A Good Reputation : How Residents Fight for an American Barrio Hardback

A historic Houston barrio provides an illuminating lens on neighborhood reputation.   Neighborhoods have the power to form significant parts of our worlds and identities.

A neighborhood’s reputation, however, doesn’t always match up to how residents see themselves or wish to be seen.

The distance between residents’ desires and their environment can profoundly shape neighborhood life.     In A Good Reputation, sociologists Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga delve into the development and transformation of the reputation of Northside, a predominantly Latinx barrio in Houston.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with residents, developers, and other neighborhood stakeholders, the authors show that people’s perceptions of their neighborhoods are essential to understanding urban inequality and poverty.

Korver-Glenn and Mayorga’s empirically detailed account of disputes over neighborhood reputation helps readers understand the complexity of high-poverty urban neighborhoods, demonstrating that gentrification is a more complicated and irregular process than existing accounts of urban inequality would suggest.

Offering insightful theoretical analysis and compelling narrative threads from understudied communities, A Good Reputation will yield insights for scholars of race and ethnicity, urban planning, and beyond.