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Chapter 6: The Neighborhoods: Not by Faith Alone
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Chapter The Neighborhoods: Not by Faith Alone Neighborhood initiatives have often been viewed as a kind of antidote to the casualties of capitalism, including its tendency to undermine local communities. The history of neighborhood initiative also reflects American society’s persistent tendency to ask those who have the least role in making and the largest role in bearing the brunt of society’s economic and social choices to deal with the effects of those choices. —Robert Halpern, Rebuilding the Inner City, Nearly a quarter of a century after America’s post-industrial cities hit bottom as both private capital and public programs appeared to have abandoned the effort to reverse the situation there finally appeared to be good news. ‘‘The American inner city is rebounding—not just here and there, not just cosmetically, but fundamentally,’’ Paul Grogan and Tony Proscio declared in their book, Comeback Cities.1 The inner city, Harvard research fellow Alexander Von Hoffman added in a study, ‘‘is no longer the lurid nightmare portrayed for so long on the local eleven o’clock news. . . . In the s a scholar examining inner-city neighborhoods found only ‘islands of renewal in seas of decay.’ Today researchers write of ‘islands of decay in seas of renewal.’ As startling as it may seem, across the United States inner-city neighborhoods are being reborn.’’2 Government was not the party responsible for neighborhood renewal, these studies asserted, but rather a broad array of largely nonprofit organizations, which managed in a variety of ways to tether new human and monetary resources to the bene- fit of places previously left behind.3 In terms of talent, creativity, and dedication , Camden’s community organizers stood among the nation’s very best for their ability to address huge problems and to make a difference in people’s lives. Like their peers elsewhere, they formed community development corporations, reinvented old organizations—notably those associated with parish churches that had once served white ethnic groups in the city Chapter before its transformation—and tapped state and national sources of expertise and capital. But an observer of Camden’s neighborhoods would have been hard pressed to declare victory. By the turn of the new century Camden ’s neighborhood improvements remained largely pockets in a sea of decay. Indeed, by no neighborhood in the entire city had escaped the dire effects of disinvestment. Camden remained, in urban commentator David Rusk’s terms, a ‘‘city past the point of no return.’’4 Why was Camden unable to rebound? Certainly, the ability to attract new investment and visitors to the waterfront signaled some progress in reversing Camden’s fortunes. An entertainment district does not a selfsustaining city make, however. For Camden to join the company of success stories, it had to become a good place to live as well as to visit. This proved a particularly daunting challenge, and not only because of ineptness in city government or a bad economy. Cumulative changes that had left Camden with the worst of all worlds—inadequate services, high taxes, and undesirable environmental conditions—undercut even the best efforts to make the city a preferred place of residence once again. Moreover, a shift in national policy away from public investments aimed at the elimination of poverty and toward attracting private capital again put social activists at a disadvantage . The strength they once possessed in bridging divides, between races and between city and suburb, declined in an era of greater personal as well as policy privitatization. Many made their adjustments to these shifts as well. Still, however impressive group efforts were in improving neighborhood conditions and however generous outside help became, Camden residents found themselves in a situation best described again by David Rusk: attempting to ascend a down escalator.5 Lacking neither social capital nor new sources of monetary investment, they nonetheless faced too many external forces against them to assure their well-being as long as they remained in place. Many objected strenuously when Time featured Camden in under the title, ‘‘Who Could Live Here?’’ but the story continued to have a ring of truth to it into the first years of the new century.6 Nor was their situation unique. Grogan and Proscio dismiss Rusk’s metropolitan prescriptions for dispersing poverty as impractical, but they do not contest his arguments that even the best community development efforts have failed to reduce poverty significantly in inner city areas. As reviewers noted, these contemporary urban boosters were all too quick to commend...
