CSSR Talk by SOCI faculty & PhD student on Gentrification and Coops

Thursday, October 27, 2011 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
CSSR Conference Room

Katie Kerstetter and John Robinson, "Preserving Affordable Housing and Building Wealth in an Economic Recovery: Limited-Equity Cooperatives as an Alternative to Tenant Displacement": In the past 15 years, more than 165,000 units of public housing have been demolished or lost as housing subsidy contracts have expired and federal funding has lagged behind what agencies need to operate and maintain public housing.  State and local governments’ efforts to rehabilitate public housing often has come at the expense of displacing low-income residents, as public housing units are converted into mixed-income developments. Limited equity cooperatives (LECs) provide an alternative mechanism to preserve affordable housing without displacing tenants.  The paper on which this presentation is based was written for a policy publication: SSSP's Agenda for Social Justice 2012.  The presentation will provide an overview of the paper's policy argument as well as a discussion of how the authors plan to adapt the paper for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.  It also will include a discussion of how to write and adapt work for both academic and policy audiences. 

Johanna Bockman, “Neoliberalizing Gentrification: The Ellen Wilson Public Housing Project and Limited-Equity Cooperatives in Washington, DC": Sociologists have studied the shift to neoliberalism in cities and the new forms that gentrification takes in neoliberal spaces. For this talk, I present archival research on a specific case study, the Ellen Wilson Dwellings, as well as other public housing projects in DC’s Ward 6. The demolition of the Ellen Wilson Dwellings and its reconstruction as limited-equity cooperatives seemed a positive model. Yet, the Capitol Hill business community coopted public housing residents’ criticisms, DC’s cooperative movement and other practices associated with the Black Power movement and forged a new form of neoliberal gentrification. The presentation ends with an exploration of how this neoliberal gentrification might have been avoided.