This article focuses on how impoverished racial and ethnic communities attribute meaning to place. I discuss theoretical ideas that support community organization along with practical ways of looking at community. Another aspect of this article involves the importance of a group's ties to place along with the constraints of a community's collective historical biography or “ghosts of place.” The “ghosts of place” refer to those presences real or imagined that are socially constructed and part of a phenomenological sociology. The creation of racial and ethnic enclaves makes place an important dimension of community life and the shaping of future events. Community practitioners could approach these types of community issues through an ongoing sensitivity to the “ghosts of place” in culturally based interventions that acknowledge the hold that place attachment, its constraints, and its possibilities has on a cultural group's way of envisioning and living out its community health.
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