Defensive Development The Role of Racial Conflict in Gentrification Michelle Boyd University of Illinois at Chicago

This article expands the standard consumption versus production debate in the gentrification literature by examining the role of racial conflict in neigh- borhood change. Drawing from historical and ethnographic research, it ana- lyzes gentrification in Douglas/Grand Boulevard, a Black community on Chicago’s South Side. It argues that although capital movements and middle- class consumption patterns created opportunities for gentrification, racial ordering politicized it, prompting Blacks to engage in what the author terms defensive development. This strategy aims to protect Black neighborhoods from control by White elites. Yet it ultimately promotes gentrification by politically and physically marginalizing the neighborhood’s most economi- cally vulnerable residents.

Keywords: race; gentrification; Chicago; development; African-American

Since its inception, the literature on gentrification has focused on thebehavior of Whites, either as gentrifiers or as economic elites responsible for patterns of disinvestment and reinvestment. Very little attention has been paid to African-Americans or other populations of color, except inasmuch as they are understood to be victims of White gentrifiers (Muñiz 1998). Yet in recent years, scholars from a variety of disciplines have noted that middle- class Blacks are initiating processes of residential and commercial investment in poor, urban, African-American neighborhoods. Although New York neigh- borhoods initially received the bulk of this attention (Schaffer and Smith 1986; Owens 1997; Smith 2002; Jackson 2001; Taylor 2002), more recent

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Author’s Note: This article benefited greatly from the constructive criticism received at the Urban Affairs Association, the Social Science History Association, and the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora meetings. Thanks to W. David Stevens, Ellen Berry, Cynthia Blair, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful reading of earlier drafts. I am especially grateful to Nancy Hudspeth for her generous research assistance and insight on gentrification in Chicago.

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work illustrates that this trend is taking place in cities across the country (Boyd 2000; Prince 2002; Moore 2002; Pattillo 2003; Hyra 2006).

This pattern challenges conventional portraits of gentrification, which tend to collapse race, class, and gentrifying status. Existing work assumes that Blacks always oppose gentrification and, therefore, that the “oppositions organizing the gentrification literature [are] middle-class gentrifiers/incomers (white) versus working-class residents/displaced (black)” (Lees 2000, 400). Black gentrifiers disrupt this easy overlay of race and class privilege and remind us that gentrifying populations are marked by a constellation of advantage and disadvantage.1 More important, Black gentrifiers draw our attention to an important gap in the literature: its failure to adequately explain how racial conflict shapes gentrification. In the long-standing debate over the causes of gentrification, most work characterizes the process as being a func- tion of either middle-class consumption patterns or capital mobility. Yet when Black community organizations initiate and promote gentrification, they por- tray their efforts as a deliberate tool for challenging or maintaining racial group subordination. They describe neighborhood development as a response to long patterns of racial discrimination, understand it as a form of resistance to racial subordination, and see it as a way to advance the race (Boyd 2005).

The frames used by African-American organizations to understand gentrifi- cation require us to examine the role of racial conflict in Black gentrification. This article does so by analyzing neighborhood change in Douglas/Grand Boulevard, a Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. I argue that while both capital movements and changing middle-class consumption patterns cre- ated opportunities for gentrification in Douglas/Grand Boulevard, racial conflict shaped the mechanism through which Black gentrification took place. Specifically, it encouraged Black elites to adopt what I call defensive develop- ment: community building and economic revitalization strategies designed to protect their neighborhoods from control by White residents, city elites, and developers. While Douglas/Grand Boulevard organizations adopted these strate- gies in an effort to avoid racial displacement, they ultimately facilitated gentrifi- cation by demobilizing those residents most likely to experience displacement. This case illustrates, then, that Black neighborhood elites use gentrification as a political strategy, one that reflects their position in the racial hierarchy as much as it expresses their class privilege.

Race and Politics in Gentrification Theory

When the gentrification literature first appeared in the late 1970s, scholars were primarily concerned with providing descriptive accounts of the process

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(Smith and Williams 1986). This early work was soon surpassed by a debate over the causes of gentrification, one that has since been dominated by the divide between consumption and production explanations. The former describes gentrification as the result of middle-class tastes that have arisen in response to demographic change, labor market transformations, new lifestyle preferences, and economic constraints (Ley 1986). These explanations are based in the Chicago School model of filtering that describes neighborhood change as a market-driven process leading to the highest and best use of land (Muñiz 1998). The production framework attributes gentrification to broad patterns of uneven development and urban restructuring brought about by the local, national, and international movement of capital (Smith 1979; Smith and Le Faivre 1984). This divide has been partially bridged by growth theory, which takes into account both broad economic patterns and individual behav- ior by describing gentrification as a conflict between use value and place value, with a neighborhood residents more concerned with preserving the place meanings that derive from their daily interactions in their community and place entrepreneurs more concerned with increasing the economic value of the property (Logan and Molotch 1987).

Black gentrification first gained popular and scholarly notice at the height of the consumption–production debate, when city-sponsored devel- opment and an increase in international tourism sparked interest in Harlem (Smith 2002; Hoffman 2003). These initial analyses focused on the degree of gentrification in the neighborhood and did not theorize about African- Americans’ unusual role as its perpetrators. Richard Schaffer and Neil Smith (1986) even went so far as to argue that Black gentrification in Harlem was necessarily a temporary phenomenon because the financial resources of African-Americans in both the neighborhood and the city were too limited to handle the financial investments required for the rehabilita- tion of homes. Yet nearly 20 years later, this pattern endures in Harlem and has sprung up in cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia (Boyd 2000; Prince 2002; Moore 2002; Pattillo 2003; Hyra 2006).

