Booked on Planning
Booked on Planning
Before Gentrification
The racial wealth gap in Washington DC isn't what you think it is. While conventional wisdom suggests Black families couldn't access homeownership due to racist housing practices, author Tanya Maria Golash-Boza reveals a more complex and troubling reality. Drawing from her personal experience growing up in DC's Petworth neighborhood as one of the few white children in a predominantly Black community, Golash-Boza uncovers how systemic disinvestment prevented wealth accumulation despite significant increases in Black homeownership between 1940 and 1970.
However, as white families departed, they took businesses and tax dollars with them. Banks stopped lending in Black neighborhoods, leading to the gradual closure of theaters, grocery stores, and community amenities. The result? Property values remained flat for decades, preventing Black homeowners from building wealth through their largest asset. The urban crisis of the 1970s-80s compounded these challenges. As deindustrialization created a joblessness crisis affecting young Black men, the response was increased policing rather than addressing root causes.
Looking ahead, Golash-Boza suggests solutions require rethinking housing as a human right through decommodification and limited equity cooperatives. If you're concerned about housing affordability, racial justice, or urban policy, this conversation offers essential insights into how historical policies continue to shape our cities today.
Show Notes:
- Author Recommended Reading:
- Chocolate City by Derek Musgrove and Chris Myers Ash
- Cappuccino City by Derek Highra
- Black in Place by Brandy Summers
- African Americans and Gentrification in Washington DC by Sabiyha Prince
- Intersectional Listening by Ali Martin
- To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/
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you're listening to the booked on planning podcast, a project of the nebraska chapter of the american planning association. In each episode we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked on Planning. Welcome back Bookworms, to another episode of Booked on Planning. In this episode we talk with author Tanya Maria Golash-Boza on her book Before Gentrification the Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap. This book rounds out our month focusing on gentrification. First we discussed how it has impacted Detroit and in this episode we dive into the impacts on Washington DC.
Jennifer Hiatt:This was actually perfect timing for me, as I had a trip to DC planned right after reading this book, so it was interesting to read about DC and then see the impacts that she was talking about. I think it's always interesting to take a close look at the different facets of one city, so we were talking about, in this case, washington DC, and its unique relationship with the federal government really exasperated the racial disparities and gentrification that was already starting to happen across the country in the 1970s and 80s.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, it was really fascinating learning about DC's lack of control, despite their home rule status, with Congress's ability to set their budget priorities and step in during a crisis. As Tanya mentioned in the conversation, this is playing out right now, with the president's takeover of DC's police returning to a failed approach to more policing to fight crime that she advocates for avoiding.
Jennifer Hiatt:It is kind of frustrating to watch something that we know probably isn't going to work happen all over again and again, especially when the impacts of the first attempt of over-policing are still impacting the city today. Let's get into our conversation with author Tanya Maria Golosh-Boza on her book Before Gentrification the Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap.
Stephanie Rouse:Tanya, thank you for joining us on Booked on Planning to talk about your book Before Gentrification the Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap. There's a misconception, at least for DC, that the wealth gap between Black families and white families resulted from a lack of homeownership for Blacks due to racist housing practices. But you have a different conclusion. What is the true cause?
