ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the ways in which newcomers learn to navigate their new homes, drawing on field research conducted by the first author over a five-year period, including thirty months of continuous residence in the Western Addition, a historically black neighborhood in San Francisco. It draws on field research conducted in the Western Addition to explain how the neighborhood is constructed as a bad neighborhood in ordinary conversations and the consequences of this construction for neighborhood residents. Parts of the neighborhood may still fit the definition of a ghetto in that there remain areas in which low-income African American live in high concentrations, but like New York's Harlem and the "U Street Corridor" in Washington, D.C., it is also "on the rise". The chapter offers a final illustration of discursive redlining. The online reviews and the face-to-face warnings described in the chapter encourage an ahistorical sense of the ghetto as a problem.