As scholarly analysis has caught up with empirical reality, the emerging literature on Black gentrifiers has begun to more closely reflect the traditional debate over the causes of gentrification. In an update of his earlier work, Smith (2002) articulates the supply-side argument that Harlem’s gentrifica- tion is largely a function of government policy that has stimulated private financial investment in response to sustained disinvestment (pp. 140-164). In contrast, more recent sociological literature has focused on Black gentrifiers themselves. This research is part of a burgeoning body of work on the Black middle class, one that aims to correct the tendency of sociological research to

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scrutinize and demonize the behavior of poor Blacks (Gregory 1998; Pattillo 1999). Thus it focuses primarily on the consequences of Black gentrification for Black identity construction and highlights its role as a vehicle for the articulation of competing definitions of Blackness (Moore 2002, 2005; Taylor 2002; Pattillo 2003). To the extent that it does seek to explain gentrification, this literature emphasizes the personal choices and cultural preferences that motivate Black gentrifiers, thereby echoing the themes raised by consump- tion explanations of gentrification. Many Black gentrifiers in Harlem, for example, see an all-Black neighborhood as respite from the racism and dis- tinction making that mark their work lives (Moore 2002; Prince 2002; Taylor 2002). African-Americans may also understand their investment in Black neighborhoods as a form of group solidarity or racial uplift (Moore 2002; Taylor 2002; Boyd 2005).

Neither strand of the emerging Black gentrification literature gives much attention to the role of racial conflict in stimulating gentrification.2 By racial conflict, I refer not only to interracial contests through which Blacks and Whites struggle to maintain or undermine patterns of racial subordina- tion; I refer as well to intraracial conflicts in which Black leaders struggle to construct competing visions of Black interests, mobilize residents around those visions, and vie for the right to represent them to those outside their communities. One exception is Neil Smith (2002), who argues that gentri- fication is a deliberate political strategy adopted by White middle and rul- ing classes against “minorities, the working class, homeless people, the unemployed, women, gays and lesbians, [and] immigrants” as revenge for the “theft” of the city (p. 211). Smith’s revanchist explanation correctly focuses our attention on how urban actors use gentrification as a tool for maintaining social and political dominance. Yet it assumes a White protag- onism (and antagonism) and non-White victimhood that overlook and can- not account for Blacks’ initiation and support of gentrification or for their framing it as a method of avoiding racial displacement.

Racial ordering theory helps elaborate and clarify how racial conflict impacts Black gentrification. Racial ordering is the establishment and maintenance of a racial hierarchy that has material and representational dimensions: It takes place both through the unequal distribution of goods and resources and through the characterization of groups as inferior or superior to one another (Omi and Winant 1994; Kim 2000). Processes, such as social and physical segregation, economic discrimination, and political exclusion, combine with racial ideologies to confer White racial privilege while maintaining Black racial disadvantage. As Claire Kim (2000) argues in Bitter Fruit, this conferral of systemic advantage and disadvantage encourages

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group conflict by “position[ing] groups differently and relationally so that one group’s misfortune becomes another’s opportunity” (pp. 37-38).3

Because of their experience with racial ordering, African-Americans view their current social position through the lens of historical subordination, regarding contemporary circumstances as the latest in a long history of racial conflicts rather than as isolated incidents.

Drawing on racial ordering theory, I argue that the history of disinvestment in urban Black neighborhoods encourages African-Americans to politicize contemporary redevelopment as racial conflict and adopt defensive develop- ment strategies that ultimately facilitate gentrification. Specifically, I suggest that racial ordering leads to gentrification through a three-step process. First, racial ordering primes Black neighborhoods for gentrification while preventing Black economic elites from acting as gentrifiers. Both the seg- regation of urban Blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent disinvestment of Black neighborhoods at mid-century have had a profound impact on contemporary conflicts over neighborhood develop- ment. In concentrating Blacks in deteriorating urban areas and stripping these communities of resources, these policies set the stage for gentrifica- tion in Black neighborhoods in the contemporary period (Mohl 1993).4

While it creates opportunities for the gentrification of Black neighbor- hoods, racial ordering simultaneously limits individual Blacks’ ability to take advantage of those opportunities. In other words, the same processes that make Black neighborhoods vulnerable to gentrification also exclude Black economic elites from capitalizing on that vulnerability. This takes place in part because of the way that racial status weakens class privilege: The advantages that accrue from income, education, and occupation are severely diminished for African-Americans relative to Whites (Oliver and Shapiro 1995). Middle- and upper-income Blacks continue to experience structural discrimination in home mortgage and insurance financing despite their income (Squires 1994). They also struggle against discrimination from individual homeowners and real estate employees (Farley et al. 1994). The combination of structural discrimination and individual bias limits Black residential mobility, confining middle-class African-Americans to poor Black neighborhoods—either their own or ones nearby (Pattillo 1999). It also restricts the amount of individualized incumbent upgrading Blacks can engage in and encourages middle-income Blacks to establish collective organizations for combating structural discrimination and disin- vestment. Thus racially motivated economic discrimination was one basis for the establishment of community-based organizations (CBOs) in the 1960s and 1970s.

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White elites’ use of neighborhood disinvestment as a tool of Black sub- ordination leads to the second stage of Black gentrification, which is the politicization of economic development. Not only do Blacks see Whites’ attempts at racial development as a form of revanchism, they also define Black control over neighborhood revitalization as a mechanism for advanc- ing the race and overcoming racial subordination. In response, Black orga- nizations promote defensive development—neighborhood-based strategies that are designed to build the economic strength of neighborhoods as a way of avoiding political and physical displacement by Whites. Neighborhood groups have employed multiple techniques, including demands for equi- table community financing from loan institutions, community-based devel- opment, and neighborhood planning (Gills 1991; Pogge and Flax-Hatch 1991; Rast 1999). More recently, African-American community develop- ment corporations (CDCs) have called for an increase in homeownership and mixed-income housing to facilitate the return of the Black middle class to poor Black neighborhoods (Owens 1997; Moore 2002). These strategies are in part designed to wrest control of the process away from White elites so that residents of Black neighborhoods can defend themselves against their fears of impending racial displacement.

In pursuing these strategies, urban Black residents act collectively, not only in the sense that they operate as part of community groups but also in the sense that those groups claim to be working for the benefit of all neighborhood residents. Because of its collective character, defensive development has the potential to avoid the displacement of low-income Blacks. It nevertheless encourages what political scientist Cathy Cohen (1999) refers to as “secondary marginalization” (p. 70) that takes place when elites who have gained partial access to development resources in turn dismiss the concerns of less privileged members of the group, as a strategy for overcoming the confines of racial hierarchy. Thus the final step toward Black gentrification takes place when Black elites become more concerned with securing development resources and enhancing property values than addressing the affordable housing needs of poorer Blacks in the neighborhood. Affluent Blacks have multiple incentives for including poorer Blacks in their neighborhood development process. Yet they ultimately help facilitate gentrification by pursuing strategies that both prioritize property value enhancement over housing affordability and funnel poorer Blacks toward individualized self-help programs that cannot address the structural sources of poverty. The remainder of this article elaborates how this pattern took shape in Douglas/Grand Boulevard.