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Yeah, hi, stephanie and Jennifer, it's really great to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Okay, so in general, there is a perception or misperception that African Americans were locked out of homeownership in the United States in general before the Fair Housing Act of 1968. There's definitely some truth to that. There definitely were racist housing tactics going on. There was blockbusting, there was redlining, all that stuff definitely was going on. But what's remarkable is that there was a significant increase in Black homeownership between 1940 and 1970 nationwide, and in Washington DC in particular. Between 1940 and 1970, there was a five-fold increase in African-American homeownership. There was a significant increase in African-American homeownership. However, there's also today a significant racial wealth gap. So what we learned from that is that large numbers of African-Americans purchasing homes did not reduce the racial wealth gap.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:So what I argue in my book Before Gentrification is that African-Americans were able to access home ownership in Washington DC actually primarily due to white flight, partly due to their relative economic success in Washington DC and then to the availability of housing, because white families were leaving the city and white families were leaving these row homes, brick row homes that had been built not too much earlier. They really had been built in the 20s and in the 30s a lot of them in the neighborhood where I grew up in particular, and white families were leaving those homes and mostly white families were leaving those homes. My evidence shows that it's primarily due to school integration. So in 1954, when schools were desegregated, a lot of schools in Washington DC went from 100 percent white in 1953 to almost 100 percent black in 1954, and particularly at the elementary school level. The high schools were a little slower.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:You kind of imagine it's a little harder to transition at that stage. No-transcript basically locked out of black neighborhoods through lots of other measures. But what happened is once white families left those neighborhoods and took their businesses and their tax dollars with them, the city and the federal government stopped investing in those neighborhoods. So it wasn't like an immediate transition. But the neighborhood that I grew up, in particular in the 1950s it was a thriving working to middle-class neighborhood with a theater, grocery stores, delis, ice cream shops, clothing stores you know all kinds of small businesses on that main street of Kennedy Street and then also Georgia Avenue which is close by, and slowly over the course of about 20 years a lot of those businesses closed, like they didn't close immediately but just as the owners retired, you know their kids didn't necessarily pick up the businesses and the businesses started closing. So the businesses were closing and there were many African-Americans who wanted to purchase businesses on those blocks but banks were now not lending money because the neighborhood had become primarily black.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:So slowly you see a decline in the quality of the neighborhood just because the amenities are not the same. You know there's no longer grocery stores, there's no longer delis, there's lots of kind of closed down businesses, lots of liquor stores, corner stores, you know just not the same quality of business that it had before. And what's interesting is like the economic status of the neighborhood didn't change, right, people are still making around the same amount of money, you know, kind of adjusted for inflation, and you have the same percentage homeownership, about 50% homeownership. But the character of the neighborhood changed with the closing of the businesses and the public schools changed significantly. So in 1954 1954 with school desegregation Washington DC had 100,000 students in the school system. By 1970, we had 150,000 students and there was not a concomitant increase in budgeting right in monetary allocation to the school. So the schools were slowly not providing the same high level of education that they had previously provided.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:So what all that does. Lack of private investment in the neighborhood, lack of public investment in the neighborhood leads to flat or reduced home values. So home values in that neighborhood didn't really increase at all, other than the rate of inflation between 1950 and 2000. So you have almost 50 years of homeownership, of many, many families owning homes, but the houses are not increasing in value. The main thing that that does is that means that they're not building wealth right, because in the United States, to the extent that we have any wealth at all, vast majority of people's wealth is in the value of your home. So if your home doesn't increase in value, then you're not going to see that increase in wealth. So that's why I argue that homeownership could have led to wealth accumulation but it didn't due to long-term disinvestment in segregated Black neighborhoods.
Jennifer Hiatt:You actually have a unique perspective on this topic. So what's your relationship to Washington DC and some of the people whose stories you highlight in the book?
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Yes, I do have a unique perspective. My parents moved to Washington DC in 1970. That's a little bit before I was born, and they lived in an apartment in one of the very few integrated neighborhoods in Washington DC. I'm white, my parents are white, my siblings are white and they moved into Mount Pleasant, which was one of the very few integrated neighborhoods in the city, and at the time my father was a laundry truck driver and my mother was in graduate school. So they didn't have a lot of money and the rent was slowly increasing in that neighborhood. At that time it was reasonable. Can you just imagine a time when a laundry truck driver and a graduate student can purchase a home? But it was possible in 1970. So in 1976, my parents purchased a home in a neighborhood that at that point was about 90% Black. It had previously been all white.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:In the 1940s and 1950s Most of the white families had left the neighborhood and my parents bought a home in the neighborhood and we were one of the very few white families growing up in that neighborhood. When I was growing up, actually, I had two best friends, and one was Monique. She's African-American and her grandparents had purchased the home where she lived, and my other best friend was Juliana and she was Korean and her family owned the corner store. So the typical of the neighborhood but atypical to see a white girl, korean girl and black girl walking down the street because almost everyone in our neighborhood was black at that time. So the neighbor that I grew up in was, you know, working to middle-class neighborhood. A lot of people own their homes, but a lot of people were like Monique in that this was now like the mid 1970s it was their grandparents who had purchased the home in the 1950s and had held on to it. So a lot of my friend's parents didn't necessarily have the means to purchase homes, but their grandparents had and they lived in those homes.
