scholarly journals Rethinking the politics of vulnerability: neighborhood empowerment in Kansas City Missouri (USA)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Voluntary Associations ◽  
Community Resilience ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Neighborhood Associations ◽  
Local Neighborhood ◽  
Urban Vulnerability

The paper provides evidence for the racialization of urban neighborhoods in Kansas City Missouri, USA and the ways in which voluntary associations of citizens work to resist and reduce conditions of urban vulnerability. The paper presents data from historical patterns of racially-biased real estate practices, including redlining, and demonstrates how these patterns continue to shape the politics of vulnerability in the region today. Three neighborhood profiles provide evidence of the ways in which local neighborhood associations are organized to respond to both social and spatial conditions of vulnerability. In contrast to the estimates of low community resilience in these neighborhoods, the author demonstrates that neighborhood empowerment is an important counterpoint to concentrated vulnerabilities.

Sustainability and the City

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-48
Author(s):  
Melissa Checker
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Human Resources ◽  
York City ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Environmental Benefits ◽  
Private Industry ◽  
The City

This chapter establishes the book’s key theoretical premises, including capitalist cycles of crisis and resolution (Marx), double-bind theory (Bateson), the spatial fix (Harvey), and capitalism and schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari). Using New York City as an example, it discusses how city leaders resolved economic crises through the continual exploitation of natural and human resources. The constant remaking of urban neighborhoods fueled the city’s economic engine, especially as the city shifted to a real estate-based economy. Towards the end of the twentieth century, this real estate imperative coincided with increased public concern about the dangers of climate change. The broad appeal of sustainability provided the perfect cover for Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s neoliberal agenda to recreate New York as a luxury city. But just as Bloomberg’s emphasis on private industry intensified the gap between the city’s rich and poor it also unevenly distributed environmental benefits and burdens.

Low-Income Housing in Crisis

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-57
Author(s):  
Benjamin Holtzman
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Real Estate Market ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
The Political ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Political Left ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The Right ◽  
Low Income Housing

During the late 1960s and 1970s, extensive disinvestment and an eviscerated real estate market led landlords of low-income housing to walk away from their real estate holdings, leaving thousands of buildings unoccupied and often city-owned due to nonpayment of taxes. In response, Latinx, African American, and some white residents protested the blight these buildings brought to their neighborhoods by directly occupying and seeking ownership of abandoned buildings through a process they called urban homesteading. Activists framed homesteading as a self-help initiative, often emphasizing their own ingenuity over state resources as the key to solving the problems of low-income urban neighborhoods. Such framing was understandable given the unstable economic terrain of the 1970s and won activists support not just from the political left, but also the right. But it also positioned homesteading as demonstrating the superiority of private-citizen and private sector–led revitalization in ways that left homesteading projects vulnerable as it became clear how necessary government resources would be to their success.

scholarly journals Positioning Urban Neighborhoods for Prosperity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mo Zell ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Capital Flows ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Physical Attributes ◽  
Cultural Pressures

Globally, financial and cultural pressures continue to contribute to localized inequalities. These growing disparities generated by real estate speculation and migrations tend to intensify rather than abate a sense of inequality and the undoing of communities. In Milwaukee, however, the problem is the opposite. Gentrification due to real estate speculations do not exist in the same degree. Instead, systemic poverty contributes to the disenfranchisement of black and brown populations. Empty storefronts in neighborhoods hit hard by poverty are not being replaced with high-end condos, but rather they simply remain empty. This paper details the efforts to ameliorate not only the physical attributes of vacancy through changing capital flows but also to give agency to voices from the community.

scholarly journals Peter and Elaine Moss: Franchisees

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 99
Author(s):  
Ross A. Malaga ◽  
Ram Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Business School ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Training Session ◽  
Commercial Real Estate ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Real Estate ◽  
Real Estate Agent ◽  
Suitable Location ◽  
The Ideal