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Methods

The northern border of Douglas/Grand Boulevard lies just two and a half miles south of the Loop—Chicago’s business district. Stretching south from 26th to 51st streets, it is tucked between the Dan Ryan Expressway on the west and Lake Michigan/Cottage Grove Avenue on its east. While the com- munity has historically suffered from high poverty and disinvestment, it is easily accessible to a number of leisure attractions, including the Chicago White Sox ballpark and McCormick Place convention center. From 1997 to 1999, I conducted ethnographic research in the neighborhood, which con- sisted primarily of participant observation with four community organiza- tions. These included the Mid-South Planning and Development Commission (Mid-South), the initiator of the “Restoring Bronzeville” plan; its political arm, the Bronzeville Organizing Strategy Sessions (BOSS); BOSS’s organiz- ing subcommittee, the Bronzeville Organizers Alliance; and the Bronzeville Community Development Partnership, an umbrella organization of seven community stakeholders that sought to acquire funding for neighborhood CDCs. In that capacity, I attended regular weekly, biweekly, and monthly organizational meetings and was involved in the planning and execution of several events designed to mobilize and educate the community. I also attended irregular events as they arose, including a 12-week organizer’s class, planning charettes, informational sessions, and aldermanic meetings.

In addition, I conducted informal and formal interviews with 20 key informants. My focus on the activities of community development organi- zations gave me access mostly to homeowners, rehabbers, developers, and community development activists rather than public housing residents or low-income renters. These observational and interview data are comple- mented by primary site documents, including neighborhood and citywide newspapers, government reports, minutes from community meetings and planning forums, newsletters, press releases and flyers, and the personal archives of neighborhood activists. These qualitative data, combined with 1990 and 2000 census data, illuminate the process by which racial conflict shaped Black gentrification in Douglas/Grand Boulevard.

The Limits of Capital Movement and Consumer Preference

Contemporary neighborhood change in Douglas/Grand Boulevard is rooted in a history of deliberate efforts to contain Blacks, one that both

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primed the neighborhood for and limited Black participation in gentrification. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, government-sponsored urban rede- velopment policies sought to ensure that the growing African-American pop- ulation would not escape the borders of the Black Belt (Hirsch 1983). Two institutions that were central to this process were located in the heart of the Douglas community: Michael Reese Hospital and the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) had both made substantial investments in their facilities during the 1940s and were fearful of the impact the surrounding community might have on their campuses. In 1946, the planning staffs of the two institu- tions united to form the South Side Planning Board (SSPB) and fight the spread of neighborhood “blight” in the surrounding Douglas neighborhood. Working as members of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council, they fought for and won the passage of the Redevelopment and Relocation Acts of 1947, which authorized the use of public funds to acquire, clear, and sell land at a reduced price to private developers.

The SSPB used this authority to tear down supposed slum housing, expand both the IIT and Michael Reese campuses, and to build housing for their middle-class employees. Because SSPB projects did not provide ade- quate relocation strategies, the construction of public housing became central to their plans. The SSPB encouraged the siting of new projects in the Douglas/Grand Boulevard area, and in an attempt to house the many residents dislocated by SSPB plans, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) was forced to violate its own admission rules, accepting individuals and families who did not meet their income requirements. As a result, from 1950 to 1954, “more than half of all public housing units constructed (2,363 apartments out of 4,636) were allocated directly to families displaced by government building programs” (Hirsch 1983, 124). While neighborhood residents objected strongly to this process, Black elected officials were largely unwilling to challenge the Democratic machine on behalf of community members.

These efforts at racial containment set the stage for gentrification in two important ways: First, they helped produce gentrifiable land. By the early 1960s, Douglas/Grand Boulevard was home to the largest concentration of public housing in the country: Stateway Gardens and the Robert Taylor Homes stood like a row of sentries along its western edge, Ida B. Wells guarded the northeast corner, and scattered site reinforcements were spread judiciously throughout the community. Although these housing complexes were badly needed and widely heralded when they were first built, their poor maintenance and underfunding led eventually to their deterioration (Venkatesh 2000). The combined result of these activities was that by the 1980s, wide swaths of the two neighborhoods remained vacant or dilapidated,

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while pockets of affluence lay scattered about its northern edge. Thus, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Douglas/Grand Boulevard was character- ized by the devaluing of land that “make[s] capital revaluation (gentrifica- tion) a rational market response” (Smith 2002, 67).

The second way these containment strategies encouraged gentrification was that they gave spatial articulation to previously existing class cleavages among Douglas/Grand Boulevard’s African-American residents. These class divisions had always been present, but prewar residential segregation had reduced the degree to which they could be expressed spatially (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1993). Urban renewal, on the other hand, concentrated and sectioned off the poorest of the poor into distinct and highly visible parts of the neighborhood. It also created middle-class enclaves like the Prairie Shores, Lake Meadows, and South Commons apartments, buildings that stood in stark material and spatial contrast to public housing. These enclaves were attractive to the “new Black middle class” that arose in the 1960s in response to federal civil rights legislation (Brown and Erie 1981; Collins 1997). They valued the neighborhood not only because of their reluctance to move to all-White areas so far away from their jobs in the cen- tral city but also because of the low cost of the area’s aging structures, some of which were priced under $10,000 at the time (Grossman 1985; Washburn 1983; Washington 1977; Young 1980).

Despite the presence of both gentrifiable land and a gentrifying popula- tion, Blacks engaged in only limited reinvestment in their neighborhood. The comments of Ernest Griffin, former owner of Griffin Funeral Home in Douglas, illustrate how racial ordering prevented more affluent Blacks from taking on the role of a traditional gentrifier. Griffin claimed that “thirty-three times he went to bankers looking for funds to build a new, more modern, funeral parlor on King Drive, but until that last time, the answer was always no the minute he mentioned his address” (Grossman 1985, 1A). His experiences represent those of many other Black Belt resi- dents who, because of racial discrimination, could not find loans for home improvement, mortgages, or commercial investment (Pogge and Flax- Hatch 1991). These policies, understood within the longer history of racial containment and urban renewal, ignited the anger of South Side Blacks and encouraged them to adopt collective strategies for addressing the issue of neighborhood disinvestment. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Douglas/ Grand Boulevard residents established a number of community development organizations, including the Douglas Development Corporation, Christ Mediator Housing Group, and the Gap Community Organization. These groups helped potential residents navigate the challenge of finding and upgrading

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homes and businesses by linking them with reputable contractors, loan institutions, and legal services (Young 1980).

