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---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-rev...@lists.h-net.org> Date: Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 2:55 PM Subject: H-Net Review [H-Citizenship]: Coppola on DeFilippis, 'Urban Policy in the Time of Obama' To: <h-rev...@lists.h-net.org> Cc: H-Net Staff <revh...@mail.h-net.org> James DeFilippis, ed. Urban Policy in the Time of Obama. Globalization and Community Series. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 368 pp. $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8166-9659-8; $105.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8166-9656-7. Reviewed by Alessandro Coppola (Gran Sasso Science Institute) Published on H-Citizenship (July, 2019) Commissioned by Emily Mitchell-Eaton Too Little and Too Much of the Same: Obama's Urban Policy, Great Expectations for Great Delusions The Obama administration is now part of the past, and the time has come to assess its political and policy heritage. _Urban Policy in the Time of Obama_, edited by James De Filippis, gathers a large and diverse group of scholars to do precisely that. This collection is a multidisciplinary evaluation of what Barack Obama and his administration achieved in the area of urban policy. Urban policy is intensely political, because, either explicitly or, more often, implicitly, urban policy discourses and programs come with an articulated conceptualization of what citizenship is and, more specifically, of how public action should be reshaped to facilitate social organization and integration--and therefore citizenship--in cities. Expectations in this area of policy were particularly high. The exceptional profile of a president who had been a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago and who was promised to be the first truly "urban president" in national history, one who "would see the world from the vantage point of the modern American metropolis," was the primary driver of such expectations (pp. 149-50). If expectations were high, the judgment of Obama's legacy in this field based on the sixteen contributions comprising this book is generally negative. This policy legacy--as the editor argues--is not only mostly made of "little pilot projects with small pots of money" but also characterized by "a striking degree of path dependency" from the long-established policy consensus (p. 296). This consensus around urban policy, which has hegemonized the Democratic Party since the end of the 1970s, is based on two ideas: first, that urban problems can be solved through the mobilization of market forces; and second, that the not-for-profit sector has to play a strategic role in attracting, if not building, these forces, especially in disadvantaged parts of cities. Combined with the creed in the engineered social mixing of people and ethnicities and in the operational implications of poverty deconcentration and planned (partial) gentrification, these two ideas have transformed the political culture and policy agenda of the party that, since the New Deal, has entertained the most profound relationship with cities, their evolving issues, and constituencies. The longevity of this consensus is also the reason why assessing Obama's legacy in this field is especially important to understand if his presidency represented (or not) a significant break in this legacy and, more specifically, a break with one of the last democratic administrations, that of Bill Clinton. To frame and define the object of this urban policy is in and of itself intensively political, in a nation where cities and their problems have long been racialized, and consequently stigmatized and marginalized, in policy agendas and discourses. To be sure, urban policy is made by policies that explicitly carry that name, but also by policies, writes De Filippis, that variably "impact people in large, dense, and diverse places," starting with the ones that "shape the rules, logic, or patterns of the larger flows that produce urbanization" (p. 5). It is for this reason that De Filippis addresses not only policies that have been defined as "stealth urban policies"--for example, much recovery spending was ultimately urban in its effects--but also pivotal structural policies that regulate fluxes of investments and people. This inclusive framing allows De Filippis to include contributions covering areas that are often left at the margins, such as education, immigration, labor relations, and health. These are all policy areas where cities mostly act as recipients of change produced at larger scales, while simultaneously acting as arenas for collective actions focusing on the claim of rights and entitlements. Even if some areas have not been addressed as thoroughly as they could have been--the environment, the climate and energy nexus, and finance--this is ultimately a book that takes urban policy seriously, offering both careful assessments of individual administrations' actions and critical readings of the political discourses promoted to justify these actions. The response to the great recession was central in Obama's early days in office. On the one hand, substantial public spending was oriented to cities through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) that, together with the issuance of Build America Bonds, funded public works, education, and health projects in metropolitan areas. On the other hand, the administration responded to the immediate effects of the foreclosure crisis through initiatives touching on the broad and complex nexus of housing and community development policies. While not ignoring its shortcomings, contributing author Hilary Sylver stresses how Obama's intervention in this field was unprecedented, with the launch of successive rounds of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), which allowed states, localities, and community development corporations to acquire and dispose of foreclosed homes to prevent foreclosures through the Making Home Affordable (MHA) program. This was a program that supported homeowners in readjusting mortgages and avoiding foreclosures but, overall, whose effectiveness was limited by the quantitative reach of these measures--4.8 million involved out of a total of 6.1 million--and the often temporary character of the relief provided. Has all this mobilization implied a substantial change in the housing policy and regulation realm? No, according to Rachel Bratt and Dan Immergluck: the largely bipartisan character of this policy area--with a shared creed in homeownership as something naturally beneficial economically and socially--was confirmed under Obama. His response to the crisis was in fact deemed "too weak, too tentative, and too confusing" (p. 94), with a bias toward corporate solutions (shown by the fact that most nonperforming loans and foreclosed properties were actually sold to financial actors and not, as originally announced, to nonprofit organizations). However, at the edges of this orientation, there were some attempts to change. The institution of a National Housing Trust Fund--funded with Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac's profits to fund rental housing for those with very low incomes and undermined by Republican opposition and the policies against homelessness--increased funding to "housing first" solutions already experimented with in cities. Also in the field of area-based policies, several authors stress again the fact that evidence mostly shows signs of continuity over change. Janet Smith and Amy Khare discuss one of the most critical pilots of the administration, Choice Neighborhoods, underlining the persistent bias toward the role of the market, the search for the social mix, and a physical approach to larger structural problems. Kathe Newman points to the reproduction of the established community development