Page 31 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

16 . Consumption in Context

Oak Street Connector was a highway project meant to connect two
major interstates. In the 1960s several blocks of houses were torn down
in preparation for the highway project. After nearly forty years the proj-
ect remains unfinished and is unlikely ever to be completed. Urban re-
newal projects eventually displaced almost 40 percent of New Haven's
black population, leveling long-standing communities of houses and
homeowners to relocate residents to housing projects owned and admin-
istered by city and federal agencies (Minerbrook 1992). The social isola-
tion of neighborhoods such as Newhallville may be seen as an outcome of
urban redevelopment, which transported families and neighborhoods
away from downtown to more distantly located developments less acces-
sible to jobs and commercial centers. Social factors internal to the black
community are undoubtedly responsible to some degree for ongoing so-
cial and economic crises, but such internal social factors did not tear
down neighborhoods and the social relationships that permeated them. 9
The history of urban redevelopment in New Haven is only one ex-
ample of how the city appears to be less and less amenable to its minori-
ty population. A city-wide property reassessment hiked 1992 residential
property taxes about 40 percent. This was the first step in a five-year tax
increase due to raise payments an average of 238 percent (Yarrow 1992).
This development came as a blow to many Newhallville residents, who
had hoped with the election of John Daniels, the city's first black mayor,
that they would have closer and less contentious ties with city hall than
had previously been the case. The great-grandmother of one child I
knew did feel at home enough with Daniels (whom she remembered as a
young man) to call him up herself and give him a piece of her mind about
her ballooning tax bill, but the newfound ability to personally blow off
steam with the mayor yielded little in terms of material benefits. These
recent economic changes have changed the Newhallville landscape dra-
matically, and abandoned buildings have begun to multiply at an alarm-
ing rate. They can be found on almost every block in the neighborhood,
fallout from bankruptcies and the vagaries of absentee landlords who
control nearly two-thirds of the area's housing units (U.S. Department
of Commerce 1993).
Newhallville's tree-lined streets are flanked by two- and three-story
frame houses and at first glance the area seems unlikely to have garnered
its reputation as one of the poorest and most problem-ridden areas of
the city. The neighborhood's median household income in 1990 was
$20,569; 26.6 percent of Newhallville residents lived in poverty (U.S.
Department of Commerce 1993). The neighborhood's 1990 poverty