While these organizations allowed more affluent residents to make some investment in Douglas/Grand Boulevard, their accomplishments were lim- ited. After discovering the existence of homes designed by well-known architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, residents at the northern end of Douglas/Grand Boulevard began pushing for historic district desig- nation for three north–south streets between 31st to 35th streets. In addi- tion, these groups sought and won infrastructural improvements that revamped the 35th Street commercial strip and encouraged the owners of the nearby Lake Meadows Shopping Center to invest 7 million dollars to update the declining complex. Although these represented significant improvements for the Douglas/Grand Boulevard community, they were concentrated in only a few streets or blocks of the neighborhood and, thus, constituted only the barest hint of the incumbent upgrading that generally presages wholesale gentrification.

Defensive Development

Douglas/Grand Boulevard organizations began promoting defensive development strategies in response to two threats. First, they were concerned about city-sponsored development taking place in nearby neighborhoods. Wendy Brown, a resident and nonprofit consultant, described development in the late 1980s in this way:

All kinda stuff started happening in the community . . . a lot of redevelopment started happening. Small things. They started calling this neighborhood “The New Downtown” . . . and Central Station opened up. . . . Before then, Jewtown was left up to Jews and Blacks—there was really not a whole lot of redevelop- ment. And they were doing moderate expansion, but nothing like, predatory like they are right now, where they’re gobbling up neighborhoods. . . . And people in the neighborhood were like “OK . . . they’re coming for our neighborhood.”5

Not only does Ms. Brown note the increasing development in the South Loop and near south community areas, she also suggests that the pace and charac- ter of this transformation broke from that of the past and served as a warning to community activists. According to her, neighborhood development took on an aggressive quality in the 1980s, which activists took as a deliberate desire on the part of the city to change the racial character of the neighborhood.

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These concerns made sense given the development occurring in other areas of Chicago that had previously been considered too risky for investment. As the Cabrini Green public housing site and nearby sections of Chicago’s West Side caught the eye of both the city and the real estate industry, it did not seem so unlikely that developers would move in on Douglas/Grand Boulevard and change the racial character of the neighborhood in a similar way (Bennett and Reed 1999). Most important, Ms. Brown’s references to the renaming of the community and the pace of development articulate the degree to which Black community leaders understood these changes as a deliberate effort on the part of Whites to take the neighborhood from them.

Neighborhood leaders’ second concern was the new development agenda of IIT. Despite its earlier efforts, IIT had suffered from the incom- plete investment in the neighborhood that took place during the urban renewal phase: In the late 1980s, the school’s enrollments were declining, and its efforts at retaining faculty were less than successful. With under- statement, President Lew Collens (1995) asserted that IIT’s location got “mixed reviews in the marketplace” and that “the perception of crime, the location amidst CHA high-rises . . . and the lack of an immediately adjacent university village with shops and entertainment, provide significant recruit- ment deterrents.” University officials saw the continued growth and vitality of IIT as dependent on comprehensive redevelopment. Neighborhood resi- dents, however, saw the university’s plans as a contemporary version of urban renewal. Ms. Brown, for example, claimed that IIT

tore down a lot of our institutions in the community. . . . That’s because they didn’t come into the community and say “Hey. We’re going to build this college, what should we do?” None of that. They left one building, that old IIT building and that was it. And everything else that was historically significant or that the older people were used to going to on a regular basis? Torn down to build that insti- tution. The rest of it was torn down to build public housing! So it really seg- mented, fragmented the community. And so IIT was never community friendly.6

Hostility toward IIT was reignited in 1989 when the university sought to shut down the local public transportation station at 35th and State streets. The proposed closure was one element of its larger plan for expansion, and it crystallized Black residents’ concerns over community control of neigh- borhood revitalization and set off a firestorm of protest (Gills 2001).

In response to these threats, Douglas/Grand Boulevard community organizations adopted a series of community building and revitalization strategies designed to protect the neighborhood from control by White res- idents, city elites, and developers. First, they entered into a collaborative

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neighborhood planning process with the university. The South Side Partnership, the group of community organizations that eventually formed Mid-South, argued that the most serious problem facing the neighborhood was that it “had no indigenous planning infrastructure. Consequently, the com- munity was vulnerable to being defined from without, and it lacked an articu- lated vision and a constituency in back of that vision to resist disinvestment” (South Side Partnership 1999). To develop that constituency and vision, they partnered with the city of Chicago’s Planning Department as well as IIT and other neighborhood institutions to form Mid-South in June of 1990.

Although it began by working with representatives from nearby bank- ing, educational, and health institutions, community organization leaders quickly sought to expand their influence in the partnership by explicitly encouraging resident participation in the neighborhood planning process. From 1991 to 1993, Mid-South hired an organizer and began holding com- munity meetings to identify the problems faced by residents. The group established five committees covering the issues of health and safety, housing, parks and recreation, transportation, and economic development. In addition to holding regular meetings, Mid-South held four planning charettes designed to publicize their activities, solicit input, and recruit volunteers. During this time, informants estimate that meetings regularly drew 100 to 200 renters, homeowners, and public housing residents.7 Collaboration with city and business elites did not eliminate neighborhood organizations’ concerns about controlling the development process. Even when the group had moved from the planning to the implementation phase, CBO leaders remained concerned that the city would take over the process and expressed frustration that Mayor Richard Daley was taking credit for their work. Instead, the collaborative process merely focused CBOs’ concern about community control onto the planning process itself.

