Featured in Comeback Cities: A Blueprint For Urban Neighborhood Revival
The point is not that poverty has been abolished, or will be, nor is it that inner cities can or should return to the full glory of their wealthier pasts. The point is that they are becoming places where people want to live, shop, run businesses and go to school. Joel Bookman, whose northwest Chicago community organization programs has led one of the more successful inner-city revitalization programs anywhere, says of his rapidly rebounding neighborhood, “It’s not pretty. It’s still not clean. We’ve got problems. But economically, it works, and people like it here.”
“It’s not pretty. It’s still not clean. We’ve got problems. But economically, it works, and people like it here.”
The modesty of that statement makes it easy to disregard. People like it here. Were Bookman talking about middle-class community of trimmed lawns and above-average schools, the statement would be unexceptional. But as a description of a neighborhood from which the middle class once fled, where poverty remains high, shops are thinly capitalized, and investment half disappeared for decades, it is a perfectly remarkable accomplishment, on which a great deal can now be built.
Comeback Cities: A Blueprint For Urban Neighborhood Revival by Paul Grogan and Tony Proscio