Middle-Class Poverty Politics: Making Place, Making People

Abstract

In a context of rising inequality and economic vulnerability in the United States, we explore links between class identities, urban place-making, and poverty politics. We ask how class difference and poverty politics are made and remade in neighborhood-level place-making and with what implications for boundaries and alliances between middle-class and poorer residents. Place-making refers to activities through which residents work to produce the neighborhood they want, such as participating in community organization or initiatives, interacting with their neighbors, and supporting or opposing particular changes in the neighborhood. We use a relational poverty framework to show that middle-class place-making reproduces normatively white middle-class place imaginaries but always also produces poverty and class politics. We extend prior research on middle-class poverty politics, which focuses primarily on class boundary making, to investigate whether progressive, alliance-building moments ever emerge. Drawing on case study research with two Seattle neighborhoods, we trace the ways in which place-making practices situate middle-class and poorer actors in relation to one another. We show that these interactions might continue to govern poverty and poorer people but might also challenge normative understandings of poverty and sow the seeds for cross-class alliances. Through comparative analysis of the neighborhoods as dense sites of class formation, we show how particular histories, place imaginaries, and built or institutional infrastructures allow (or foreclose) questioning and reworking of normative class and race formations and poverty politics to pave the way for cross-class alliance.