Stephanie Rouse:I think it's important to understand how all of the topics that you discuss in your book play out, because of DC's unique operations and the role of the federal government and how the city functions, like the budget and the prison system. Can you describe the structure and how it's impacted?
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:the community today and for the next 30 days, so probably within that time frame. I think so a couple of days ago right now it's August 14th, so around August 12th President Trump took over DC's metropolitan police department. He's able to do that in DC because there's a provision in the Home Rule Act of 1973 that says that the president can take control of the police department if there's ever a crisis in the city. You can imagine why that exists. Come to your own conclusions about why they're doing it right now. But the important thing we want to focus on here is the fact that DC has had home rules since 1973, which means that DC has its own mayor that's elected by the people, and we have a city council that's elected by the people. So we function like a city, like many other places, but the federal government has reach in DC that they don't have in other places. So the US attorney is appointed directly by the president, and this is important for democracy because DC, like most cities, is heavily Democrat probably 80 to 90 percent Democrat and so whenever there's a Republican in office, most people in the city didn't vote for that person Right, and also they're the president, not the mayor, so anyway. So the president has the right to appoint our US attorney, who then is the person who decides on the sentences for people that are in the incarceration system. So that's unique to DC.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:And what's also unique to DC is so we are a city, but there are significant limits on the ways that the city can produce revenue. So 43% of the land in DC is not taxable, which is because either it's owned by a nonprofit or it's owned by the federal government. So there's a lot of land in DC that's not taxable. And then we're also forbidden by Congress from implementing a commuter tax, so DC can't decide on its own whether or not it wants to have a commuter tax, and there's other provisions that Congress will put in place to protect Congress that may have negative revenue consequences for DC. And then the other important thing is that, well, there's many important things, but if DC passes a law so, for example, dc passed a law for marijuana legalization, you know, like many liberal cities do, and Congress can block it, and they can block it and they did block it they can overrule laws that we pass. Congress also has the authority to vote on our budget. So when the city passes the budget, you know it goes through the city council and then it goes to the mayor and then it gets approved at that level, but then Congress can change it. So at that point they can put in provisions for things that they want to see. And again, these are not people that are elected by people in DC. Dc we do have one congressperson, but they're not voting. So DC has limited control. We don't have the same democratic rights as other people in the mainland United States.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Ok, so now DC, because of our revenue constraints and because of the fact that we're a city, but then we need to operate a library system, like counties do, and then a jail, like counties do, and then a prison system, like states do. So in 1997, the federal government agreed to take over our prison system. They basically paid for our prison system, or really anyone that is convicted under the US code in DC is sent to federal prison, and they sometimes are sent close by. There's not anything super close, but maybe 100, 150 miles away, but they really can be sent anywhere in the country. So there are currently what we call DC code offenders or US code offenders people convicted of crimes in DC who are in California, who are in Arizona, who are in Texas who are in Kentucky, they can be anywhere. Colorado, they can be anywhere in the country. So that obviously puts a burden on families and also makes reintegration challenging when people return from prison.
Jennifer Hiatt:It was perfect timing on my behalf. I was in DC over the 4th of July holiday. Didn't seem like a massive emergency of crime was occurring. Urban disinvestment has been a major impact on the communities that you are highlighting. What has this disinvestment looked like and how is it directly connected to the urban violence that was so prominent in the 1980s and 1990s in DC, but really in many major cities across the country at that time?
