"We Just Want a Place to Hang Out": Students' Experiences of Gentrification in Washington, DC

• In Event: Resisting Policies of Displacement and Dispossession in Educational Spaces

Abstract

Policies to promote gentrification may have significant and unintended impacts on local youth. Nevertheless, most examinations of gentrification’s effects on local youth talk about them, rather than to them (Quarles & Butler, 2018). This study draws on critical race spatial analysis (CRSA), recent scholarship elevating local youths’ perspectives (Kinloch, 2010; Kitchin, 1994), and data from a participatory mapping project with 30 Black, public high school students in Washington, D.C. to explore how local youth recognize, make sense of, and experience gentrification in their neighborhoods and schools. These local youth are ‘border crossers’ regularly moving between revitalized and underresourced areas, and, thus well appointed to discuss the District's spatial injustices that are variegated by class and race.

Author

• Bradley Quarles, University of Maryland College Park/WestED