In 1993, Mid-South released the Restoring Bronzeville land-use plan, which argued that city and neighborhood institutions should develop the area into an African-American Heritage tourism destination (Mid-South Planning and Development Commission 1993). These sites celebrate Black history and culture through the preservation and restoration of historic structures, districts, and cultural practices. Heritage tourism development, thus, constituted the neighborhood’s second defensive development strat- egy because it involved deliberate attempts to maintain the racial character of the community. This included symbolic efforts to mark the neighborhood as explicitly African-American. The land-use plan, for example, was just one of many documents through which Douglas/Grand Boulevard was renamed “Bronzeville.” This designation, which was also promoted in

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public venues and organizational literature, was borrowed from the classic ethnography of Black Chicago published by Drake and Cayton ([1945] 1993). Its use minimized the history of White ethnic groups that dominated the neighborhood prior to African-Americans’ arrival and instead empha- sized the activities of the Black elite that developed during the Great Migration era of the early twentieth century. It also gave scholarly legiti- macy to the claim that Douglas/Grand Boulevard was truly an African- American neighborhood and legitimized them as the rightful “owners” of the space (Boyd 2000).

Mid-South and its supporters sought to institutionalize this identity shift by sponsoring the creation and exhibition of Bronzeville-related cultural products. This included public murals, sculptures, photography, drawing, and writing by adults as well as high school and college students (Bey 1996; Glanton, 1997). For example, the “Gateway” public art project cre- ated a 10-block walking tour laden with bronze plaques, monuments, recognition panels, and sculptural benches that detail the history of the neighborhood and the contributions of its Black residents. This project was specifically designed both to draw visitors from the city’s nearby conven- tion center and to visually mark their entrance into Bronzeville. Similarly, the annual neighborhood Blues Fest, held each June right before the city’s festival of the same name, sought to build community commitment to the Restoring Bronzeville agenda but also to attract the latter’s international audience. These activities not only developed a series of Black cultural arti- facts that could be consumed by tourists, they also inculcated the neigh- borhood’s identity as specifically African-American.

Mid-South also used preservation and rehabilitation projects to inscribe this racialized identity on to the built environment. Along with the Black Metropolis Convention and Tourism Council, Mid-South fought for city and federal historic district designation of an eight-square-block area in the neigh- borhood, referred to as the Black Metropolis Historic District. This area con- tained a number of buildings that had housed or been built by Black businessmen during the early twentieth century, which CBOs hoped would be restored to hold businesses and re-creations of life in the Great Migration era. These efforts reflected more than mere “race pride.” In combination, the sym- bolic, cultural, and physical components of heritage tourism were particularly useful as claims-making tools for the neighborhood’s Black residents. These activities were part of a strategy to improve the neighborhood’s visibility and reputation, thereby attracting commercial and residential investors to the area. They also functioned as a way to reaffirm African-Americans’ claims to the community, as the need for an “authentic” Black tourist product requires their

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continuing presence (Boyd 2000). CBO director Grady Karl expressed as much when explaining why Mid-South should pursue heritage tourism as a development strategy. He argued that

Illinois has appropriated 50 million dollars in the last five years to do pro- motion and architectural tour development. . . . We have to learn how to cap- italize off of that. . . . White people are moving back to this area . . . it’s going to be a multiethnic area. We don’t want to get pushed out.8

Thus Mr. Karl sees heritage tourism not just as a strategy for maintaining Blacks’ presence in the neighborhood but also as a mechanism for Blacks to get their “fair share” from state government expenditures.

While the more symbolic elements of tourism development were rela- tively easy to achieve, the implementation of actual brick-and-mortar pro- jects proved more of a challenge for Mid-South. Not only did the organization have trouble securing city support for some of its projects, but its plans were sometimes in conflict with those of local Black aldermen. Like many CBOs, Mid-South’s board and membership also lacked the tech- nical expertise and financial capacity to easily manage restoration projects. Thus Mid-South and its allies tried a third defensive development strategy, creating a local Black leadership base to implement the economic develop- ment called for by the Restoring Bronzeville plan. Neighborhood CBOs learned that city–community partnerships required an identifiable group of leaders understood to be both influential in and representative of the neigh- borhood. Moreover, as Grady Karl insisted, they feared that without this group of leaders, Blacks would be “forced [out], with the demolition of public housing and other housing, and will be over-run by outside develop- ers. So we need to close ranks around our history and culture.”9 To avoid that outcome, Mid-South provided support to several business and neigh- borhood associations, including the Muddy Waters Blues District Business Association and the 47th Street Merchant’s Association, and also sought the development of an umbrella organization that could coordinate community development in the neighborhood.

The final component of Mid-South’s defensive development was the human and social capital development of the neighborhood’s poorest resi- dents. Both the Restoring Bronzeville plan and its advocates explicitly and repeatedly articulated the importance of providing for the economic security of poor residents. The plan called for the establishment of “a range of job oppor- tunities for all area residents, including long term economic opportunities for

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low income individuals and public housing residents” (Mid-South Planning and Development Commission 1993, 25). For example, the organization took concrete steps to try to secure employment for area residents: When the neighborhood was selected as the site for the new Chicago Police Department headquarters, Mid-South collaborated with two other CBOs to monitor the affirmative action compliance of the construction company. They ran work- shops to facilitate Minority/Women Business Enterprise (M/WBE) certifica- tion and developed two databases: one listing local M/WBE firms interested in contract work and another listing individuals willing to do construction work. In addition, Mid-South sponsored a series of business development classes, including a three-month entrepreneurial training course for adults, a self-employment class for students at the nearby Dunbar High School, and the savings training class for moderate-income families. The first two pro- vided training for residents who sought employment through the develop- ment of small businesses, while the savings training taught students financial literacy and provided them with a matched Individual Development Account. These human and social capital development programs sought to raise the skill level of and opportunities available to individual residents. While they did not challenge the policies and structural conditions causing neighborhood poverty, Mid-South offered them as strategies for maintaining poor Blacks’ presence in the neighborhood.

