Displacing the dream

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For decades, our cities have been under attack. Since the 1960s, urban renewal programs have literally removed communities of color from major urban centers throughout the United States, including 1,600 Black neighborhoods from San Francisco to Miami and dozens of cities in between. These cities have been shaped and reshaped by cycles of government intervention and real estate speculation. Throughout these cycles, vulnerable communities have been displaced and have fought for their right to stay.

Today, new economic policies have transformed these cycles of displacement into a more entrenched form of market-driven gentrification. While government officials and corporate speculators may not operate with the same explicit intention of wholesale dislocation as in the days of urban renewal, the policies that fuel global finance-driven development have similar impacts on these vulnerable communities.

New Orleans has lost more than 350,000 people - most of them African-American - since Hurricane Katrina. There, almost 5,000 units of public housing units are currently slated for demolition while big developers have moved in to shape the fate of the city for the next 20 years. Corporations driving this process include the Hyatt hotel chain and the Trump real estate and finance empire.

Similarly, San Francisco and Oakland have each lost more than 20 percent of their cities' Black populations over the past six years. African-American families and communities have been uprooted because of intentional underdevelopment, the loss of industrial jobs that have been relocated to the global South under neoliberal policies and environmental pollution.

The globalized city

This internal displacement of low-income communities of color is the result of globalization hitting home. As available pipelines of public financing from the federal government to cities have dried up, public services - from welfare to subsidized housing - have been slashed from the federal budget.

As a result of this domestic divestment, cities are more and more dependent on real estate taxes to raise their budgets. Developers that build on land within the city are essentially giving city governments the money they need to operate; the more upmarket the development, the more taxes the city can collect. In this context the profits that developers reap are both monetary and political, including increased control over the policy and planning decisions that shape civic life.

This privatization of local financing and political power is unprecedented. It has transformed the cyclical process of development into wide-scale privatization of public space and services. As more and more city space sells out to the highest bidder, longstanding communities - usually African-American, Latino and Asian - which held rich social, economic and cultural networks, are being displaced and, thus, destroyed. And with that destruction, there is tremendous cost.

The right to the city

A growing alliance of organizations is working to uphold these communities' right to stay and participate in the cities they call home. These organizations are working on affordable housing, quality schools, accessible transportation, defense of public space from private control and other issues that affect working class and poor residents of the global city. But for all their good work, the carpet is being pulled out from under these organizations as their members and therefore their power is displaced and scattered.

Even before communities are displaced, the threat of being forced out weakens the ability of organizers to push the grassroots to build power and fight for practical needs.
Organizers are faced with questions like "Why would we fix the school if our kids aren't going to go there?" This response from community members is understandable and very material, very on-the-ground. Organizations are also faced with fighting the "common sense" created by corporate-owned mainstream media, right wing think tanks and a mainstream culture created by those in power to maintain the drive for profit over people.

This "common sense" holds that working class and poor neighborhoods, particularly when populated by people of color, have little value. These communities are portrayed as crime-ridden, toxic, run-down and blighted - ghettos where no one would choose to stay.

Within this "common sense" framework, gentrification and displacement are welcomed as a natural solution to poverty and the harmful consequences of market forces that truly remain hidden. The idea that people move only because they want to escape - and that the influx of moneyed newcomers is a natural benefit to these neighborhoods - is an oversimplified and false belief that denies residents their right and the resources to develop their own communities.

Organizations working to establish and defend the right to the city for low-income communities need to increase the visibility, value and importance of historic existing neighborhoods. This was our starting point in Miami, and it has led to sharpened public debate on this issue, as well as concrete victories in affordable housing creation.

By making historic neighborhoods visible in media coverage, we can replace the common sense of "here is a valueless neighborhood, let's gentrify it" with the common sense that these communities are places of value and worth beyond land prices. We can also begin to tell broader stories about displacement and development trends in an entire region, like Miami's Dade County or the Bay Area. An expanded public dialogue also creates space to explore new concepts like municipal citizenship, a local definition of citizenship that secures the rights of all residents to fully participate in the political decisions of their neighborhoods and cities.

Community organizers, residents and journalists together have a role to play in deepening the way we talk about urban development. The easy way is to continue to attempt to fit dissenting voices into the dominant public conversation about corporate investment. The harder road is to tell the untold stories of community displacement and the serious and devastating impacts of profit driven development.

"Displacing the Dream" is a reflection of strengths and weaknesses in Bay Area newspaper coverage of the complex issue of urban development. Community organizers, residents and journalists can use it to support local coverage that mirrors and nurtures conditions on the ground.

Because, in the end, we all want neighborhoods that work - we all want to belong to a community. That's what keeps us connected, that's what makes our lives whole.

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