The Washington Informer, March 27th, 2019: EDITORIAL: ‘Cultural Displacement’ Means D.C.’s Poorer Blacks are Packing Up with Nowhere to Go
The cost of housing gobbles up an average of 30 percent of a family’s monthly gross income — even more if you live in places like New York City or Los Angeles. But for some, that average hovers closer to almost 50 percent — a situation which the federal government describes as “severely cost burdened.”
As for longtime native Washingtonians, particularly low-income African Americans, they’re feeling the crunch to such an extent that over the past two decades, they’ve had little or no choice but to abandon the communities that they, their parents, even their grandparents, once fondly called “home” — desperately searching for alternative cities with housing that they can afford.
In fact, according to a new report conducted by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), “Shifting Neighborhoods: Gentrification and Cultural Displacement in American Cities,” the District now has the highest percentage of gentrified neighborhoods in the nation. The study reveals that more than 20,000 Black residents were displaced from low-income neighborhoods from 2000 to 2013 in D.C. which has the highest “intensity” of gentrification of any U.S. city and ranks third highest of U.S. neighborhoods that have been transformed.
Further details, according to Jason Richardson, who serves as director for NCRC and who shared the results earlier this week on the Kojo Nnamdi Show, gentrification leads to cultural displacement — that is, “when the tastes, norms and desires of newcomers supplant and replace those of the incumbent residents.”
These newcomers, the research shows, were mostly affluent whites as nearly 111,000 Blacks and more than 24,000 Hispanics, nationwide, moved out of gentrifying neighborhoods in former urban strongholds for Black and brown citizens in cities that also include Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore and San Diego.
