FORMAL ASPIRATIONS AND INFORMAL ENCOUNTERS Plural laws and economies revealed by eminent domain on Philadelphia’s American Street1

DRAFT- October 2008- Please Do Not Cite without Permission from Author. Debbie Becher2 Department of Sociology Princeton University In this paper, the author describes how the pursuit of growth in American poor neighborhoods can be an attempt to formalize informal systems. The article develops theory about the social processes that precede and follow such an effort. It merges sociological studies of informal economies with socio-legal studies of informal law. Data are from an ethnographic history (archives, interviews, and observations, covering approximately 1980-2007) of resident and government involvement in decisions that the city would use eminent domain powers to “take” sixty-eight properties surrounding a section of North American Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The case study demonstrates three distinct social processes: (1) quiet coexistence of informal and formal orders, (2) aspirations to formalization that anticipate conversion of informally accumulated material wealth to holdings in the new order, and (3) translation of cultural values from the informal to the formal order. The resulting anti-government struggle exposes a subversive claim for self-determination and community preservation beneath a property-rights facade. In its conclusion, the paper extends this case study to other quests for formal recognition of informally managed activity. INTRODUCTION For the last 50 years, sociologists have paid little attention to property (North 1990 is an exception. Also see Carruthers and Ariovich 2004). By contrast, major early theorists of the capitalist political economy put property front and center (Marx 1887; Polanyi 1944; Weber and Knight 1950; Weber, Roth, and Wittich 1978). They associated the establishment of private property with two broad institutional changes. First, the formal rules of written contracts and universal law displace informal orders of local relationships and oral agreements (Weber, Roth, and Wittich 1978). Second, accumulation replaces subsistence as the primary motivation for                                                              1 This paper was developed with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Dissertation Improvement Grant, Law and Social Sciences and from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Office of University Partnerships, Grant Number H-21536SG, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and Princeton University. Points of views or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of any of these supporting organizations. The author thanks Kim Scheppele, Paul DiMaggio, Hendrik Hartog, Viviana Zelizer, Emily Zackin, Keith Brown, Caryn Carpenter, and workshops with Princeton University’s Center for Human Values, the International Sociological Association, and the Law and Society Association for helpful comments on various drafts. She also owes deep gratitude to the many individuals and organizations who agreed to participate in the study. 2 Contact at [email protected], 107 Wallace Hall, Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, 215.622.0700

economic action (Marx 1887; Polanyi 1944). Contemporary empirical researchers have shown that neither of these transformations is complete. Advanced capitalist societies contain varying degrees of formality in law and the economy and diverse motivations for pursuing property. Modern researchers have not yet theorized how informal and formal systems coexist, nor have they theorized the simultaneous pursuit of subsistence and growth. This paper uses a case study of a recent neighborhood struggle to theorize the social processes of these kinds of encounters. It investigates processes of formalization (Stinchcombe 2001) without assuming that formal orders replace informal ones. It examines appeals to property rights without presuming that private property primarily breeds narrow self-interest in gain. Empirically, this paper focuses on negotiations between government and citizens over private property and economic growth. It analyzes the motivation for, implementation of, and resistance to a city’s plan to entice local investment by using eminent domain (the power of government to “take private property” for “public use” in return for “just compensation” [U.S. Const., 5th Amend.]) in a single neighborhood. The study uncovers conflicts between informal and formal law and economy preceding a conflict that laid claim to property rights. Individuals and groups embedded in the informal relations of a poor Philadelphia neighborhood hoped to attract government and formal market investment. Community leaders even sanctioned the use of eminent domain to encourage development. When government failed to fulfill its promises to preserve the wealth that homeowners had created, residents protested. Activists turned to local politicians, community groups, and the media for support. To publicize their demands, they translated values of self-sufficiency and community preservation from the informal order to the formally and widely accepted language of property rights. The stories they told suggest that their fight for property rights was not a simple sanctioning of a long-standing American commitment to individual ownership and self-interest. By appealing to property rights with stories of home, activists demanded respect for the slightly different value of self-determination. PLURAL ORDERS: LEVELS OF FORMALITY AND PROPERTY’S VALUES Scholars focused on the political economy and property, especially in economics and law, have largely followed Weber’s replacement perspective on formalization in capitalist expansion. With respect to land in particular, they assume that formal rules and state protection of private property replace informal kin and community oversight. Economist Hernando De Soto’s bestselling books are exemplary of how this plays out in studies of property rights. De Soto (1989) called for reform of Peru’s ineffective formal regulations. Inefficiencies were forcing at least 60 to 70 % of economic activity to remain in the informal sector. He argued for better formalization of property rights. The vibrant, informal economic activity, he said, showed that the country had a great deal of untapped potential. The inability to access legal procedures necessary to enforce property rights held people back. Without being able to use the state to enforce property titles, Peru was doomed to remain beholden to a subsistence rather than a growth economy.

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Sociologists have repeatedly shown that formalization quashes neither informal economic activity nor informal law. Informal and formal economic activities endure or grow together, interdependent and mutually supportive. Economic and urban sociologists have described persistent informal activity and structures supporting the highly regulated U.S. (and other capitalist) economy (Portes, Castells, and Benton 1989; Sassen-Koob 1989; Stack 1974; Venkatesh 2006). Sociological studies have revealed vibrant underground economies hidden beneath trenchant formal systems, and the same individuals and communities often participate in both (Duneier and Carter 1999; Liebow 1967; Stack 1974). Ethnographies describe how and why people and communities use informal means to conduct economic activities and ensure social control even when formal means are available. The main subject of Duneier and Carter’s (1999) ethnography of New York’s Sixth Avenue vendors, for instance, preferred to live on the street though he could have held a job and had an apartment. More often than not, individuals who choose informal activity are the same people who choose formal paths in other areas of life (Moore 1973; Venkatesh 2006). Chicagoans with regular jobs, homes, and bank accounts regularly choose to employ underground mechanics, housecleaners, and nannies (Venkatesh 2006). Urban neighbors use family and community ties to settle disputes instead of going to court, even when they could do the latter (Engel 1984; Greenhouse 1982; Merry 1979). Structurally as well, the success of formal markets often depends on the strengths of informal activity to plug its holes. Above-ground enterprises rely on underground sweatshops to help them cut costs, locate labor sources, and provide flexibility (Portes, Castells, and Benton 1989; Sassen-Koob 1989). Socio-legal scholars have similarly identified crucial informal institutions buttressing formal legal practice (Macaulay 1963). Socio-legal studies have given special attention to contradictions between the two orders (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Engel 1984; Hartog 1985; Levit 2005; Merry 2000; Moore 1973; Winn 1994). They find that the compelling questions raised by the coexistence of informal and formal systems are about negotiations between conflicting systems of law (Griffiths 1986; Merry 1988). This paper develops propositions about the results of such coexistence and conflict. Like plural degrees of formality, plural orientations towards property remain vibrant even in a highly regulated private property system. Private property promotes the pursuit of gain, but the desire for accumulation does not eradicate the pursuit of means of subsistence. Property offers multiple forms of worth. Rights to the same thing can be valuable in different ways at different times to different people. Property such as clothing or personal jewelry can be a resource in the expression of personal identity (Goffman 1961; Radin 1982). Property such as food and clothing are the means through which mothers provide their children with physical security and show their love (Zelizer 2005a). Property in the home, both through the house itself and the neighborhood in which it sits, is a medium for services essential to daily life (Logan and Molotch 1987). In the context of some of these forms of worth, “gain” is not the primary goal. And as is explored in greater detail below, conflicts between different types of value in the same object can Debbie Becher  

