Community Displacement: Navigating Community and School Transitions

• In Event: 21.034 - Neighborhood Gentrification and Schools: Implications for Equity and Diversity

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ways in which longtime traditional resident families experience and navigate community displacement from neighborhoods and schools due to gentrification.

This research employed a community displacement framework (Davidson, 2008) to assess the impacts of displacement on traditional resident families within a gentrifying community and school in East Austin, Texas. Traditional resident families experience gentrification’s changes to communities and schools similarly, often resulting in the disappearance of the historical community (Howell, 2018; Chernoff, 1980). This research focuses on the shared experiences of families who seek affordable alternatives elsewhere. Counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) revealed the power structures that affect race and class oppression through gentrification.

Qualitative case study methodology was used to document and reflect upon the ways traditional resident families navigate community displacement when families become socially, culturally, and physically removed from the community due to struggles with affordability. Semi-structured interviews of five parents from East Austin took place. These included four Mexican Immigrant parents who were interviewed in Spanish, and one longtime Anglo resident mother. Additionally, school demographic enrollment changes and document analysis of school facility improvement planning were used to frame the context in which the gentrification of the community, and subsequently the school, impacts traditional resident families.
Findings from this research indicate that, as the community becomes increasingly less affordable, traditional resident families were compelled to react and to navigate the changes that came with increasing property values. As the community transitioned, traditional resident families first experienced social displacement (Chernoff, 1980, Betancur, 2002) making it ever more difficult to remain in community as other longtime community residents departed. Over time, traditional resident families left the community for more affordable options in outlying suburbs and towns resulting ultimately in the physical displacement of the longtime community itself.

Findings also indicate that social displacement occurred as social networks dissolved. In the case of Mexican immigrant control of the school’s Parent Teacher Association PTA, Mexican immigrant mothers not only stopped assuming leaderships rolls, these mothers stopped attending altogether as predominately White parents took over the PTA.

Additionally, children experienced a decline in school quality as they moved away from Austin schools and transitioned to outlying school districts less equipped to support their academic needs. Parents expressed high satisfaction with the degree of quality the bilingual teachers and the program their school had implemented, but consequently expressed frustration with program implantation at the schools where their children had enrolled after the move lamenting, “they said it was a bilingual program, but it was only in name.”

This research departs significantly from the gentrification and school’s literature that so often reflects the experiences of middle-class families as these families come to remake the community and school. This research, alternatively, focuses on the lived-experiences of longtime resident families providing a venue for the counter-narrative expression of their stories and their experiences with a particular focus on the ways in which Mexican immigrant parents experience and navigate these transitions.

Author

• Gregory Brian Pulte, The University of Texas at Austin