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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

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Matthew Desmond talks about the issue of poverty in America and eviction. He captures the stories of personal lives of a couple of families struggling during the Great Recession. This does not directly correlate to gentrification but it connects to the lives of low-income/ poverty families and can give an insight of what they go through when their surrounding areas are raising the price of living.

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Lacino Hamilton is telling his story from being sentenced to prison to the gentrification of his hometown. He did not have family to rely on and he had to create his own hussle with the resources around him, drug trade. "Insurmountable barriers to education, housing, recreation and social services for working-class and poor people, prison’s majority clientele". Where do those people go? criminal background? poor hard working families? Minority races? I think this is important because those lower class families are forced into areas of high drug/ prostitution, homelessness, high crime areas.

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This story is the fifth piece in the Truthout series, Severed Ties: The Human Toll of Prisons. This series dives deeply into the impact of incarceration on families, loved ones and communities, demonstrating how the United States' incarceration of more than 2 million people also harms many millions more - including 2.7 million children.
When I was asked to write something "personal" about being sentenced to a prison term of 52 to 80 years, and the time I have served thus far, I was torn. During the last 23 years of having to always chase after something, hide something and hold my ground against something or someone, I have always shied away from autobiographical ways of speaking and writing about this real-life nightmare. But I believe personal stories like mine are important because they give a human face to the pain and misery of imprisonment experienced by incarcerated people as a whole.

It's a failure of both local and national media, as well as institutions of higher learning, that an essay such as this is even thought to be necessary. Our society has massively launched onto a path of caging and torturing an unprecedented number of men, women and children, and the people who are supposed to critique and shed light on this draconian practice have largely neglected to do so, at least in a way that is commensurate to the crisis.

From time to time there is reporting on some major problem of imprisonment, but in my opinion, the reporting rarely conveys the connection between the specific crises they describe and the root cause of imprisonment itself. For example, in relation to the US leading the world in imprisonment, many issues have been the subject of investigative inquiry, including the disproportionate number of imprisoned poor people; long-term consequences, such as the making of a permanent underclass; the expected cycle of imprisonment from generation to generation; the decline in births among groups that are overrepresented in America's many jails and prisons; the school-to-prison pipeline; the connection between race and imprisonment; and the pay-to-play nature of the criminal justice system. But few of these matters are linked directly to the imperatives of economic expansion, monopoly capitalism, imperialism and the pursuit of super-profits. The net result is a lack of clarity.

By telling my own story - a story shared by the many working-class Detroit residents who were forcefully displaced through the brutal "redevelopment" of the city's Cass Corridor area - I hope to shed some much-needed light on how the capitalist profit motives that drive gentrification are a core cause of mass incarceration in this country.
City Planners Wreak Disaster on the Cass Corridor in Detroit
I first learned about people, about cruelty, about forced sacrifices, about being a hard worker [to build a life for others], about who is and isn't important, and about fair speech and diabolical actions during the 1980s and 1990s, in my hometown of Detroit, Michigan, under conditions of gentrification. I saw with my own eyes how economic and social development dismantled the downtown Cass Corridor area and created internal refugees of American citizens, many of whom join me in here, in prison.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Cass Corridor was suffused with vibrancy, joy and a tolerance of others that was clearly connected with Detroiters' self-esteem and a general sense of optimism about the future. When Detroiters elected their first Black mayor, Coleman A. Young, in 1974, first-time home ownership was at an all-time high, and conflicts that plagued Detroit's labor movement for over half a century appeared to be resolved. Then life changed.

I don't know which came first, but the changes came hard and fast: mortgage foreclosures, the imposition of tax liens, governments seizing property through their power of eminent domain, the reduction and gutting of city services, city officials ignoring an influx of drugs and prostitution, rampant homelessness, and courts and prisons' increased presence in our lives. But I am certain we were being pushed out of the Cass Corridor, displaced through a complex network of public and private interests. In the mid 1980s, Detroit Mayor Coleman Young announced that city dollars would be used to finance the development of downtown hotels, so that Detroit could attract convention business. Homes were foreclosed. Businesses were dismantled. And everyday decision-making power was shifted from families and local business owners to state legislators, venture capitalists and a combination of financial institutions and interests.

It was as if a number of bombs just went off. Almost overnight the Cass Corridor resembled a war zone. Vehicles that swept city streets and removed trash could be seen broken down on the side of the road. The stench from mountains of trash was unbearable. Two of the three supermarkets that provided food to the 2,000 or so residents of the Cass Corridor were burned down, never to be rebuilt. The city shut off power lines needed to keep the street lights on, giving a whole new meaning to the word darkness. Then, many men in the neighborhood took to scrapping, and the power lines were the first to go. At night on some streets, it was impossible to see three feet in any direction. I don't think anyone felt safe, including myself. Three of the area's four schools - Burton Elementary, James Couzens Elementary and Jefferson Junior High - looked more like abandoned factories than places of learning. Disinvestment made it appear as if every essential service required for a decent and safe living had come under rocket fire.

The immediate objective seemed to be to create unlivable conditions. The longer-term objective seemed to be to force us out of the Cass Corridor so it could be "renewed," the new phrase at the time meant to hide and shift public dialogue into a direction favorable to economic power. To accomplish these twin goals, city officials became the linchpin of a strategy that involved radically reducing municipal spending - including spending on health, education and welfare - combined with giving greater resources and authority to police and prosecutors and expanding the criminal code before embarking on imprisoning many of the casualties of renewal.

I knew we were being pushed out but was clueless about what to do to push back. I just accepted the fact that we were being uprooted. Families were being broken apart and social stability was being destroyed. I did not have much help, not even from my parents. Both were incapacitated: My mother was dependent on drugs and my father was in prison. I had to improvise and fell into a lot of desperate activity. I learned how to make do with whatever resources were around - wit, audacity, determination and the drug trade. It was a confusing time. A climate of heavy-handed abusive policing intensified as the police attempted to run us out of the Cass Corridor. Eventually, Detroit police arrested me and my decades of incarceration began.
Gentrification's Human Costs
When Detroit mayors Coleman Young and Dave Bing began to publicly acknowledge the need for the city to both shrink and radically reinvent itself, they [were] committing to additional outcomes besides "economic and social development." Where were we, the poor, working class, predominantly Black population, supposed to go after being pushed out? A few families relocated and found housing in other parts of Detroit. A few moved to other cities. A tiny fraction moved to other states. But the overwhelming majority of families could not just up ad relocate. Some were housed in shelters and others [in] emergency placements. Many became homeless, living in makeshift tents that were considered eyesores and nuisances, and ultimately targeted for forced removal.