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cause dilemmas when people need to consider changes in the property, especially when they need to make decisions collectively. FORMALIZATION AS ASPIRATION Though everyone’s life in an advanced capitalist economy is either directly or indirectly connected to informal activity, informality may be more likely to dominate the lives of the poor and disenfranchised. Informality is a practical resource for those disadvantaged by formal systems (Duneier and Carter 1999; Liebow 1967; Sassen-Koob 1989; Stack 1974; Venkatesh 2006). But informality is not always the ideal, either in Peru when informality dominated or in the contemporary United States where formality is more pervasive. Informal relations can create access to otherwise restricted resources, but it can also prevent access to the benefits available in the dominant, formal sector (Portes and Stepick 1993). Formalization is often an aspiration in these places, whether or not it becomes an objective reality. (See Hartog 1987 for a discussion of aspirational rights.) A goal of formalization may develop from the outside or inside. Middle-class citizens often attempt to push informal activity that they experience as a nuisance into the formal sphere. The use of ordinances, regulations, and law enforcement to move people who are homeless from sleeping in parks and transportation stations is an obvious example. Neighbors wanting to rid their streets of day laborers waiting for work and Americans advocating for secure international borders push for the enforcement of labor laws against undocumented workers and their employers. To the extent these attempts are effective, they limit the options of laborers and employers looking for temporary and informal relations, forcing them to more narrow sectors, spaces, and times (Duneier and Carter 1999; Liebow 1967; Massey and Denton 1993; Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002). Bottom-up attempts to increase formalization have gotten less scholarly attention. Sudhir Venkatesh’s (2006) recent detailed account of a Chicago neighborhood’s underground economy is an exception. Venkatesh’s ethnography exposes these kinds of aspirations to formality, at individual and community levels. An underground mechanic saves his earnings to secure a bank loan that will allow him to create a more stable, above-ground enterprise. Neighborhood leaders whose bargaining for kickbacks from local gang leaders has provided some measure of security also attempt to engage police and politicians in their struggle for neighborhood improvement. In both of these examples from Venkatesh’s work, poor Americans who have relied heavily on informal activity aspire to increase their involvement in the formal economy and law. They attempt to more strongly incorporate formal systems into the activities that provide them wealth and security. TRANSFORMATION PROCESSES: MATERIAL CONVERSION AND CULTURAL TRANSLATION By noticing formalization as aspiration, we can better theorize how it is pursued and what is likely to be achieved. First, despite attempts at formalization, informal rules endure. Existing informal norms are stubborn (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Merry 2000; Moore 1973; Debbie Becher  

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Stinchcombe 2001). Formal practices often fail to penetrate the systems they target, leaving them changed in name only (Meyer and Rowan 1977; Stinchcombe 2001). A study of property relations after a dramatic government reform among the Chagga of Mt. Kilimanjaro illustrates the point. Though the state formally converted land from a system of private to public ownership, residents continued to treat the land as if it were privately owned (Moore 1973). In another example, Americans adapted formal practices to existing informal norms instead of the other way around. Residents of a small rural community in Illinois rarely used personal injury litigation in the late 1970s, when most of the rest of the country was exploding with it. “Personal injury plaintiffs were viewed in Sander County as people who made waves and as troublemakers.” (Engel 1984: 553) Personal injuries were accepted as part of life simply because people were exposed to risks, and individuals were expected to take precautions when possible. David Engel concluded that residents usually avoided using personal injury litigation because it conflicted with these pre-existing norms. Second, people who have been benefitting from informal relations demand the conversion of existing wealth distributions from informal to formal currencies. This tendency is suggested by the suburban residents that Engel studied, who conditioned their litigation on the preservation not only of existing norms but also of existing distributions of resources. Viviana Zelizer (1997, 2005) draws attention to the coexistence of multiple currencies within an economy. Most glaringly, the exchange of cash for sex is anticipated and acceptable in the relationship between a prostitute and a customer but in-kind services and goods, not cash, are to be traded for sex between spouses. This research has beautifully described how the use of one currency rather than another can distinguish the type of relationship (e.g. familial or distant) and exchange (e.g. market or gift) a transaction expresses. But it has not specifically addressed how stories and currencies appropriate to formal relationships and settings conflict with those associated with informal relationships and settings. The attempts at transformation recounted by Venkatesh (2006) demonstrate how conflicts arise from attempts to formalize previously informal relations. The mechanic endeavors to but cannot use his earnings from the informal economy to show a bank he is creditworthy. Thus, he cannot secure a loan for a stable location and continues to operate underground. Resident leaders wanting to involve the police find that it is hard to have it both ways. Though they would like more police protection, they have learned not to rely on them. The leaders’ involvement with the police threatens their cooperative relationship with a local gang leader, who has more reliably provided neighborhood security but brought his own nuisances as well. The success of conversion – how well material goods held in one order are preserved in the other – is likely to affect support for formalization. If the conversion fails, insiders will prefer to revert to informal activity. If it succeeds, they are likely to support incorporation into the formal. Third, demands for formalization may involve translation of cultural values held in one order to the language of another, perhaps especially when a political conflict forces an encounter between the worlds. We can understand different laws or sets of rules (e.g. informal and formal) as different languages through which to evaluate the same situations (Santos 1987b). The Debbie Becher  

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attempt to formalize brings the two languages into contact with one another. Legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry has thus employed the term “translation” to describe the process of attempted cultural transference between legal systems (Merry 2006; Merry and Stern 2005). Women outside of Hong Kong performed acts of translation when they organized under the banner of international human rights to defend beliefs that they had been wronged under customary norms of familial ties (Merry and Stern 2005). A successful act of translation makes expectations in the informal world legible in the formal world, thus demanding the new system’s recognition of cultural values from the old. “Translation” focuses attention on two contrasting dimensions of the change process: reification and subversion of settled concepts. By employing the language of the dominant, formal world, actors reinforce the power relations supported by the dominant, formal order. Thus, skeptics fear that liberalism gains strength through the spread of language about human rights. But by telling their particular stories in this context, claimants also redefine the concept accepted in the formal rules. Thus, the women of Hong Kong shifted the local meaning of human rights to include protections for relational obligations. The process of translation enables this subtle form of rebellion. “PROPERTY” AND “HOME” AS FLEXIBLE TOOLS Property is both a powerful and adaptive tool in the contemporary United States. As political and legal theorists have elaborated, property nurtures and guards various kinds of value, including but not limited to financial value. Property can represent a communal resource (Rose 1983), a sentimental attachment (Radin 1982), a source of subsistence (Locke 1986), and/or a commodity for exchange (Marx 1887). In practice, a person can emphasize one or more of these different kinds of value when describing her/his relationship to an object. And that emphasis can shift with changing circumstances. In the more general study of cultural sociology, we can understand concepts as tools people have at their fingertips to deploy (Swidler 1986). Ambiguity of meaning in those concepts gives political actors opportunities to frame their struggles in multiple ways (Polletta 2006). Private property rights are a useful cultural resource because their force is so strong and their meaning so malleable. Home, like property, is powerful and flexible. Home can symbolize everything that is different from the market and the state. The home (or similar references to household, family, or domesticity) represents an institution, just as crucial to capitalism but different from its two other pillars, market and state (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Bourdieu 1979; Bourdieu 2005 [1998]; Friedland and Alford 1991; Hochschild 1981; Orloff 1992). To make judgments about any action of a friend, coworker, or government representative, people first decide whether that action happened in the domestic, economic, or political sphere so that they can know what standards to use (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). Put crudely, they base their judgments about fairness on specific relationships in the domestic sphere, on merit in the market sphere, and on equality in the political sphere (Hochschild 1981).

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Expectations of the domestic sphere can starkly contrast with those of the market. The spirit of the domestic economy contrasts the spirit of calculation (Bourdieu 2005 [1998]). Intimacy, sentiment, and care are associated with the household; distance, contract, and gain are associated with the market (Zelizer 2005b). Thus, Robert Ellickson (2007) writes about the household as a setting that allows informal exchanges among trustworthy intimates precisely because it exists in opposition with the market, contract, and a larger community. Like property, home represents more than one kind of value. Though home can represent the converse of the market and state, it can also embody it all. The household was an economic unit before and continues as an economic unit during capitalism (Ellickson 2007; Weber and Knight 1950; Zelizer 2005b). The modern home can symbolize the opposite of everything outside of it, and at the same time contain symbols of those opposites within it (Bourdieu 1979). The American household provides the opportunity to combine intimacy and economic activity (Zelizer 2005b), identity and investment (Bourdieu 2005 [1998]), and exchange and use value (Logan and Molotch 1987). Home also exists at multiple levels of magnitude, often extending beyond the house to a larger community (Bourdieu 1979). The American urban poor and working class may display particularly strong attachments to a sense of home existing in particular neighborhoods (Fried 1963; Fullilove 2004; Stack 1974). Like property, home can be used to emphasize one or more meanings, and each of these meanings can carry political weight. Homes are American families’ single most financially valuable source of wealth (Oliver and Shapiro 1995), and this can be an overriding consideration in any discussion or decision. But the orientation toward home as real estate is also one of desire and affection (Garber 2000), and the loss of a home is commonly experienced as longing and grief, similar to how people react to the loss of another person (Fried 1963). Home can represent the will and ability to survive and reproduce as well. “What is tacitly asserted through the creation of a house is the will to create a permanent group” (Bourdieu 2005 [1998]: p. 21). Scholars of the political economy have mostly ignored how the overlap between property and home highlights the goal of subsistence. They have associated private property with a capitalist fervor for accumulation and in this way treated all property as alike. Karl Polanyi (1944) contrasted capitalist with pre-capitalist economies as privileging the pursuit of accumulation and habitation respectively. De Soto (2002) portrays subsistence as supported by informal whereas growth is supported by formal orders. Though these ideal-types were useful for their arguments, they can only begin to help us explain processes within living capitalist economies where multiple forms of value coexist. In real life, all people are not exclusively attached to either ideal all of the time, but some are attached to one of them some of the time. In Recife, Brazil, for example, a bourgeois legality views land through a lens of the formal market. They value housing mostly for its worth as a commodity and understand property rights to be established with the purchase of a legal title. By contrast, squatters use a lens of land and housing (Santos 1987a). They value homes for how they help them survive, and they believe that the use of land can establish property rights. In advanced capitalist economies, like the U.S., where private property titles are generally enforced Debbie Becher  

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and housing is a great financial asset,i subgroups also maintain a reverence for use. In fact, contrasting orientations to real estate largely fueled post-1960s political conflicts in American cities (Logan and Molotch 1987). Logan and Molotch summed up the clash in this way: middle class residents advocated for government support of real estate’s “exchange-values,” and poor residents demanded government support of its “use-values.” When individuals or grassroots groups frame a struggle through property, they can emphasize either its worth to accumulation or subsistence, or both. In the context of a struggle appealing to property rights, the poor tell stories about survival, sentiment, and self-reliance by talking about home. By doing so, they translate their communities’ more dominant values of subsistence and self-realization into property rights. Rather than simply reaffirm ideals of markets and growth, they use private property to demand respect for home. THE CASE: EMINENT DOMAIN FOR REDEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN STREET Formal market activity often fails to the fulfill people’s wishes. As discussed above, one response is to meet those desires through informal activity. Another approach is to attempt to spark greater involvement of formal government and markets. The use of eminent domain can be one of the most dramatic examples of the latter approach. The taking of private property is a spectacular show of force. When citizens consider support for it, they grapple with the limits of appropriate government responses to failed formal markets. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unleashed large-scale municipal government acquisition by affirming the constitutionality of property “condemnation” (a legal term for the use of eminent domain for acquisition) to improve conditions of “blighted” neighborhoods (Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26 ). About a decade later, a backlash against “negro removal” forced a retreat. The issue remained relatively quiet in the news until 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it was constitutional for the City of New London, Connecticut to take several homes (this time of mostly white working class residents) to support redevelopment plans (Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut, 545 U.S. 469). Opinion-polls showed that Kelo was one of the most reviled decisions in the Supreme Court’s recent history, buttressing a nationwide legal reform movement spearheaded by the libertarian public-interest law firm representing the property owners (Bradley and Dowling 2008). This paper presents a Philadelphia version of the Kelo backlash. Unlike with Kelo, the takings on American Street (the real street name!) involved almost no litigation. However, critiques of the American Street takings by Philadelphia media, City Council members, and protestors were just as strong. Along or near a one-mile strip of American Street, Philadelphia condemned sixty-eight parcels and began relocating fourteen homeowners between 2001 and 2003. (See Appendix A for details about the three ordinances approved by City Council that make up what I am calling the American Street takings.) Community meetings about the American Street takings drew hundreds of angry and fearful residents in the fall of 2002. The condemnations proceeded, albeit slightly delayed, but the activism they galvanized built resistance to government taking of property citywide. Nearby residents allied themselves with activists from other neighborhoods to form the Coalition to Debbie Becher  

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Save Our Homes in June 2003, and this organization developed a relationship with the national movement against eminent domain led by the Institute for Justice, an arm of the libertarian Cato Institute. [Insert Figure 1 about here.] The portion of Philadelphia discussed here is located just a mile north of the city center and a few blocks from the I-95 interstate. Decades earlier, it had been the heart of Philadelphia’s textile industry, hosting mostly factories directly on American Street with some housing squeezed between and behind. By the 1990s, toward the beginning of our story, this strip of American Street had a few operating businesses and was surrounded by residential neighborhoods dominated by low-income and Puerto Rican residents. In 2000, the neighborhoods along American Street had more than twice as many households with incomes under the poverty level (45 percent) as the city at large (22 percent). Almost ten times more individuals identified as Puerto Rican than in the whole city (55 percent/ 6 percent); and about half as many American Street area residents identified as White compared to the entirety of the city (26 percent/ 45 percent), Black (19 percent/ 43 percent), or Asian (2 percent/ 4 percent). Methods: An Ethnographic History This project is part of a larger study of eminent domain in Philadelphia, but the American Street story deserves special attention. While thousands of properties targeted for takings roughly between 1992 and 2007 were quickly forgotten, the homes on American Street became etched in collective memory. This paper investigates how a fight for property rights developed from a practice that, possibly to the reader’s surprise, often draws little protest. The author initially became familiar with the American Street case through interviews with twenty informants about the practice of eminent domain in Philadelphia. Many government workers, developers, and community respondents mentioned American Street as a case to be learned from and described their involvement in and impression of what occurred there. The author examined how the plans to use eminent domain developed, how those plans proceeded, and how individuals and neighborhood groups evaluated government throughout the process. There were a variety of perspectives on the project from the beginning, and many individuals and groups changed their minds about the project as events unfolded. Observations of public meetings, hearings, and professional training sessions related to the more general study of eminent domain in Philadelphia informed initial hypotheses. The author then used archival evidence to develop a timeline of events related to the American Street takings. She collected and reviewed relevant mass media coverage and publicly available activist materials. She accessed the personal files kept by this project’s managers in the Mayor’s Office of the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, the Philadelphia Commerce Department, and the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Philadelphia. These files allowed analysis of inter-office memos, e-mails, and other correspondence; budgeting, appraisals, timelines, and other project planning documents; contracts, planned testimonies, and other legally-relevant forms; and policy reports. The author also accessed the official meeting agendas and minutes of the American Street Empowerment Zone Community Trust Board, a governing body comprised Debbie Becher  

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of residents, business owners, and government workers. From all of these documents the author created a timeline of events and a spreadsheet of property addresses targeted, with relevant data about communications with property owners, legal decisions, and compensation amounts. The author personally conducted fifty interviews (average length: 80 minutes) with people identified as stakeholders in this project, either as government employees, resident leaders, business owners, or targeted property owners and renters. Interviews were loosely structured with sets of questions about the subject’s general background and relationships to the project. Questions also solicited personal narratives about land management in the neighborhood before, during, and after eminent domain plans. Interviews were fully transcribed, read twice, and coded for analysis of themes and narrative elements. FINDINGS

In the story that follows, three phases of eminent domain on American Street roughly map onto the three propositions about transitions from informal to formal economy and law. (1) Informal and formal activities coexist quietly. For many years following the exit of industry and many residents from the area, informal relations primarily managed much of the neighborhood’s land care. This informal land management continued at the same time Philadelphia’s municipal government regulated land titles and provided some neighborhood services. (2) Aspirations to formalization lead to demands for conversion of material wealth. By the 1980s, community leaders had organized to ask for government help with attracting investment to the area. They only supported more government and market involvement if the change would preserve existing wealth distributions. Government moved forward with plans to use eminent domain to spur development but failed to ensure this preservation of wealth. (3) Appeals for public support translate cultural values from informal to formal language. Activists responded to the government failure by using the language of formal economy and law to make their case to a wider public. They used a universally held belief in property to demand a less recognized right to home. QUIET COEXISTENCE OF INFORMAL AND FORMAL LAW AND ECONOMY

In the 1980s, when we might begin the American Street takings story, conditions in the neighborhood were arguably the worst. During that time, many residents began taking a selfsufficiency approach to land management around their homes. That is, they recognized that the formal institutions of governments and markets virtually ignored their area, and they took on the care of land -- whether or not they owned it -- as both a personal and community priority. (At this time, resident leaders were also founding organizations based on lawsuits demanding equity in government services.) Residents relied on themselves, their families, and their neighbors to prevent others from dumping and drugging near their homes. They found ways to capitalize on neglected land and buildings. They depended on friends and relatives to help with physical

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improvements, and labor was often provided out of family responsibility and in return for cash and in-kind payments. The work was generally not done under permit nor taxed. Neighbors fenced, cared for, and used land that belonged to others who had abandoned it. They developed norms that legitimized activity that some people, with a private property lens and little understanding of the neighborhood conditions, would call illegal squatting. It certainly might have looked like trespassing from an outsider’s perspective. But by tolerating and even complementing the practice, government and neighbors condoned the private use of and care for land whose legal owners had seemingly abandoned it. In the face of the devastation facing the residents of this post-industrial neighborhood, small acts of self-help became the right thing to do to survive. The Context: Market and Government Abandonment of a Poor Neighborhood

At least since the 1980s, many poor, urban U.S. neighborhoods have endured both market (labor and real estate) and government failure. The concentration of low-income families in specific places causes large-scale flight of formal market institutions. Scholars of urban inequality beginning with William Julius Wilson (1987) have focused their attention on the localized absence of labor markets in the 1980s. Doug Massey and Nancy Denton (1993) attributed urban inequalities to the low performance of inner city real estate markets. John Logan and Harvey Molotch (1987) similarly argued that real estate market outcomes are the primary cause of urban inequality. Both of these major studies of real estate markets demonstrated how government action was central to their failure in low-income neighborhoods. The neighborhoods surrounding this one-mile stretch of American Street were no different. Many people knew them as home throughout the twentieth century, but in the 1980s and 90s, the area’s reputation for lawlessness and vacant property had earned it a nickname with outsiders as the “Badlands.” The same factory buildings that created vitality during Philadelphia’s industrial heyday had left their remains in the form of crumbling shells, environmental contamination, and empty lots. Vacant land had received so much dumping that piles of debris sometimes reached the heights of nearby buildings. An auto repair shop, a glass company, a food distributor, and two junk yards were still operating, but “pipers” (slang for crack addicts) inhabited many of the vacant warehouses. Several vacant and occupied rowhomes lined the street; more were on the smaller roads directly to the east or west of N. American. In adjacent neighborhoods, there were blocks of densely packed, occupied rowhomes in varying conditions. Other blocks that had once been similarly dense with houses were pock-marked with lots laid bare by building collapses and demolitions. By the 1980s, many of the people who were living in the neighborhoods surrounding American Street must have become accustomed to what seemed like government’s laissez-faire approach to land management and real estate market disinterest. The place was a poster child of physical devastation. Few, if any, outside investors seeking to profit from the real estate market paid the area any mind. Property owners often chose to abandon buildings and lots rather than care for them or pay property taxes. Police were generally not providing safety from drugdealing, theft, or dumping. Responding to the Context: Residents take a self-sufficiency approach Debbie Becher  

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Despite the formal market and government failures, the picture is not entirely bleak for either American Street or other similar American neighborhoods. People often look to themselves and their neighbors for protection, just as ethnographies of poor urban neighborhoods would predict. In study after study, it becomes clear that the urban poor manage to turn seemingly devastating conditions into sources of advantage, both individually and collectively. Some of the earliest Chicago studies of ethnically and racially segregated neighborhoods revealed the benefits behind geographic isolation caused by real estate restrictions. Though Herbert Gans (1982) set out to study the devastation of one of the first federally funded slumremoval projects of the 1950s, he found himself uncovering the strength of a poor, isolated Italian enclave in the West End of Boston. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton (1945) described in beautiful detail how the sequestering of black Chicago created otherwise unimaginable business opportunities for entrepreneurs there. Other scholars have exposed how poor blacks take advantage of opportunity and create wealth through informal economies (Duneier and Carter 1999; Stack 1974; Venkatesh 2006). Contemporary studies of immigrant ethnic enclaves have likewise revealed these positive outcomes (Portes and Stepick 1993). People living and working near American Street approached abandoned land as both a problem and an opportunity. They reached tacit agreements with each other and with a smallscale government. They became accustomed to doing for themselves and for their neighbors what governments and markets might do in middle- and upper-income neighborhoods. Most of the owners of occupied housing later to be targeted by eminent domain had taken this selfsufficiency approach. They created these homes by taking advantage of abandonment. Sonia Ortiz (among the first affected by acquisitions discussed in this paper) ended up in her residence on Bodine Street because of her father, who lived about four blocks away. He told her about a two-bedroom shell at 2104 N. Bodine St. It would need to be completely renovated – new windows, plumbing, electrical, drywall, etc. But she could get it from the city for a dollar because it had been abandoned. Her father and her uncle did the renovations, and she moved in with her two young kids as soon as there was a kitchen and a bathroom. Over the ten years she lived there, she cleaned up the yards around her and acquired one of the lots next door from the city. With her uncle’s help, she built an addition with a kitchen and another bedroom (Ortiz 2008). Another resident and target of eminent domain, Claudia Pantoja, rented her house at the other end of the same block, for about thirty years, starting at $30/month and creeping up to $60/month until Charles Cooper, the owner of her house and several others on the block, died in the early 1990s. For several years she and her neighbors continued to live there without paying rent. Eventually, they too went to the city, and they got titles to their homes for between a dollar and a few thousand dollars to cover the accumulation of back taxes (Cartegena 2008; Pantoja 2008). The lack of security and care in the neighborhood -- largely caused by absent landowners and government -- forced residents to be vigilant around their homes. They would make sure that houses with any valuables (e.g. copper pipes) did not stand vacant long enough for opportunistic crimes. Though they sometimes called on the police, residents attribute the safety Debbie Becher  

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they felt either to their own watchfulness or the collective attention of their neighbors (Cartegena 2008; Ortiz 2008; Pantoja 2008). Some of the residents who were eventually relocated told me they had intentionally chosen to live on a block (the one being condemned) where that kind of self-protection would be possible. The vacant space around them actually made them feel safe – it was a barrier that anyone who wanted to harm them would have to cross (Ortiz 2008; Pantoja 2008). Residents maintained some of the land beyond their own property lines, in part for their own enjoyment and in part to make clear that the area was cared for and therefore watched, something neither governments nor real estate markets were taking care of. Miguelina de Jesus (involved in the third set of acquisitions discussed in this paper) of 1730 N. American Street, knew that private use of others’ empty lots was ignored by city government when she used the one next door to her house as a yard and garden. She “never got around” to going downtown to get the title at City Hall, but she knew the city was giving them away.ii It was very common for residents to begin caring for lots they did not own, because it was obvious no one else was going to do it. And it was clear that caring for property was the crucial way to prevent dumping and other nuisances that followed. Fences became a symbol that dumping was not acceptable, and the fences were usually erected by people other than the owners (Velez 2008). The residents relocated by eminent domain were not the only ones who took this approach in the area. Tomasita Romero, one of the women who helped initiate gardening on several vacant lots talked to me about how she first started to breach property’s legal boundaries. Romero explained that in the 1980s, things started to get a lot worse in the neighborhood. She started to claim control over land that wasn’t legally hers by putting up a fence. She explained, Little by little people moved away and the houses were left unoccupied and they got old and…houses got demolished…behind my house is almost a whole block with no houses. Trucks then come at night and unload whatever they didn’t want, we would have everything in there and that was terrible. Cars come in at night, prostitution and everything. So, my neighbors and I we got together and fenced that space…. I figured if I just put a fence up it would stop them. I had to take control because no one else was going to do it for me. I couldn’t be afraid to say, this is my house, and you don’t do that around here (Romero 2008). Since then, The Norris Square neighborhood has become a hotbed of community-based urban agriculture, and it all started very informally. (American Street is surrounded by several neighborhoods. Norris Square is the closest neighborhood to the takings on the 2100 block, Proposal #1.) Many residents maintained only distant relationships with formal institutions of government and markets– especially banks involved in the formal management of land. To Miguelina de Jesus, there didn’t seem to be much distinction between government and formal, nonprofit organizations. Nor did she, or any others, want to have a mortgage. Interviewees regularly mention that owning a house outright is better than owing a bank, even if it means that the house or its location is less desirable than one requiring a mortgage. Debbie Becher  

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The self-sufficiency approach described here involved reliance on both individual and collective capacities at a very local level to manage externalities caused by land abandonment. Residents shared a faith that certain family and neighbors would help them and expected that others (drug users, thieves, and those who dumped their trash) might do them harm. They depended on the former to protect them from the latter. They also shared a sense of the general irrelevance of formal business and government institutions, except in allowing them to pursue a self-help strategy. This government and market failure made it perfectly acceptable to install a fence around the abandoned lot next door or to squat in a house once rented to a family after the owner died. Block residents agreed to disregard certain formal limits to their behavior, such as property titles, when it was clear that they were increasing the public good by improving care for the land. Local government’s own acquiescence in this arrangement was visible both in its disregard for the extra-legal use of others’ private property and in its facilitating the purchase of abandoned buildings and lots. ASPIRATIONS TO FORMALIZATION INVOLVE DEMANDS FOR CONVERSION OF MATERIAL VALUES In the mid-1980s and the late 1990s, city employees and community representatives strategized together about using government to lure investment to the area. A tenuous compromise among resident, business, and government representatives invited government to promote growth, and thus formalization of the area’s economy. Community leaders accepted plans to use eminent domain to make land available for private development, but they demanded that no individual residents be hurt in the process. They insisted that their existing wealth be converted to value in the changed neighborhood. Though government offered assurances that this would happen, as plans were implemented it became clear that it would not deliver. Cautious Invitation to the Government Bulldozer Though we should recognize the opportunities that self-help strategies create, we ought not romanticize them. To be sure, some of the residents embedded in informal activities probably had no desire to move outside of that world. But for others, adaptations to isolation and minimal formal government and market involvement can be a local, temporary optimum though not an ideal. While the informal economy and law may enable survival during rough times, it can also limit success. For instance, the Cuban enclave may provide a recent immigrant with an opportunity for an entry-level job and affordable housing, but the tight networks and use of Spanish within those neighborhoods can also prevent economic advancement over the long term (Portes and Stepick 1993). Many residents of the area entertained aspirations for incorporation into formal market and for the benefits that such incorporation would provide. Renters looked forward to home ownership. Some unemployed residents hoped to secure newly created local jobs. By the 1990s, resident leaders became involved in attempts to engage government positively in improving land conditions. Neighbors pushed government pursuit of growth. As they were doing in other poor neighborhoods in cities across the country, community leaders Debbie Becher  

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along American Street organized themselves to demand that government actively help recover some of the vitality of the neighborhood destroyed over previous decades (Peirce and Steinbach 1987; Small 2004). Residents and small businesses formed several community-based organizations to support the safety and development of the neighborhoods surrounding American Street in the late 1970s and mid 1980s. Initially, the groups came together either to pursue lawsuits against government and banks for neighborhood neglect or to achieve other goals related to empowering local community members and improving the area. By the 1990s several of these organizations had created or become large community development corporations, contributing significantly to housing and business construction with significant government funding. (Some of these were the Norris Square Neighborhood Association, the Women’s Community Revitalization Project, The Hispanic Association of Contractors and Entrepreneurs, and Asociacion Puertorriquenos en Marcha. Still, even these leaders maintained some of the doit-yourself approach. The Norris Square Community Association, for instance, largely retained local contractors for construction work it oversaw.) Many leaders of residential neighborhoods near American Street – including some who eventually became the leaders of the anti-eminent domain activism in 2002 – were originally supportive of growth initiatives, albeit cautiously. They lobbied for government investment in development-related activities. In 1994, they convinced Mayor Rendell to include their area as one of three communities on a national application for federal “Empowerment Zone” funds, and Philadelphia soon became one of the six cities nationwide to win an Empowerment Zone designation. Once they had the Mayor’s support, they invested numerous hours in outreach and planning to prepare the application (Gonzalez 2008; Salas 2007; Source 2007). Many of the community-based organizations that had formed in the 1970s and 80s, as well as a few hundred other residents, were involved with the planning for the city’s successful 1994 Empowerment Zone application and the 1997 revisiting of the Empowerment Zone vision. (Twenty-four of the seventy-nine million dollars the city won with its designation as an “Empowerment Zone” in 1994 were reserved for the American Street neighborhoods. The neighborhoods included in the American Street Empowerment Zone together housed approximately 20,000 residents.) Resident leaders expressed concerns that government and formal market involvement would threaten what they had built over previous decades through self-help. One leader called the Empowerment Zone a “double-edged sword” because she worried that government would make the wrong decisions about how to invest the sought-after resources. Many of the community representatives who had fought for government help would consider and endorse the use of eminent domain from their positions as American Street Empowerment Zone Community Trust Board members. They expressed support for the use of eminent domain as a blightremoval tool in certain circumstances.iii But the willingness to allow government to use eminent domain to encourage private investment was acceptable and desirable only if local conditions actually improved. Specifically, they demanded assurances that land development and/or jobs would actually happen and that no individuals would be made worse off.

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The issue of eminent domain came up in the 1990s over the development of a ball field, which was planned to require a handful of relocations because of its intended site. Board members acknowledged this unfortunate consequence of their plans at Community Trust Board meetings and discussed their intention to ensure that such relocations were handled with care. The community leaders were willing to endorse the sacrifice. However, they also expressed the limits of their support for eminent domain. This community-leader sanction of the ball-field proposal and the possible use of eminent domain elsewhere did not comprise unlimited or naïve support for government and growth because the support was restricted by caveats requiring that residents not lose what they already had because of the change. First, relocations would need to be limited and, when necessary, carried out in a humane manner. In 1995, when the Community Trust Board considered supporting the construction of a ball-field that would require relocations to the board, one member asked for assurances that government would initiate early communication with any residents to be displaced (ASEZ CTB Minutes, October 17, 1995). When relocation was sporadically mentioned for different projects over the coming years, Trust Board members requested similar assurances that the number of relocations would be minimal and that communication and compensation for relocatees would be responsible and humane. Second, the development that occurred on the acquired property would need to be locally beneficial to warrant the disruption. Before supporting condemnation for economic development projects, community representatives wanted to know that future development would actually be realized, and if realized, that it would serve their community. Aware that condemnation actually can take one, two, or more years to complete, Trust Board members and interested businesses wondered whether eminent domain was a practical means of securing land for businesses that were ready to move in. Skeptics understood that despite policy-makers’ best intentions, government acquisition of land takes much longer than anticipated, and businesses operate on a tight timeline. They worried that once the residential displacement and land acquisition were complete, businesses would not be interested in buying the freshly prepared land. In addition, market and other policy conditions changed so quickly that the same businesses willing to build one day may not be interested six months or a year later. Last but not least, they claimed history had taught them that the White and Asian owners on “the strip” (American Street) passed over the Black and Hispanic residents nearby for White and Asian employees from farther away. Government workers offering the plans to use eminent domain provided assurances regarding the concerns about relocations and development. Once they had selected sites for acquisition, city staff members tried to demonstrate that the number of relocations was extremely small compared to the size of the parcels to be gained. Though they said communication with specific relocatees would have to wait until particular properties were decided upon, staff members reassured resident leaders that it would happen in a timely and respectful fashion. Government representatives said the Redevelopment Authority (RDA) would administer a legally regulated relocation process which guaranteed communication and fair compensation. Policy promoters answered the skepticism about future development with the best evidence they Debbie Becher  

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could muster that what they envisioned could and would happen. Representatives of the Commerce Department assured detractors that a live business was planning to take over the first block that they were acquiring, and several others had shown interest in the other blocks (Burgos 2001). With these details of the proposed solution in mind, it was possible to imagine that no one would be made worse off and that many people in the community would gain value. Failures of the Growth Pursuit and of the Conversion of Value Though government staff members originally thought they could meet residents’ two requests for ensuring benefits from the project, they ultimately failed to do so. Those who pushed the first project had reason to believe it would work. The American Street takings became a “pilot project” for the Mayor’s high profile anti-blight initiative, promising it would benefit from pressure from the top. After years of trying, government had identified a business ready and eager to move in. But time and communication bedeviled government attempts at success. Negotiations between the RDA Legal Department and the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, footing the bill, ground the first project to a halt for several crucial months (Walker 2008; Walker 2002). The combination of the long delays and problems with government’s communication with property owners contributed to a general impression that relocations were stripping residents of the value they had in their housing. Many residents were aggravated by an eligibility-determination process that could not convert informal assets into compensation justified by formal procedures. What happened to Manuel Velez, the resident who took the longest to move, was the only one to litigate, and is probably the least satisfied with his relocation benefits, illustrates the problem. He was used to living under the formal radar and finding his own way. His house was in poor condition by most outsiders’ standards, but he had made improvements, and he loved how big it was and how much vacant land surrounded it (de Jesus 2008; Velez 2008). Maria Reyes, Manuel Velez’s relocation worker, wrote that he kept insistently repeating that he wanted to find a replacement house that had a big yard and had room for his two trucks (which he had been storing under a structure he erected on property next to his that he did not own). In 2004 and 2005, he found three different houses he was willing to move in to. RDA inspectors determined that all three failed basic health and safety requirements; therefore, government could not relocate him to those places. In addition, the money Manuel Velez was going to get was at least $4,000 lower than others in similar situations because his brother, not he, was technically the owner of the house. He had put his house in his brother’s name in the late 1990s because he heard that if you owned more than $3,000 in assets, government would reduce your social security benefits. The relocation benefits he could get as a tenant, what the RDA’s legal team insisted he must be considered, amounted to almost $4,000 less than the maximum replacement housing payment of $22,500 that most people received (justified in addition to the property’s “fair market value” because they were unable to find a comparable house for the price paid to them as compensation for what was being condemned). Another relocatee, Analid Rivera eventually forfeited the extra $22,500 all together because she moved into a house her husband already owned, and the RDA requires an arms-length transaction to justify the relocation housing payment (Rivera 2008). Debbie Becher  

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Unlike Manuel, his only former immediate neighbor was quite happy with what happened

to her. Miguelina de Jesus was able to convert what she had into something the RDA could compensate. She wanted to leave the nicely cared for house where she had raised her kids and move out of the area, but she wouldn’t have been able to afford as nice a home as she found, in the northeast near her daughter, if she had sold on the open market. Miguelina de Jesus had established ownership of her house on American Street; she produced receipts for improvements on her house; she bought her new house from a stranger, with the help of a real estate agent. She even took on a loan from the RDA for a few thousand dollars to cover an outstanding utility bill and close the deal (de Jesus 2008). At the community level, there has thus far been very little evidence that these blocks on American Street will support above-board businesses and jobs justifying the disruption. In late 2002 or early 2003, before the city could finalize the exchange of the 2100 block with Reline Brakes (when most residents to be relocated were still living there), the company decided to develop a smaller site in northeast Philadelphia. The condemnations had dragged on longer than the city had promised; Reline had to move, and it determined that business was not going as well as anticipated anyway (Brakes 2007). After negotiating for another three years, a different warehousing business erected a building on the 2100 block and began operations in 2007. On the 1700 block, construction of another warehouse was just beginning in 2007. C&C Poultry is expanding from its site on the 1900 block, thus creating more jobs but leaving another parcel vacant. The smaller 2500 block site remains vacant, and Commerce continues to seek a buyer. Citysort, the one existing business that was to expand next to its existing operation, closed its doors completely before that could happen. Relocatees and many of their former neighbors now feel that the outcome confirmed their suspicions about the project’s ability to bring jobs. One condemnee recently told me her son had applied for a job at the new processed meat warehouse on the 2100 block without success. Another said her cousin had stopped in and was told they were not hiring. A neighbor raised his hand and pointed an index finger to its parking lot catty corner to his house, saying the fact that we couldn’t see any old cars was evidence enough that people like them, low-income people, weren’t working there. In the years following initial planning, government botched the conversion of value that those who agreed to support the project had hoped for. One or two new warehouses that provided few if any jobs to local residents failed to make the property worth more than it was when it was open land scattered with a few houses. And calculations for compensation undervalued the wealth American Street residents had created through their own ingenuity.

TRANSLATING CULTURAL VALUES: RESISTING THE BULLDOZER AND DEFENDING HOME An anti-eminent domain struggle grew out of the failure to convert material values. Activists broadcast their demands by attempting to translate cultural values of their small Debbie Becher  

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community embedded in informal activity to a larger public. Activists fought for rights to home by appealing to a law (5th Amend., U.S. Const.) that protects property. Activists did not simply claim that they be allowed to keep what was theirs (property security) or even that they were entitled to decent housing (right to housing). Referring to home, they claimed entitlement to self-determination and community preservation. (Notably, both of the majority opinions in Kelo employ the word housing rather than home. The dissenting opinions use both words. The word home is in the O’Connor dissent’s first sentence of the description of the facts of the case.) Once it was clear that what residents had was not being respected in the shift toward government and market involvement, they rebelled. Though the anti-eminent domain organizing did not manage to stop the takings along American Street, the conflict birthed the commitment of a small network of committed activists to pursue defense of others around the city. A Community Leadership Institute flyer telling its own story declares that “it became clear that this [American Street Corridor taking on Bodine] was the start of a very large project with far reaching impact – 2000 properties were authorized to be ‘taken’ citywide.” They reportedly managed to entice the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to investigate. Using the HUD report as a narrative thread, the free weekly Philadelphia City Paper published a cover story exposing the vagaries of eminent domain and focusing on American Street (Webb 2003). Since then, two videos have memorialized the American Street story to create support for eminent domain resistance, and a third is on its way. The American Street story became a symbol for anti-eminent domain activism in Philadelphia, and the memory of original support for the effort faded. Activists forgot that they had once hoped government and the formal market would enable the neighborhood to make a fluid transition from informally to formally acquired wealth. By the time of the City Council hearing on the last of the proposals, public opposition to the eminent domain plan was evident. (See Appendix B for a full list of those who testified at each hearing.) Two daughters of residents of the 1700 block of N. American Street testified about how their parents’ lives were being torn apart by this notice that they would lose their homes. Derelia Rodriguez said her family did not want to move. She also said they were not against progress, and she expected the city to treat them fairly and provide just compensation. When they heard about the revitalization of American Street years ago, she said, they were excited because they thought they would benefit. Once they realized they would have to leave, excitement turned to disappointment that they would not be there to enjoy the changes. Milagros Velez, Manuel Velez’s daughter, implied that if someone in government had justified the decision to them before they faced imminent eviction and had worked out a fair deal for their house, they would not be quite so resistant. Even those who continued to vocalize their support for the government’s initiative expressed their uneasiness about how the relocations had been handled. Business and communitydevelopment professionals (Rose Gray, of Asociacion de Puertorriquenos en Marcha [APM], and Guillermo Salas, of the Hispanic Association of Contractors and Enterprises [HACE]) lined up to describe the need for revitalization and the tens of millions of dollars of public investments they Debbie Becher  