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Yeah, if we go back to the 1970s, you'll remember. You may or may not remember, but if you were around you might know, you may have heard, that in the 1970s the US was starting to go into a pretty significant economic crisis, which had to do with, you know, the rise of Germany and Japan in terms of competition and then the big oil crisis of 1973. So that left the US in a crisis mode, and one of the responses to that crisis was deindustrialization, basically to close down factories and move them to Mexico and other places. So DC didn't have factories, so we weren't directly impacted by deindustrialization in the exact same way, but we were impacted by another thing, which is suburbanization, where a lot of jobs were sent to the suburbs. So the federal government is based in DC, but actually a lot of the jobs are in Bethesda or in Arlington or in Pentagon, like they're not in the city. Some of them are, but there's a lot of jobs in federal agencies started opening up outside the city and they were not as accessible to people in the city, and so cities across the United States in the 1980s began to encounter what they called the joblessness crisis right, and that particularly affected young Black men In DC and in other cities many young Black men had very few employment opportunities. So that's the general context of the United States and in DC we also had this employment crisis in the 1980s.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:In DC there were a couple other crises that also affected the city. One is the HIV-AIDS crisis. Dc was very hard hit by that. So then in 1984, crack cocaine was introduced to the city. It was introduced to DC. It started out in LA, then it spread to New York and to DC and to many other cities. So crack cocaine hit at a time when there was this joblessness crisis, when there was the HIV crisis. The HIV crisis came a little later, but there was lots of challenges in the city and schools were failing. And when crack cocaine came along it provided an opportunity for young men to make a lot of money very quickly. So it just exploded right. There was many people that were looking for money, looking for ways to make money. Schools were not that engaging. The schools had been defunded, so there was big cuts to the afterschool programs, to the recreation programs, to the sports teams. So a lot of young boys and young men were idle. So when crack cocaine came along, a lot of them began to sell the drug, and then addiction also became a big problem in DC and in other cities.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:The response of the city to this complex of these crises was to invest in policing, right. So you have a problem where there's widespread drug use, there's widespread drug selling, there's a rise in violence across the city that's related to that, and then libraries are closing, you know, the streets have potholes, schools are not providing the services they used to provide, and the city decides. You know, what would be really good right now is more police. And I want to add one more piece of context to that, which is that the federal government also was insisting on more police. So it's very similar to what's happening right now. So there honestly was much more of a crisis in the late 1980s than there is today. Today, it's definitely an exaggeration to say that there's a crime crisis in DC right now.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:In the late 1980s there was more of a crisis. Homicides were very high. There was high rates of violent crime in the city in DC and really just across the city. And just for context, I saw a figure that said that DC homicide rate is about 40 and much. I also saw another one that said 20. So it's somewhere between 20 and 40. But in 1991, it was 80 per 100,000. So it's at least twice what it is today and possibly more depending on how things are counted.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:But basically there was a crisis and the solution was to introduce more policing and more prisons, and Congress also was pushing this. So when DC's budget went to Congress they were like we're not going to vote on it unless you hire 1,500 additional police officers. So there was definitely a push from Congress not from the president, like we're seeing today, but similarly from the federal government. So that insistence on heavy policing in the city. What that did is create another crisis, which is the crisis of mass incarceration.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:So by 1997, 50% of young Black men in DC were caught in the carceral net, meaning that they were either in prison, in jail on probation, out on a warrant, somehow caught up in the policing system. So what's important to note about that when it's 50 percent is it wasn't limited to a small number of people in super poor areas. Right, it was across the city. So it was poor Black boys, poor Black men, working class Black boys and men, and also more well-to-do Black boys and men Across the city. There it was poor Black boys, poor Black men, working class Black boys and men, and also more well-to-do Black boys and men Across the city. There were very high rates of incarceration, so that created another crisis in the city.
Stephanie Rouse:So you've talked about this a little bit, about carceral investment. It's one of the three phases that you describe in the book, between disinvestment and racialized investment. You've talked a little bit about the impacts that this approach had on the city. How does this tie back into the racial wealth gap and homeownership?
