Posted Sep 12, 2020, 3:12 PM
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Why Do Low-Income Residents Oppose Development Even When Displacement Risk Is Low?
Why Do Low-Income Residents Oppose Development Even When Displacement Risk Is Low?
September 2, 2020
By Stephen Danley
Read More: https://shelterforce.org/2020/09/02/...t-risk-is-low/
Quote:
For decades, activists in Camden, New Jersey, have complained that investment in their city has focused on the downtown and waterfront neighborhoods that attract suburbanites, tourists, and newer residents, to the exclusion of longtime residents in the community. It’s a familiar complaint, the type you might hear from activists in Baltimore about the Inner Harbor. Residents see downtown investment and wonder why must we depend on the theory of trickle-down economics belief that neighborhoods will be helped by investment downtown? Why can’t we invest in our neighborhoods directly?
- In Camden, after residents argued for years that there needed to be investment in neighborhoods, a funny thing happened: A vocal group of residents opposed such investment when it came, on the grounds that it would gentrify those neighborhoods. — The very thing that activists and residents had spent decades advocating for investment in their neighborhoods was now being criticized as gentrification. Why? When I spoke with some Camden activists and residents, they all pointed to the same thing: they felt unwelcome when development happened. — The residents were concerned about letters they received explaining that the grant might require the use of eminent domain in their community. Fearful of losing their homes, they packed the hospital to protest the application despite its potential to provide important neighborhood services. To make the situation even more puzzling, the city of Camden as a whole, and particularly the neighborhoods further from downtown, are undergoing very little of what would classically be thought of as gentrification.
- In 1985, Peter Marcuse theorized that displacement includes not just what we think of as classic gentrification, an increase in white population, increase in rent prices and the ensuing displacement but that it includes exclusionary displacement, in which residents are priced out of new buildings, and, critically for Camden, displacement pressure in which new businesses and development are seen as signs that residents will soon be displaced. — If you squint, perhaps a new coffee shop near Cooper Hospital is an example of displacement pressure, or a luxury apartment complex on the waterfront is an example of exclusionary displacement. But these facilities are the exceptions rather than the norm. Camden is not facing widespread displacement, making the opposition to neighborhood investment, and the ensuing fear of gentrification, even more puzzling. — When activists and residents I spoke to talked about gentrification in Camden, sometimes they were talking about future displacement. But just as often, they were talking about what new development meant for them now.
- They have another concern: that new development will exclude them, creating “bubble cities” within Camden that they cannot access. Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology and African American studies at Yale, has spent much of his career exploring the dynamics of African-American life in mostly Black urban environments. Three years ago, he published a paper titled “The White Space,” which looked at the racial complexities of mostly white urban environments. — Anderson defines “white space” as having an overwhelming presence of white people and an absence of Black people with the result that “whites and others often stigmatize anonymous Black persons by associating them with the putative danger, crime, and poverty of the iconic ghetto, typically leaving Blacks with much to prove before being able to establish trusting relations with them.” The most notable recent case in point occurred on April 12, [2018], when a white employee of a Starbucks in Philadelphia called the police on two young Black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, who asked to use the rest room before they had ordered anything. They were arrested on suspicion of trespassing; it turned out that they had been waiting for a business associate to join them.
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