Abstract
I’ve reviewed a number of books on gentrification in Washington, DC, and Tanya Maria Golash-Boza’s Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap stands out as an exemplar of how to theorize and conceptualize processes of gentrification in U.S. cities through the lens of racial capitalism, even if the neighborhood at the center of the book is perhaps a little unique. Critically, this is a book not simply focused on the “’hood” or on a high-poverty neighborhood, but on a well-functioning neighborhood that had working families with high rates of Black home ownership that theoretically should have protected it from gentrification.
Sociologist Golash-Boza turns her lens on a neighborhood she knows well; she was brought up there, and she was able to ascertain the fate of many of its residents through personal and snowballed networks. Her positionality and deep knowledge of Mount Pleasant gives the book a special, lived essence. Indeed, her use of her own upbringing in the neighborhood reminds me of, and stands in interesting contrast to, that of the character Dylan Ebdus in Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003)—the White boy growing up in a Black gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn in the 1970s.
In her focus on what happened before gentrification began, Golash-Boza empirically shows how the rent gap played out in a quite particular way: a disinvested Black neighborhood suffering from “organized abandonment” saw what she calls “carceral reinvestment” as men in the neighborhood were incarcerated. These men were not the “truly disadvantaged” of renowned sociologist William Julius Wilson’s writings (1987); rather, they came from middle-class, property/home-owning families. Significantly, Golash-Boza’s research uncovers findings that counter or muddy previous ideas—for example, she found that Black families in her childhood neighborhood of Mount Pleasant did gain access to federally subsidized mortgages and were not living in slums, left behind by White flight (the story often told in relation to the “Black ghetto”). She also shows that having access to homeownership was not enough for the Black residents in her neighborhood: anti-Black racism interfered and undermined this protection. The Wikipedia entry for Mount Pleasant needs changing now; it refers to White flight having affected the neighborhood. Golash-Boza counters the myth of a Black poor left behind by White flight: the Black middle class in her childhood neighborhood were in place and remained in place until particular processes undermined their ability to stay put.
What this book has underlined for me is that work in gentrification studies today does not simply build on previous work in the usual ways; rather, it is beginning to really question the efficacy of previous work. This is important, and it is high time we reinvestigated concepts, theories, and narratives that are often taken for granted in gentrification studies. This is happening in other areas of urban studies—the planetary urbanization thesis (see Brenner and Schmidt 2015), for example, questions the old binaries of city-suburb—and that work has influenced new work in gentrification studies. For example, the thesis of planetary gentrification (see Lees, Shin, and López-Morales 2016) itself has begun to question the value today of Ruth Glass’s definition of gentrification that came out of London in 1964.
But Golash-Boza disrupts some of the fundamental assumptions and narratives about not only the “Black ghetto” but also the rent gap in U.S. cities and the process of gentrification itself. Viewing gentrification in Mount Pleasant through the lens of racial capitalism allows her to tell a different story and reveal a different set of reinvestments at play in the rent gap. The crux of her argument is that Mount Pleasant experienced a “carceral reinvestment”—the War on Drugs and state reinvestment in what Ruth Gilmore (2007) called the “Golden Gulag” (in California)—a new prison-industrial complex that incarcerates huge numbers of young people of color. Golash-Boza’s Black peers from Mount Pleasant experienced downward intergenerational mobility due to this “reinvestment,” and she argues that this had arguably worse effects than the poverty that Wilson saw as defining the “truly disadvantaged.”
Golash-Boza does a much better job than Neil Smith (1996) did of explicating the realities of the revanchist city for Black Americans—and the history is raw and racist—from redlining to dispossessions and disinvestments to the War on Drugs (this reminded me of Operation Pressure Point in New York City: enacted in the mid-1980s, it sought to clean up the crack dens and open air drug dealing in the Lower East Side to sanitize it for gentrification) to carceral investment, and then reinvestment from gentrification. She found, “Each of the tens of thousands of homicides and tens of thousands of incarcerations had a ripple effect. Some family members lost their homes through foreclosures or evictions due to loss of income from an incarcerated or murdered relative. Some family members left for Prince George’s Country or the South to protect their remaining relatives from violence and incarceration. Some people left so they would no longer have to be reminded of their losses” (p. 120).
Mount Pleasant was not the Lower East Side in New York City. It was not a minority, low-income, non-property-owning neighborhood full of abandoned and burned out buildings; it was a Black, middle-class, property-owning neighborhood that was targeted by the federal operation Violent Gang Safe Streets. Golash-Boza is right that an analysis of racial capitalism helps us “understand why local and federal officials chose to spend their resources on policing young Black men rather than investing in schools, community centers, and libraries” (p. 143). But what of the more well documented (in gentrification studies) reinvestment side of the rent gap? Here Golash-Boza makes clear the role of the City in pushing and supporting gentrification, but she also outlines federal programs such as HOPE VI’s destruction of public housing and new-build gentrification. Golash-Boza extends her lens to other Black neighborhoods in Washington, DC, as she does when she earlier discusses redlining. Given that Mount Pleasant is perhaps a little unique, I am glad these counterweights exist in the book to better situate both her arguments and the neighborhood she focuses on.
But perhaps the most poignant moment is when she discusses previously incarcerated Black men returning to a gentrified city—to a cappuccino, not a chocolate city (Hyra 2017)—and their struggle to find and afford a place to live. I’d love to hear more about this; it would be a useful topic for future research. I’d also like to see much fuller attention given to “What is to be done?” than the two paragraphs the book concludes with (pp. 215–16). I am left wondering what will be Golash-Boza’s next project. She understands how racist and racialized capitalism has dispossessed Black Americans in Washington, DC, how it has shattered intergenerational wealth and property ownership; using this, I call now on not just Golash-Boza but also other gentrification scholars in the United States to come up with some detailed solutions. A push for inclusionary zoning and affordable housing is a good starting idea, but we need to flesh out its bones and think about other solutions too. Dismantling racism, as Golash-Boza advocates, sounds great—but how? And how specifically in relation to gentrification?