Toward Collaborative Multisector Resistance: Black Community-based Educational Spaces Fighting Against Gentrification and Displacement

• In Event: Resistance to Gentrification and Housing Insecurity: Centering the Situated Knowledge of Youth, Parents, and Community-Based Educational Spaces

Abstract

Gentrification and its subsequent displacement of those living in poverty and racially minoritized communities have sparked battles over school choice, school belonging, and the right to space (Davis & Oakley, 2013). However, we need to learn more about how gentrification and neoliberal education restructuring (Lipman, 2011) contribute to the displacement and weakening of community-based educational spaces (CBES) (e.g., afterschool programs, youth centers, etc.) and make the lives of youth workers more precarious. The Black Collective - a powerful force in uniting community-based youth-serving, family-serving, and health-care-based organizations, was created as a form of resistance and a strategy to sustain Black neighborhoods. This collective ensures Black neighborhoods can withstand gentrification and education restructuring. This paper asks: How and in what ways do gentrification, school restructuring, and housing insecurity inform youth workers’ professional stability? How do youth workers make sense of collaborative multisector community-based activism to resist gentrification and housing insecurity?

Theoretical Frameworks
This paper draws on theorizations of antiblackness and racial capitalism to examine how change within cities shapes CBES. These “changes” are deliberate forms of anti-Blackness leading to well-documented suffering: redlining, failed school desegregation efforts, massive school closures in predominantly Black cities, and systemic underemployment are key examples (Diamond, 2018; Dumas & ross, 2018). The corporate takeover of public education (Jenkins, 2020), gentrification (Freeman, 2011; Rucks-Ahidiana, 2021), and economic (re)development and (re)structuring always entail a racialization that cannot be disconnected from capitalism (Melamed, 2015; Robinson, 2000). To fully understand this process, a lens of racial capitalism and anti-Blackness helps to identify the mechanisms of social control and displacement experienced by Black communities in urban settings.

Research Design
This paper comes from a larger multi-city and multi-organizational critical qualitative analysis of city change to interrogate how CBES and youth workers understand and respond to city change. It focuses on one city and the creation of a “Black Collective” - a collaboration between several community-based nonprofit organizations as a response to gentrification and housing insecurity. Through 60 to 90-minute interviews with leaders of this collective and observations of strategy meetings, this paper captures their perspectives and strategic moves to sustain neighborhood and educational autonomy.

Findings and Significance
Findings reveal that parents are displaced due to gentrification and are forced to live hours away from their jobs, leading to long commutes and insufficient rest for students. Aligned with growing work on the precarious lives of youth workers (Author 1., 2024; Vasudevan, 2019), findings also show that youth workers are housing insecure. Finally, findings show that a collaborative and multisector community-based resistance among school and community-based education spaces, community-health partners, employment, and housing activists generates a more sustainable fight against the threat of gentrification and housing insecurity. Findings from this paper can help document youth workers’ strategies of collaborative and multisector resistance to gentrification and perhaps lead to similar strategies for cities across the country undergoing gentrification. At the policy level, findings from this work can enrich local and national education and political discourse about the precarity of youth work(ers) and those fighting displacement.

Authors

• Bianca Jontae Baldridge, Harvard University

• Moisés Gabriel Contreras, Harvard University

• Zora Haque, Harvard University

• Woohee Kim, Harvard University

• Georgina Rivers, Harvard University

• Michelle Amponsah, Harvard University

• Nora Ngo Mitchell, Harvard University