ABSTRACT
Neither the people-based nor the place-based redevelopment strategies really anticipated the difficulty that entrenched centers of crime would pose for redevelopment efforts. Tough anticrime and mandatory sentencing policies implemented in the 1980s had enormous social by-products in communities with illegal drug markets—often those same communities where Committee for Economic Development (CED) efforts were under way. The drug trade brought violence into the neighborhoods, soaring arrest rates destabilized the communities, and the number of people returning from prison to the community was growing exponentially. New laws created additional barriers to employment, housing, and education for ex-offenders, so that benefits that might have been available in 1975 for those formerly incarcerated were no longer. The consequence was a near-inevitable return to crime and a growing entrenchment of violence in the communities that were “home.”