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Okay. So when I started the book project, one of the reasons I was looking at this intersection between homeownership and carceral investment is that one of the families I introduced in the beginning of the book, their home was raided for drug-related reasons, for suspected drug activity, and the home was actually taken. So basically, because of very strict drug laws in the United States, if you are suspected to have sold drugs out of a home or somehow engaged in drug-selling activity in a house, the federal government can forfeit that house. The family home was actually forfeited. So I was curious to find out how common that was, and it turned out it wasn't very common, or at least the DC Recorded Deeds database doesn't show that many examples of homes being forfeited. So then I was thinking OK, well, you know how? Is policing and prisons and mass incarceration related to the racial wealth gap more broadly if it's not directly taking the home? And it turns out the story is a little bit more complex.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:So in the 1950s, like I said before, many African-American families were purchasing homes and then they move into these neighborhoods which have great schools, which have parks, which have libraries, which have delis, et cetera. But over the course of the next 20 years the neighborhoods decline in terms of those amenities and the schools decline. So by the 1970s they're sending their kids to schools that are just not the same quality that they were before and their children are not able to attain the level of economic success that they attained. So the children end up staying in the home with the parents. So now, instead of okay, grandma and grandpa bought a home, and then if mom and dad can buy a home too, then you maintain wealth.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:But now, even when the home gets passed down, that second generation didn't purchase homes. So now the wealth is dispersed. So you can have one person buy a home in 1954, but if it gets sold in 1994 for not very much money, and now there's 12 heirs, right, so everyone gets $5,000. So it's really not that really impedes it becoming a wealth generator. So basically, what I saw is that there was downward mobility across generations and that was exacerbated by incarceration. There are certainly many children of DC, african-american children of DC, who grew up in the 1970s and went on to become very successful, but there are many who did not as well and a lot of them ended up being incarcerated. So that's how it plays into this failure to transmit wealth across generations.
Jennifer Hiatt:And it's not just that one or two generations. This conversation you just ended in the 90s, this is still impacting people today, correct?
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Absolutely still impacting people today, and I mean, basically, you had a generation of people who grew up without their fathers because their fathers were incarcerated. You had all these resources going to prisons that didn't go to schools. So, yeah, so definitely has intergenerational impacts today, and some of the people that I interviewed for this book had actually lost their kids to gun violence and a lot of times it was, you know, while they were away, while they were incarcerated. They weren't able to provide for their children, to provide the kind of social safety net that they would want to, and a lot of times their children ended up also getting incarcerated or getting murdered and for them it was directly related to them being away, to them being incarcerated.
Jennifer Hiatt:I just think often people are like okay, but it's 2025, so what, right? And it's like, no, this is still impacting people today and it will impact the next generation as well. So understanding what has happened in the past and being able to fix it, moving forward, is so important, absolutely.
Stephanie Rouse:And in the book you describe two different types of gentrification. One is wholesale demolition, clearing, building new. Other is more slower and it's like housing rehabilitation on a much smaller scale, which are both active in a lot of communities, dc included. Can you talk about these two forms and how they're forms of racialized reinvestment? Yes, absolutely.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:I have another project related to gentrification in DC which is more quantitative. So we're looking at, you know, how is gentrification related to other outcomes? How is it related to arrests, to policing, to crime? So for a quantitative project you need to measure gentrification. And when I started running models that would look at you know how do we figure out which neighborhoods in DC have gentrified, it didn't always align with what you might think, right. So, like as a qualitative researcher, you go to a neighborhood and you think, oh, this neighborhood is definitely gentrified. Look, it has coffee shops. You know, you have people walking their dogs at midnight, right? So this is definitely gentrified.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:But then when you do a little more research, it's like, well, this might not qualify for the technical definition of gentrification for a lot of reasons. The neighborhood went from 95% Black to 10% Black. The educational level has just completely changed, went from majority without a high school degree to majority with a graduate degree. So now it's like, how do we capture all? Like what do we if we just say this neighborhood is gentrified, maybe it's not capturing all of this difference? So then I started thinking about what really happened in each neighborhood and how I could develop a categorization that made sense, at least qualitatively. And one thing that I came up with was that there are neighborhoods in DC where there was public housing and when you have public housing in a neighborhood and then the neighborhood gets the HOPE VI program, which means the public housing is completely demolished, that's a very quick and significant transformation of the neighborhood. So kind of started with public housing. So, looking at you know, navy Yard is often quoted as one of the most gentrified neighborhoods in the city and in the country. But Navy Yard has just been completely erased, right? So the Navy Yard of the 1980s is just like it's just gone, right, if you're from Navy Yard, if you grew up there, if you grew up in those housing projects, there's no visible landmarks, there's no recognizable landmark. I always say no. I think there's two, there's a church and then there's a few of these like power plant buildings that are still there, kind of used for these industrial chic restaurants. The structure is still there but almost nothing is still there. You still recognize the neighborhood. There's still like a fourth in Kennedy Street. In Navy Yard there's no fifth and I it's completely gone. So that's how I kind of got there to sort of think about these different neighborhoods. So Navy Yard involved new build gentrification right, so the public housing project was completely demolished. There was a stadium built in the neighborhood and then the Navy Yard itself was parts of it were sold off. Some of them were converted to federal buildings and other things. So it's just a completely different landscape.