UC Press Blog

By Willow S. Lung-Amam, author of The Right to Suburbia: Combating Gentrification on the Urban Edge

This essay was originally published at Next City

The movement of people of color, immigrants and impoverished communities to suburbs has been celebrated by some who suggest that it has opened opportunities for those long denied its benefits. While true for some, for others suburbanization has deepened inequalities. My new book, The Right to Suburbia, offers a cautionary tale, charging scholars as well as political and community leaders to ask who bears the burden of suburban redevelopment — and what is owed to those who are harmed.

Scholarly and popular political discourses often position suburban redevelopment, whether inspired by retrofitting, smart growth, or New Urbanism, as a rather banal process that should be welcomed by suburbs. They claim that it helps to correct the wrongs of decades of irresponsible policies that led to sprawling, disconnected suburbs that are environmentally and socially damaging. In Silver Spring, Langley Park and Wheaton, three Maryland suburbs near Washington, D.C., we can also see the costs of such development.

In Silver Spring, a national model for smart growth, county and community leaders used the rhetoric of revitalization and rebirth to justify one of the state’s largest urban renewal projects. It has since become a national poster child of the suburban retrofit. But those who tout new models of suburban redevelopment rarely acknowledge the suffering they can cause. They fail to see redevelopment processes as deeply politicized and racialized, as many residents and businesses are violently displaced.

This view requires not just a look forward but also a view back to the roots of suburbs now undergoing a rebirth.

Early white suburbs grew as protected places bolstered by a tight web of racist policies and practices — restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, steering, police violence, and much more. When these protections could no longer be justified, white residents and businesses fortified their privilege and power in new places and ways.

In Silver Spring, the opening of downtown to African Americans and later to new African, Latinx and other immigrants prompted massive white flight to farther-out suburbs that drained its tax base and dimmed investment prospects. While some middle-class white residents refused to leave, they increasingly sealed off their neighborhoods, growing Silver Spring’s racial and class divide and prefacing the unequal dynamics of future redevelopment battles.

In Langley Park, the migration of African Americans and diverse immigrants to the neighborhood prompted a more wholesale departure of white residents and businesses, including Jewish residents who were once subject to similar restrictions. As housing and employment opportunities continued to open for more upwardly mobile people of color, many followed their white peers, leaving close-in suburbs like Langley Park for new developments farther away. As had happened in inner-city neighborhoods, in inner suburbs poverty became more entrenched, crime rose, schools declined and infrastructure began to fail.

Whether settling in inner or outer suburbs, Black and Brown suburbanites found that their new neighborhoods became less economically valuable simply because of their presence. The places they once saw as communities of hope — places to build out of their disparate circumstances — became targets for new predatory forms of suburban inclusion.

As white businesses left, neighborhoods were commercially redlined by large businesses that did not see their traditional customer base reflected in the faces of new residents. In Langley Park, predatory and low-cost businesses moved in to fill the gap: check-cashing facilities, dollar stores and the like. Commercial landlords exploited underdeveloped suburbs, overcharging tenants for repairs and escalating rents while refusing basic property maintenance.

In housing, the Great Recession ravaged communities of color, especially Black neighborhoods in Prince George’s County, with skyrocketing foreclosures. As homes lost value, landlords took the opportunity to exploit and harass tenants, while the county tended to turn a blind eye.

Langley Park became a “slumlord market,” ripe for multinational real estate corporations and complicated financial conglomerates to nickel-and-dime residents, especially the undocumented. Slumlords thrived in environments where housing regulations were lax and tenants were vulnerable. They lined their shareholders pockets while patiently waiting for higher-paying tenants certain to arrive after the state and county invested in a new light-rail line.

It was not just private disinvestment but also public neglect that devastated places like Langley Park. The sidewalks did not get fixed; potholes were not filled. Parks and public spaces were almost nonexistent or so run-down that many residents avoided them, seeing them as more of a hazard than an amenity. The public transit that residents relied on was inefficient at best. As is often the case for Black and Brown communities, they were left with the use value of their communities — the joy, memories and hard work that they invested in places undervalued by others. They were not given the exchange value of white communities that were deemed viable and invested in simply because of the racialized value attached to their residents.

