To understand the emotion of those impacted by gentrification and its weapons of rising housing costs and eviction practices;
to understand why communities impacted by gentrification are concentrated by race/ethnicity – especially those in and around environmentally impacted geographies (i.e. semi-industrial zones before artist live-work spaces and lofts were hip and actual toxic industries were vibrant and polluting);
to understand dis-connected workers – those not even looking for work, and those that tried to take advantage of public education but where local taxes were so low these schools tried to make the best with inexperience teachers, outdated text books, limited extra curricular activities to build character;
to understand embodied anger generated when one is tied to place not by choice by by means of social control and public policy;
we must understand institutional racist biases in our nation’s housing policy instituted since the post-Reconstruction period after the Civil War.
Here is one link to get started in learning:https://www.mappingprejudice.org/what-are-covenants/
Learn more on racial segregation in Los Angeles – recommended books include:
L.A. City Limits – African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present by Josh Sides
Fire This Time – The Watts Uprising and the 1960’s by Gerald Horne
Bound for Freedom – Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America by Douglas Flamming
Right Out of California – the 1930’s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism by Kathryn Olmsted
Alisa's thoughts on Beloved Communities 