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:And then on the other side of town, where you have these, the neighborhood I was talking about earlier that has, like the brick homes that experienced white flight. The process has been more slow. There aren't big developments in the neighborhood. Instead, what you have is just houses being flipped, kind of one by one. But there's still a small set of actors behind the scenes, like if you walked around the neighborhood about 10 years ago, you would see the same real estate company selling the houses. You would see the houses that were being flipped would have the same exact landscaping. So there's a sort of landscaping company that they were using. They all kind of look the same. You could kind of tell. And then there was an article in Redfin about the neighborhood that said that neighborhood, which is called Petworth in Washington DC, was the most profitable for home flipping in 2016. And the article actually interviewed a real estate agent who said, oh, you know, what you really want to get is grandma's house. He actually said that I was like, wow, okay.
Stephanie Rouse:What's interesting about the description of the slower, house by house by grandma's house type of gentrification is that we read a book earlier this year, I think it was, and I am totally blanking on its title. Gentrification was in its name, but it was talking about early on late 1800s, early 1900s, dc and how that was the type of gentrification it was building. By building it was owners coming in, buying properties, flipping them and slowly gentrifying the neighborhood in a way that you wouldn't see, like in navy yards, where it's very obvious that that took place, but it took longer to see that flip and the changing demographics in the neighborhood. So it's almost like it's happening again 100 years later yeah, and DC people talk about waves of gentrification.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:So you have what happened in the early 20th century, then the seventies and the nineties and now we're in this current very big tidal wave. That does feel qualitatively different from previous waves, I think. I mean, for a lot of people in DC, the shift from it no longer being majority black is significant. I think that happened around 2015 or 2016.
Jennifer Hiatt:Stephanie. The book is the Misunderstood History of Gentrification by Dennis Gale.
Stephanie Rouse:Yes.
Jennifer Hiatt:And he actually was pointing out that Washington DC was the first city most likely to experience gentrification, even ahead of New York City. It's part of his argument. So you actually present a new concept, or it was a new concept to me that you're calling white reclamation in the book. So can you explain to listeners what is white reclamation and why you specifically chose to use the term reclamation as opposed to anything else?
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Yeah, and I know it's definitely a very charged term, but as someone who grew up in a neighborhood that is experiencing white reclamation and also talking to a lot of other people who are experiencing this process, it does very much feel like this neighborhood was. So Petworth in Washington DC was built for white people. There are racially restrictive covenants in the deeds. The developers are very specific. These homes are for white people. And then, with school desegregation, the white families of Petworth decided almost all of them that they didn't want to live there anymore and they left very quickly. I took a close look at the block where my friend Monique lived, because it's all houses. It's an interesting block you can look at. Between like 1954 and, I think, 1958, 75% of people sold their homes right Like it. Just people left very quickly. So it was very much. They were like, yeah, we're done with this neighborhood, we don't want to be here anymore. When they left, you know, over time the neighborhood experienced this disinvestment that I was talking about earlier and then in the early 2000s the new generation decided you know what? Actually that neighborhood is super cool. It has these cool brick homes. It has these wide tree lawns everywhere. It has parks. It's right next to Rock Creek Park. We don't want to live in the suburbs anymore. That's like so 20th century. We want to live in Petworth again. And because their parents had moved to the suburbs and they got a great education, they're now making a lot of money and they can afford to move back home. They can sell their parents' home in the suburbs and buy a home in Petworth, and a lot of Black families that grew up in Petworth can't do that. So it does feel very much like white people didn't want to live here from like 1960 to 2000. And then they did, and guess what they were able to, or lots of them were able to. So that's why I use the term white reclamation, because white people are like yeah, we're coming back, we're reclaiming this space.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Obviously there's a lot of variety in terms of the white people in the neighborhood, but there are many of them who come back, who come to the neighborhood, I should say, and very much kind of take ownership of the space this came up a lot in interviews where they make their own rules, they disparage the long-term residents, they open restaurants that have no sense of the community. There was I think there still is on Kennedy Street just this restaurant that sells this like very boutique cider, so they don't sell anything that the people, the long-term residents of the neighborhood, would even want. So it's sort of a very much like let's forget about the new people, let's make this better. And actually one of my newer neighbors actually said you know, like we shouldn't be ashamed to be gentrifiers, we made this place so much better.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:This place was not, there was nothing here when we moved and I was like actually the woman who lives in the house before you had a very important position at the Kennedy Center, like you're not necessarily, you know, a more important person than she was, but sort of this. There's this myth about the neighborhood that there was nothing here, there was nothing worthwhile, and then now that they're here, it's a better place and I think that's it's an ignoring of the history. So that's why it feels like white reclamation. So and I recognize it's a charged term, but it is a very charged history- yeah, it's all about perspective.
