Anna Nichole Gorman

This thesis, "The Fight for Los Sures: Tracing Welfare Policy 'Reform' and Resistance to Displacement," examines the troubling relationship between federal social welfare policy and urban displacement through the study of two sites in North Brooklyn: the Los Sures (or "South Side") neighborhood in South Williamsburg and the Domino Sugar Refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront. This place-based investigation contends that social welfare policy "reform" actually facilitated the neoliberal objective of marginalizing and displacing vulnerable residents (the "unprofitable") in order to replace these populations with wealthier (and more "profitable") residents. This research also suggests that in the urban context, the cultivation of established "sense of place" (i.e., place attachment and place identity) may lay the necessary groundwork for the alternative urban systems required to transcend the neoliberal urban policies driving displacement and marginalization.