COMMUNITY ACTIVISM IN OAK PARK: COMPETING AGENDAS ...

NOTES
1 Neighborhood “revitalization” is also known as “gentrification” (Lee, Spain, and Umberson 1985:581).
Revitalization projects are projects that attempt to rebuild or renew a city or neighborhood.
2 In this thesis, although I bring to light the various definitions of “gentrification,” I utilize Neil Smith’s
definition as the process through which “poor and working-class neighborhoods in the inner city are
refurbished via an influx of private capital and middle-class homebuyers and renters” (1996:32).
3 “Critics of revitalization argue that the process unfairly rejects former residents and displaces them from
their homes at great financial, social, and psychological costs” (Hodge 1981:189).
4 The political economy model is both the, “attempt to understand the emergence of particular peoples at
the conjunction of local and global histories, to place local populations in the larger currents of world
history,” and “the attempt to constantly place culture in time, to see a constant interplay between
experience and meaning in a context in which both experience and meaning are shaped by inequality and
domination” (Roseberry 1989:49).
5 Population demographics for Oak Park were gathered from a report written by Sacramento Housing and
Redevelopment Agency titled, Sacramento Revitalization, Oak Park: The Resurgence of Sacramento’s
First Suburb. This is the Oak Park Redevelopment Area 2005 Implementation Plan.
6 Source of demographic information is the U.S. Census Bureau 2000, Fact Finder, 95817 zip code
tabulation area.
7 Source of demographic information is the U.S. Census Bureau 2000, Fact Finder, 95817 zip code
tabulation area.
8 Data taken from http://www.city-data.com, 95817 Zip Code Detailed Profile.
9 Pseudonyms are used to keep the anonymity of all informants in this thesis.
10 Before moving to Oak Park to conduct full-time fieldwork, I conducted part-time fieldwork in the
neighborhood for two years.
11 Neighborhood Association refers to the association I participated in while residing in Oak Park and
neighborhood association refers to the general usage of the term.
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