Customer Reviews

Community Versus Commodity: Tenants and the American City (S U N Y Series on the New Inequalities)

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Praise for Community Versus Commodity: Tenants and the American City by
Stella M. Capek and John I. Gilderbloom Albany, NY: SUNY

"Community versus Commodity is the best available case study of the tenants' movement..."
---Pierre Clavel, Cotemporary Sociology July 1993

". . . an important sociological treatise . . . their work will undoubtedly become a weighty intellectual guidebook for activists who want to shift the balance of power in their communities."
--Bradley Inman, San Francisco Examiner and President of the National Association of Newspaper Real Estate Writers.

"This is a thoughtful book that examines the progressives as a movement coming to power, investigates progressive housing policies once in power and offers a wealth of information about tenant behavior and attitudes. As such, it offers a well-rounded and original contribution to the literature...a good research book that can be recommended to others."
--K. Hoggart, Regional Studies: Journal of the Regional Studies Association

"Fascinating . . . a model of qualitative research . . . nearly flawless . . . a masterful combination of historical information, fieldwork and theoretical analysis...it is worthwhile reading for urban scholars, social movement scholars and methodologists."
--American Journal of Sociology

"Their well-researched and thorough study is a model of a community political inquiry . . . Using the tools of social science and not riding a particular ideological or theoretical horse, Capek and Gilderbloom have produced the most thorough and honest assessment of the Santa Monica political experience to date. It will be the standard by which any subsequent studies will be judged."
--Derek Shearer, from the preface of "Community Versus Commodity" & co-author of Economic Democracy

"a significant contribution to the literature of rental housing and of tenants as a social group...A major portion of the book is a comparison between Santa Monica where a "rainbow coalition" of renters, seniors, environmentalists and liberals put together an extraordinarily progressive government, and its free-enterprise antithesis, Houston. Santa Monica's success in coalition politics led to a strong rent control law, affordable housing, low-density development and homeless shelters. By contrast, America's least regulated city, Houston, suffers from deplorable low-income housing and a host of other undressed urban problems. The contrast is drawn in a riveting and absorbing piece of writing." Norman Krumholz, past President American Planning Association & co-author of Making Equity Planning Work

Capek and Gilderbloom advance considerably our understanding of the housing movement in the United States and its transformative potential...A strong theoretical contribution and an illuminating case study.
--Chester Hartman, Senior Fellow Institute for Policy Studies
Washington D.C. and author of Housing and Social Policy

Stella Capek and John I. Gilderbloom's Community Versus Commodity is a pioneering work in the several fields of urban studies, social movement theory, political ethnography and urban politics. More than pathbreaking interdisciplinary research, Community Versus Commodity also highlights questions of political meaning and American public values at the center of American politics in the 1990s. It is a call to ask what America stands for.
--Harry C. Boyte, Senior Fellow Humphrey Institute, University of Minnesota and author of Backyard Revolution

This articulate, provocative, and often controversial book merits the attention of readers across the nation, including those in government and the academy. Capek and Gilderbloom's extensive data and wise suggestions about tenants' organizations, community-based housing and democratic housing cooperatives offer the basis for new grass-roots and federal policy initiatives to solve the ongoing housing emergency.
--Joe Feagin, author of The Urban Real Estate Game

Capek & Gilderbloom will outrage dogmatists on the left and anger free market apologists on the right. This book is a watershed event that will stimulate debate on contemporary urban social movements.
--John Atlas, President of the National Housing Institute