Wealth Equity - Firebird Film Festival 2019 - Wealth - Learning Resources Division at University of the District of Columbia

Chocolate City

Inequality and the Struggle for Wealth Equity in America

Friday, November 1

Chocolate City

In 2003, over 400 families from the Arthur Capper's housing project in South East Washington DC were forced from their homes as part of a massive nation-wide redevelopment program. Although they lived only a stone's throw from Capitol Hill, a world famous symbol of democracy, their voices were silenced when it came to making key decisions about the development of their neighborhood. Chocolate City explores the rapid gentrification of Washington, D.C. through the eyes of a group of local women who are fighting to return to their neighborhood. Although living in the shadows of power, their story celebrates the strength of communities and the capacity of art to inspire change.

Time: Doors Open @ 5 p.m. Film – Starts @ 6 p.m. (Main feature preceeded by Richard Wright Film Student Shorts)

Location: Student Center, Ballroom (4200 Connecticut Ave. NW)

Summary

Gentrification

Gentrification refers to the process that occurs when a professional and managerial population moves into a neighborhood, frequently run-down, that has primarily been inhabited by people of a lower socioeconomic class. The newcomers then rehabilitate and improve their new properties, driving up housing costs and displacing the earlier residents. Although gentrification has occurred in many cities, it has generally been confined to a small number of neighborhoods in each of them and encompasses only a small part of their housing stock.

Gentrification often occurs in stages. Initially, many new arrivals are attracted by the relatively low housing prices in these sections of the city, as well as by the demographic diversity, historical character, or architectural quality of an area. Over time, as housing units are renovated and their prices increase, later arrivals in these neighborhoods are likely to be more affluent than the earlier “pioneers” and are often attracted to the area largely as an investment. Some neighborhoods become almost completely gentrified, and the existing population becomes displaced by newcomers. Other neighborhoods begin the gentrification process but retain much of their earlier population as gentrification slows or comes to an early halt.

Those who have studied gentrification have offered several explanations for its occurrence in the 1970s and 1980s. One focus has been the characteristics of gentrifiers, especially those in the early years of a neighborhood’s gentrification. They were likely to remain unmarried and childless longer than the norm; therefore, they were not as interested in a relatively homogeneous suburban environment and more willing to live in diverse urban neighborhoods. Compatible with this interpretation is one that interprets gentrification primarily as a “market” phenomenon. As housing prices decrease in these neighborhoods, potential residents see an economic bargain. The decision to move can also bring gentrifiers nearer their places of employment because these neighborhoods are often close to central business districts or other job centers.

Other analyses have emphasized the role of institutions in creating conditions under which gentrification can occur. For example, banking institutions often contributed to the decline of these neighborhoods by redlining them and making loans difficult to obtain for either rehabilitation or purchase. Now these financial institutions saw a chance to profit and “greenlined” these areas, making capital more readily available. Other institutions whose policies contributed to decline and then gentrification included the real estate industry and national and local governments.

Although there are benefits to gentrification, such as improving the housing stock within a city and perhaps enhancing a city’s tax base, there are also costs. The most significant has been the involuntary displacement of many residents. Displacement has primarily acted upon renters whose buildings were purchased by gentrifiers who turned them back into single-family homes, or whose buildings were bought by investors who converted them into condominiums or increased rents significantly. Some homeowners also faced dislodging as property taxes on their houses increased to reflect higher values. In many communities, there have been conflicts over whether to provide some kind of protection to those subject to displacement. Examples of policies advocated by those concerned about displacement are guaranteeing tenure for certain classes of renters, such as the elderly, and placing restrictions on condominium conversions.

Kerstein, Robert. "Gentrification." Encyclopedia of Urban America: The Cities and Suburbs, edited by Neil L. Shumsky, ABC-CLIO, 1st edition, 1998.

