The racial fix

Focaal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (79) ◽  
pp. 102-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Mumm
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Debt Financing ◽  
Consensus Building ◽  
Property Value ◽  
White People ◽  
West Side ◽  
Growth Machine ◽  
Building Process ◽  
Survey Results ◽  
The City

In Chicago, real estate value is fixed by race through the process of gentrification. I present findings from an ethnography of the black, Mexican, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods of the greater West Side. Gentrification here is a “racial fix”: a consensus-building process to inflate value in a speculative market reliant on the historical legacies of racism. The white flight era devalued neighborhoods now facing speculation and hyperinflation as increased global investment, debt culture, and debt financing fuel the growth machine. The discourses of residents, randomized survey results, and a built environment scan show that property value corresponds more to white residence than material improvement. White people cultivate the currency of whiteness through gentrification to build social status, capital, and the city of their dreams.

Analysis of geodetic and legal documentation in the process of expropriation for roads. Krakow case study

2013 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-84
Author(s):  
Anna Trembecka
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
The State ◽  
Property Value ◽  
Real Property ◽  
Construction Design ◽  
Special Rules ◽  
The City

Abstract Amendment to the Act on special rules of preparation and implementation of investment in public roads resulted in an accelerated mode of acquisition of land for the development of roads. The decision to authorize the execution of road investment issued on its basis has several effects, i.e. determines the location of a road, approves surveying division, approves construction design and also results in acquisition of a real property by virtue of law by the State Treasury or local government unit, among others. The conducted study revealed that over 3 years, in this mode, the city of Krakow has acquired 31 hectares of land intended for the implementation of road investments. Compensation is determined in separate proceedings based on an appraisal study estimating property value, often at a distant time after the loss of land by the owner. One reason for the lengthy compensation proceedings is challenging the proposed amount of compensation, unregulated legal status of the property as well as imprecise legislation. It is important to properly develop geodetic and legal documentation which accompanies the application for issuance of the decision and is also used in compensation proceedings.

Toward Camden

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mercy Romero
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Vacant Lots ◽  
Award Recipient ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Book Award ◽  
Duke University ◽  
The City

In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

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