Metropolitics

“The Apartment You Can Own with Pride”: Federally Insured Black Housing Cooperatives, 1950–1955

Nicholas Shatan — 2025-11-25T06:00:00Z

Postwar Black cooperatives insured by the federal government trouble the binary of public and private in housing development.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” In October 1950, civil-rights leader Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune spoke when the cornerstone was laid for Parkway Gardens, perhaps the first apartment development cooperatively owned by African Americans in Chicago (Chicago Defender 1950). Built next to the “L” rapid-transit station at 63rd St and South Park Avenue on the

- Essays / race, segregation, residential segregation, housing, cooperative housing, Federal Housing Administration, United States, Black neighborhoods, real estate

Confronting Police Violence and an Unjust Justice System

Michele Graham — 2020-05-19T05:00:00Z

We publish Michele Graham's review of the 2018 book The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City as Black people in the US again endure the trauma of a murder in their community at the hands of police officers. Graham's reflections on the authors' findings (drawn from a neighborhood study in Chicago) emphasize the continuing legacies of historically racist policing, racist prosecution practices and racist incarceration patterns in the United States. The review

- Reviews / police violence, United States, Chicago, incarceration, prison, Black neighborhoods, neighborhood, justice, discriminatory policing, brutality

Displacement, Demobilization, and Democracy: Current Eviction and Historic Dispossession in Richmond, Virginia

Kathryn Howell & Benjamin F. Teresa — 2020-02-04T06:00:00Z

High eviction rates in Black Richmond neighborhoods must be understood in the context of a long history of political and physical displacement that has suppressed activism in these neighborhoods.
In April 2018, the Princeton Eviction Lab released a nearly nationwide dataset of eviction filings and judgments between 2000 and 2016. From this work, a New York Times article identified Richmond, Virginia, as having the second-highest eviction rate of large cities in the United States. Five of the

- From the Field / Black neighborhoods, Black politics, democracy, displacement, race, race and space, United States, Richmond, Virginia, evictions

“People of Color Are Not Props”: Black Branding and Community Resistance in Gentrifying Brooklyn

Maura McGee — 2018-02-06T13:00:00Z

When a new white-owned upscale bar-restaurant in the gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights advertised rosé wine served in 40-ounce bottles and a purported “bullet-hole-ridden” wall, the neighborhood erupted with protest. In her analysis of the “bullet-hole bar” controversy, Maura McGee probes the intersection of race, gentrification, and community in a changing commercial landscape.
Summerhill—a “boozy sandwich shop”—opened in the gentrifying historically low-income black

- From the Field / authenticity, gentrification, New York, race, community, Brooklyn, Black neighborhoods, marketing, branding

The Evolution of New York City's Black Neighborhoods

John Mollenkopf — 2017-05-09T06:00:00Z

Especially in the central cities of the Northeast, neighborhoods that were once identified with black politics and culture are growing more ethnically diverse, and wealthier. John Mollenkopf examines demographic data from New York City's Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant and reflects on their implications for electoral politics and the fates of economically vulnerable black households.
New trends are influencing American cities. Particularly notable is the falling-off of African-American

- From the Field / immigration, gentrification, New York, Brooklyn, Black politics, Black neighborhoods, Manhattan, Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant