RETAINING FAMILIES, RENEWING CITIES? THE PROMISES AND PITFALLS OF URBAN UPPER-CLASS RETENTION POLICIES
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2019
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Abstract
This dissertation critically considers the racial, gendered and classed implications of public policies aimed at retaining affluent families in urban centers. In recent decades, policy makers, economists, and urban developers alike have heralded the integration of middle and upper-class families as a panacea for rebuilding struggling cities; reversing decades of declining urban populations, bolstering tax bases insufficient to support city infrastructure and services, and pumping economic capital into lackluster consumer markets. These intended outcomes are built on the implicit proposition that an influx of affluent families will catalyze improvements to city services and infrastructure, leading to better quality of life for all. However, many privileged families have means to opt-out of public schools, transit, and recreation facilities. Far from achieving these policies’ stated goals, retaining families who favor elite pay-to-play options further exacerbates structural violence and segregation. Drawing from over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Baltimore, MD, this dissertation empirically explores community mobilization efforts aimed at incentivizing privileged families to enroll in public schools. Marrying theoretical insights on power with practical action, I consider the limitations and potentials of these initiatives as means of ameliorating sources of institutionalized racism, systemic poverty, and political marginalization. Original empirical findings from this fieldwork are brought into dialogue with findings from scholarship investigating similar policies in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago’s east side, Seattle, and a handful of cities abroad all struggling with family retention. Based on analysis of these data, I argue making incremental improvements to failing urban schools and segregation through such efforts is possible, when such initiatives are undertaken concurrently with efforts to control for unintended consequences. When family retention initiatives are taken with critical attention to institutionalized structures of racial, socioeconomic and gendered disparities, these policies are powerful tools for upending the underlying social structures that propagate poverty and segregation.