cover image House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America's Urban Neighborhoods

House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America's Urban Neighborhoods

Alexander Von Hoffman, Alexander Hoffman. Oxford University Press, USA, $30 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-19-514437-6

America's blighted inner cities enjoyed a renaissance in the 1990s, with crime rates plummeting and employment, real estate values and population all rising for the first time in decades. The credit for the turnaround, according to this absorbing study of urban revitalization, belongs to local community organizations, whose David vs. Goliath fight against red-lining banks and insurance companies, all-devouring real-estate developments and neglectful city halls helped preserve and revitalize their neighborhoods. Von Hoffman, an academic and the author of Local Attachments: The Making of an American Neighborhood, studies urban disaster areas such as the South Bronx, where housing activists helped transform burned-out ruins into flourishing neighborhoods, and South Central Los Angeles, where an influx of hard-working, entrepreneurial Latino immigrants built a vibrant working-class community after the 1992 riots. His is a somewhat conservative brand of urbanism, favoring""the power of capitalism"" over vast urban renewal schemes that, he says, often destroy the character of the areas they're meant to revitalize. Hope for cities, he argues, lies not in glitzy stadiums and civic centers or giant public-housing projects, but in smaller-scale public-private partnerships, subsidies and tax incentives that encourage local landlords and mom-and-pop businesses, the motor of inner-city revitalization. Urban development policy is a labyrinth of heavily acronymed programs, regulations, community groups and government agencies, but von Hoffman's lucid narrative, with its colorful activists, Machiavellian politicians and inspiring struggles, brings this potentially mind-numbing subject to life. This book deserves to be read by everyone concerned with the fate of America's cities. Photos.