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had already spent in the area. Most accompanied their expressions of support with explanations of uneasiness about how home owners were being treated. Council members even publicly joined in the chorus criticizing the bureaucrats for bungling the project, though they went ahead and passed the ordinance anyway. If the cooperation with government for growth involved attempts to convert material values from one system to another, the resistance sparked attempts to translate cultural values. Claims by anti-eminent domain activists simultaneously (1) reified existing public beliefs about property rights and (2) subverted them by offering a significant alternative relying on stories about home. On the one hand, the anti-eminent domain activists generalized their claims by explicitly invoking “rights” in general and property rights in particular, both bedrock principles of American law. Discussions often either explicitly or implicitly referred to the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which requires just compensation for the public taking of private property for public use. Activists translated their claims into language of property that any Philadelphia resident would understand. There were virtually no complaints about the taking of dozens of parcels of abandoned land or three operating businesses. If property had been the central issue, objections would have been raised about the targeting of all sixty-eight pieces of property involved. Resistance focused on the thirteen occupied homes. In this and many other cases across the country, people remain silent about the much more common condemnations of parcels not serving as someone’s home, suggesting that it is the taking of a home, not the taking of property, that evokes so much rancor. Activists explicitly and repeatedly used the word home more than the word property. Manuel Velez’ daughter says on an activist video, “This cannot happen, because this is not a communist place, we are free here, nobody can come and take my home.” And community leader Rosemary Cubas emphasized home as she described to the camera how she and others were moved to act, “The maps or projections that they had were going straight through somebody’s home that had been there for years. I did not know them, but at that moment, we said, ‘Why are you going through these people’s homes, when there is so much vacant land?’” In the United States, “property rights” is a phrase that slides easily off the tongue. Any attachment of home to rights, as in the phrases “home rights” or “rights to home,” sounds like a non sequitur. Those fighting eminent domain along American Street did not employ a phrase like “rights to home” in their claims against eminent domain. But they did talk a lot about rights and about home, and a little bit about property. When advocates were not using such direct language that implied a right to home, they told stories about injustices which implied the same. They told particular stories that would help others identify with their experiences of home, and thus with their expectations of home security. Depending on the statement, home might have implied something about the building, the financial investment, the place, the family, the community, or the personal attachment. Eminent domain resisters invoked all of these values of home by describing how much they had invested in, cared for, and become attached to their houses and their community. Debbie Becher  

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Anti-eminent domain sympathizers demonstrated that the homes were rightfully theirs because they used them and cared for them, not simply because they possessed an official title. They emphasized the extent of both financial and sentimental investment. Defenders repeatedly point out that these residents owned their homes out-right. They did not have a mortgage. They had paid for their houses in full. They had paid their property taxes. They had made financial and emotional investments. Residents had improved their kitchens, repaired their roofs, and even created handicapped accommodations for older family members. The decades they had been there represented significant personal investments. Nine years was the shortest time any of the families had lived in the houses on the 2100 block of Bodine Street (included in proposal#1); most had been there for between twenty and forty years. In an interview, condemnee Aida Cartegena told me that she still hangs on to her deed. During the relocation process, she mused about returning to her lot, knocking on the door of whatever new building replaced her home, and waiving the deed in the new occupant’s face to prove she was the true owner of the property (Cartegena 2008). A sense of home as property certainly lies hidden beneath the claims just described, but it is the home rather than property that was explicitly called upon in their defense. Activists also demanded that residents be able to keep their community -- often understood as an extension of home -- intact. The neighborhood fabric was largely a product of the specific people who lived there. Many residents had several different relatives and long-time friends scattered through the neighborhood. Thus Cubas complained about the city “wiping out a neighborhood” by moving away some of its long-timers. Non-resident stakeholders often wondered how residents could be so protective of such a desolate and dangerous area. In part, outsiders did not imagine the care that some owners gave to the inside of their houses. But those residents also explained that it wasn’t just their investment in their houses that they valued. Especially at 2100 N. Bodine they had created a safe, quiet block within a more dangerous area by developing a family-like interdependence. When the author asked one relocatee if she had looked for a replacement house in the same area, she responded negatively, and her daughter explained, “It was a good block, not a good neighborhood.” The residents there were mostly related to one another and say the group of seven households felt like family, whether related or not (Cartegena 2008). These stories about home were bound up in claims to be treated equally, in claims to “rights.” On one of the videos produced by the anti-eminent domain group, Milagros Velez says, “It is like as if we do not have any rights, even though we get to vote” (Project 2004). Activists claimed that their low-income communities were particularly vulnerable to rights violations. Condemnees and anti-eminent domain activists make a strong collective critique that poor people were being unjustly targeted. Sonia Ortiz, in her letter of resistance to the RDA, claimed “The reason you are targeting my neighborhood is probably because it is in North Philly [well-known as Philadelphia’s poorest region]. I know that you would never do this to a middle class neighborhood.” Aida Cartegena said she didn’t think so at the time, but looking back she believes what happened was a plan to get rid of the poor people in that area.

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Activists who picked up the citywide (and national) fight against eminent domain make a similar argument. The clear pattern of takings throughout the city in the low-income neighborhoods is their most basic and compelling defense. Moreover, the spirit of the law limiting takings for redevelopment to “blighted” neighborhoods requires that these kinds of takings happen only in poor areas. Activists often reason that the city uses eminent domain to replace low-income with higher-income residents, largely to be able to collect more taxes. Of course, this critique is somewhat paradoxical because eminent domain was supported precisely because this neighborhood was so financially desperate. But that contradiction is overshadowed by the principled claims for universal rights. DISCUSSION American Street’s decades-long struggle to secure land management reveals three processes of transformation from informal to formal economies and laws. (1) In advanced capitalist economies, where government and formal markets show little interest, informal and formal means of order quietly coexist. In this case, residents accessed formal systems. They acquired property titles, signed leases, and sometimes called on the police. But they also managed and invested in land in extra-legal ways and primarily defended themselves. (2) Those strongly affected by informal economies and laws are likely to cautiously seek formalization. They try to determine whether formalization will improve the local community’s situation. They demand that, at the least, no one will be made worse off by the change, and this requires a conversion of wealth from one currency to another. American Street’s resident leaders solicited government help to spark growth in the American Street neighborhood. They even sanctioned the dramatic government action of taking property to make way for new development. But they made it clear that this support was conditioned upon government’s ability to ensure that homeowners would be relocated humanely and compensated fairly and that new developments would benefit local residents. In sum, they required that wealth existing in the old order be converted to the new. (3) The attempt to convert wealth from informal to formal systems sometimes fails. When that happens, those hurt may appeal to a wider public for support. To make their case, they may attach their individual stories to strong and malleable cultural concepts from the formal order. By doing so, they translate cultural values held in the informal world to those already accepted in the formal world. In Philadelphia, activists and sympathizers attached stories and claims about government responsibility toward home to already accepted ideas about property rights. Some of their propositions about what a right to home entails may already be inherent in private property rights, but some may not. (See Hurst 1956 for an analysis of American property rights in the nineteenth century as valuing self determination as well.) In the translation, activists reinforced existing attachments about property rights by claiming paramount respect for home. Their demands about home moved toward a redefinition of property. They demanded rights for both individual family homes and for the community as home. They expected respect for investments made in land adjacent to their houses but to which they had no title or lease. These acts of homesteading in the heart of a twenty-first century, postindustrial northeast city recall Debbie Becher  

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those of squatters on federal and Indian land in the 19th century who with full knowledge that their investments were illegal, often anticipated and won formal rights (Hurst 1956). These were claims to rights based on use rather than title. They expected respect for the residential community they had built, the enclave of Puerto Rican families and businesses that had settled and established lives and livelihoods there. The particular people who lived in that community, as they argued, had a right to continue to do so, to resist either government or market-induced destruction. These were claims to communal rather than individual rights. CONCLUSION Sociological studies of the United States have taken property in land as much for granted as do most Americans. Though urban and political sociologists have focused on demands for growth in the past two to three decades, they have left the study of property to collect dust in the pages written by classical sociologists (See Carruthers and Ariovich 2004 for a review of recent sociological studies of property). The solidification of private property in 19th century England embodied a transformation of the political economy’s ideal: from providing for subsistence to pursuing gain (Marx 1887; Polanyi 1944). The widespread belief that neoliberal ideology is securing its hegemony suggests that faith in property in advanced capitalist countries has only strengthened since then. But the careful analysis of contemporary appeals to property rights suggests another shift may be afoot. In the Philadelphia neighborhood examined here, as in many other poor urban areas, private property does not provide the kinds of protections typically expected of it. Ownership of land neither induces financial investment in one’s own property nor prevents one from committing acts that create nuisances for another’s. Though legal titles provide none of these expected benefits, the idea of property ownership persists. Residents can envision the dynamics of a middle-class neighborhood, where owners exchange property taxes for government services, invest in their properties with an expectation of returns, and respect proscriptions against acts that create nuisances. But these neighborhoods’ political and economic contexts give land a different meaning. As private property gains even more dominance, residents of these countries may be developing expectations that property rights protect efforts toward subsistence, even if they conflict with the pursuit of growth. Social movements for food security through backyard gardening and economic development through community-enforced microloans build on these kinds of commitments. The American Street story, read closely, suggests that we ought to open our eyes to fights for rights to subsistence, self-determination, and community preservation hidden beneath appeals to private property. The processes explored here may occur beyond issues explictly addressing property. We might recognize aspirations for formalization in numerous struggles in advanced capitalist societies. When people pursue increased government and formal market resources, often through political action, they engage these processes. Some recent struggles for gender equity in the United States provide one example we can briefly explore. Activists have convinced Debbie Becher  

