Government land disposition decisions shaped and reshaped the Lower East since the late 1920s. The most visible physical changes occurred in the depression and post war eras when slum clearance razed entire neighborhoods and the communities they harbored. Economic and social unrest during the 1960s staved off wholesale renewal but ultimately led to rampant abandonment and “burn-out� by the mid 1970s (Mele, p. 126). The spatial deconcentration policy that came out of the Kerner Commission was a direct attempt to disperse poor inner-city citizens into ineffectual minority populations spread among the tri-state region’s white majority. This spatial deconcentration policy has taken the last thirty years to manifest in the LES, starting with the simultaneous abandonment, speculative reinvestment, and gentrification of the 1970s and early 1980s. The economic boom of the 1980s signaled another push to gentrify the neighborhood for a new generation of white collar professionals. The Black Monday stock market crash thwarted this attempt in an eerie replay of the 1929 crash. Just before both market crashes, pressures to replace the poorer residents of the district were at their peak. As we enter the new millenium, the forces of gentrification have almost completed the economic and social transformation in parts of the district from low-rent slum to high-rent district first envisioned by politicians, planners, and developers more than seventy years ago.
Along the way, many social networks and self-help movements have risen, particularly during the ebb of gentrification pressures when the city has neglected the district’s needs. Among them, the self-help housing and the community gardening movements served as a regenerative force to combat the ills of landlord abandonment and arson. These social movements fulfilled the specific needs of many in the diverse community when the city government would not. Often times, the participants in these movements were directly responsible for the neighborhood renewal, beautification, anti-crime measures, and artistic or alternative culture that have made the district an attractive place to live, even for those able to afford pricier areas. Yet they acted as a base of power to resist gentrification and displacement, making them targets of the city government, rather than heroes. In the last 25 years, the city government made numerous decisions that threatened to destroy community movements and depoliticize the population. Yet the community continues to fight for its preservation. As Abu-Lughod wrote in 1991, “The government did not play a passive role, but indeed sought to encourage certain outcomes and discourage others� (p. 123). The motive for this encouragement was social control over and replacement of poor and minority residents in the district with a new, higher-class population.