Gentrification
What is it?
Gentrification is the process by which governments and corporations make changes to a neighborhood (through new luxury developments, for instance) that make the area unaffordable for long-time residents and incentivize newer, richer (often whiter) residents to move in. Gentrification displaces long-time residents and can change the demographic makeup of the neighborhood.
Why do I care?
UChicago has intentionally displaced low-income and Black communities for decades. UChicago was founded with money made from the exploitation of Black enslaved people – Stephen Douglas (yes, that Stephen Douglas) bought the land for the original UChicago campus with money from his wife’s plantation. UChicago still avoids its responsibility for reparations to this day. In the 1930s and ‘40s, the University sponsored racially restrictive covenants and then defended them in court when they were legally challenged. In the ’50s, the University played a key role in one of the nation’s first urban renewal projects, which systemically pushed low-income and Black residents out of Hyde Park and Kenwood. Urban renewal displaced over 40% of lower income Black families out of the neighborhood. In the past few years, the University advocated for the Obama Presidential Center to be built on the South Side, causing significant rent increases that threaten to displace long-time residents. Today, the University continues to gentrify neighborhoods around campus by buying up land in Woodlawn, breaking an agreement it has previously made with The Woodlawn Organization to not expand past 60th St. The University owns property all over the South Side with no transparency in its land holdings, privately acting as a major landlord and further displacing Black working class residents. The violence of UChicago’s gentrification is clear and tangible.
Just this summer, Christiana Powell, a 63 year old, third-generation Woodlawn resident whose family was one of the first Black families in Woodlawn, was illegally evicted from her home after her loan was changed without her knowledge and her mortgage and property taxes increased dramatically. When organizers showed up to defend her home, police, including UCPD, were deployed to aggress them, with as many as 60 cops pushing, yelling at, and threatening the arrest of just 15 protestors. Community members stayed all day to help move Christiana’s belongings – which the police violently took out of her house and threw out of her windows – reminding us of what community care looks like.
What we can do
The CBA (Community Benefits Agreement) Coalition is a grassroots initiative based out of Woodlawn, South Shore and Kenwood-Oakland that is working to combat gentrification in these neighborhoods. The CBA Coalition is working to pass affordable housing policies that prevent displacement in South Shore. In 2020, the initiative succeeded in getting such policies passed in Woodlawn.
UChicago Against Displacement (UCAD) is the student arm of the Coalition. UCAD works to hold UChicago accountable for its history of gentrification and organizes for the University to pay reparations to fund affordable housing and education on the South Side.
@ucad.cba
@notmewe
