Poverty and the Willful Destruction of Social Capital: Displacement and Dispossession in African American Communities

The concept of “social capital” has grown in popularity among those who write about poverty and its alleviation. This paper examines and criticizes recent policy initiatives that seek to cure poverty by scattering the poor, with the rationale that they are harming themselves and each other by forming communal ties in public housing. Neoliberal constructs of social capital, in which social ties are viewed as a fungible commodity possessed and manipulated by individual actors, are contrasted with neo-Marxist views of social capital that reflect pessimistic, reproductionist ideas that are not too dissimilar. Ethnographic examples of the social capital of public housing residents illustrate a competing usage that emphasizes the potential for agency and change.