ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on community board members in light of postreform politics. The symbolic and substantive impact of David Dinkins’s election on African-American board members may have been lessened as the forces of fiscal centralization, incorporated into the postreform regime, successfully pressured the new mayor to adopt policies adversely affecting his own constituency base. Race and class are obviously interrelated demographic facts in American cities; African-Americans and Latinos represent disproportionately high percentages of low-income populations in urban areas. The political realities of the post-1975 crisis years in New York may have especially alienated the city’s low-income African-American population. The resulting frustration with integrative land-use mechanisms may well account for the greater community-control temperament of African-American respondents across all three land-use items in the scale. The strong community-control reaction to land-use issues among the respondents, then, has roots that are both historical and immediate.
