The New Urban Renewal: Reclaiming Our Neighborhoods

"I never saw a ghetto that didn't have a neighborhood inside, yearning to get out and breathe free." Clarence Page is our guide on this 3-tape visit to East Brooklyn, Miami, and Los Angeles, where Community Development Corporations (CDCs) are hard at work "rebuilding neighborhoods from the ground up." Guided by the principle that "[agencies] should never do for others what they can do for themselves," the residents of these neighborhoods focus on blight and abandonment, and work step-by-step, house-by-house, and block-by-block to turn their communities around. In the first installment, we see how public and private dollars and bottom-up planning are used not for "gentrification," but to build new housing affordable to the people who live there, and to stimulate new business, better schools, and health services. The second tape describes initiatives to help curb crime rates and welfare dependency; the third recounts the concept of "tenants as landlords," or resident-ownership. Inspirational yet practical, this title may motivate other urban-dwellers to form their own CDCs, and to continue "weaving an interlocking web of physical and human support, from new housing to businesses and social services." A perfect complement to Back From the Brink: Saving America's Cities by Design (VL-1/98). Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (K. Glaser)