Secondary Marginalization

In pursuing these strategies, Mid-South sought the support of a wide range of Douglas/Grand Boulevard residents, including homeowners, renters, and public housing residents. This was not only an attempt to gain leverage against the powerful White elites with whom they were collabo- rating, it was also an organizing tactic designed to build common interests among the diverse Black residents and mobilize their support for Mid- South’s leadership. The planning process involved intense participation on the part of a small, dedicated and often expert group of community members; yet Mid-South used planning charettes to attract and involve a diverse group of community members in the neighborhood planning process. As one officer of Mid-South insists, the charettes were crucial to establishing the organization as the representative of the community because they gave residents the opportunity to air complaints and make their voices heard. Before discussing solutions, she told me,

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You gotta do the “Ain’t it Awful.” I mean you really do gotta do it. And what we’re collecting is just lists. Of Ain’t it Awful, Ain’t it Awful. Somebody might say, “Well we should do this and this instead of that.” [But someone would respond,] “Yeah, but what’s wrong with the way it is now, it’s awful because X, Y, and Z!” And it was really like that.10

These comments illustrate the importance of merely being heard in a con- text where residents’ opinions and concerns had historically been repressed or ignored. In comparison with traditional strategies of neighborhood change, Mid-South’s planning process represented an enormous increase in resident accessibility to development decision-making processes.

Mid-South and its allies also attempted to link the interests of low- and middle-income residents by highlighting their common economic con- cerns. Supporters of the Restoring Bronzeville plan argued that using tourism as the driver for economic development would encourage small- businesses development among the community’s middle-income residents. In turn, they suggested, these businesses would be patronized by and pro- vide local employment for the neighborhood’s poorer residents. This rhetoric of racial uplift, in which the financial investment of the middle class would support and be supported by less affluent residents, was central to their strategy (Boyd 2005). Finally, the Restoring Bronzeville plan advo- cated the development of mixed-income housing to account for the needs of its poor residents: Instead of promoting demolition and reconstruction, Mid-South called for the rehabilitation of existing structures and construc- tion on vacant lots, so as to avoid displacement of “indigenous” residents (Mid-South Planning and Development Commission 1993).

These strategies reflected common fears among Douglas/Grand Boulevard residents that neighborhood revitalization would lead to displacement by Whites. They also reflected the organization’s dependence on broad-based political support—to distinguish their own agenda from that of institutions such as IIT, Mid-South needed to address the concerns of the neighbor- hood’s more affluent residents as well as those of its poorer community members. Nevertheless, defensive development ultimately facilitated gen- trification in Douglas/Grand Boulevard by demobilizing its most vulnera- ble residents. By the late 1990s, the leaders and most active participants in Mid-South were homeowners, and very rarely were issues related to afford- able housing retention raised in any substantive matter by organization members or leadership. The following exchange took place at Mid-South’s April 1998 meeting between board member Olivia Ethan and public hous- ing resident Julia Keyes, and it illustrates the extent to which the issues of poor residents were sidelined by the organization’s leadership:

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Olivia [to the membership]: I hope you will stay for another 20 minutes. We have a developer coming to do a presentation on a development that’s going to be between 39th and 47th, from Cottage Grove to Vincennes and St. Lawrence. They want to do rental housing and they want to do a TIF [tax increment financing district]. I hope you’ll stay for it. Afterwards, we have some sur- veys for you to fill out so we will know what you think about the idea. I promise that it will be no more than 20 minutes.

Julia: Are these meetings for homeowners, or are you giving information to people in Chicago Housing as to what we can do? Or are we just going to come, and go home and nobody has told us anything? Nobody is doing nothing!

Olivia: I’m going to come talk to you, because I don’t understand your question. Resident 2: [In the row behind me, an older woman says plainly, so everyone

close by can hear] she lives in the projects and she’s concerned about where she’s going to live next year.11

This excerpt reflects the deep sense of alienation that some public housing residents felt and suggests why many of them avoided participation in Mid- South. In distinguishing between the issues important to homeowners and those that mattered to public housing residents, Ms. Keyes identified an essential division that influenced much of the organization’s activities but was not often addressed by the membership or leadership.

More interesting, however, is that this excerpt captures the way defensive development lubricates gentrification by demobilizing Blacks most likely to object to both the demolition of affordable housing and its replacement with high-priced homes, regardless of the race of its occupants. First, the exchange between Olivia and Julia reflects the fact that Mid-South prioritized property value enhancement over demands for affordable housing. As Olivia’s com- ments about development indicate, the organization emphasized its role as a community building intermediary. In that capacity, said one organization leader, they chose to emphasize “the gaps in services, or the needs that the community has, and work with other organizations to come up with solutions and then try to identify resources for that.”12 Mid-South’s focus on business association development, historic building restoration, and place marketing was framed as a strategy that would benefit all residents by increasing the vis- ibility and improving the reputation of the neighborhood and thereby attract commercial and residential investors to the area. Yet these efforts did little to prevent demolition or maintain affordable housing in the area, a point that Julia indelicately raised during the meeting.

Second, Olivia’s response to Julia reflects the fact that to the extent that Mid-South did address the needs of poor residents, they did so with indi- vidualized rather than collective responses. Rather than acknowledge or change Mid-South’s preference for the issues of homeowners, Olivia

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attempted to address Julia’s complaint through private conversation. This strategy left Julia feeling completely unsatisfied: After the meeting was over, I saw her talking with Barrett Lee, another public housing resident, complaining that “I still don’t know what’s going on!” and Ms. Lee agreed, saying that it was always like this. Olivia’s response to Julia mirrored Mid- South’s overall approach to addressing the interests of poor community members: Just as she had attempted to individually respond to Julia’s com- plaint, Mid-South habitually tried to address the issues of poor residents by engaging in individual human and social capital development. These strate- gies were insufficient for addressing the greatest threat to public housing residents: the impending demolition of CHA projects and the lack of affordable replacement housing. In the 1990s, the CHA established the “Plan for Transformation,” which sought to demolish most of the public housing in the area and replace it with a mix of market rate, affordable, and low-income housing (Chicago Housing Authority 2005). Not only did the low-income housing exclude many public housing residents, but the CHA failed to provide replacement housing at the promised rate (Bennett, Smith, and Wright 2006). Although this policy directly threatened Mid-South’s ability to achieve its goals of retaining the indigenous community, the orga- nization chose not to devote its resources to organizing specifically around affordable housing issues. This was the case despite attempts by citywide organizations, such as the Coalition to Protect Public Housing, to build alliances and working relationships with Mid-South.

