ABSTRACT
Over the course of the twentieth century, historic preservation evolved as one strategy for improving declining and disinvested neighborhoods. In many U.S. cities, community development corporations (CDCs) emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s with a focus on improving low-income neighborhoods for the benefit of existing residents. This chapter explores preservation’s intersection with community development during the 1970s, using a comparative case study of Pittsburgh’s Manchester Citizens Corporation (MCC) and Cincinnati’s Mt. Auburn Good Housing Foundation (MAGHF). While both organizations innovatively demonstrated preservation’s positive role in low-income areas during the 1970s, they took drastically divergent paths from the 1980s to the present. The chapter advances a nuanced understanding of urban preservation in impoverished neighborhoods and provides a framework for exploring the rise of preservation within the context of urban decline.
