| Popis: |
Durham, North Carolina residents are concerned that the current squeeze on housing availability reinforces and is intensifying gendered and racialized patterns of poverty. In this context, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) has emerged as an important affordable housing program in Durham and nationally. Since its creation through the Reagan-era Tax Reform Act of 1986, the LIHTC has been the primary source of funding for building new or preserving existing affordable housing in the United States. In Durham the city���s current affordable housing goals incorporate LIHTC funding and a high-profile development was recently awarded these tax-credits. The LIHTC offers a market-based incentive in the form of a tax credit subsidy in order to encourage developers to participate in affordable housing projects. This study investigates the LIHTC as an opening for examining neoliberal city building and politics, shifting forms of urban governance, and constructions of social difference in the city of Durham. The research draws together feminist geographic work on the affective politics of encountering difference, critical legal scholarship on property, and data collected through participant observation, interviews and document analysis to conceptualize the LIHTC as a relational policy. This approach details where the LIHTC fits in the trajectory of low-income housing policy in the United States, how the LIHTC works contractually, and who among the network of stakeholders involved benefit (and in what ways) from the program. Findings reveal that, in keeping with the conflicting demands emblematic of actually existing urban neoliberal politics, in Durham, the LIHTC is rearticulating, and reproducing inequalities as well as opportunities for resistance through new affordable housing networks that generate and solidify hierarchical power relations. |