Narratives about these struggling suburbs fueled further disinvestment. Race and risk are tied in an inexorable link. In Silver Spring, decline was likened to a disease to be surgically removed and contained, lest it infect nearby communities with the violence and vacancy it wrought. These narratives placed blame on those who lived through disinvestment, not the systems and structures that caused it.

To many who sat in city hall, board rooms, or comfortable middle-class neighborhoods, these communities were black holes — unsafe and unlivable for legitimate suburbanites who had once made them vibrant communities. They painted them as places of death and despair or as blank canvases ripe and ravenous for investment, where something, anything, would do. Their narratives justified massive public and private intervention and its side effects, intentional or not, large or small.

Someone always has to lose, they said. It is the price of progress. In the end, we will all be better off.

Those who had invested their time, sweat, and limited funds to keep these neighborhoods afloat while starved of the resources they needed to do so were not lauded, rewarded or protected when redevelopment came. Like the many Black- and immigrant-owned businesses that closed in Silver Spring, they were treated as necessary casualties of a war for the survival of the suburbs or as obstacles to progress.

Just as there was nothing natural about the processes that prompted suburban decline, there was nothing natural about the vast funds poured into these communities to make redevelopment happen. County and state governments led the way through planning, policies, and public investments meant to entice private investment. As Silver Spring and Wheaton vividly revealed, their efforts were layered and robust: enterprise zones, urban and art districts, eminent domain, tax breaks, parcel assemblage, parking regulations, new transit investments and infrastructure. Public agencies created new market pressures that directed and enabled profitable private development. They served as the promotional arm of private corporations, advertising new suburban downtowns as safe for middle-class consumers and residents. They were critical actors in creating displacement pressures and were, as many activists argued, responsible for their redress.

But for the millions of dollars in tax breaks, incentives and assistance that developers were given, what was asked in return for those who lost their homes, businesses and sense of community? What was gained for those who had lived with broken sidewalks and run-down playgrounds for decades? Were they the beneficiaries of this progress – or was the development, as many suspected, for someone else?

As visions for new suburban downtowns emerged, long-standing communities could scarcely see themselves in the sketches of shiny new plazas and pedestrian streets. As in downtown Silver Spring, these images projected futures that allowed for the comfortable return of the white middle classes, catering to their tastes and preferences for what an authentic and safe urban experience looked and felt like. They did not honor marginalized groups’ deep histories, struggles or valued places. If suburban boosters dared to look back at all, their visions sugarcoated the past in ways that did not trouble their present plans.

Even diversity became a selling point. In Wheaton, multicultural festivals crowded the downtown plaza and colorful art displays featured faces from across the world. Yet many wondered whether its fragile diversity was simply a transition to a future in which they no longer existed.

This is gentrification — and it is suburban. While the language of retrofitting or renaissance may be much more genteel, their processes are no less brutal nor disruptive. They affect the lives and livelihoods of countless neighborhoods and threaten the sense of place that people of color and new immigrants have fought to establish and protect, sometimes with, but largely in the absence of, white neighbors and public support.

Urban scholars, policymakers, planners and community advocates must challenge the racial inequalities that these processes produce and on which they were built. They must ask, “What is lost?” and “What is owed?”

In some cases, the consequences are not fully known. Redevelopment is an ongoing process that is perhaps never complete. But failing to reckon with these questions leaves the victims unaccounted for, the ledger more unequal and racialized structures intact. To stop the bleeding and begin to repair the damage, public policy and urban development practices must carefully account for what has been taken and by whom.

As with other reparative processes, they must seek solutions with those who have been harmed and must invest in their visions. And they must reconcile questions about why place matters to the unequal processes of investment and disinvestment that repeatedly take shape across metropolitan landscapes.