Isn't It Time? Names and Location

Neighborhood residents -- particularly homeowners and White residents -- as well as the local community development corporations, city agencies, and elected officials saw the planning process as inclusive of neighborhood goals and needs.....

This chapter argues that the [city] government, neighborhood groups, housing advocates, and developers instituted some of the best practices in urban planning and housing policy, which sought to deconcentrate poverty and focus on dense, mixed-use, mixed-income, and multimodal transit-oriented development....However, these best practices exposed a tension between neighborhood planning and citywide goals, as well as the conflicting goals within the neighborhood. While the residents who remained retained power in the collective and private spacers of their homes and residential buildings, the dramatic changes in the concentration of poverty and race meant that African American and low-income residents' ability to control public and social spaces in the community was challenged by the neighborhood's changing form. More importantly, a narrative of dysfunction [about the area] from 1968 to 2002 continues to justify changes throughout the neighborhood.

-- Kathryn Howell. "It's Complicated: Long-Term Residents and Their Relationships to Gentrification in Washington, DC," IN Capital Dilemma: Growth and Inequality in Washington DC.

Since the Kerner Report* was issued, life chances have grown worse for the descendants** left behind in very poor places. Economic inequality has increased, racial and ideological polarization has grown, segregation in neighborhoods and schools are a persistent feature of American life....

Where high levels of Black segregation persist, researchers have found that it was actively promoted by zoning laws that restricted density and by high levels of anti-Black prejudice, particularly in places with large numbers of Blacks with lower incomes and educaiton levels than most whites [note39]. Old habits persist. Those who feel justified in their prejudices about descendants are not likely to know or care about intentional state action in creating and sustaingin segregation and pols have pandered to those prejudices for decades. -- Sheryll Cashin, White Space, Black Hood (2021), p.76

*See pages 4-5 in same volume: "I call the Black people trapped in high-poverty neighborhoods "descendants," in recognition of an unbroken continuum from slavery. Occasionally, I also use this honorific to describe Black Americans like myself, who do not live in the hood but descend from the long legacy of slavery. "

**Cashin quotes from and extensively discusses the Kerner Report, issued on Leap Day, 1968. Here is just one excerpt:

"Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructrive environmnet totally unkonw to most white Americans. What white American s have never fully understood -- but what the Negro can enever forget -- is that white society is deeply implciated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it." p.60, Cashin.

Sheryll Cashin. White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality.

Beacon Press, 2021.