This weekend I will be participating (read: opening my big mouth!) on a panel about gentrification at Ro2 Gallery as part of the closing exhibition of Giovanni Valderas’ Forged Utopia exhibition at the MAC. Click for more information about Giovanni’s fantastic (and you know I rarely call anything in Dallas fantastic), timely, and relevant exhibition.
Accordingly, this week’s reading list is a list of gentrification resources that I’ve been compiling over the past year, with the goal of building connectivity between national networks and local knowledges about the ways in which communities of color are displaced and resist displacement. Please comment with thoughts and additional resources.
What is Gentrification?
- WHAT IS GENTRIFICATION? PART I: THE RENT GAP – Produced by Oakcliff-based Streets Organizing for Liberation
- How the Federal Government Built White Suburbia – Gentrification is this generation’s housing discrimination.
- There’s Basically No Way Not to Be a Gentrifier – This is such an important read countering the hand-wringing of do-gooders who think that feeling guilty and getting to know their neighbors will absolve their gentrifier guilt. Hint: there are things that you can do. It involves flexing your socioeconomic and political privilege and going down to City Hall!
- Concentrated poverty is the new urban panic
- What Happens to Sex Workers when the ‘Hood Gentrifies?
- As Rental Prices Rise, Women Stay In Bad Relationships to Survive – I see this constantly in my neighborhood. Our housing movement must be intersectional!
- Combating Gentrification Through Equitable Development – One of the most thorough articles I’ve read on the subject.
Gentrifier Aesthetics and Aesthetics of Resistance
- The peril of hipster economics – When urban decay becomes a set piece to be remodelled or romanticised. – “Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.” Also mentions the 50-50-20-15 proposal for local business hiring.
- Spatial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City – One of my favorite pieces from placekeeping guru Roberto Bedoya on how aesthetics of the city become a site of contestation.
- Even hipsters and artists should be afraid of gentrification
- An Afrofuturist Community Center Targets Gentrification
- Beautiful poem from Cathy Arellano’s Salvation on Mission Street.
Local Context – Dallas
- City Hall Wants to Screw Oak Cliff The Same Way It Did East Dallas
- South Dallas’ Future Isn’t Black and White. It’s All About the Gentrifiers’ Green.
- There Goes the Neighborhood: The Ups and Downs of Gentrification in Dallas
- How Dallas, donors and two banks plan to erase AT&T Performing Arts Center’s crushing debt – City Hall is proposing to cut 60% of the city’s cultural centers’ programming budgets (which have waiting lists of children for their South Dallas summer programming), while giving the AT&T Performing Arts Center $1.5 million over the course of 10 years to build up the Arts District. Dallas! Continuing its war on communities of color, one plutocratic decision at a time.
Local Context – Los Angeles
- AN OPEN LETTER TO HYPERALLERGIC FROM ULTRA-RED: Regarding the PSSST/Boyle Heights debate. Ultra-Red was the artist collective that taught me about the value of listening and more importantly of listening for the voices that are working on the ground. Such an important principle to keep in mind not only for housing, but all social justice movements.
- LA City Council: ‘City Hall is Clueless about Its Role in Fueling Homelessness
Local Context – Other
- You Can’t Evict a Movement: Strategies for Housing Justice in the United States – Strategies from the Bay Area, Chicago, and New York City
- Can Neighborhoods Be Revitalized Without Gentrifying Them? – Baltimore
- Is Gentrification a Human-Rights Violation? – Brooklyn
- Gentrification of Detroit Leaves Black-Owned Businesses Behind – Detroit
- San Francisco has become one huge metaphor for economic inequality in America – San Francisco
- UCLA Philanthropists Fund Purchase Evicting Mission District Tenants – San Francisco – To state the obvious for those of us in the charity-nonprofit industrial complex, making ethical choices about philanthropy is really, really hard.
- Mapping the Incredible Spread of Million-Dollar Homes Across San Francisco
- Anti-Eviction Mapping Project – Amazing AF coalition addressing gentrification in the Bay Area, with many resources and information on their site.
- A Soundwalk on Private ‘Sidewalks’ in Houston’s Third Ward – Trans.lation sister project Project Row Houses is partnering with MIT, Rice, and other stakeholders to combat gentrification in the Third Ward. A case study to watch.
Macro Patterns of Migration
- Why has there been an exodus of black residents from West Coast liberal hubs? – Exoduses from the West Coast to cities like Dallas also bring with them housing challenges. Definitely have seen this happen with the tech migration to my hometown of Austin, which precipitated the housing crisis in East Austin. Thanks, SXSW!
The Bridge to Texangeles 