Stephanie Rouse:It's better for them and that's what they want to see in the neighborhood, but it's not necessarily what was there and what was working well for the residents before them. So most of your book is devoted to laying out the evidence of gentrification in DC, but in the last chapter you point out that when you were sharing this work with people, they would always ask well, what's next? What can we do about this? And I'm guessing a lot of our listeners would have the same question. So how do we start to dismantle the racist and capitalist cycles that created Black displacement and dispossession in these communities?
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Yeah, thank you, and I think whenever we ask the question like what do we do? How do we change this? There's so many things we can do to anyone that wants to engage in change. I think it depends on where you're sitting and what interests you. There's many avenues, right.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:So top of mind right now is that it's not going down this path of policing, of intensive policing again. Right, it is very hard for people to understand that more police do not prevent crime. I think the easiest way to understand it is that police show up after a crime has been committed, so they really don't prevent crime. But it seems just so obvious to people and to many people in my neighborhood today particularly, many of the newer residents are like we need more police. Someone broke into my car last night and like how many police would it take for someone not to break into your car? Like no one's going to be sitting there watching your car all night, so like it's not going to work in the way you think it is. I think it's really hard for people to get their brains around that, but I think people that are interested in policing should read up on it and think about that and try and understand the history of what happened before and how it got us to where we are today. So that's one avenue. Another avenue is DC really does have very strong affordable housing programs, and I think you can look at them and see that they have been successful to some extent. They're super limited, though, and they also can be taken away at any point. So I think what DC shows us is that is a lot of examples of cooperative housing, of affordable housing, of public housing, but then also at the limits of those reforms, because they're never enough and they also can be reversed at any time. So the more that I think about the challenges that DC faces.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:The challenge that we face is basically that in the United States, we've created a situation that wealth is very important. In the United States. If you don't have wealth, then if you have a huge medical problem, you could be completely broke tomorrow, right? Wealth is so important for our ability to just survive a medical crisis. If you don't have wealth right now and you want to send your kids to college, you're going to put them in lifelong debt, right, or you put yourself in lifelong debt. So it's just like wealth is very important. So a lot of anxiety about building wealth, and then the main avenue that we have for building wealth is through homeownership. So we have this system where people are expecting to make a lot of money through their home so that they can weather these significant crises that probably will happen at some point, or these significant life challenges. And this system doesn't work very well, right, because there can be a crash in the housing market at any time. It's also very racially unequal Homes in white neighborhoods increase far more quickly than homes in black neighborhoods, so it's a very racially unequal system.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:I think the system of relying on homes for wealth and belief, for just security is a problem in itself. So I think the solution to that is to decommodify housing right, and the way that that looks is a home would become somewhere where you live but that you're not depending on for your nest egg, you're not depending on to borrow money out of to pay for college, and what that would do is it would bring home prices down significantly. Right, if a lot of homes were decommodified, but it would no longer have this feature, and so then we wouldn't be spending 50 to 60% of our income on housing right. So it's a kind of longer term, but I think we can see it. You know a lot of universities have, you know, student housing is decommodified housing faculty A lot of universities have faculty housing. And then some cities are even starting with teacher housing or with government worker housing.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Right In California, if you want to have teachers in Silicon Valley, how much are you going to have to pay them to afford to live there? Like a lot of money, basically, and there's only so much the market will pay teachers. Some cities in California have started housing for teachers, for example. We're getting to a point where housing is a significant crisis in the United States and these small reforms are going to have their significant limits. So we have to think more deeply about decommodification of housing, getting housing outside of the financial market and treating it more like a human right. Like you need a place to live, you got two kids. You need a two bedroom apartment or two bedroom house, as opposed to you have a lot of money, so now you get to live in a super big mansion that maybe you don't need.
