Renewing North Beach Place

Chapter 11 charts North Beach Place’s decade-long struggle from initial HOPE VI proposal (1995) to completed development (2005). Unlike Tucson, where the public sector held sway, San Francisco had a weak housing authority; unlike Boston, no single tenant emerged as a Plebs pole star; and unlike New Orleans, San Franciscans refused to leave the fate of public housing to the unchecked preferences of for-profit developers. Instead, buoyed by support from the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center and the Chinatown Community Development Center, proponents of the North Beach Place redevelopment insisted on retaining all 229 deeply subsidized apartments, while densifying the site to include an additional 112 units of affordable housing, financed with Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. With strong mayoral support, leadership from a not-for-profit developer, and empowered tenants, this version of HOPE VI preserved and enhanced the last remnants of affordable housing in an otherwise gentrifying neighborhood.

Sense and sensibility: Dual knowledge bases of Greenwich House, NYC, 1902–1920

Both interpretive and positivist research were a daily part of early work by social workers in settlement houses of the US Social Workers from 1902 to 1922 at Greenwich House, a settlement house (neighborhood center) founded on the west side of Greenwich Village, New York City in 1902, involved themselves in diverse investigative methods. As this analysis reveals, Greenwich House workers pursued case studies of families, residential blocks, neighborhoods, and workplaces; ethnographic depictions of an alley and a garment workers’ strike; participant-observation of tenement households, small businesses, street life, and urban factories; and social surveys on the sanitary conditions and degree of housing congestion in the neighborhoods surrounding Greenwich House.