Foreclosing on mortgages, canceling leases and raising rents to prices that longtime residents could not afford, and thus forcing them to relocate, in some case was not necessary. Removal didn't exclusively mean physical displacement. There was also cultural displacement. For example, it was a different kind of forced removal that took place when my friends and I did not feel welcome in houses of worship and social clubs built primarily to cater to white dispositions and cultures, or when we did not feel welcome in restaurants and retail stores built to cater primarily to affluent tastes and lifestyles.

The Cass Corridor became the shining example of how urban renewal could supposedly benefit Detroit. But before the 1980s came to a close, the emptiness of that claim was clearly apparent. The Cass Corridor virtually became a ghost town. There were two basic factors to explain this: first, the absence of an income-generating strategy for the poor and working-class people who historically took up residency there, and second, the absence of a democratic system by which area residents could participate in decision-making about the neighborhood. We were cut out of decision-making about the future of the place where we lived, learned, worked, loved, dreamed, created and did our best to resolve conflicts surrounding our lives. Perhaps we should ask society: What did all this development really mean?

How does gentrification alter the experience of everyday life? How does it affect the concepts of social participation, community and self-worth? How does it change education, work, family life and leisure? What are the implications for the environment, human health and disease? How does it serve to homogenize subcultures, or on the contrary, does it promote diversity and inclusiveness? And considering that gentrification (capitalist-sponsored development) influences competition, who gains and who loses?

This does not mean that all "development" is undesirable - but rather that every plan to gentrify a neighborhood or section of a city will necessary have predetermined destructive effects. It also means that social planners, policy makers, bankers, venture capitalists, elected officials, corporations and others who partake in gentrification schemes are aware of the consequences of such development, but choose not to share these consequences with the public. These consequences are often hidden from investigative inquiry through the imprisonment of those who are displaced. I call this the gentrification-to-prison pipeline.
The Direct Line From Displacement to Incarceration
Forcing people to evacuate a neighborhood or entire section of a city cannot be achieved by democratic means. It is inconceivable that anyone would vote to displace themselves, right? This explains why police, courts and prison are often used to remove and disappear some people. I was either stopped, arrested and/or conveyed to the police station once or twice a month for the entire 10 years I lived in and frequented the Cass Corridor, supposedly for "identification purposes," by regular beat police. Mind you, these same beat police worked the area for decades and were familiar with me, my friends and extended members of my family. I was told that if I did not like the treatment, I could always move.

A number of comprehensive studies admit that neighborhoods in Detroit, Baltimore, Brooklyn and Chicago, among other places that have undergone gentrification, created large populations of internal refugees and displaced and disappeared people. Unfortunately, these studies do not say to where they disappeared.

A much more nuanced understanding of the social role of "redevelopment" is required in order for society to give up the usual way of thinking about imprisonment being the inevitable consequences of crime. For many of my friends and neighbors and me, imprisonment did not result from inevitable "crime," but rather imprisonment was linked to the agendas of social planners, politicians and real estate developers, and resulted due to the extraordinary powers given to the police and courts.

Years after I was imprisoned, local newspapers and television stations began reporting that according to the FBI's uniform Crime Report for 1998, one in every 13 murder arrests in the United States was made by Detroit police. Several investigations were launched around what were called dragnet arrests. These involved mass roundups and lockups of any potential witnesses until they talked. And if they did not talk, many were beat[en] and charged with manufactured crimes, like I was.

On July 8, 1994, I regret not running when I saw the roundup vans coming. Normally I would have, not because I had done anything wrong, but at a minimum, I knew I would be harassed. I never imagined I would be locked up, beaten up and charged for a crime of which I had no knowledge. The state's star and only witness was a jailhouse informant who testified in numerous cases claiming to have received uncoerced confessions. If that is not unbelievable and tragic enough, the same thing also happened to several dozen other Cass Corridor residents who disappeared around the time I did.

The grim reality of gentrification for a large portion of the Cass Corridor's population has been evident for years. In the eyes of city officials and the big corporations that now control that section of Detroit, the "limits of development" did not call for public participation but for confinement. We were viewed as obsolete commodities that had to leave whether we had some place to go or not, and many of us didn't. This is how the city of Detroit's approach to "social development" came to rely so dramatically on the bricks and mortar of prison at the expense of other responses that would have been both more humane and more effective - such as social development with people in mind, not profit.

If we are willing to take seriously the consequences of a justice system that is the extension of money and power, it should not be difficult to reach the conclusion that enormous numbers of people are in prison simply because someone else's vision for the future did not include them. We were sent to prison not so much because of the crime we may have indeed committed, but largely for the expropriation of land (i.e., gentrification), which requires getting rid of the people who live on the land. Social development, urban renewal and the like are just new words for what sociologists in the past called imperialism, and what we can loosely refer to as colonialism. Gentrification and colonialism are the same processes largely because they share the same goals - dislocation, expropriation and the pursuit of profit.

My community's experiences suggest that gentrification can and often does have substantial impacts on citizens returning to the larger society. Almost 25 years later, many of those who were forced out of the Cass Corridor and relocated to Michigan prisons are now being released. Released not only to a world that has technologically left them behind (as prison offers little more than a GED), but to a Cass Corridor that has erected nearly insurmountable barriers to education, housing, recreation and social services for working-class and poor people, prison's majority clientele. People are being released into a permanent undercaste: This is how gentrification succeeds in disappearing working-class and poor people to make way for a more affluent population.

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, author Michelle Alexander writes that "prisoners returning 'home' are typically the poorest of the poor, lacking the ability to pay for private housing and routinely denied public assistance." In other words, those of us who are able to get out usually lack access to the type of assistance that could provide some much-needed stability in our lives. Alexander goes on to write that "for them 'going home' is more of a figure of speech than a realistic option." Gentrification not only forces people out but also prevents them from coming back. In moving toward a more complete understanding of why imprisonment patterns have been so persistent, we cannot limit our attention to characteristics of individuals and families, to policies targeting individual poverty, or to macro-level forces leading to growing income inequality. We must also consider places. We must consider the various forces that affect neighborhoods, cities and the ways that the trajectories of people and places are connected over time.

The conditions and circumstances that influenced my imprisonment have helped me to think outside the conventional framework of prison abolition. I believe we will only rid society of prisons when we also find a way to abolish gentrification.

Prison abolition has to be seen in the context of the broader set of economic and political forces that have served to maintain imprisonment trends for the last several decades. Abolishing the gentrification-to-prison pipeline requires us to take on the founding of a new society.