The organization was not unique in its emphasis on community and eco- nomic development. This focus reflects broader trends among community organizations, and as many scholars have noted, this shift has created a con- flict between organizational maintenance and community mobilization (Weir 1999). Yet Mid-South’s defensive development strategies had signif- icant consequences for neighborhood change in Douglas/Grand Boulevard: Its neighborhood planning and property enhancement activities set in motion a process of neighborhood investment that threatened the neighbor- hood’s poorest residents, its support for mixed-income housing provided tacit approval for their displacement through public housing demolition, and its human capital development encouraged their demobilization by fun- neling them toward self-help strategies incapable of addressing their most pressing economic needs. This pattern is consistent with Wyly and Hammel’s (1999) argument that a history of class turnover in deteriorating neighborhoods facilitates gentrification by creating “islands of decay in seas of renewal” that local elites are compelled to facilitate through the demolition of public housing. In this case, Black CDCs play a crucial role

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in facilitating and legitimizing both those processes by acting as the repre- sentative of “community” support.

The demolition of public housing has been crucial to Douglas/Grand Boulevard’s revitalization because it has erased the major human and struc- tural indicators that marked the neighborhood as unsuitable for investment. One illustration of this is the cover story published in the March 2004 issue of Chicago magazine. Although the authors admitted that the area had been prey to “decades of white flight, poverty, and gangs,” they quickly assured the reader that the recent demolition had created a “wide open space” on which to build mixed-income housing units (Rodkin, Whitaker, and Wilk 2004, 74). Readers who remained concerned about the lingering impact of the area’s infamous past would have been soothed by the words of Arnold Randall, a city planning official: He insisted that in 20 to 30 years, “these communities will be such nice places to live that all the negative things in the past will be for- gotten . . . people won’t realize where we’ve come from” (Rodkin, Whitaker, and Wilk 2004, 74). Indeed, by 2003, all but 5 of the original 28 buildings in the Robert Taylor Homes had been taken down, and the last of the buildings in Stateway Gardens were scheduled for demolition in October of 2006 (Chicago Housing Authority 2005; Olivo 2006; Venkatesh and Celimi 2004).

Douglas/Grand Boulevard is not yet experiencing the same degree of gentrification found in other areas of the city sharing the same pattern of revitalization and deterioration. But while neighborhood change is difficult to confirm in its beginning stages, the community has shown signs of gen- trification since the late 1990s. Census data indicate that Douglas/Grand Boulevard’s population has changed in ways that are consistent with gen- trification.13 For example, the neighborhood’s low-income renters are being replaced by high-income homeowners. In 1990, there were no households (0% of total) that reported earnings of $75,000 or more in the previous year.14 In 2000, after adjusting for inflation, there were 1,018 (5% of total households in the area) with annual earnings of $100,000 or more. At the same time that the number of wealthy households rose, the number of poor residents dropped precipitously. In 1990, there were 8,474 families living below poverty; by 2000, that number had been reduced by nearly half, to 4,879. Similarly, the number of owner-occupied housing units has increased by 58%, from 1,571 to 2,487, while the number of renter households dropped by 24%, from 23,493 to 17,949. Both of these shifts are well above the city’s 9.3% increase in owner-occupied housing and .5% decrease in renter-occupied units.

While neighborhood organization leaders were most concerned that Whites would displace Blacks in the neighborhood, census data indicate

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that at this stage displacement is economic rather than racial. From 1990 to 2000, Douglas/Grand Boulevard’s total population dropped by nearly 20%, from 67,234 to 54,579, and its African-American population dropped by almost 22%, from 64,251 to 50,218. Yet the percentage of White residents increased only minimally, from 2.4% to 3.3%. Instead, low-income Black renters are being replaced by higher-income homeowners who are also Black. It is theoretically possible that these dramatic shifts reflect poor Black households’ move out of poverty. Yet the broader context of CHA housing demolition, tenure changes, increases in market rate housing con- struction and prices, and development trends all suggest that the more likely scenario is that poor families are moving away from the neighborhood, while wealthier households are moving in to take their place.

Douglas/Grand Boulevard has also experienced a significant degree of residential and commercial investment. As is the case in several communities throughout the city, the average selling price of property near former public housing sites has skyrocketed (Kelly 2005). For example, recent reports indi- cate that townhomes scheduled to be built near the old Stateway Gardens site “are already selling for more than $540,000” (Olivo 2006, 7). Between 1990 and 2002, the median value of single-family homes in Douglas doubled from $124, 632 to $261,000; in Grand Boulevard, the price of single-family homes increased by 267% from 1993 to 2002 (Metro Chicago Facts Online 2006). According to public records published by the Chicago Tribune, the neigh- borhood is also experiencing a fair amount of flipping, with some homes sell- ing for twice or three times their original value in as few as three months.15

These residential investments have been accompanied by commercial invest- ment and redevelopment, including the opening of the Harold Washington Cultural Center at 47th and King Drive and the Bronzeville Visitor Information Center a few blocks north at 35th Street. In addition, upscale eateries, such as the Bronzeville Coffee House on 43rd Street and Blu 47 on King Drive, cater explicitly to the neighborhood’s newly arrived and antici- pated upper-income residents, as does the miner’s canary of gentrification, the Starbucks that opened in September 2007 on the site of the former Stateway Gardens housing project (Chaney 2007).

These changes suggest that Douglas/Grand Boulevard is taking its first slow steps toward gentrification. It is important to note that Mid-South did not explicitly promote the displacement of poor Black residents. If any- thing, the organization took small steps to prevent it, despite the reserva- tions and class bias of some of its middle-class members. But while Mid-South and its allies maintained a symbolic commitment to public housing residents, its leadership ultimately facilitated their removal by

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advocating for racially inclusive revitalization that ignored the concerns of the most economically vulnerable African-Americans in the neighborhood.

Conclusion

Contemporary gentrification in Douglas/Grand Boulevard has been shaped both by new consumptive patterns and by a history of elite-driven investments. Yet to understand how Blacks come to be involved in gentrifi- cation, one must look past either individual tastes or broad patterns of eco- nomic restructuring to the ways that racial ordering shapes the significance of each of those patterns for different groups. When one does so, one finds that although the class status of the neighborhood’s middle-class residents affords them opportunities to respond like traditional gentrifiers, the cumu- lative effects of racism prevent them from taking on that role. Thus, Black community organizations advocate defensive development strategies, not merely as profit-hungry place entrepreneurs but also in a deliberate effort to overcome the limitations of racial hierarchies.