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governments to increasingly criminalize, and thus formalize, society’s response to domestic and sexual violence. Advocates of wage equity have pushed for government regulation to force employers to offer wages that relate to the way work is informally valued rather than use the price arrived at through a meeting of supply and demand. In both of these cases, supporters look to enact legislation and written policies to secure their demands. By looking at these struggles as resulting from aspirations for formalization, we recognize that individuals and groups enjoy some level of informally provided economic or legal security before making such demands. Survivors of sexual and domestic violence are likely to have attempted and sometimes managed to control the violence before seeking any formal help. They might sometimes minimize damage by appeasing or avoiding perpetrators. Similarly, women who make smaller wages than they think they deserve may have figured out alternative ways to get the compensation they feel is due, without appealing to any formal regulations. Perhaps they “steal” time or resources from work by taking care of personal business there or bring home paper, pens, and cleaning supplies from their secretarial and janitorial jobs. In practice, formal involvement may threaten these informal means of coping. Or, in the theoretical language employed here, conversion of material values from one order to the other may not be assured. A victim of domestic or sexual violence who calls on the authorities for help may jeopardize any relief she gains from appeasing her attacker. A secretary or janitorial worker guaranteed comparable worth may be forced to show more evidence of what they produce than previously required, thus limiting their ability to take time for themselves during working hours. Participants in these fights may wish for the increased security that formalization can provide, but they are likely to worry about the destruction of their current, informal ways. And they will be unwilling to accept less than what they have already achieved. Research needs to develop explanations of how decisions are made about whether the new, formalized system will be commensurate or better than the old (Espeland 1998a; Espeland 1998b). These claims for formal protection are also likely to involve cultural translation. Contemporary domestic and sexual violence activists use the language of the criminal law. They argue that the crossing of boundaries by loved ones is every bit as criminal as similar behaviors by strangers. Wage equity activists use the language of free market labor. The idea of “comparable worth” suggests that price can sum up value. These acts of translation both reify and redefine the existing norms in the formal economy and law. By invoking the terms, activists reinforce criminality and wage labor as standard categories. At the same time, they attempt to attach previously excluded events to these standards. By associating new stories with the categories, they may shift the latter’s boundaries. Future research into these and numerous other struggles for formalization may use the concepts of conversion and translation as a starting rather than ending point. How do they happen; when do they succeed and fail; and what are the consequences? (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Carruthers and Ariovich 2004; Drake and Cayton 1962; Friedland and Alford 1991; Gans 1982; Goffman 1961; Hartog 1987; Hochschild 1981; Wilson 1987) Debbie Becher  

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WATERL OO

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American Street Case Study

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Appendix A. Proposals Included in the American Street Case Study

What this paper calls the American Street case involved three proposals for particular sets of takings by Philadelphia’s City Council between December 2001 and December 2002. All were conceived as part of the same policy agenda but were pursued separately for various reasons. With these three proposals, the city targeted sixty-eight privately owned properties, of which forty-two were vacant lots and buildings, fourteen were occupied homes, and two were occupied businesses. All of these properties were within a mile of each other either directly on or adjacent to the hundred-foot-wide road named American Street. The first batch of properties pushed through for city acquisition comprised the west side of the 2100 block of N. American Street, through to the east side of 3rd Street, and completely engulfed Bodine Street (the narrow north-south street between American and 3rd). Within this “2100 block” area, City Council would grant permission for the taking of thirty-seven privately-owned properties; seven of the parcels had occupied homes, and two had occupied businesses. (See Proposal1 in Figure 1.) With the second proposal, the city pursued two vacant properties adjacent to one another, on Germantown Avenue, and established a new “urban renewal area,” allowing them to expedite future proposals (See Proposal 2 in Figure 1.) In the third proposal, the city moved to assemble large parcels of land on two more blocks (the 1700 and 2501 blocks of N. American) as well as two other vacant properties on disconnected blocks (1700 block of Randolph Street and 1400 block of American Street); this third set included twenty-eight privately-owned properties, of which seven were occupied residences. (These were on the west side of the 1700 block and the east side of the 2500 block of N. American Street. See Proposal 3 in Figure 1.)

 

Appendix B. Dates, Pertinent Content, and Testimony at City Council Committee on Rules Hearings Hearing 1 Date: December 5, 2001 Bill Content: Authorization to Condemn the 2100 block of N. American and North Bodine St. and 1500 N. 5th St., under the Model Cities Urban Renewal Plan (MOC URA) Name Organization Representing Category Position Herbert Wetzel Redevelopment Authority City/State Government Support Cathy Califano Philadelphia Empowerment Zone City Government Support Rose Gray Asociación de Puertorriqueños en Community Organization Support Marcha (APM) (for different project) Kevin Vaughn Calcutta House Community Organization Support (for different project) Hearing 2 Date: June 5, 2002 Bills Content: Creation of American Street Industrial Corridor Urban Renewal Area (and deletion from MOC URA) Authorization to Condemn 1300 Germantown Avenue and 1300 American Street for E.G. Emil Expansion, under the American Street Industrial Corridor Urban Renewal Plan. Name Organization Representing Category Position Herbert Wetzel Redevelopment Authority City/State Government Support Richard Redding City Planning Commission City Government Support M. Rousch N/A Resident Oppose Eva Gladstein Philadelphia Empowerment Zone City Government Support Unnamed Norris Square Community Community Organization Support Participant Association (for different project) Hearing 3 Date: December 9, 2002 Bill Content: Authorization to Condemn the 1700 and 2501 blocks of N. American Street, under the American Street Industrial Corridor Urban Renewal Plan Name Organization Representing Category Position Herbert Wetzel Redevelopment Authority City/State Government Support David Napton City Planning Commission City Government Support Eva Gladstein Philadelphia Empowerment Zone City Government Support Daralia Rodriguez N/A Resident-Owner being relocated Oppose Malgras Velas N/A Resident-Owner being relocated Oppose Rose Gray Asociacion de Puertorriqueños en Community Organization Support with Marcha (APM) Reservations Jeramos Salas Hispanic Association of Community Organization Support with Contractors and Enterprises Reservations (HACE) Tom Forkin American Street Erie Avenue Community Organization Support asking Business Association (ASEBA) for equity Thomas Carbine American Street Erie Avenue Community Organization Support asking Business Association (ASEBA) for fairness Ron Ramstead N/A Business Owner Support Jim Flaherty Kensington South Neighborhood Community Organization Support with Advisory Council (KSNAC) Reservations Jim Hartling Urban Partners Planning Consultant for Support Government Jordan Muhammad N/A Citizen-At-Large Oppose Akbar

 

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                                                             i Within U.S. property law, users can win formal rights to a piece of land through “adverse possession,” by contrasting their use of the land with the legal owner’s abandonment of it. These claims are rare, however, and certainly not a part of popular wisdom about property rights. ii And when her house was condemned, she thought that the unwillingness of the city to pay for those lots she had been taking care of was unfair. City representatives told her that if she didn’t have the piece of paper, they couldn’t compensate her for the lots. If she had had the papers, she would have gotten $2,000 a lot. She and her husband were always intending to do that; they just hadn’t gotten around to it (de Jesus, 2008). iii This is consistent with later statements by many members of the anti-eminent domain group in Philadelphia and other cities that they do not intend to simply be obstructionists. They support development as long as it is “community-controlled development” (Al Alston in Philadelphia Folklore Project 2004).