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This story is the fifth piece in the Truthout series, Severed Ties: The Human Toll of Prisons. This series dives deeply into the impact of incarceration on families, loved ones and communities, demonstrating how the United States' incarceration of more than 2 million people also harms many millions more - including 2.7 million children.

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A girl named Sydney was born and raised in Brooklyn but her neighborhood is changing around her. FOR SALE signs are popping up and her neighbors that have built this community are disappearing. She learns about her new neighbor Theo and they learn about the history of their area.

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Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine confronts decades of gentrification and displacement - Article

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Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine confronts decades of gentrification and displacement - Article

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This is gentrification in my local area. It talks about the crime, drug dealing, and overall changes in the community.

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CINCINNATI - To be able to tell their story, I had to see that window.

The window of the Cornerstone Apartments compound located in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine (OTR) district by Green and Republic Street. Going inside the building should not have been an issue. John Hancock, one of the Cornerstone residents, agreed to meet me by the parking lot entrance on Race Street and walk me over to the affordable housing community's common area, where the shattered window stood.

The window overlooked the intersection and the Over-the-Rhine Recreation Center across the street. The shattered glass appeared to be a bleak reminder of the constant dangers and grievances the residents faced beyond the oasis they crafted for themselves in a quickly changing neighborhood.

One innocent bystander was wounded, and if any of the Cornerstone residents - mostly senior citizens and working class families - had been sitting at the table at the time of the shooting, they could have been killed.

The people who live at Cornerstone may be representative of the population of working class Black Americans who have followed the rules of respectability and financial propriety in their personal and professional lives, but remain living in subpar conditions. These conditions are a result of inferior public services, lack of capital, stigmatization and varying forms of violence and destabilization that often plague their communities.

At the receiving end of gentrification, their experience may be symbolic of the tensions Black Americans wrestle with fundamentally: the challenge of coexistence with and consideration of varying circumstances of the community, in order to elevate the community as a whole.

"You go out there and they say, 'This is the hood,'" said Vickie Watkins, 63, a Cornerstone resident, referring to the people who loiter directly outside her apartment. Once a shoe saleswoman, Watkins originally viewed her unit as her sanctuary in which she would enjoy her retirement. "This is not the hood. This is our home."

Observing the Cornerstone residents means watching them grapple with their disappointment and aggravation toward the people on their street, and their distrust of the police officers whose duty it is to keep the peace. And, to add insult to injury, their predicament stands in stark contrast to the protections and community relations enjoyed by the local affluent white people living just blocks away.

To appreciate the frustrations of Cornerstone residents, I had to understand how the neighborhood has been changing.

Most of Over-the-Rhine has a polished and ritzy feel to it. Cincinnati's poster child for gentrification has chic and shiny storefronts, and immaculate streets and townhouses . But a stone's throw from the Cornerstone residences, you can see row after row of dilapidated buildings.

Findlay Playground, located about two blocks north, at Vine and Findlay Streets, had been closed for nearly two years. The shutdown was a response to an overwhelming amount of crime, including drug dealing and substance abuse. City officials wanted to renovate the park and transform it into a safer, more attractive space for children and families. The plan was to reopen it by the spring or summer of 2019.

But the prolonged shutdown had unintended consequence s , much to the displeasure of the residents of Cornerstone. The park closure pushed drug dealers, homeless, mentally ill and inebriated people into their streets.

This intersection - once so clean and quiet, so carefully maintained by the humble, hardworking people who lived and worked in the streets' affordable housing and non-profit organizations - now had to compete with crowds of displaced locals holding their daily kickback.

"Having this problem with the community park closed has affected this whole neighborhood," John Hancock, 55, said. An artist whose day job is as a contractor, Hancock has lived on Green Street for three years. "They need to open the park back up so people can have somewhere to go."

As a child, Hancock lived in surrounding neighborhoods like Mount Auburn, Corryville and further out, in Seven Hills. He remembered his mother warning him as a boy about the gentrification that was to come in the '70s.

Before arriving on Green Street, he lived in Hartwell, a neighborhood also hit by rising rents. Coming to Cornerstone felt something like destiny because he beat out over 200 people for his affordable unit. He thought living in the excitement of Over-the-Rhine's revitalization would inspire his artwork and give him a sense of community, but has largely been met with disappointment.

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"I feel like we are a part of Over-the-Rhine that has never been able to feel like they're a part of the development that's going on," Hancock said, his presence demanding a special, humble kind of reverence. "A lot of it is because of the gentrification. A lot of it is because it seems as if the powers that be, the development is pushing this certain segment of communities or streets onto us."

Cornerstone residents said working-class Black people living in Over-the-Rhine believed developers, city officials and other stakeholders were waiting to revitalize the last parts of the neighborhood until more white and wealthy residents moved in.

"It's not hard to see what's really going on," said Mr. Hancock, frustrated that more affluent white residents who now live in the revitalized townhouses and apartments immediately surrounding the park are catered to in ways their Black neighbors are not.

"It is clear that the park is closed because it was a nuisance to the people who moved in down here," Hancock said. "And I get that, but do something about the nuisance with the park...not shut it down. Put more law enforcement, have more law presence there."

Hancock went on, saying that while race is a problem Black people are frequently forced to discuss, those in power don't openly acknowledge the underlying elements of class and racial politics that have shaped the developments of the area and the park itself.

"We want the people who's in control to look at it as what it is and to see that it's not fair," he said. "It's not humane."

"Kickback" is a bit of a misnomer for the crowds by Green and Republic, which sometimes swarm from around 50 milling locals to hundreds of revelers. The loiterers, often from surrounding neighborhoods like Avondale and Evanston, blast their music well into the night. They shuffle their lawn chairs down the street to chase the shade. Others play dice games, openly drink alcohol and smoke weed just like they once did at Findlay Playground. The area began to be colloquially referred to as "The Living Room."

Cornerstone residents lamented all of this nightly activity, which dated as far back as 2018, when the park closed. They said the police, by their negligence, were not doing enough to discourage the crowds. They said the police barely even left their cars or spoke to the people on the street when they did pass through.

All of this had a harrowing effect on Green and Republic Street residents. A few complained of health problems, like insomnia and the onset of depression and anxiety. Those who lived in ground floor apartments with street-facing entrances said they were now too afraid to even walk through their front doors, and had resorted to entering the compound through the parking lot. One asthmatic woman said she could no longer open her windows because of all of the weed smoke emanating from the street.

Watkins, her sister, told me she had begun taking refuge in her daughter's home in another neighborhood to relieve herself from all of the stress. Others said they no longer allowed their children and grandchildren to visit them, out of fear of putting them in danger. That, because not only had drug dealers come to dominate the area, but because the latest shooting marked the third on Green Street in recent months. Hancock had become too ashamed to tell other people where he lived.

