“As tenants and small business owners invest their time and money into gradually upgrading their neighborhoods, real estate investors become attracted to these areas anxious to capitalize on the improvements.”

Gentrification. We’ve seen it unfold throughout various parts of the city, quickly creeping to the other parts. This chapter documents the fight of those inhabitants that were dislocated due to “redevelopment”, those who began to declare “we won’t move”; if only it were that simple.

Throughout the chapter, Angotti (directly and indirectly) states that if you weren’t white or with a position of power (which were usually elite urban reform activists), you were bound to be dislocated. On page 89 he brings up the “professional planner’s bias”. For urban renewal, city planners were to define the community a “slums” or “blighted areas”. Yet these terms were subjective to the city planners who were usually middle-class whites. They weren’t a part of the community, and projected their “racial fears and class anxieties” in their decisions.

Another interesting point to note is that if you were part of the working-class, being white gave you a upper hand. This isn’t so much of a surprise as this advantage still applies today, but the interesting point is that we haven’t progressed away from these race and class divisions in the past 50 years. In 1961, Jane Jacobs published her book The Death and Life of Great American cities. While her work was definitely significant, the main reason her community was able to stop the urban renewal process was because the majority of the neighborhood was white. Meanwhile, communities more vulnerable were not heard.

These two points highlight the other side of the urban renewal process; who is the city really trying to benefit with these plans? Do the inhabitants of communities undergoing this process today play a role in the decision making, or are powerful elitists still projecting their racial fears and class anxieties? I think we know which side the answer is leaning towards.