Abstract
"What kind of reputation does your neighborhood have, and how does this affect your daily life? Are you embarassed or proud when you share this information or when friends come over for dinner? Are you surrounded by businesses that cater to your needs and reflect your sense of self, or does your heart sink when you gaze down your block? As sociologists Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga demonstrate in A Good Reputation, people's feelings about their neighborhood and its reputation have an outsized effect on either addressing or driving inequality. In this book, they take a close look at Houston, Texas's historic Northside barrio-a high-poverty urban neighborhood. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with poor, working-class, and middle-class Latinx people and additional interviews with Black, White, and multiracial local stakeholders, they examine how and why neighborhood reputation shapes unequal urban processes. The authors center people's own perceptions of their neighborhood, leveraging these data to foreground how neighborhood heterogeneity, Whiteness, and placemaking intersect with and shape stakeholders' constructions of neighborhood reputation. Korver-Glenn and Mayorga ultimately demonstrate how constructing a neighborhood as "nice" or "ghetto" has profound implications for neighborhood inequality. In the process, they develop a theoretically rich, empirically detailed account of urban neighborhood inequality that brings to the fore understudied communities, processes of relation formation across class and racial lines, and ways these communities develop cultural logics about specific places"--
"A historic Houston barrio provides an illuminating lens on neighborhood reputation. Neighborhoods have the power to form significant parts of our worlds and identities. A neighborhood's reputation, however, doesn't always match up to how residents see themselves or wish to be seen. The distance between residents' desires and their environment can profoundly shape neighborhood life. In A Good Reputation, sociologists Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga delve into the development and transformation of the reputation of Northside, a predominantly Latinx barrio in Houston. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with residents, developers, and other neighborhood stakeholders, the authors show that people's perceptions of their neighborhoods are essential to understanding urban inequality and poverty. Korver-Glenn and Mayorga's empirically detailed account of disputes over neighborhood reputation helps readers understand the complexity of high-poverty urban neighborhoods, demonstrating that gentrification is a more complicated and irregular process than existing accounts of urban inequality would suggest. Offering insightful theoretical analysis and compelling narrative threads from understudied communities, A Good Reputation will yield insights for scholars of race and ethnicity, urban planning, and beyond. "--
Includes bibliographical references and index