A number of Cornerstone residents were excited that a journalist took interest in their troubles and eagerly sat down to talk. But Hancock was the only one who spoke on camera for the television report, while others feared that being seen on camera would make them easy targets. Hancock knew the risks but felt the situation on the street had become so bad that he had nothing to lose.

Perhaps that's because this wasn't the first time he'd been targeted by bad actors in the area for taking a stand to improve conditions on the street. When he first moved to Cornerstone, Hancock developed a habit of picking up trash along the street after the loiterers. Other residents eventually joined him, but not before he weathered drug dealers and passersby throwing garbage at him, and derisively taking his picture.

"But I never stopped. And the more I did it, it began to have an effect on people," Mr. Hancock said. "And then I started getting their trust and their respect." Referring to the drug dealers and loiterers, he said, "They thought I thought I was better than them because I wanted to take care of where I lived at. And today, I can walk out my door and dope dealers will start picking up trash."

During the interview, Hancock spoke passionately about the activity on the street, about how it was harming him and his neighbors. He spoke about his frustration and disappointment with the police. He spoke about the need for Findlay Playground to reopen as fast as possible, so that Over-the-Rhine's low-income, disadvantaged residents of color could have a comfortable, practical place to socialize that was more accessible than the distant, already gentrified spaces in the area.

He also spoke about the empathy he felt for the loiterers who had been harassing him and the other residents of Cornerstone. While virtually none of these people were from the immediate area, all of them were Black. Hancock spoke with an edge then. He recognized that they shared the burden of Blackness, and that under slightly different circumstances, he could have been in their shoes.

To an outsider, the frustrations of Hancock and his neighbors may seem like petty, solvable transgressions. In truth, they are symptoms of the city's history of stunted efforts at urban real estate development in the early 1900s, as well as the pitfalls of Over-the-Rhine's gentrification a century later.

Anne Delano Steinert, a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati and the vice chair of fundraising at the Over-the-Rhine Museum, said she lived in Over-the-Rhine in the early 2000s when the gentrification was first starting.

"Over-the-Rhine was a very different place then. It was very much a low-income neighborhood and largely an African American neighborhood. And certainly the neighborhood Over-the-Rhine today, below Liberty street, is drastically different. I think as you move north from Liberty Street, you'll see pockets of the old 1980s, 1990s Over-the-Rhine. But it's clearly a different demographic living below Liberty Street...and moving northward pretty rapidly."

That population started thinning out once inclines were installed that gave more affluent residents the option of moving into nicer, more technologically advanced homes in the hillsides by the end of the century.

Still, the population of African American migrants continued to grow in the greater Cincinnati area, going on to become 11% of the city's population by 1930, at almost 50,000 people. But the upward mobility of African Americans was derailed by the Great Depression. The catastrophic moment in America's economic history also left over 50% of Black Americans unemployed, and many were further disadvantaged by the instances of displacement and declining conditions of properties in their communities.

Over-the-Rhine's socioeconomic makeup was also heavily impacted by changes happening in the close by West End neighborhood. Even though OTR remained untouched in Cincinnati's mid-20th century redevelopment, thousands of Blacks in the neighboring district of West End lost their homes to the construction of Interstate-75 that now connects Cincinnati to Dayton. Steinert explained further that a large number of these people would then migrate to Over-the-Rhine, and how this migration " sets off a wave of white flight out of Over-the-Rhine, which was a working class and lower class Appalachian neighborhood at the time. So that the population of Over-the-Rhine drops drastically."

Scots-Irish Appalachians from other southern states, however, did join the neighborhood. Along with Black residents, they took advantage of subsidized housing that was generated by a new, federal Section 8 tax credit system for landlords. This also meant that a number of landlords who were disconnected from the community were buying a lot of properties at low costs, leading some buildings vacant for many years.

The poor conditions yielded high crime rates, the emergence of diseases like tuberculosis and cholera, as well as the downfall of local Black businesses and organizations by the 1970s. Little structural change was made in the 80s and 90s, a time in which Blacks would make up 80% of Over-the-Rhine.

The downward spiral of Over-the-Rhine began to slow, then reverse itself as leaders like housing advocate Buddy Gray rose to prominence in the 1970s. For decades, Gray leveraged a movement to stop displacement and preserve the neighborhood for low-income residents, holding demonstrations and buying out buildings with city grants through his organizations, which advocated for the poor.

Gray's work was polarizing; supporters viewed his strategies as necessary steps to change Cincinnati's handling of housing options for the lower class, as well as Over-the-Rhine's overall economic state, but detractors charged his approach was impractical, and that his buying up buildings (many of which remained vacant) blocked opportunities for development. Critics went on to say that his properties were all too often converted into warehouses that exacerbated criminal activity in the neighborhood, causing more problems than he was creating solutions. Given OTR's continued blight, taxpayer funds for revitalization went further south to the Central Business District.

The legacy of Gray's impact on Over-the-Rhine, and its options for affordable housing and development, is unresolved. The 46-year-old was fatally shot in 1996 in his office by a homeless man he once helped. Cincinnati lost the figure who had most prominently and forcefully fought against gentrification in Over-the-Rhine for the past 20 years.

Significantly, five years later, in 2001, 19-year-old Timothy Thomas was shot dead by a police officer in an alley by Vine Street, after being chased down for a number of minor warrants. Thomas was unarmed when he was killed.

Civil unrest in the neighborhood stretched on for days, and Black activists engaged in an economic boycott of Cincinnati. The social turbulence prompted city officials to face the dire conditions of Over-the-Rhine head-on and build a foundation for economic and housing reform. The Cincinnati Center for Development Corporation (3CDC) was born in 2003.

Following the advice of a New York real estate consultant, then-Mayor Charles Luken coordinated with the president and CEO of Procter & Gamble to launch the privately-funded entity that provided community designing and economic development to OTR. Using federal money mandated to revitalize blighted areas, the entity bought up and rehabilitated properties throughout the neighborhood. Over 100 historic buildings were restored while dozens of new buildings were built. 3CDC also kept subsidized housing and refurbished parks in the area while discouraging criminals with the increased presence of cameras, enhanced lighting and the shutting down of liquor stores.

Almost two decades later, the look, character and feel of Over-the-Rhine changed tremendously, as young, affluent professionals revel in the neighborhood's new, artisanal, glamorous flare. But it's the low-income Black locals who have long-lived in or traversed the streets there who feel alienated and dismissed with all the changes.

