Lexington Books
Pages: 150
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-0-7391-6506-5 • Hardback • August 2015 • $114.00 • (£88.00)
978-0-7391-6508-9 • eBook • August 2015 • $108.00 • (£83.00)
Tiffany Gayle Chenault is associate professor at Salem State University.
1. Welcome to Rivertown
2. Code for Community Engagement
3. Who’s Leading the Council
4. Rules for Organizing a Council
5. Not Fitting the Public Housing Image: Location and Communication
6. Meeting and Manager Dynamics
7. Policy Recommendations
With an eye for telling detail and an ear for down-to-earth prose, Tiffany Chenault takes us inside the daily politics of a public housing development. We meet the residents, managers and officials whose cross-purposes often hinder community-building among tenants. Chenault pays particular attention to the contradictions between federal policy and local practice, and the semi-tacit stereotypes of blacks and poor people that influence her subjects' approaches to project politics.
— Roberta S. Gold, Author of When Tenants Claimed the City: The Struggle for Citizenship in New York City Housing
Many studies talk about public housing and community engagement but few truly provide a grassroots perspective on what really happens when policies are put into practice. The Unseen Politics of Public Housing is a blistering first-hand account on how local communities make sense of national policies. In giving this account, the book makes a convincing case for agencies to work alongside, rather than against, people.
— Harris Beider, Professor in Community Cohesion, Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University