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Books

African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, DC by Sabiyha Prince
ISBN: 9781409446125
Publication Date: 2014-01-02
This book uses qualitative data to explore the experiences and ideas of African Americans confronting and constructing gentrification in Washington, D.C. It contextualizes Black Washingtonians¿ perspectives on belonging and attachment during a marked period of urban restructuring and demographic change in the Nation¿s Capital and sheds light on the process of social hierarchies and standpoints unfolding over time. African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, D.C. emerges as a portrait of a heterogeneous African American population wherein members define their identity and culture as a people informed by the impact of injustice on the urban landscape. It presents oral history and ethnographic data on current and former African American residents of D.C. and combines these findings with analyses from institutional, statistical, and scholarly reports on wealth inequality, shortages in affordable housing, and rates of unemployment. Prince contends that gentrification seizes upon and fosters uneven development, vulnerability and alienation and contributes to classed and racialized tensions in affected communities in a book that will interest social scientists working in the fields of critical urban studies and urban ethnography. African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, D.C. will also invigorate discussions of neoliberalism, critical whiteness studies and race relations in the 21st Century.
Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks
ISBN: 9781250074317
Publication Date: 2018-01-23
WINNER: The 2018 McGannon Center Book Prize and shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice The New York Times Book Review: "Riveting." Naomi Klein: "This book is downright scary." Ethan Zuckerman, MIT: "Should be required reading." Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: "A must-read." Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: "The single most important book about technology you will read this year." Cory Doctorow: "Indispensable." A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination--and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years--because a new computer system interprets any mistake as "failure to cooperate." In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect. Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems--rather than humans--control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile. The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values. This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.
Being Black, Living in the Red by Dalton Conley
ISBN: 9780520261303
Publication Date: 2009-12-10
Being Black, Living in the Red demonstrates that many differences between blacks and whites stem not from race but from economic inequalities that have accumulated over the course of American history. Property ownership--as measured by net worth--reflects this legacy of economic oppression. The racial discrepancy in wealth holdings leads to advantages for whites in the form of better schools, more desirable residences, higher wages, and more opportunities to save, invest, and thereby further their economic advantages. A new afterword by the author summarizes Conley's recent research on racial differences in wealth mobility and security and discusses potential policy solutions to the racial asset gap and America's low savings rate more generally.
Black Food Geographies by Ashanté M. Reese
ISBN: 9781469651514
Publication Date: 2019-03-08
In this book, Ashante M. Reese makes clear the structural forces that determine food access in urban areas, highlighting Black residents' navigation of and resistance to unequal food distribution systems. Linking these local food issues to the national problem of systemic racism, Reese examines the history of the majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Reese not only documents racism and residential segregation in the nation's capital but also tracks the ways transnational food corporations have shaped food availability. By connecting community members' stories to the larger issues of racism and gentrification, Reese shows there are hundreds of Deanwoods across the country. Reese's geographies of self-reliance offer an alternative to models that depict Black residents as lacking agency, demonstrating how an ethnographically grounded study can locate and amplify nuances in how Black life unfolds within the context of unequal food access.
Capital Dilemma by Derek S. Hyra; Sabiyha Prince
ISBN: 1138886904
Publication Date: 2015-11-30
Capital Dilemma: Growth and Inequality in Washington, DC uncovers and explains the dynamics that have influenced the contemporary economic advancement of Washington, DC. This volume¿s unique interdisciplinary approach using historical, sociological, anthropological, economic, geographic, political, and linguistic theories and approaches, captures the comprehensive factors related to changes taking place in one of the world¿s most important cities. Capital Dilemma clarifies how preexisting urban social hierarchies, established mainly along race and class lines but also along national and local interests, are linked with the city¿s contemporary inequitable growth. While accounting for historic disparities, this book reveals how more recent federal and city political decisions and circumstances shape contemporary neighborhood gentrification patterns, highlighting the layered complexities of the modern national capital and connecting these considerations to Washington, DC¿s past as well as to more recent policy choices. As we enter a period where advanced service sector cities prosper, Washington, DC¿s changing landscape illustrates important processes and outcomes critical to other US cities and national capitals throughout the world. The Capital Dilemma for DC, and other major cities, is how to produce sustainable equitable economic growth. This volume expands our understanding of the contradictions, challenges and opportunities associated with contemporary urban development.
