This article problematizes the development of affordable housing as a form of equity planning. Through both qualitative and quantitative data, the article examines three affordable housing projects within a redevelopment plan in Santa Ana, California. The research finds that a narrow focus on affordable housing, as it is designed and produced within the larger affordable housing complex, facilitates the process of gentrification and displacement. The findings show that equity is more than housing production alone. When affordability is defined at a larger scale, and the planning process is stripped of substantive community participation, affordable housing loses its more equitable underpinnings.

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Much of the community-based planning literature focuses on the development of collaborative social relationships in small territorial communities. It is argued that the collective action that is foundational to such planning is based on closed social relationships, trust and the ability of participants to control or punish potential defectors. The article examines how community-based planning and the social relationships that underlie it emerge and are maintained transnationally. The research focuses on immigrants from Oaxaca, Mexico, who have relocated to Southern California and established hometown associations. The associations remit money to their pueblos of origin for community-based planning. The article examines (1) how social networks and the relationships of trust upon which they are built connect immigrants in California to their pueblo of origin, (2) how these social relationships that facilitate community-level collective action are maintained across transnational spaces and (3) the potential of such collective action for broader social and political transformation in Southern California and Oaxaca.

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