Before Gentrification The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap

"Tanya Maria Golash-Boza weaves personal memory, interviews, and administrative and archival data to uncover the capitalist and carceral systems that caused the downward mobility of striving Black families in Washington, DC. Their losses are the gains of today's gentrifiers. Before Gentrification offers a sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms of racial inequality and represents sociological imagination at its best."—Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City

"Before Gentrification is an urgent, subtle, insightful, and critically important contribution. Backed by rich data and sophisticated theory, Golash-Boza persuasively demonstrates how the gentrification of 'Chocolate City' does not occur in isolation, but has been animated by a wave of policies that abandoned the vulnerable through criminalization and economic deprivation. Through this original and well-written text, we are better equipped to understand, critique, and—just possibly—resist the contradictions and consequences of neoliberalism and racial capitalism."—Marc Lamont Hill, coauthor of Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

"Before Gentrification tells the overlooked narrative of how the carceral state and gentrified city are connected. Policies of Black community dispossession, disinvestment, and violent police surveillance set the stage for neighborhood reinvestment and racially uneven wealth accumulation. This stark story is told powerfully through intergenerational experiences of middle-class and low-income African American families struggling to survive and thrive in a capitalist system filled with destructive discriminatory structures. This is a must-read for those interested in understanding how anti-Black policy decisions drive mass incarceration, gentrification, and dire racial inequality in Washington, DC, and throughout our nation."—Derek Hyra, author of Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City

"Blending the sharp insights of a top sociologist and the passion of a proud local, Golash-Boza exposes the myriad ways that mass incarceration scars Black communities, undercuts the foundation of intergenerational mobility, and renders neighborhoods ripe for expropriation."—Forrest Stuart, author of Down, Out, and Under Arrest

"Before Gentrification describes in vivid, gut-wrenching, and often heartbreaking detail how the American dream of homeownership in Washington, DC, became an African American nightmare of dispossession, displacement, and disinvestment. Golash-Boza demonstrates that in the nation's capital, gentrification has meant white racial violence, with state-sponsored, anti-Black carceral policies as its disturbing underside. Based on moving oral testimonies and impressive archival research, Before Gentrification is a critical addition to recent studies of capitalism and racism that should be urgently read by both scholars and policy makers—and anyone committed to racial justice and the elimination of the racial wealth gap."—Peter James Hudson, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History, UCLA

Draws a direct line between redlining, incarceration, and gentrification in an American city.

This book shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in Washington, DC. In Before Gentrification, Tanya Maria Golash-Boza tracks the cycles of state abandonment and punishment that have shaped the city, revealing how policies and policing work to displace and decimate the Black middle class.

Through the stories of those who have lost their homes and livelihoods, Golash-Boza explores how DC came to be the nation's "murder capital" and incarceration capital, and why it is now a haven for wealthy White people. This troubling history makes clear that the choice to use prisons and policing to solve problems faced by Black communities in the twentieth century—instead of investing in schools, community centers, social services, health care, and violence prevention—is what made gentrification possible in the twenty-first. Before Gentrification unveils a pattern of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in DC that has implications for all US cities.