Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City (review)

Bargaining for Brooklyn, a measured ethnographic report on eight community-based organizations in its eponymous borough of New York, does not show itself off as an important book. But it is one.

For a hundred years, and through many permutations, the prevalent model of urban sociology has taken the individual and his/her social integration as its object and the geographically-bounded neighborhood or community as its locus of inquiry. Nicole P. Marwell argues that it has been wrong to do so on both counts. Studies of urban poverty consistently miss the importance that local, formal organizations make in the life chances of the poor. These community-based organizations provide bridges to larger fields of organizations – primarily the state – and broker resources that mitigate the effects of poverty. Because CBOs operate in multi-organizational environments with substantive policy foci, they must devise strategies to cooperate and compete with other CBOs, and sometimes challenge government agencies that extend far beyond the neighborhood in order to maintain their access to scarce resources. The performance of CBOs in these policy fields, Marwell explains, is more important than any social integration they may provide individuals.

With a fluid and balanced mixture of historical background, narrative and analysis, Marwell highlights the varied methods by which the CBOs attempt to attract housing, childcare and employment for their constituents, and to build their political voice. She takes us among the housing organizers from a Latino community development group that turns to protest when a plan to rezone a part of the Williamsburg neighborhood squeezes it between gentrification pressures and the demands of a politically favored Hasidic group for scarce housing resources. She takes us into a CBO in neighboring Bushwick, whose founder became a state legislator and built an efficient patronage machine. The CBO he used to lead is now an efficient broker of resources and votes, one of the neighborhood's largest employers, and the provider of cradle-to-grave services to many of its poor residents. She shows us how another group deals with a public conflict over a youth services program, and how another, church-based organization fosters community involvement while simultaneously circumscribing its members' taste for what might sometimes be necessary confrontation with other organizations and the state.

Observers of community-based organizations will find familiar dilemmas here. Trade-offs between "insider" and "outsider" strategies are common. So is the paradox of community development: CBOs' efforts to stem the tide of private disinvestment and to safeguard the lives of their poor constituents often attract entrepreneurial gentrifiers, endangering both poor people's tenure and the CBO's social and material base. The question of when and how CBOs become part of the urban "growth machine" troubles the CBOs themselves.

Yet Marwell's treatment of these familiar questions still stands out for several reasons. In addition to its main criticism of individualist sociological inquiry on urban poverty, the book corrects the general invisibility of CBOs and sometimes-romantic treatment of "community" in the literature on urban social problems. Further, there is no more accessible, balanced and multifaceted treatment of CBOs' complexity and variation, illustrated as sensitively with ethnographic evidence. Finally, Marwell's treatment of CBOs' dilemmas and varied strategies to meet them often suggests other areas of inquiry that might be informed by her work. For example, she consistently implies that the fields in which CBOs operate run on reputation. A group's ability to demonstrate to multiple audiences its local support and capability thus becomes central to processes that might otherwise be interpreted as the bloodless unfolding of structural imperatives or of the simple alignment and realignment of interests. Thus, too, a CBO's reputation can be critical in determining how deeply its constituents experience poverty.

Even amid this rich fare, there is room for further development. Marwell resists judgment throughout: Could the CBOs she studied have acted differently than they did? Might some have been more effective if they had organized...