotch (1987) popularized the term along with the metaphor of "the city as a growth machine," it became increasingly unclear whether the city power structure and the growth coalition could be separated (see Friedland and Palmer, 1984). On the other hand, Fleischmann and Feagin (1987) limit growth coalition to "business centered, mayor-led coalitions," which seems too narrow. Some clarity of the concept has been Copyrighted Material 265 returned by Houghton (1991), who argued for a clear separation of the concepts of growth coalition and growth machine. My use of the term is more variable, as expressed further in Chapter 1, from a coalition of elites supporting a particular project outside government, to the complete dominance of urban governance by the growth-oriented elite. 6. Fleischmann and Feagin (1987) advocate more research to determine just what affects growth-machine outcomes, hypothesizing that the outcomes may vary historically, by type of capital involved, according to the city's position in the urban hierarchy, or because of other variables. 7. The typical Marxist elaboration of this problem refers to a contradiction between "accumulation" and "legitimation," or "production" and "reproduction ." Regime theorists such as Elkin (1987) and Stone (1987) describe a tension between "equality" and "efficiency." In the regime characterization , though essentially the same as the Marxist, efficiency can be defined in several ways, and what is efficient for the accumulation of capital in the short term will likely not be efficient for community maintenance in the long term. Thus, the source of the problem is more accurately depicted as a tension between accumulation and the need to legitimize that accumulation to citizens who will not likely gain from it and will likely lose out. There is also a debate among local state theorists over whether the local state is more involved in supporting legitimation through providing social reproduction services such as housing and unemployment compensation (Cockburn, 1977; Saunders, 1981; Boddy, 1983), or may variably attempt to support both accumulation and legitimation (Duncan and Goodwin, 1982; Clark and Dear, 1984). In the case of U.S. cities the evidence is strong that the local state, through its ability to provide tax abatements and other incentives, strongly supports capital accumulation as well as legitimation functions (Lauria, 1986; Fainstein et aI., 1986; Squires, 1989b). Swanstrom's (1985) work on the attacks of capital against the Kucinich mayoral administration in Cleveland shows just how vulnerable the local state becomes when its managers refuse to use it to support capital. 8. Core activists are motivated by their commitment to the collective good, or "purposive incentives" (Wilson, 1973; Oliver, 1983, Williams, 1985). But a movement can rarely run on only its core group and must expand its base with less committed members. 9. Gerlach (1976) has also referred to this model as "segmented," "polycentric ," and "networked," and (Gerlach, 1983), along with Dwyer (1983), as "segmentary," "polycephalous," and "reticulate." 10. Snoose News has been an extremely valuable source and is very accurate as a historical...