Neighborhood Change

Organizing in AAPI communities has challenges, but their location and composition make them key in the fight against gentrification. Here’s why.

As long as there’s a shortage of transit-rich, walkable neighborhoods, piecemeal solutions to address affordability issues won’t be enough.

Community preference policies have been challenged by those inside and outside of government who fail to see or value the anti-displacement benefits of the policy.

Sustained resistance to gentrification and displacement requires more than antagonism. It requires a community organized around an open, positive alternative vision that has both big ambitions and achievable, intermediary steps.

Community preference policies, which give current residents preference for new affordable housing in their neighborhood, have become increasingly controversial. Supporters say these types of policies are a crucial way to fight displacement, but fair housing advocates argue that the policies are exclusionary. Different cities are balancing these two concerns in different ways.

The legacy of racist housing policy shapes—and disempowers—Black, largely urban, neighborhoods to this day, and can be seen in places like the Northside neighborhood of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Strategies for turning the conversation back to places where gentrification is not only *not* present, but not impending.

“Drop dead” wasn’t an acceptable answer to urban decay in the 1970s. And it isn’t the right answer for struggling rural areas today.

Where are “naturally-occurring” mixed income neighborhoods, how do we support them, and how do we use them as examples to model?

What does the future hold for urban Black middle and working class neighborhoods in cities, and is there any way to shape it?

A conversation with an NCRC senior research analyst about the organization’s report on gentrification, what its findings show and don’t show, and what the policy implications might be.

“We could use some gentrification here.” Let’s never say this—we must refrain from debating the long-term likelihood of gentrification in distressed places.