The Orange County Board of Commissioners voted last week against inclusive housing. Despite public outcry, the commissioners passed a bond referendum that included $120 million for education and only $5 million for affordable housing.
As a chapter leader for Students for Education Reform at UNC, I understand the dire need for education funding. But I was appalled by the poor awareness of the connections between housing affordability and education access, and also a broader assault on low-income communities of color.
Housing prices in areas of downtown Durham have risen nearly 500 percent in the past decade, pricing out historically Black communities in neighborhoods such as the Hayti district. In downtown Raleigh young, mostly white and upper middle class professionals have displaced Black residents in the city’s southeast.
Meanwhile, the “revitalization” of Rosemary Street and influx of student residents have caused housing prices and rent in the historically Black Northside community to rise astronomically. This has been a prominent talking point for all town council and mayoral candidates. Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership Executive Director Meg McGurk said, “Development can change the composition of a street when you bring feeling to it.”
Let’s get one thing straight, “changing the composition” and “bringing feeling” are phrases coated in white supremacy and reference an overtly violent and racialized process of uprooting Black communities — gentrification.
The processes of gentrification are rooted in the insidious failings of racial capitalism. Capitalism functions upon growth, and when this growth is not realized, the private and public sectors attempt to stabilize the system through the collection of capital “rent.”
Over the past four decades, capital accumulation has created a “surplus,” socially displaced humanity deemed in need of control. Gentrification is thus an exploitation of the urban rent gaps resulting from exclusionary zoning, white flight and disenfranchisement. Following the decay of the manufacturing sector, urban revitalization, including speculation in Northside, has operated as a component of this ill-fated rent-seeking machine.
Gentrification results from not just racist development practices, but also from an imagining of Black communities as pathological, criminal and in need of control and dispulsion. The myths of black-on-black crime and black-on-white violence have buttressed an unparalleled rise in policing, surveillance and mass incarceration against Black communities for the sole purpose of constructing racial boundaries.
James Baldwin quipped in 1963, “Urban renewal means negro removal,” and today it remains a telling assessment of the processes underway in downtown Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh. We should not reduce gentrification to just a lack of affordable housing or a whitewashed urban renaissance, but to what it truly is: plunder.
