Building a Better Chicago explores the complex ecosystem of nonprofits within Chicago and highlights the tensions between formal nonprofits and informal grassroots organizations. As scholars of urban neighborhoods argue, such field-level analysis allows one to more fully understand how relationships between community members within the neighborhoods and external agencies and groups frame neighborhood dynamics. Throughout the text, the author analyzes how urban elites, nonprofit staff, and residents use interorganizational trust and mistrust to respond to large-scale redevelopment initiatives. ... More

Building a Better Chicago explores the complex ecosystem of nonprofits within Chicago and highlights the tensions between formal nonprofits and informal grassroots organizations. As scholars of urban neighborhoods argue, such field-level analysis allows one to more fully understand how relationships between community members within the neighborhoods and external agencies and groups frame neighborhood dynamics. Throughout the text, the author analyzes how urban elites, nonprofit staff, and residents use interorganizational trust and mistrust to respond to large-scale redevelopment initiatives. As part of this, the author analyzes the New Communities Program, a ten-year, multimillion-dollar urban redevelopment initiative that was led by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a national community development intermediary. Problematizing normative understandings of organizational trust and mistrust, the author examines the ways that Chicago’s poor Black and Mexican American communities leveraged collective skepticism as a tactical tool in order to ensure more equitable redevelopment occurred in their neighborhoods. Organizational trust is not always a positive force—rather, it can be co-opted as a mode of control, used to minimize dissent and to socialize members into a homogenous organizational culture. This book demonstrates how organizational mistrust, or collective skepticism, can yield a number of positive outcomes.