Timothy Thomas' name continues to have a strong presence in Cincinnati, and he became especially relevant during the explosive unrest over police brutality and racial injustice in the summer of 2020, following the police killing of George Floyd. It was not uncommon to see his name in fresh graffiti or his face drawn in a mural somewhere around town, like the one on Vine Street, where his image accompanies Samuel DuBose and Breonna Taylor, among others.

Despite the praise 3CDC has received for revitalizing Over-the-Rhine, there is a fervent group of individuals from marginalized backgrounds who argue that 3CDC has not fulfilled its objective: to create a community that is sustainably diverse in race and economic classes. They claim it has failed to consult with OTR's disadvantaged residents to note and implement changes that would improve their quality of life and help them maintain a presence in the district. As a result, OTR's underprivileged have resorted to huddling on sidewalks and pockets of the neighborhood that have yet to be fully redeveloped. So pockets of the neighborhood, like Green and Republic Street, remain blighted.

"It's part of the gentrification," Mr. Hancock said. "And then you have the kids not having anywhere to go. Kids visited that park," he said, referring to Findlay Playground. "It might not have been the best thing for them. But they had a place to go and now they don't have anywhere to go. They're hanging out on the street."

Mr. Hancock and the Cornerstone residents would soon get what they wished for. But, as some feared, that wasn't enough to stop people from congregating and engaging in illicit activity on their street.

It has been six months since the park was reopened. Despite this, the gates that fenced off the public while it was closed are still up on Findlay's more affluent side. These days, groups of people can be found playing cards on the picnic tables bordering Vine Street. Families and small children are occasionally seen inside the park, as are those experiencing homelessness. Police officers on patrol are an altogether rare sight.

At Green and Republic Street, Mr. Hancock told me that the activity there had calmed down dramatically in the weeks after the press attention. He said that officers were patrolling their street more, and that drug dealers began to act more civil and deferential towards him.

But activity eventually picked up again by the end of August. Hancock and the other residents reported that the noise, the drug dealing and the unruly loiterers had returned. Not only was the air foggy again from the clouds of smoke, but it was also thick from the blasting music and clusters of people walking throughout the street. One woman had set up a table selling t-shirts in front Cornerstone, and another set up a barbershop on the sidewalk.

Some of the residents partnered with the small businesses and non-profits on their street, as well as the Urban League, to form a community safety group and block watch. Residents have also met with the police to devise solutions that would eliminate the violence and illegal activities. They have additionally met with the city council, as well as the Over-the-Rhine Community Council, to address their quality of life concerns.

On Dec. 16, the city council voted to grant Green Street residents with permit-parking on the block in an effort to preserve space for them in the street and discourage people from congregating in the area.

Still, morale is low among the residents. The gun violence, drug sales and other disruptive, problematic activity continue, and city officials haven't responded quickly or forcefully enough to these issues to satisfy residents. At the time of writing, Hancock said an innocent bystander was injured in yet another shooting two days before.

The city did, however, sign off on a new capital improvement program with 3CDC by mid-October, designating the firm as the primary company to manage recreational improvements in and around Findlay Park. The city agreed to put forward $50,000 for the project out of a reserve for one-time expenses and emergencies that would then be matched by 3CDC.

Hancock doesn't have any plans to move out of Over-the-Rhine. Still, his once defiant, rigid voice now sounds more like a defeated murmur when he talks about his frustration with loiterers. But through it all, he defends their humanity, the Black men and women who ended up less fortunate.

"These people stand out here and they celebrate what life they have," Mr. Hancock said. "They should have somewhere to go to celebrate what life they have. Even if it ain't the life you want."
Monique John covers gentrification for the WCPO . This dispatch is part of a series called " On the Ground " with Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Follow her on Twitter: @themoniquejohn
Report for America is now accepting applications for journalists to fill local newsroom positions across the country in 2021. These opportunities include print, photography, radio and television. Apply by Jan. 31 at reportforamerica.org.

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Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine confronts decades of gentrification and displacement | The GroundTruth Project

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CINCINNATI - To be able to tell their story, I had to see that window. The window of the Cornerstone Apartments compound located in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine (OTR) district by Green and Republic Street. Going inside the building should not have been an issue.

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Shameless | 'Gentrification' Official Clip - Movie Clip

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Shameless | 'Gentrification' Official Clip - Movie Clip

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Frank talks about gentrification in his area. He tells his friends to be warned as to whats going to happen. He gives his stereotype but also facts as to what gentrification does. This episode gives a good idea of what the low income citizens go through.

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Shameless | 'Gentrification' Official Clip ft. William H. Macy | Season 5 Episode 2

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What if gentrification was about healing communities instead of displacing them? - TED Talk

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What if gentrification was about healing communities instead of displacing them? - TED Talk

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Liz Ogbu is an architect who is talking about why do people have to be pushed out of their communities and asking for developers and policymakers to make a commitment to adding to their communities instead of stripping it away from the individuals who lived there.

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What if gentrification was about healing communities instead of displacing them? | Liz Ogbu

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What we don’t understand about gentrification - TED Talk

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What we don’t understand about gentrification - TED Talk

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This urban planning scholar talks about the costs of gentrification and the misconceptions of it. The low income communities are being capitalized by high income customers and flipping the communities to where the original low income families. She talks about economic inequality along with black/brown people inequality.

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What we don’t understand about gentrification | Stacey Sutton | TEDxNewYork

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'Whitewashed': how gentrification continues to erase LA's bold murals - Article

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'Whitewashed': how gentrification continues to erase LA's bold murals - Article

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This article talks about how the artwork and murals from the community and the culture it showed is being taken away. Companies are moving in and taking the meaning of communities out. Erasing history.

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Kathy Gallegos remembers the first time she saw John "Zender" Estrada's striking mural of an Aztec warrior flanked by two eagles. She was parking behind a music venue in Highland Park, a heavily Latino working-class neighborhood northeast of downtown Los Angeles, and couldn't help noticing the bold imagery of a piece that Zender had painted in the wake of the 1992 riots to urge ordinary Angelenos to "resist violence with peace".

"I remember thinking, that's a really nice mural," Gallegos recalled. "Next thing I knew, the place was bought and it was gone."

It was the same pattern a couple of years later, when Gallegos - who owns a local gallery promoting Latino and Chicano art - stopped to admire a graffiti-strewn parking lot wall on the other side of Figueroa Boulevard, where for years young artists had been given free rein to practice and invent at will. She particularly liked a heart image reminiscent of a veteran LA muralist named Frank Romero and made a note to photograph it.

