ABSTRACT
American cities enter the next decade profoundly changed by the political forces of the 70s. The past ten years have seen the emergence of a new urban politics, based in the neighborhoods. Unlike earlier community initiatives, neighborhood organizations have combined accountability to community residents with the delivery of social and human services to become powerful advocates for their constituents’ needs. In the process, they have developed fundamentally different approaches to urban revitalization than those advocated by the planners, city administrators, and policy makers of the sixties. Multifamily abandonment is a slow, complex, and painful process, occurring primarily in older, deteriorating tenement buildings. With rents remaining constant or decreasing, and without mortgages to refinance their investments, landlords find it increasingly unprofitable to maintain their buildings. The self-help approach costs approximately half the construction costs of conventionally financed and rehabilitated buildings, and one quarter of the cost of new construction.
