[Tracy Levick]

Gentrification is a less violent yet still significant form of trespassing whose effects and even existence are often denied. Some argue that if privileged (often white) people move to a neighborhood mostly populated by a minority racial group, like an enclave or ghetto, the area will become more diverse, and the original inhabitants may enjoy better living conditions which people of political influence often bring: parks, grocery stores, safer streets, etc. But the reality is that gentrification encourages landlords to raise the prices of rent, trying to convince a wealthy new clientele that these urban areas are trendy, hip, and ripe for cultural appropriation. The existing culture eventually decays as buildings and structures are remodeled to further attract more prosperous residents. Meanwhile, exorbitantly high prices drive out the original population, contributing more to the current housing crisis.

Source: Thom Quine, 2015. https://medium.com/for-whom-cities-grow/gentrification-what-does-the-term-mean-part-1-7be9ae3616a

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[Tracy Levick]

This graphic shows the size of major spills form the Dakota Access Pipeline and adjoining Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline in 2017. When protesters attempted to block construction of the pipelines, citing concerns of air and water pollution, damage to Native land, and risk of spillage, they were shut down and arrested. Now, land and lives are compromised with endless water and soil contamination. It is a harrowing thought that the federal government will punish Americans for exercising their rights and standing up for their livelihoods, just to humor special interests they’ve struck deals with.

Source: The Intercept, https://www.openinvest.co/blog/where-is-the-dapl-now/

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[Tracy Levick]

Love Canal is a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York whose residents mysteriously began falling ill in the mid-1970s. Abnormalities appeared in children, and women suffered a high rate of miscarriages. In 1978, reporter Michael Brown traced this phenomenon to the Hooker Chemical Company using the eponymous canal as a toxic waste dump for over two decades. The community was outraged, and children took to the streets, as shown in the photo. The federal government eventually responded by passing the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act in 1980, essentially delegating liability (ideally to the responsible parties) for the cost of remedying environmental disasters.

The homeowners and most vocal activists of Love Canal were predominantly white and middle-class, hinting at the unusually quick action taken by the government and resulting legislation. Even so, the mostly black renters in the community were marginalized by the more mainstream efforts. They organized the Concerned Love Canal Renters Association in response but felt as though their concerns were undercut by or conflicted with those of the white homeowners.

Photo: Mark Kitchell, from A Fierce Green Fire, 2013: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/03/15/jan-wahl-movie-review-a-fierce-green-fire/

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[Tracy Levick]

The environmental injustices against minority communities in New Orleans did not stop after Hurricane Katrina, or in the decade after Bush’s presidency ended. This picture is from a council meeting in which the city approved the construction of a natural gas power plant in New Orleans East, where mainly African-American and Vietnamese-American residents live. As the source article mentions, this neighborhood was “one of the hardest hit” and “the last to recover” from the hurricane. Residents feel, and rightly so, that their community is treated like an isolated dump where the city leaves all of its heavy pollutors.

Source: https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/03/13/new-orleans-approves-entergy-natural-gas-plant-environmental-racism-climate-change, March 2018

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[Tracy Levick]

On June 14, 2017 the Grenfell Tower apartment complex in West London caught on fire, causing over seventy deaths and injuries each. While the fire itself is thought to have been started by a malfunctioning freezer, its rapid spread was due in part to the building’s exterior cladding, which had been added the year prior to improve its physical appearance. The building also had no sprinklers, and many cavity barriers were installed incorrectly. Additionally, the one stairwell situated inside the tower was clogged with litter and old mattresses, making evacuation difficult.

The North Kensington neighborhood is notoriously wealthy, yet the owners of the mostly working-class complex chose not to use fire-resistant cladding in order to save money. Grenfell Tower residents had criticized the landlords and renovation contractors for years, highlighting the neglect for health and safety standards. The management company’s and neighborhood’s refusal to enforce safe living conditions directly led to the injury and death of over 140 low-income people who had been forced into substandard homes.

Photo by Natalie Oxford, https://twitter.com/Natalie_Oxford/status/875001457476608001

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[Tracy Levick]

After the United States abolished slavery, the government famously promised each newly freed family “forty acres and a mule.” But with systems of racism and discrimination still in place, black Americans still struggled to make ends meet. Segregated neighborhoods forced them into less-than-favorable living situations. Many turned to sharecropping, a system in which white landlords employed black workers to farm their land and pay their rent in yields. This photo by Dorothea Lange depicts a sharecropper, supposedly with said mule, working tirelessly. With the power that landlords held over their tenants, sharecropping was effectively little better than slavery.

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[Tracy Levick]

The Why‘s documentary Park Avenue introduced me to the concept of structural wealth and racial inequality. The iconic New York street runs through the richest neighborhood in the city as well as the South Bronx, an urban ghetto and “the poorest congressional district in the country,” as nearly forty percent of residents live below the poverty line. This is a view from the film of the South Bronx side, a bleak, dilapidated cityscape. The high unemployment rate causes long lines at the food pantry which cannot serve everyone who needs it, and neglected public schools fail to provide children with the same opportunities to obtain a higher education. Additionally, Majora Carter lists in her TED talk the environmental facilities polluting the neighborhood: “a sewage treatment pelletizing plant, a sewage sludge plant, four power plants,” and “the world’s largest food distribution center.” While Upper East Side residents continue perpetrating “white-collar” crimes, they effectively suppress the people north of the Harlem River, withholding from them the freedom to acquire better living conditions and a political voice.

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[Tracy Levick]

This map depicts the segregated neighborhoods in the Greater New Orleans area. The discriminatory practice of “redlining,” designating specific spaces as “dangerous” or “undesirable,” is clear. Green areas are “best,” while red areas are marked “hazardous.” It is no coincidence that the latter consist of primarily Black residents. The discrimination does not stop at merely separating communities of color; banks would use these maps to determine which residents deserved home mortgages. To Black neighborhoods, they made the cost of home loans preventatively high so that they could not afford to buy houses in predominantly White suburbs. This act de facto segregated many major cities in addition to New Orleans, such as Philadelphia and Chicago. Even though redlining is illegal today, the difficulties that communities of color have faced moving to safer, less polluted neighborhoods have essentially trapped them in the red zones without access to better education, food, water, and air.

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/19/498536077/interactive-redlining-map-zooms-in-on-americas-history-of-discrimination, W.M. E. Boesch, Date unknown

• This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by Tracy Levick.

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