"Next thing I know," she said, "the whole wall was whitewashed."

Urban murals are fragile artworks at the best of times, subject to the whims of taggers who may deface them, and of property owners who often want to paint over them or knock down the walls. But Gallegos and many others in Highland Park recognized that these new erasures were different: the result of dizzying change in one of the most rapidly gentrifying parts of LA and, it seemed, a failure by the newcomers to understand the culture of the neighborhood they were starting to call their own.

Now, the consternation that Gallegos and others once felt has degenerated into a full-blown conflict, with the murals of Highland Park acting as a proxy battleground for a variety of other tensions - over property prices, the pace of gentrification, tenant evictions, the integrity of once-venerated local artists, and the ability of local city officials to act as honest brokers between the competing interest groups.

Mural wars

Old murals, even those protected under a 2013 citywide ordinance, continue to disappear without warning, triggering noisy protests. Commissioning new artwork, meanwhile, often proves perilous, as muralists endure personal taunts and threats as they paint and never know when their work will get spray-bombed with loud slogans telling the hipsters and gentrifiers to go back where they came from.

The Highland Park mural war erupted in earnest in 2017, when two city-owned sites - including the wall with the Frank Romero-esque heart - were whitewashed, and a radical group calling itself Restorative Justice for the Arts started accusing local city officials of colluding with incoming property speculators to destroy the neighborhood.

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A building on the corner of Figueroa Street and Avenue 58 is up for lease. Photograph: Allison Zaucha/The Guardian

It did not help the city's cause that a trail of official emails soon became public and showed that council employees had deemed the long-standing graffiti walls to be "illegal" and given their blessing to a local business owners' association to wipe them clean.

The city appeared to understand it had made a blunder and sought to make amends by asking Zender, the artist behind the destroyed Aztec warrior, to paint something new at the site of one of the erasures. The plan fell apart, though, after Zender complained that the offer came with too little money and too many conditions about who in the neighborhood Zender was allowed to associate with.

Plan B was to turn to the venerable Frank Romero - most famous for a mural he painted on the side of a downtown freeway for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics - who accepted the commission but passed most of the work off to an assistant, since he lived most of the year outside the United States.

The new mural was attacked over and over, once with blue paint and the single word "Displacers" (in imitation of the Dodgers baseball team's logo), and another time with crude white spray paint that read: "Fuck hipsters." The anti-gentrification activists were incensed, first because a local real estate agency was sponsoring the mural, which made Romero a sellout in their eyes, and second because Romero's assistant was white. Pretty soon the wall was back to all white, too.

Next on the anti-gentrification taggers' list was a mural on the side of an upscale bar and deli called Tinfoil (since renamed Flask), where whisky connoisseurs can spend as much as $1,200 on a single bottle. The city itself vetoed Tinfoil's first idea, which was to turn the mural into an advertisement for Johnny Walker. Instead, the bar commissioned a local Latino artist, Sol Luongo, to produce a montage of Highland Park landmarks under the title Momentos Magicos Magic Moments.

Left: Flask, an upscale bar and deli, is one of the many new businesses in Highland Park. Right: A mural on the side of Flask includes an image of the controversial Chicken Boy. Photographs: Allison Zaucha/The Guardian
Left: Flask, an upscale bar and deli, is one of the many new businesses in Highland Park. Right: A mural on the side of Flask includes an image of the controversial Chicken Boy. Photographs: Allison Zaucha/The Guardian

One of the features Luongo included was a piece of vernacular art that a graphic designer brought into the neighborhood just a few years ago: a giant statue of a man with a chicken head and a bucket of wings that once adorned a restaurant roof in downtown Los Angeles and now sits on its owner's roof on Figueroa Boulevard. It has proven a powerful marketing tool for the local business association - which is exactly why the anti-gentrification crowd hates it.

"We're not going to allow Chicken Boy to become the statue of Highland Park. It has nothing to do with Highland Park. That's some Christopher Columbus shit," said Brenda Perez, founder of Restorative Justice for the Arts.

The mural was tagged repeatedly as it went up, and Luongo became so afraid of one particular activist who hurled abuse at her from the sidewalk that she asked friends to stand by her while she worked. Her mural did get completed, and the bar paid to have it coated in an expensive graffiti-resistant varnish. But it continues to be attacked - regularly enough for the bar manager to have the city graffiti-cleaning service on his speed-dial.

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The Chicken Boy statue has proven a powerful marketing tool for the local business association. Photograph: Allison Zaucha/The Guardian

Erasing history

Many Highland Park residents and business owners claim the anti-gentrification taggers and protesters are a tiny minority who do not represent the views of a diverse and broadly happy community. On the other hand, many of those same residents and business owners have been shocked by the aggressiveness of property speculators who have bought out apartment buildings and storefronts and either jacked up the rents - sometimes more than threefold overnight - or evicted the tenants on short notice.

Some of Highland Park's most revered muralists have themselves been priced out of the neighborhood. And there is a sense, among those who grew up with them in the 1990s and 2000s and are still hanging on - either because they own their own houses or continue to live in rent-controlled apartment buildings - that what's at stake is an essential piece of the city's soul. "Those of us born and raised in LA know the significance of murals, and those who aren't from here don't know," said Irene Narvaez, the principal of Highland Park High School who grew up locally and now encourages student mural-painting on her own schoolyard. "There's more about social justice and history in these murals than my students can learn about in books."

It's not that the newcomers are hostile to mural art, because most of them aren't. And while Perez and her allies point fingers at the city, the city says, with some justification, that it has only limited enforcement authority. "You have to have a culturally sensitive approach, but there's also a whole issue related to property ownership," Conrado Terrazas of the local council district office said. "It's very complicated."

Often, the problem is not ruthless property speculation, but a glaring lack of sensitivity among those, including public officials, who should know better. Last October - during National Hispanic Heritage Month no less - a Highland Park elementary school principal who did not grow up in the area whitewashed a much-loved mural depicting immigrant farmworkers, ostensibly because she was worried that it was attracting graffiti.

Right: A much-loved mural at Gervanza Elementary school depicting immigrant farmworkers was whitewashed last October. Left: "They want to erase the history of the walls we wanted to put up," said Daniel Cervantes, the artist of the Gervanza mural. Photographs: Allison Zaucha/The Guardian
Right: A much-loved mural at Gervanza Elementary school depicting immigrant farmworkers was whitewashed last October. Left: "They want to erase the history of the walls we wanted to put up," said Daniel Cervantes, the artist of the Gervanza mural. Photographs: Allison Zaucha/The Guardian

After the principal felt the community's outrage - including a letter from the son of Cesar Chavez, the legendary Californian farmworkers' leader - she contacted the original artist and a second muralist and began planning for a replacement. What remains unclear, however, is whether she wants to restore the spirit of the original or - as the artist, Daniel Cervantes, told the Guardian - she wants to use the mural to promote Garvanza Elementary as a magnet school. (The principal, Sarah Gilman, would not comment beyond a brief statement saying how excited she was to move forward with community input.)

