Nicole Marwell’s new book is out

Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City (University of Chicago Press). The poor neighborhoods of today’s American cities are home to tens of thousands of nonprofit community-based organizations, which work diligently on tight budgets to provide assistance to some of our most vulnerable citizens. Scholars and policymakers have touted the role of CBOs in fostering neighborhood networks of trust and collective action, building “social capital” to combat school drop-out, crime, and other negative dynamics often found in poor places. This book draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in eight CBOs in Brooklyn to open up a wider lens on the organizational life of poor neighborhoods, showing how CBOs are embedded in complex and contentious systems of economic and political action, the outcomes of which determine the limits of CBOs’ ability to bring opportunity to the poor residents of
their neighborhoods.