Is Failure the Cost of Success? with author Joseph Margulies

219 South 6th Street,Philadelphia PA 19106

23 September, 2021

Description

Joseph Margulies is the author of Thanks for Everything (Now Get Out) When a distressed urban neighborhood gentrifies, all the ratios change: poor to rich; Black and Brown to white; unskilled to professional; vulnerable to secure. Vacant lots and toxic dumps become condos and parks. But the low-income residents who held on when the neighborhood was at its worst, who worked so hard to make it better, are gradually driven out. For them, the neighborhood hasn’t been restored so much as destroyed. Tracing the history of Olneyville, a neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island, that has traveled the long arc from urban decay to the cusp of gentrification, Joseph Margulies asks the most important question facing cities today: Can we restore distressed neighborhoods without setting the stage for their destruction? Is failure the inevitable cost of success? Based on years of interviews and on-the-ground observation, Margulies argues that to save Olneyville and thousands of neighborhoods like it, we need to empower low-income residents by giving them ownership and control of neighborhood assets. His model for a new form of neighborhood organization—the “neighborhood trust”—is already gaining traction nationwide and promises to give the poor what they have never had in this country: the power to control their future. About Joseph Margulies: Joseph Margulies is a civil rights lawyer and professor at Cornell University. He litigates and writes about cities, criminal justice reform, and the post-9/11 attacks on liberty. In a world of Venn diagrams, he has found that these subjects intersect in toxic attitudes about the poor and marginalized, and the nearly irresistible allure of cruelty. Social hour and book signing to follow. The Athenaeum was established in 1814 as a subscription library, at a time when the free public library system did not exist and collections of books, available for reading or research, were still mostly limited to institutions, schools or colleges. The Athenaeum of Philadelphia nurtures curiosity in members and neighbors, strengthening community through learning and discourse. The Athenaeum of Philadelphia is one of 16 membership libraries that collaborate through the Membership Libraries Group. Some, like the Charleston (est. 1748), New York Society (est. 1754), and Newport (est. 1741) libraries, date from the 18th Century.