"First they push people out, and now they want to erase the history of the walls we wanted to put up," Cervantes said. "I want to keep the peace and try to make it right, but we have got to have an explanation. We've lost so much and have very little left."

Cervantes, who moved to the outer suburbs three years ago to raise his daughters and earns his living mostly as a tattoo artist, has gone through a similar agony over what is arguably his masterwork - a 170-ft frieze depicting indigenous peoples and myths from Canada down to Mexico that adorns the roadside perimeter of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in LA.

For several years after he completed the mural in 2004, the museum took good care of it. But starting in 2013, Cervantes said, the museum started ignoring his maintenance recommendations, the paint was soon covered in graffiti, and eventually the whole thing was whitewashed. A consortium of interested parties - including Kathy Gallegos's Avenue 50 Studio and the city - raised $20,000 to have it restored but somehow cut Cervantes out of their deliberations and ended up giving the job to another artist.

The mural looks stunning once more - the restoration is expected to be completed by early February - but there is no budget to maintain it and the museum property is up for sale, which could leave the mural without institutional support. Cervantes is fatalistic about a piece that has broken his heart many times already. "Que sera, sera," he said.

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Pola Lopez helps to restore Daniel Cervantes' mural along the side of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian. Photograph: Allison Zaucha/The Guardian

'We need to preserve them'

There was a time, more than a decade ago, when the political leadership in Los Angeles pushed hard to preserve the mural art that, in many ways, has defined the popular culture of the city. Zender recalled how Ed Reyes, the city council member for Highland Park from 2001 to 2013, would not only visit his work sites but would dip a brush in the paint himself. Antonio Villaraigosa was a council member in the neighboring district from 2003 to 2005 and then LA mayor for the next eight years; he, too, was a champion of the muralists and helped create a register to preserve their work.

What has changed since is not so much the political outlook of the new leadership than the sheer pace of change as LA's economy has boomed and waves of young professionals have radiated out from downtown and Hollywood (themselves once depressed) into the next ring of neighborhoods. The rules protecting murals were never that strong to begin with, but in the swirl of gentrification they have often been overlooked or forgotten.

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Graffiti mars a mural in a Highland Park parking lot. Photograph: Allison Zaucha/The Guardian

"Things can go out of whack when people don't follow protocol," Zender said. "What happened to the Aztec warrior mural is that people didn't follow protocol."

Now the protocol is about to be tested again with what is arguably Zender's masterwork - another big piece, painted with nine other muralists, that runs along the side of a commercial building on North Avenue 61 titled Tenochtitlan - the Wall That Talks, after the great Aztec city destroyed to make way for Mexico City. A consortium led by a Beverly Hills property developer bought the building last August

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'Whitewashed': how gentrification continues to erase LA's bold murals

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Kathy Gallegos remembers the first time she saw John "Zender" Estrada's striking mural of an Aztec warrior flanked by two eagles. She was parking behind a music venue in Highland Park, a heavily Latino working-class neighborhood northeast of downtown Los Angeles, and couldn't help noticing the bold imagery of a piece that Zender had painted in the wake of the 1992 riots to urge ordinary Angelenos to "resist violence with peace".

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Music and gentrification: 5 raptivists find power in their craft - Article

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Music and gentrification: 5 raptivists find power in their craft - Article

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It mentions how Nipsey was helping advocate against gentrification in his home community and how it was pushing black residents out. Other artists like Jay-Z, Wale, Cardi B, and NoName are bringing awareness to this topic.

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Music and gentrification: 5 raptivists find power in their craft

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Gentrification plagues many communities today, including ones that our favorite music artists have grown up and developed their sounds in.

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This 16 minute short film took place in Over the Rhine in Cincinnati, Ohio.  This short film talked about different racial issues that are going on in that area. It also talked about how the residences have changed their opinion and actions on gentrification throughout the years. This short film talked about Reginald Stroud, who was affected by gentrification and what he has done to bring attention to the issue.

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GOOD WHITE PEOPLE: A Short Film About Gentrification

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 Stanford professor's study finds gentrification disproportionately affects minorities - Article 

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 Stanford professor's study finds gentrification disproportionately affects minorities - Article 

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This article talks about how gentrification is affecting minorities compared to white families. The article relates well with gentrification because it can provide insight into the racial injustice that gentrification can often cause. It talks about how we can combat inequality and gentrification in the future.

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A new study by a Stanford sociologist has determined that the negative effects of gentrification are felt disproportionately by minority communities, whose residents have fewer options of neighborhoods they can move to compared to their white counterparts.

"If we look at where people end up if they move, poor residents moving from historically Black gentrifying neighborhoods tend to move to poorer non-gentrifying neighborhoods within the city, while residents moving from other gentrifying neighborhoods tend to move to wealthier neighborhoods in the city and in the suburbs," said study co-author Jackelyn Hwang, assistant professor of sociology in Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences.

Hwang and co-author Lei Ding of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia conducted one of the first studies to examine empirically where disadvantaged residents move as a result of gentrification and how a neighborhood's racial context affects those moves.

Looking at the city of Philadelphia, Hwang and Ding found that financially disadvantaged residents who moved from neighborhoods that were not predominantly Black benefitted from gentrification by moving to more advantaged locations, but those moving from once predominantly Black areas did not. The research is published in the American Journal of Sociology.

"As neighborhoods gentrify, when poor people can no longer remain in their neighborhoods and move, there are fewer affordable neighborhoods," Hwang said. "Our findings suggest that, for the Black community, there are additional constraints when they move, leading them to move to a shrinking set of affordable yet disadvantaged neighborhoods within the city."

For the purposes of the study, an area was considered to be gentrifying if it experienced a significant increase, compared to other areas in the same city, either in median gross rent or median home value coupled with an increase in college-educated residents. In Philadelphia, there are many historically Black neighborhoods that have undergone gentrification over the last 20 years.

The issue of how gentrification affects different racial groups is particularly relevant right now in light of the increased instability people are facing due to the pandemic and incidents bringing attention to the unnecessary use of policing against people of color in the United States, Hwang said.

Fewer options

Hwang and Ding analyzed a consumer credit database of more than 50,000 adult residents with financial credit records in Philadelphia.