industry underlying some signs of potential evolution, such as foreclosure prevention initiatives, land banking, and partnerships with health institutions. In this context of path dependency, one area of change was governance. The Obama administration tried to optimize federal spending through a fairly unprecedented dose of evaluation activities, federal interagency coordination, interjurisdictional and regional approaches, and capacity building. While the record of the White House Office for Urban Affairs is somehow unclear, the Sustainable Communities Initiative (SCI), a collaboration between the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Department of Transportation (DOT), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which supported collaborative regional planning projects open to a wide range of local actors, has presented several areas of interests, embodying a (pilot) test bed for the metropolitan turn in urban policy long advocated by Bruce Katz at the Brookings Institution. At the core of many of these planning exercises was a closer coordination of housing and transport policies, mostly built around the idea of transit-oriented development (the concentration of housing around mass transit nodes) that have generated discussion around poverty deconcentration centered by previous discourses about so-called neighborhoods of opportunity. In the area of social policy, Philip Thomson discusses the urban implications of Obama's most important political legacy: the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The strengthening of federal requirements for community benefit activities for nonprofit hospitals was associated with the opening up of significant potential for locally based organizing drives for ensuring the uninsured. Pauline Lipman stresses how Obama's education policy, Blueprint for Education Reform, Race to the Top, accelerated "the neoliberal restructuring of public education" (p. 132). The ACA took the opportunity of the fiscal crisis of states and cities to implement, through competitive grants, the usual recipe of more testing, competition, privatization (in the form of charter schools), and a reorientation of curricula toward training. The role of "an interlocking network of corporate consulting groups, neoliberal think thanks, [and] billionaire venture philanthropies" in the shaping of new policies and related markets is evident in Obama's embrace of new tools, such as Pay for Success (PFS) contracts and social impact bonds (SIBs) (Lipman, p. 133). At stake here, argues Robert W. Lake, is the subjection of social policy to the remuneration expectations of financial markets. The selling of SIBs allows the rise of capital on financial markets to fund policy actions pursuing measurable outcomes in terms of government budget savings (a specific program able, say, to save on incarceration costs preventing it) that, once materialized, will then flow back to the initial investors. The Obama administration's role in promoting such tools was one more proof of its support of a neoliberal policy framework pursuing new government technologies that, while focusing on behavioral modification and the disciplining of marginal subjects, enhance the remuneration of capital, removing the broader structural context from public discussion. Another chapter involves policies that, while not having an explicitly spatial management dimension, actively involve urban constituencies and their potential for collective action. Obama strengthened the administrative basis for fair housing and expanded the number and type of discrimination cases pursued, sued financial institutions for so-called reverse red-lining, established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (and within it the Office for Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity), and sued local governments for discriminatory housing practices. In the field of immigration policy--a field where promises of comprehensive reform were made--the administration proceeded mostly through executive orders, with an overall shift, writes Christine Thurlow Brenner, toward a more selective policy aimed, in Obama's words, at "attracting the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers who will help create good paying jobs and grow the economy" (p. 128). Moving toward this direction was the growth in employment-based visas (with a decrease of the family-based visas that, however, still largely prevail) and in so-called investor visas, coupled with more funding for training for immigrants while deportations continued, coming to be a highly controversial issue throughout the Obama presidency. On the one hand, there was a shift from workplace raids, common under George W. Bush's administration, to a focus on employers hiring undocumented workers. On the other hand, there emerged a regime of exception that protected, through the device of "deferred action," specific categories of migrants from deportation for a period (for example, in the case of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [DACA] initiative). One more undelivered comprehensive reform, discusses Nik Theodor, is the union-sponsored labor relations reform Employee Free Choice Act, an act seen by its supporters as the achievement of an over twenty-year-long season of innovative organizing that left a legacy of new actors, such as workers centers. Beyond a very early initiative on pay gender equality and some late initiatives, the administration failed to deliver what was promised: "right to work" legislation put in place in states under Republican control. As shown, the collection offers extensive material to assess Obama's urban policy through the perspective of the citizenship discourse it mobilized and through the concrete, actionable political spaces it opened. Overall, despite some signs of revival for place-based approaches focusing on the integration of social services and schooling, policies mostly reproduced inherited, consensual understandings of urban citizenship. The role of communities and the centrality that homeownership plays in shaping their forms of sociability and organization, associated with the persistent emphasis on poverty deconcentration and social mixing as ways to handle increasing socio-spatial inequalities, have confirmed that integration of subordinated social and ethnic groups has to be produced through the engineering of individual pathways to social mobility. This judgment is further confirmed when Obama's discourse on the pivotal issue of race is examined, showing what Preston H. Smith II defines in his contribution as the "Faustian pact" between Obama and the white majority based on the avoidance discussions on race. When he did speak on race, his call for the need to strengthen traditional social norms in African American communities (his use of the long-established theme of fatherhood is significant here) would have strategically appealed both to that majority and to African American middle and upper classes. If not much really changed on that side, it would be hard to deny that some of the policies that were described offered some limited organizing gateways that could energize grassroots, creative political experiments in the urban social movements model discussed by Lorainne Minnite and Frances Fox Piven. The approval of labor and immigration reform would have turned these limited gateways into large avenues, and if we look at urban policy in the perspective of citizenship, this is the failure that most dramatically affects the legacy of Obama's urban policy and also the long-term fate of the Democratic Party. Citation: Alessandro Coppola. Review of DeFilippis, James, ed., _Urban Policy in the Time of Obama_. H-Citizenship, H-Net Reviews. July, 2019. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=49588 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