Carving Out the Commons by Amanda Huron
ISBN: 9781517901974
Publication Date: 2018-03-13
An investigation of the practice of "commoning"in urban housing and its necessity for challenging economic injustice in our rapidly gentrifying cities Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource--housing--that had been used to extract profit from them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them. In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban "commoning"through a close investigation of the city's limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism's totalizing claims over life.
Evicted by Matthew Desmond
ISBN: 0553447432
Publication Date: 2016-03-01
New York Times Bestseller From Harvard sociologist and MacArthur "Genius" Matthew Desmond, a landmark work of scholarship and reportage that will forever change the way we look at poverty in America In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the $20 a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup after her hours are cut. All are spending almost everything they have on rent, and all have fallen behind. The fates of these families are in the hands of two landlords: Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher turned inner-city entrepreneur, and Tobin Charney, who runs one of the worst trailer parks in Milwaukee. They loathe some of their tenants and are fond of others, but as Sherrena puts it, "Love don't pay the bills." She moves to evict Arleen and her boys a few days before Christmas. Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. But today, most poor renting families are spending more than half of their income on housing, and eviction has become ordinary, especially for single mothers. In vivid, intimate prose, Desmond provides a ground-level view of one of the most urgent issues facing America today. As we see families forced into shelters, squalid apartments, or more dangerous neighborhoods, we bear witness to the human cost of America's vast inequality--and to people's determination and intelligence in the face of hardship. Based on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data, this masterful book transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a devastating, uniquely American problem. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.
Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado
ISBN: 0399171983
Publication Date: 2014-10-02
One of the Best 5 Books of 2014 — Esquire "I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time. Well, not this book, because I never imagined that the book I was waiting for would be so devastatingly smart and funny, so consistently entertaining and unflinchingly on target. In fact, I would like to have written it myself – if, that is, I had lived Linda Tirado’s life and extracted all the hard lessons she has learned. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed, which tells the story of my own brief attempt, as a semi-undercover journalist, to survive on low-wage retail and service jobs. Tirado is the real thing." —from the foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed We in America have certain ideas of what it means to be poor. Linda Tirado, in her signature brutally honest yet personable voice, takes all of these preconceived notions and smashes them to bits. She articulates not only what it is to be working poor in America (yes, you can be poor and live in a house and have a job, even two), but what poverty is truly like—on all levels. Frankly and boldly, Tirado discusses openly how she went from lower-middle class, to sometimes middle class, to poor and everything in between, and in doing so reveals why “poor people don’t always behave the way middle-class America thinks they should.”
The Missing Class by Katherine S. Newman; Victor Tan Chen
ISBN: 0807041394
Publication Date: 2007-09-01
Fifty-seven million Americans-including 21 percent of the nation's children-live a notch above the poverty line, and yet the challenges they face are largely ignored. While government programs assist the poor, and politicians woo the more fortunate, the "Missing Class" is largely invisible and left to fend for itself. Missing Class parents often work at a breakneck pace to preserve the progress they have made and are but one divorce or unexpected hospitalization away from sliding into poverty. Children face an even more perilous and uncertain future because their parents have so little time to help them with their schoolwork or guide them during their adolescent years. With little supervision, the younger generation often flounders in school, sometimes falling prey to the same problems that are prevalent in the much poorer communities that border Missing Class neighborhoods. Paradoxically, the very efforts that enabled parents to get ahead financially often inhibit their children from advancing; they are in real danger of losing what little ground their parents have gained. The Missing Class is an urgent and timely exploration that describes-through the experiences of nine families-the unique problems faced by this growing class of people who are neither working poor nor middle class. Katherine Newman and Victor Tan Chen trace where these families came from, how they've struggled to make a decent living, and why they're stuck without a safety net. An eloquent argument for the need to think about inequality in a broader way, The Missing Class has much to tell us about whether the American dream still exists for those who are sacrificing daily to achieve it.
