Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore - REVIEW

by Emily Lieb

Investigation that traces the birth, plunder, and scavenging of Rosemont, a Black middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore.

In the mid-1950s Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctor’s offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern.

That highway was never built, but it didn’t matter—even the failure to build it destroyed Rosemont economically, if not physically. In telling the history of the neighborhood and the notional East–West Expressway, Emily Lieb shows the interwoven tragedies caused by racism in education, housing, and transportation policy. Black families had been attracted to the neighborhood after Baltimore’s Board of School Commissioners converted several white schools into “colored” ones, which had also laid the groundwork for predatory real-estate agents who bought low from white sellers and sold high to determined Black buyers. Despite financial discrimination, Black homeowners built a thriving community before the city council formally voted to condemn some nine hundred homes in Rosemont for the expressway, leading to deflated home values and even more predatory real estate deals.

Drawing on land records, oral history, media coverage, and policy documents, Lieb demystifies blockbusting, redlining, and prejudicial lending, highlighting the national patterns at work in a single neighborhood. The result is an absorbing story about the deliberate decisions that produced racial inequalities in housing, jobs, health, and wealth—as well as a testament to the ingenuity of the residents who fought to stay in their homes, down to today.

Emily Lieb is a writer and historian in Seattle, Washington.

University of Chicago Press
ISBN-13: 978-0226844381

Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation - REVIEW

by Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, Craig Borowiak

Mapping the transformative effects of America’s urban solidarity economies.

Solidarity economies, characterized by diverse practices of cooperation and mutual support, have long played pivotal but largely invisible roles in fostering shared survival and envisioning alternatives to racial capitalism globally and in the United States. This book maps the thriving existence of these cooperative networks in three differently sized American cities, highlighting their commitment to cooperation, democracy, and inclusion and demonstrating the desire—and the pressing need—to establish alternative foundations for social and economic justice.

Collectively authored by four social scientists, Solidarity Cities analyzes the deeply entrenched racial and economic divides from which cooperative networks emerge as they work to provide unmet basic needs, including food security, affordable housing, access to fair credit, and employment opportunities. Examining entities such as community gardens, credit unions, cooperatives, and other forms of economic solidarity, the authors highlight how relatively small yet vital interventions into public life can expand into broader movements that help bolster the overall well-being of their surrounding communities.

Bringing together insights from geography, political economy, and political science with mapping and spatial analysis methodologies, surveys, and in-depth interviews, Solidarity Cities illuminates the extensive footprints of solidarity economies and the roles they play in communities. The authors show how these initiatives act as bulwarks against gentrification, exploitation, and economic exclusion, helping readers see them as part of the past, present, and future of more livable and just cities.

Maliha Safri is professor of economics at Drew University. Her writing has been published in Antipode, Signs, and Environmental Policy and Governance.

Marianna Pavlovskaya is professor of geography at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center. She is coeditor of Rethinking Neoliberalism: Resisting the Disciplinary Regime.

Stephen Healy is associate professor of geography at Western Sydney University and coauthor of Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities (Minnesota, 2013).

Craig Borowiak is professor of political science at Haverford College and author of Accountability and Democracy: The Pitfalls and Promise of Popular Control.

Univ Of Minnesota Press
ISBN-13 978-1517916022

The State of Black Progress: Confronting Government and Judicial Obstacles - REVIEW

Edited by Star Parker

Black Americans have arguably arrived at the height of their cultural prominence. In politics, entertainment, academia, and nearly every sphere of influence, “black issues” dominate the national discussion. Yet many black Americans are suffering more than ever from the blight of poverty, physical and mental health struggles, lack of opportunity, and failing schools.

This edited volume, sponsored by the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and featuring contributions from W.B. Allen, Judge Janice Rogers Brown (ret.), Ian Rowe, Sally Pipes, Stephen Moore, and others, addresses this question in light of American values and the history of constitutional jurisprudence. In the 1860s, black America was promised emancipation but continued to experience subjugation. In the 1960s, black America was promised equality but was frequently exploited. Racial discrimination played a role, but in the intervening decades misguided progressive policies and the normalization of victimhood rhetoric has proven even more disastrous. By failing to live up to American ideals, our nation denied many black Americans their chance at the American Dream.

The scholars and luminaries who contributed to this volume believe that what has been lost can be recovered. If our nation recognizes the history of our current predicament, embraces the founding principles that made America an economic powerhouse, and commits to an agenda of empowering fiscal, educational, and faith and family-affirming policies, then black Americans can overcome the obstacles that most hamper progress in their communities.

Star Parker is President of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), which she founded in 1995. She serves on the US Commission on Civil Rights California Advisory Committee and previously served on the US Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Commission. In 2017, Parker joined the White House Opportunity Initiative advisory team and has served on the board of directors of the National Religious Broadcasters and the Leadership Institute.

Parker is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of several books, including Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can Do About It; White Ghetto: How Middle-Class America Reflects Inner City Decay; and Pimps, Whores and Welfare Brats: From Welfare Cheat to Conservative Messenger.

Encounter Books
ISBN-13 978-1641773416

BROKE: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises - REVIEW

In BROKE: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises, which follows seven Detroiters as they navigate life during and after the city's 2013 bankruptcy, Jodie Adams Kirshner asks: 

    How could policymakers hype bankruptcy as the solution to struggling cities without understanding the efficacy or basic consequences of its use? We had overlooked urban residents and considered the issues all wrong. 

     The individual lives portrayed in BROKE underscore Kirshner's assertions. Reggie loses his savings trying to make a habitable home for his family. Cindy fights drug use, prostitution, and dumping on her block. Lola commutes two hours a day to her suburban job. For them, financial issues are mired within the larger ramifications of poor urban policies, state and federal negligence, and-even before the 2013 decision to declare Detroit bankrupt-the root causes of a city's fiscal demise. 

     Like Matthew Desmond's Evicted, BROKE looks at what municipal distress means in practical and personal terms. More than 35 percent of Detroit's 700,000 residents fall below the poverty line. Post-bankruptcy, they struggle with a broken real estate market, school system, and job market-and their lives have not improved. In his foreword, Michael Eric Dyson sums it up beautifully: 

   The central, trenchant, undeniable argument of BROKE is clear: bankruptcy is neither a fiscally responsible nor morally irresistible response to the myriad challenges faced by the modem American city ... after reading the poignant, heartbreaking, defiant pages of BROKE, no one should question the need for a moral referendum on how policy is created in and for urban America. 

     BROKE's implications extend beyond the city it takes for its subject because Detroit is nationally emblematic. Kirshner makes a powerful argument that cities-the economic engine of our nation­ aren't being given the state or federal government aid they need for their residents to survive, much less flourish. Success for all America's citizens depends on equity of opportunity. 

About the Author: Jodie Adams Kirshner is a research professor at New York University. Previously a law professor at Cambridge University, where she also served as the deputy director of the Cambridge LLM program, the deputy director of the Cambridge Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law, and as a fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, Kirshner also teaches bankruptcy law at Columbia Law School. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, past term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a technical advisor to the Bank for International Settlements. She received a prestigious multi-year grant from the Kresge Foundation to research BROKE. Kirshner received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and graduate degrees in law and in journalism from Columbia University. She lives in New York City.

BROKE: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises
 by Jodie Adams Kirshner
St. Martin's Press. ISBN: 978-1-25-023712-5

"BROKE provides a humane but clear-eyed account of the collapse and rebirth of Detroit that re,reals what a court can and cannot accomplish via a well-managed municipal bankruptcy."
  -Paul Romer, co-recipient, 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and founding director, Marron Institute of Urban Governance, NYU