Abstract
Over the last few decades historians have begun to document and analyze the roles that research universities have played in redeveloping urban space and, recently, in fostering demographic and economic change around their campuses and making the city more attractive to knowledge workers. Edward M. Epstein’s Race, Real Estate, and Education: Inventing Gentrification in Philadelphia, 1960-2020, adds to this discussion. While the University of Pennsylvania’s role in reshaping West Philadelphia via marketing, real estate redevelopment, and providing social and cultural amenities is well-documented, Epstein highlights how public K-12 education improvements spearheaded by Penn benefited knowledge workers at the expense of African Americans, leading to gentrification in the twenty-first century.
The narrative begins in the immediate postwar era, when planner Edmund Bacon and city and university leaders sought to re-make Philadelphia from an aging, industrial place to a center for jobs focused on “eds and meds,” research, medical, and other white-collar professions that they viewed as more desirable. Remaking the area around Penn was central to this process. In 1959 Penn along with other local universities and hospitals founded the West Philadelphia Corporation (WPC), a not-for-profit organization that rebranded the area surrounding campus from “Black Bottom” to “University City” and used federal urban renewal funds to redevelop real estate. The effort, Epstein argues, was overtly racist and sought to remove poorer African American residents and replace them with white-collar professionals. The WPC and school system also recognized that improved public education would attract more middle-class residents, and the city began funding innovative, though short-lived, projects in selected areas throughout the city. The changes were rooted in liberal efforts to undo long-standing segregation in the city’s schools, but they fell victim to political unrest and economic decline during the tumultuous 1960s.
Chapters three and four chart the WPC’s most ambitious projects, the University City High School (UCHS) and the University City Science Center (UCSC) as well the significant resistance the projects faced from local residents and the city’s decline as deindustrialization took hold. Proposed in the early 1960s, both projects sought to use urban renewal funding to remake the core of Black Bottom while simultaneously attracting new wealthier residents. Residents fought back in several ways during the 1960s, including staging a sit-in on Penn’s campus in 1969. Neither project ever developed into a force of neighborhood change, in part because of community protest and in part because of political turmoil and a declining economy, although they did displace residents. Epstein’s granular level analysis and strong primary research base stand out here, as he shows how residents portrayed the projects as symbols of inequity alongside the structural and political forces that led to decline.
The last three chapters trace Penn’s renewed efforts to revitalize West Philadelphia more equitably in the wake of tragic violence and community fracture in the 1970s and 1980s, punctuated by the 1985 MOVE bombing, when police incinerated an entire block in West Philadelphia. Chapter five addresses the city’s rightward turn in politics beginning with Frank Rizzo’s election in 1971, which did little to reduce white flight or combat rising crime. In the mid-1990s Penn introduced West Philadelphia Initiatives (WPI), a more community-focused and less draconian version of WPC that built Penn’s signature educational institution, the Penn Alexander School (PAS), in 2001. Here Epstein wisely uses oral history accounts to show how PAS initially catered to both low-income residents and knowledge workers, providing a strong, integrated public high school option in West Philadelphia. Yet despite good intentions, the market forces associated with quality public education and other amenities that WPI provided led to increased real estate costs and the gentrification that progressives had hoped to avoid—ironically carrying out the plan that the WPC had envisioned forty years earlier. Like the neighborhood around it, PAS has lost African American population over the last two decades.
While the introduction could have contained a more developed historiography and provided a more comparative framework (the list of secondary sources is thin and the narrative rarely leaves Philadelphia), the strengths of this book are its primary source materials—especially the oral histories with local residents, members of the not-for-profit groups, and other Penn faculty and administration. Epstein’s efforts to historicize and complicate gentrification as something rooted in postwar urban planning and Keynesian-era economics, rather than ascribing it solely to the market forces of the last thirty years, is commendable. Putting public schools at the center of the story is also important as education has been among the most relevant factors in the American middle-class return to cities in recent decades and in pricing out racial minorities and less affluent citizens. Many cities today provide elite magnet schools and other options designed for this very purpose. Yet in this narrative twenty-first century market forces are the primary driver of gentrification, and neighborhood change seems almost inevitable because any amenity, even well-intentioned public assets, engenders middle-class demand and eventually prices out lower income residents. For Epstein the solution is reparations, an idea that may appeal to social justice advocates but does not offer a developed policy model for urban planners hoping to avoid the problems that continue to plague Philadelphia and other cities. These mild criticisms notwithstanding, this is a book that will appeal to historians interested in public education, deindustrialization, gentrification, and Philadelphia, and it does well to illustrate how historically racist planning undermines efforts to reduce inequality today.