Jennifer Hiatt:And as we as individuals work towards that dismantling and policy change, cities are still probably in the best position of power to advance these changes now, right, so what policies should city officials be thinking about to ensure that, as redevelopment does occur, we are not letting that redevelopment tear communities apart?
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:DC has this Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act. So when a building is about to be sold off, the tenants have the opportunity to purchase and DC uses the funds from its housing development programs to fund that. When the tenants do purchase the building, they have the opportunity to make it into a limited equity co-op. That's an example of decommodified housing. So cities have the power to create these tenant opportunity to purchase buildings and then turn the buildings into the limited equity cooperative and then also to think about the long-term when you do that. There's a building on the corner from me that used to be a limited equity cooperative, but now it's not exactly. But the challenge is a lot of seniors live in that building who want to fix income. So there needs to be provisions whereby the fees associated with living there don't increase faster than Social Security.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Putting housing first, thinking about you know, do we want a downtown that's a playground for the wealthy, or do we want a downtown area that reflects the diversity of our city?
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Do we want young people to have to live six in a one-bedroom apartment to be able to afford to live in the city, or do we want them to have the dignity of a private room?
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:And really thinking that through and also thinking through the issue holistically, Because one thing I see in DC is we have a lot of these programs say, okay, you can live here if you make 40% of the area median income. But there isn't a big plan where it's like okay, how many people make 40% of the area median income and where can they live, how many units are available for them? Right? So you can think kind of broadly about how do we house our workers. And this is super important for city officials, because you probably have a target where you live and target only pays so much, right. And so if the target worker cannot afford to live in your city, then you know at some point they're just going to move out farther out of town to somewhere else, right. But the city needs target workers, city needs electricians, city needs bus drivers. So if you need workers, then you need to give them housing. So affordable housing is about it's not just about like, doing the right thing, but it's about continuing to have people make the city function.
Jennifer Hiatt:Always. Our last question on Booked, on Planning. Obviously, we would recommend everybody run out and get your book and read through it because it was a very fascinating read. But what are some books that you would recommend readers check out?
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:If you want to learn more about DC, there's a nice thick tome you can take some time to get through called Chocolate City by Derek Musgrove and Chris Myers-Ashk. It's a nice big tome about DC. You also have Cappuccino City by Derek Hira. Cappuccino City by Derek Hira. I also recommend Brandy Summers' book Black in Place about Washington DC and Sabia Prince's book Gentrification in the Chocolate City. Lots of great books coming out about DC that I highly recommend. Oh, and there's one more book. Ali Martin has a new book called Intersectional Listening. For those of you into the soundscape side of things, it's a very good book thinking about go-go music in DC, which is a genre of music specific to DC, and how gentrification has shaped go-go music and how the city has also been shaped by this music.
Stephanie Rouse:All great recommendations, but thank you, Tanya, again for joining us to talk about your book Before Gentrification the Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza:Thank you, so much, Stephanie and Jennifer. It was great chatting with you and appreciate you engaging with the book. It's super fun.
Jennifer Hiatt:We really hoped you enjoyed this conversation with Tanya Marie Golosh-Boza on her book Before Gentrification the Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap. You can get your own copy through the publisher at the University of California Press or click the link in the show notes to take you directly to our affiliate page. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked, on Planning, Thank you.
