How Community Reinvestment Underdevelops Black Neighborhoods

Keywords: Neighborhoods, disinvestment, racial capital
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper problematizes the concept of “urban disinvestment” and its use within the professional fields of urban planning and community development. First it puts urban political economy in conversation with racial capitalism in order to critique the concept of urban disinvestment. Then, it frames urban disinvestment (and reinvestment) as what Nancy Fraser (1989) calls a needs discourse, which is produced and reproduced through racially colorblind knowledge of urban political economy. Through qualititive methods, it traces the historic evolution of urban disinvestment/reinvestment discourse by examining the technologies of reinvestment that employ these discourses as they target one Chicago neighborhood from the 1970s through today. A content analysis of archival documents and interviews, finds the urban disinvestment/reinvestment discourse to be officially antiracist. Further, the official antiracist discourses of urban disinvestment have led to the development of a community reinvestment infrastructure that empowers a multicultural, accommodationist, and technocratic urban elite, limiting the mobilities of more radical antiracist discourses and technologies. The paper concludes with a discussion of different ways that community reinvestment can be troubled or extended through radically antiracist discourse and practice.