These findings are useful for three reasons. First, they support the revan- chist argument that gentrification is a political tool used by urban actors against their putative enemies. But while elite and marginalized groups are in fact struggling to maintain control over space, theirs is not always a one- sided war in which Whites attack more vulnerable populations of color. While this pattern clearly persists, African-Americans’ post-civil rights political incorporation has changed that dynamic. Gentrification is being used by Black middle-class elites, who are adopting the “master’s tools” in an effort not to dismantle his house but to keep ownership of their own.

Second, this article suggests two important conceptual distinctions that are useful to bear in mind when analyzing gentrification. First, one must distinguish between the reasons for gentrification and the mechanisms through which it takes place. That is, consumption and production theories explain why gentrification becomes possible; yet the gentrifying group’s place in the racial order helps explain the role they play in and their impact on the process. Middle-class Whites who seek to gentrify, for example, do not face racial bias in home financing. They may, therefore, be more likely to use gentrification as an offensive strategy and to explicitly promote their behavior as beneficial for the entire city. Displacement occurs through con- ventional economic processes in which housing remains but is upgraded to the extent that rents, property taxes, and home prices rise beyond the means of low-income residents, who are forced to look elsewhere for affordable

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housing. In this case, gentrification leads to economically homogeneous White neighborhoods. African-American gentrifiers, on the other hand, may find themselves initially constrained from acting as gentrifiers and may be themselves vulnerable to displacement regardless of class status. In response, they organize and take up development as a political strategy, pro- moting its benefits to the racial community that inhabits the threatened neighborhood. They may encourage the displacement of the neighbor- hood’s low-income residents by politically marginalizing them from the development process, thereby easing the removal of affordable housing (rather than its rehabilitation). In this case, the possibility is strong that the affected neighborhood will remain Black or eventually become a racially integrated space but only at the cost of displacing poor African-Americans.

The role that Mid-South and other organizations played in gentrification also highlights the importance of distinguishing between advocating the strategy of gentrification and promoting the process of gentrification. Because of the history of racial discrimination, Black organizations in Douglas/Grand Boulevard adopted development strategies designed to head off and combat what they saw as their impending displacement by Whites. In doing so, they were quite careful not to refer to their actions as gentrifi- cation and made good-faith efforts to include poor Blacks in the neighbor- hood planning process. Yet defensive development still facilitates the changes commonly understood to indicate gentrification, including the dis- placement of poor residents, the conversion of housing stock, and the enhancement of the physical and economic infrastructure. This happens in part because Black elites continue to argue that what benefits them also benefits less privileged African-Americans. Defensive development may also provide cover for Black gentrifiers who wish to keep their ulterior motives private. Thus, recognizing the distinction between advocacy and promotion does not minimize Black organizations’ culpability in gentrifi- cation: It merely clarifies their role in it.

Finally, these findings suggest a way to discuss Black gentrification that is both empirically accurate and theoretically sound. While it is important for scholars to describe and analyze African-Americans’ new role in neigh- borhood change processes, one must do more than “add race and stir.” In examining the impact of racial ordering on gentrification, I have sought ultimately to consider what makes Black gentrification distinctive or unique. If Black gentrification is just your garden-variety gentrification committed by African-Americans rather than Whites, then there is no need to highlight their racial status. Yet if there is something particular about the roots, nature, or implications of African-American gentrification, one must

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be clear about what that difference is and why its description warrants the use of a racial modifier. This article tries to show that racial hierarchy is particularly important for the way it structures the opportunities available to different racial groups and the meanings they attach to their behavior. Black gentrification is important, then, not only because it takes place dif- ferently than White gentrification but also because its emergence illumi- nates how the racial order shapes gentrification for all urban actors.

Notes 1. M. Young, “Blacks Filling in the ‘GAP,’” Chicago Defender, July 26, 1988, 1. This

population is not the first to challenge the stereotype of the wealthy White gentrifier displac- ing poor Black residents: The preliminary stages of gentrification are often initiated by incum- bent upgraders, artists, and students—populations whose tenuous economic circumstances or unconventional lifestyle makes them distinct from the more affluent and privileged gentrifiers who follow in their footsteps. Moreover, these first-stage gentrifiers often displace other White or White ethnic residents “because white middle-class gentrifiers have generally been less squeamish about moving into white working class areas” (Schaffer and Smith 1986, 351).

2. Betancur’s (2002) recent analysis of gentrification in Chicago’s West Town and Pérez’s (2002) ethnography of gentrification in Humboldt Park are notable exceptions in the field of Puerto Rican politics, although each focuses on traditional race and class cleavages in the gen- trification process.

3. Kim’s ultimate aim is to illuminate Blacks’ and Koreans’ relative position in the racial hierarchy and how that leads to conflict between them. Yet her theory applies just as well to explaining racial conflict between Blacks and Whites.

4. Many of these policies were not racially neutral, but a deliberate effort on the part of native and immigrant Whites to contain Black populations physically, economically, and polit- ically. Others were neutral on their face but produced highly racialized outcomes. Regardless of intent, their combined effect was to produce Black neighborhoods that were ripe for restruc- turing by economic elites and place entrepreneurs.

5. Interview, July 14, 1998, Chicago. 6. Interview, October 13, 1998, Chicago. 7. Information is from multiple informal conversations documented in author’s field notes. 8. Author’s field notes, March 5, 1998, Chicago. 9. Author’s field notes, February 9, 1998, Chicago.

10. Interview, October 13, 1998, Chicago. 11. Author's field notes, April 21, 1998, Chicago. 12. Interview, January 23, 1997, Chicago. 13. All 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census data downloaded from the American Factfinder Web

site, http://www.census.gov, during the week of October 8-12, 2007. See tables HCT7, HCT11, HCT31A and B, HCT32A and B, HCT39A and B, H001, H004, H008, P001, P005, P012, P013, P057, P080, P123, H035, H050, P1, P7, P14, P8, P37, P52, P080, and P090.

14. Given the 1.34% inflation rate between 1989 and 1999, households that earned $75,000 in 1989 would be the same as a household that earned $100,500 in 1999.

15. http://chicagotribune.public-record.com/realestate/.s (accessed October 12, 2007).

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