Recognizing that a primary cause of gentrification-related displacement is increased costs for current residents, the authors looked at individuals with low or missing credit scores who might be more vulnerable to displacement and at the same time might face limitations in housing searches if they did move.

The study found that residents in predominately non-Black gentrifying neighborhoods have a broader set of neighborhoods they moved to, while those from Black gentrifying areas were relegated to less advantaged neighborhoods and faced fewer options. These options included other largely Black neighborhoods or immigrant-populated neighborhoods, exacerbating neighborhood inequality by race and class.

"Gentrification is reconfiguring the urban landscape by shrinking residential options within cities for disadvantaged residents and expanding them for more advantaged residents," the authors write.

Reasons for this discrepancy in Philadelphia and other major cities, Hwang said, include racially stratified housing markets and discriminatory lending practices that have long disadvantaged Black people.

The researchers found that the patterns exhibited by poorer residents moving out of largely Black gentrifying neighborhoods were similar to those of other disadvantaged residents who moved from non-gentrifying neighborhoods.

"Even if people are moving by choice, white people have more advantage when they go into the housing market," she said.

Combatting inequities

In order to combat the likelihood of gentrification increasing socioeconomic and racial segregation within cities, the authors note the need for policies like Philadelphia's recently implemented property tax relief program, which prohibits increases in property taxes for long-time low- and middle-income homeowners.

While the authors consider this a step in the right direction, they also would like to see more cities adopt policies that ensure residential stability for renters. Efforts to address racial discrimination in the housing market and overall racial wealth disparities also require attention, they write.

The authors note that as cities continue to transform, a sustained investment in non-gentrifying neighborhoods is needed to attract racial and socioeconomic diversity. At the same time, policies must be in place that allow disadvantaged residents to stay and that connect them to resources and opportunities.

This greater investment in non-gentrifying neighborhoods would, Hwang and Ding write, "ensure that disadvantaged movers are not limited to neighborhoods with high levels of disadvantage, high crime and low-quality schools."
The study, titled "Unequal Displacement: Gentrification, Racial Stratification, and Residential Destinations in Philadelphia," was supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

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Gentrification disproportionately affects minorities | Stanford News

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Disadvantaged residents from predominately Black neighborhoods have fewer options in face of gentrification.

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Gentrification and The Health of Low-Income Children in New York City - Website

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Gentrification and The Health of Low-Income Children in New York City - Website

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This article gives a unique perspective by showing a study that was conducted on children in gentrified neighborhoods and children that remained in low-poverty. It shows increased risk for anxiety and depression for the children living in gentrified neighborhoods. This is important part of a changing community because seeing the impact on the children directly relates to how the growing community is being impacted.

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This book is about a modern-day story of family, loss, and renewal. The young girl, Penelope, once lived with her family in Brooklyn but since then became separated since her move to Pittsburgh and her mother’s move to the Dominican Republic. When moving back to Brooklyn to be closer to her father, Penelope notices that gentrification has reshaped her old neighborhood. Familiar places have been destroyed, and she notices an influx of wealthy, white strangers living in the community. She is starting her new life dealing with her changing community and then has to handle her mother coming back into her life even though she left.

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Health Effects of Gentrification - Website

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Health Effects of Gentrification - Website

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When reading this article, the importance is the health effects that are related to gentrification. It states that vulnerable populations face an increased risk for some diseases, shorter life expectancy, and birth-related complications. People in gentrified communities also have limited access to many resources including transportation choices, quality schools, healthy food choices, and affordable housing. This article looks at our topic in a unique light because it focuses on more than just the physical changes that gentrification causes.

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The Healthy Community Design Initiative, also known as the Built Environment and Health Initiative, is no longer a funded program and the information on this website is not being reviewed and updated on a regular basis.

Definitions

Gentrification is often defined as the transformation of neighborhoods from low value to high value. This change has the potential to cause displacement of long-time residents and businesses. Displacement happens when long-time or original neighborhood residents move from a gentrified area because of higher rents, mortgages, and property taxes.

Gentrification is a housing, economic, and health issue that affects a community's history and culture and reduces social capital. It often shifts a neighborhood's characteristics (e.g., racial/ethnic composition and household income) by adding new stores and resources in previously run-down neighborhoods.

Causes of Gentrification

The causes of gentrification are debatable. Some literature suggests that it is caused by social and cultural factors such as family structure, rapid job growth, lack of housing, traffic congestion, and public-sector policies ( Kennedy, 2001). Gentrification can occur on a small or large scale. For example, individual newcomers can slowly populate an area because of renovations. Conversely, large-scale redevelopment and the accompanying regeneration can cause an immediate shift in neighborhood residents.

Health Effects

Where people live, work, and play has an impact on their health. Several factors create disparities in a community's health. Examples include socioeconomic status, land use/the built environment, race/ethnicity, and environmental injustice. In addition, displacement has many health implications that contribute to disparities among special populations, including the poor, women, children, the elderly, and members of racial/ethnic minority groups.

These special populations are at increased risk for the negative consequences of gentrification. Studies indicate that vulnerable populations typically have shorter life expectancy; higher cancer rates; more birth defects; greater infant mortality; and higher incidence of asthma, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. In addition, increasing evidence shows that these populations have an unequal share of residential exposure to hazardous substances such as lead paint.

Other health effects include limited access to or availability of the following:

affordable healthy housing

healthy food choices

transportation choices

quality schools

bicycle and walking paths, exercise facilities, etc.

social networks

Changes can also occur in:

stress levels

injuries

violence and crime

mental health

social and environmental justice

Gentrification and Environmental Justice Resources:

Federal

Nonfederal

References:

Dealing with Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification and Policy Choices ( http://www.policylink.org/sites/default/files/DealingWithGentrification_final.pdf [PDF - 209 KB]) Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard. Discussion Paper prepared for the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy and PolicyLink. April 2001.

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The Healthy Community Design Initiative, also known as the Built Environment and Health Initiative, is no longer a funded program and the information on this website is not being reviewed and updated on a regular basis. Gentrification is often defined as the transformation of neighborhoods from low value to high value.

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This a book about twin sisters living in an urban suburb in Portland and their area is facing the struggles and challenges of gentrification. The start their senior year of high school as they are seeing their town change drastically and they as individuals change too, their opinions differ from one another. When their best friend who lives in the house across the street is forced out of her home in order for it to be renovated and sold to a new, white family that moves in shortly after, the lines of friendship and sisterhood begin to blur. Along the changes in the neighborhood, there is a new principal that has started at the high school in the area and with this change comes a major increase in racial tensions.