Current Projects
Black Community Building: Public Housing Reform and the Promise of an Alternative Model to Mixed Income Neighborhoods
(Under contract with Georgetown University Press)
Studies of the consequences for displaced public housing residents who moved to mixed-income neighborhoods indicate that mixed-income housing as a solution to poverty is a policy failure on the grounds that it pushes poverty to other areas within cities and doesn’t largely produce the outcomes alleged by its proponents. Despite this fact, the devotion among policymakers and others remains commonplace. My first book argues that mixed-income housing creation as urban social policy must be abandoned because it serves as a vehicle of death for Black communities in high-poverty neighborhoods. It offers an alternative conceptual model of community building—“Black urbanism”—that grounds the well-being of Black communities in high-poverty neighborhoods targeted for capital reinvestment vis-a-vis reflection on the transformation of one historically Black neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
Religion Disrupted: The Impact of Gentrification on Black Churches in Oakland, CA.
Gentrification has been a long-studied problem in U.S. cities since the mid-twentieth century. Scholars have given much attention to the impact of gentrification on inner-city neighborhoods, particularly attending to the economic evolution of dilapidated neighborhoods as well as the physical displacement and social and political disenfranchisement of poor and working-class (predominantly Black) residents. While various cities including Washington, D.C., Nashville, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and Oakland, among many others, have been the focus of gentrification interrogating neighborhood change writ large, little attention has been given to the impact of gentrification on faith-based congregations. Specifically, what impact does gentrification have on Black churches in largely Black cities? This research project uses a case study approach to analyze the impact of gentrification on Black congregations in Oakland, CA.
At the Intersection of Community and Capital(ism): Rethinking ‘Beloved Community’ in Black Thought
Derived from American philosopher Josiah Royce and popularized by Martin Luther King Jr., “beloved community” is a popular concept in some streams of Black thought to describe a morally ideal society free from the ills of racism, white supremacy, and capitalist imperialism. Thinkers like King, Howard Thurman, Robert M. Franklin, and Lewis Baldwin, among others, have grappled with its meaning and symbolism across time. This essay reviews and analyzes constructions of beloved community in Black thought. It draws on insights from critical urban theory to consider the relationship between community and capital and considers how community has historically been constituted in and through capital in order to rethink the utility of Beloved Community as a compelling moral vision for racial and socio-economic equity in the contemporary U.S.
Research Affiliations
