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<a href="/author/michael-gecan" class="active">Michael Gecan</a>

About This Author

Michael Gecan

Michael Gecan, an organizer with Industrial Areas Foundation for over 25 years, is author of After America’s Midlife Crisis and Going Public. The views expressed in his essays are his own, not the views of Metro IAF or any of its affiliates.

Content From This Author

Class & Inequality, Politics

How Not to Fix Gentrification

The community development industry has failed in the fight for fair housing. Despite claiming to involve residents, power and self-interest still have the final say.

Michael Gecan

Politics

In Defense of Politics

The only antidote to despair over national politics will be to generate and expand new solutions at local, state, and regional levels.

Michael Gecan

Politics

How Not to Do Activism

The calculus of power isn’t defined by hits or clicks or tweets. It is measured in relationships and meaningful reactions over time.

Michael Gecan

Politics

Back of the Yards

Lessons from a community organizer on building political power.

Michael Gecan

Forum Response

Gecan Response to Anxieties of Democracy

Ordinary people have proven that they can access political life.

Michael Gecan

Class & Inequality, Politics

How De Blasio's Real Estate Choices Can Save NYC

Cities can make decisions. Cities can set their own priorities. Cities can resist the self-interested categories of those with extraordinary wealth.

Michael Gecan

Class & Inequality

Predatory Learning

American education used to be locally controlled and highly pragmatic. Not anymore.

Michael Gecan

Politics

Reclaiming Politics

Isn’t the whole national political scene just so depressing?

Michael Gecan

Forum Response

The Many Forms of Influence

My quarrel is not with Gilens’s insights, but the premise of his argument.

Michael Gecan

Arts in Society, Class & Inequality

Obama’s Chicago Tactics

The Chicago way of doing politics.

Michael Gecan

Class & Inequality, Politics

The Triangle

Policy wonks, patronage, and the possibilities of the grassroots

Michael Gecan

Arts in Society, Class & Inequality

On Borrowed Time

Urban decline moves to the suburbs

Michael Gecan

Pages

       

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