Peter Moss, a business school professor, and his wife, Elaine, a corporate executive, bought a Hair Shear franchise in the suburban Maryland area in July 2007. Hair Shear was a national chain of over 2,000 stores, all of which were franchisee owned. Peter and Elaine Moss contracted with Philip Levinson, a commercial real estate agent authorized by Hair Shear, to obtain a suitable location for their franchise. During her training session at Hair Shear headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri, Elaine learned of the importance of a good location for the success of the franchise. The first location identified by the real estate agent did not work out because the strip malls main tenant, a day spa, vetoed the entry of a hair dressing salon, considering the salon to be a competitor. Elaine Moss identified a second location only to be told much later by the real estate agent that the location was taken by a barber friend of the landlord. Disappointed by their inability to find a suitable location, the Moss met a couple who owned multiple Hair Shear stores in Maryland who suggested that they typically negotiated directly with landlords. This couple suggested a third location for the Moss to consider. The dilemma facing Peter and Elaine Moss is two fold: which of the two was the ideal location for their store? The larger question was, should they bypass the authorized real estate agent and negotiate directly with the landlord?

Business Patterns in the Growth of a Midwestern City: The Kansas City Business Community Before the Civil War

1959 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-174
Author(s):  
Charles N. Glaab
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Business Community ◽  
The West ◽  
Investment Opportunities ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Midwestern City

The Western traders who made centers like Kansas City their base soon found that urban development offered greater, safer investment opportunities than did trade. Bonanza real estate earnings became a major source of capital for the further development of the West.

Exploring Attitudes, Perceived Norms, and Personal Agency: Insights Into Theory-Based Messages to Encourage Park-Based Physical Activity in Low-Income Urban Neighborhoods

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Groshong ◽  
Sonja A. Wilhelm Stanis ◽  
Andrew T. Kaczynski ◽  
J. Aaron Hipp ◽  
Gina M. Besenyi
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Personal Agency ◽  
Public Parks ◽  
Park Use ◽  
Perceived Norms

Background:Public parks hold promise for promoting population-level PA, but studies show a significant portion of park use is sedentary. Past research has documented the effectiveness of message-based strategies for influencing diverse behaviors in park settings and for increasing PA in nonpark contexts. Therefore, to inform message-based interventions (eg, point-ofdecision prompts) to increase park-based PA, the purpose of this study was to elicit insights about key attitudes, perceived norms, and personal agency that affect park use and park-based PA in low-income urban neighborhoods.Methods:This study used 6 focus groups with youth and adults (n = 41) from low-income urban areas in Kansas City, MO, to examine perceptions of key attitudinal outcomes and motivations, perceived norms, key referents, and personal agency facilitators and constraints that affect park use and park-based PA.Results:Participant attitudes reflected the importance of parks for mental and physical health, with social interaction and solitude cited as key motivations. Of 10 themes regarding perceived norms, influential others reflected participants’ ethnic makeup but little consensus emerged among groups. Social and safety themes were cited as both facilitators and constraints, along with park offerings and setting.Conclusions:Information about attitudes, perceived norms, and personal agency can increase understanding of theoretically derived factors that influence park-based PA and help park and health professionals create communication strategies to promote PA.

Book Reviews

2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-78
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
York City ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Urban Neighborhood ◽  
Social Autopsy

Books reviewed in this article: Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000 Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio, Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival Chester Hartman, Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago Paul Stoller, Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City

Beyond Invasion and Succession: School Segregation, Real Estate Blockbusting, and the Political Economy of Neighborhood Racial Transition

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Fox Gotham
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Organized Interests ◽  
Institutional Forces ◽  
Ecological Patterns ◽  
Succession Model ◽  
Racial Transition

Recent urban scholarship has questioned the validity, methodology, and assumptions of the invasion‐succession model of neighborhood racial transition but has yet to elaborate a framework that extends beyond a critique of ecological theory. In this article, I use the theoretical insights of the sociospatial approach and draw on census data, government documents and reports, in‐depth interviews, and oral histories to examine the racial transition of southeast Kansas City, Missouri after 1950. I advance understanding of neighborhood transition by identifying the key actors, organized interests, and institutional forces that the invasion‐succession model has neglected to incorporate into its explanatory framework. I investigate the critical links between discriminatory school boundary decisions and real estate blockbusting in determining the timing, pace, and magnitude of racial succession. My objective is to fashion an alternative theory of neighborhood racial transition that takes into account the power of events to shape and transform ecological patterns, illuminates the interconnectedness of structural factors and human agency, and highlights the role of powerful actors and organized interests in marketing racial exclusion and reinforcing racially segregated settlement spaces.

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