Missing Class by Betsy Leondar-Wright
ISBN: 9780801452567
Publication Date: 2014-03-20
Many activists worry about the same few problems in their groups: low turnout, inactive members, conflicting views on racism, overtalking, and offensive violations of group norms. But in searching for solutions to these predictable and intractable troubles, progressive social movement groups overlook class culture differences. Missing Class looks through a class lens and discovers that members with different class life experiences tend to approach these problems differently. Using this class lens enables readers to envision new solutions, solutions that draw on the strengths of all class cultures to form the basis of stronger cross-class and multiracial movements. In Missing Class, the first comprehensive empirical study of US activist class cultures, Betsy Leondar-Wright looks at class dynamics in twenty-five groups that span the spectrum of social movement organizations in the United States today, including the labor movement, grassroots community organizing, and groups working on global causes in the anarchist and progressive traditions. Missing Class applies Pierre Bourdieu's theories of cultural capital and habitus to four class trajectories: lifelong working-class and poor; lifelong professional middle class; voluntarily downwardly mobile; and upwardly mobile. Compellingly written for both activists and social scientists, Missing Class describes class differences in paths to activism, attitudes toward leadership, methods of conflict resolution, ways of using language, diversity practices, use of humor, methods of recruiting, and group process preferences. Too often, we miss class. Missing Class makes a persuasive case that seeing class culture differences could enable activists to strengthen their own groups and build more durable cross-class alliances for social justice.
Upscaling Downtown by Richard E. Ocejo
ISBN: 1400852633
Publication Date: 2014-09-07
Once known for slum-like conditions in its immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, New York City's downtown now features luxury housing, chic boutiques and hotels, and, most notably, a vibrant nightlife culture. While a burgeoning bar scene can be viewed as a positive sign of urban transformation, tensions lurk beneath, reflecting the social conflicts within postindustrial cities. Upscaling Downtown examines the perspectives and actions of disparate social groups who have been affected by or played a role in the nightlife of the Lower East Side, East Village, and Bowery. Using the social world of bars as windows into understanding urban development, Richard Ocejo argues that the gentrifying neighborhoods of postindustrial cities are increasingly influenced by upscale commercial projects, causing significant conflicts for the people involved. Ocejo explores what community institutions, such as neighborhood bars, gain or lose amid gentrification. He considers why residents continue unsuccessfully to protest the arrival of new bars, how new bar owners produce a nightlife culture that attracts visitors rather than locals, and how government actors, including elected officials and the police, regulate and encourage nightlife culture. By focusing on commercial newcomers and the residents who protest local changes, Ocejo illustrates the contested and dynamic process of neighborhood growth. Delving into the social ecosystem of one emblematic section of Manhattan, Upscaling Downtown sheds fresh light on the tensions and consequences of urban progress.
Upscaling Downtown by Brett Williams
ISBN: 0801421063
Publication Date: 1988-02-26
In Upscaling Downtown, anthropologist Brett Williams provides an ethnography of a changing urban neighborhood that she calls "Elm Valley." Located in Washington, D.C., Elm Valley was one of the first neighborhoods to draw middle-class property owners back to the inner city, but a faltering housing industry halted what might have been the rapid displacement of the poor. As a result, Elm Valley experienced several years of stalled gentrification. It was a period when very unlikely people lived side by side: black families who had migrated to the nation's capital from the Carolinas decades earlier, newly arrived refugees from Central America and Southeast Asia, and more prosperous whites. For Williams, a ten-year resident of Elm Valley, stalled gentrification offered a rare opportunity to observe how people 'with varied cultural traditions and economic resources saw and used the neighborhood in which they lived.

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Firebird Film Festival 2019 - Wealth

Chocolate City

Inequality and the Struggle for Wealth Equity in America

Friday, November 1

Chocolate City

Summary

Gentrification

More Information

Books

Databases

ask@udc.libanswers.com

202-274-6120