Reclaiming Your Community

Majora Carter shows how to end the brain drain that cripples low-income communities, mapping out a development strategy focused on encouraging talented people to stay and help lift up the community.



What is a path toward wealth creation, quality of life, and happiness in low-status communities? Unfortunately, most people born in them measure their success by how far away they get. Majora Carter could have been one of them, but she chose to stay in the South Bronx.

In this sure to be controversial book, Carter argues for what she calls a talent retention community development strategy, an alternative to gentrification, and to programs that ameliorate poverty without building wealth. She advocates measure like:

• Providing assistance to help homeowners resist those "we pay cash for houses" fliers
• Creating mixed-income housing instead of exclusively low-income housing
• Mentoring people from low-status communities to use the tools of real estate development to preserve and strengthen them

This is a profoundly personal book. Carter talks about seeing her brother killed by the police, her struggles as a woman of color confronting the mostly "male and pale" real estate and nonprofit and philanthropic establishments, and is candid about her failures as well as her successes. It is a powerful, heartfelt rethinking of poverty, economic development, and individual and family success.