The Neighborhood Story Project: Keeping More Than Our Homes

By

Amie Thurber

Dissertation

Submitted to the Faculty of the

Graduate School of Vanderbilt University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

Community Research and Action

May 11, 2018

Nashville, Tennessee

Approved:
Sara Safransky, Ph.D.

Janet Finn, Ph.D.

James Fraser, Ph.D.

Paul Speer, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2018 by Amie Thurber
All Rights Reserved

ii
 To Lauren, Abigail and Ella (and of course Ben, Shae, Annabelle and Solomon), who

uprooted yourselves to accompany me on this journey, and kept me grounded and whole

along the way.

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the investment of the 28

community members who joined the Neighborhood Story Project; their commitment to

their neighborhoods remains a source of inspiration. I am also grateful to the organizational

partners on the projects: the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Association, Edgehill United

Methodist Church, Homes for All Nashville, Organized Neighbors of Edgehill, Stratford

STEM High School, Martha O’Bryan Center, and the Rosebank Neighbors Association.

The Neighborhood Story Project pilot projects were made possible by generous financial

support from Humanities Tennessee—which also funded the development of a

Neighborhood Story Project Facilitation Guide and is scaling the initiative statewide—as

well as the Metropolitan Nashville Arts Commission, and the Curb Center for Art,

Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.

I am deeply appreciative of members of my Dissertation Committee, who have

served as mentors and thinking partners throughout this project. Each of you has

contributed significantly to my intellectual, professional, and human development. I am also

grateful to the collaborating researchers on this project—Jyoti Gupta, Sara Eccleston and

Joseph Gutierrez—whose efforts and insights strengthened the projects and this study.

Most importantly, I am indebted to the unwavering support and accompaniment

from my family and friends. I could not have done this without your encouragement,

editing, conversation, meals together, dog walks, coffee breaks, breakfast burritos, bad

movies, and occasional non-academic adventures.

You each have made me a better scholar, neighbor, and human.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ............................................................................................................... iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.......................................................................................... ivii
LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................... vii
LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................... viii
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 1. SITUATING THE NEIGHBORHOOD STORY PROJECT ..................... 6
The Case for a More Than Material Framework ............................................................ 6
The Need for Expanded Publicly-Engaged Scholarship in Gentrifying Neighborhoods .. 18
Intervention Design ..................................................................................................... 25
CHAPTER 2. METHODOLOGY AND CONTEXT .................................................... 45
Methodology .............................................................................................................. 46
Context: Welcome to the ‘It City’ ................................................................................ 59
CHAPTER 3. TRACING THE THREE PROJECTS .................................................... 66
Cleveland Park ............................................................................................................ 67
Edgehill ...................................................................................................................... 78
Stratford ..................................................................................................................... 86
Theorizing gentrification ............................................................................................. 94
CHAPTER 4. OUTCOME FINDINGS ....................................................................... 104
Place Attachment ....................................................................................................... 105
Social Ties ................................................................................................................. 112
Civic Action............................................................................................................... 113
Unintended Outcomes ............................................................................................... 119
Synthesizing Outcomes and Limitations ..................................................................... 124
CHAPTER 5. PROCESS FINDINGS .......................................................................... 127
A Learning Environment............................................................................................ 128
A Caring Environment ............................................................................................... 135
An Empowering Environment .................................................................................... 140
Facilitation Challenges ............................................................................................... 145
Relationships of Reciprocity ....................................................................................... 159
Synthesizing Process Findings .................................................................................... 162

v
CHAPTER 6. IMPLICATIONS FOR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT .................... 165
A Practice Model for Group Work in Gentrifying Neighborhoods ............................... 168
An Expanded Role for Community Development ....................................................... 173
The Place of Policymakers.......................................................................................... 182
A Continued Role for Research .................................................................................. 186
CHAPTER 7. RE-THEORIZING GENTRIFICATION ............................................... 188
Who Theorizes Gentrification’s Effects? ..................................................................... 189
The Multiple Dimensions of Neighborhoods ............................................................... 192
EPILOGUE .................................................................................................................. 212
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................. 216
Appendix A. National policy reports on gentrification: Identified harms and recommended
strategies ....................................................................................................................... 235
Appendix B. Neighborhood Story Project: Curriculum summary .................................... 236
Appendix C. Focus group guide ..................................................................................... 237
Appendix D. Interview guide ......................................................................................... 238
Appendix E. Codebook ................................................................................................. 239
Appendix F. Sources and processing of geographic and demographic data ...................... 252
Appendix G. Summary of studies included in review ...................................................... 254

vi
 LIST OF TABLES

Table Page
1. Summary of participant demographics by race, gender and age ......................................... 51
2. Summary of participant demographics by housing type and tenure ................................... 51
3. Data collected .......................................................................................................................... 53

vii
 LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1. Three phases of the Neighborhood Story Project.......................................................... 27
2.Theoretical foundation of the Neighborhood Story Project............................................ 30
3. Design roots by phase of project .................................................................................. 42
4. Three neighborhood projects nested within study ......................................................... 45
5. Two moments in time: HOLC map of Nashville, and the racial dot map ...................... 62
6. Changing housing values (1999-2014) and racial demographics (2000-2010) ................. 66
7. Members of the Cleveland Park Story Project .............................................................. 72
8. Sample posters from exhibition ................................................................................... 75
9.Cleveland Park neighbor with stone ............................................................................. 77
10. Edgehill Story Project team meeting .......................................................................... 82
11. Excerpt from Edgehill Story Project zoning comic strip .............................................. 84
12. Members of the Edgehill Story Project following their event ....................................... 85
13. Stratford Story Project Team at early screening .......................................................... 93
14.Summary of participant outcomes ............................................................................. 105
15. Relationship of neighborhood demographics to enrollment demographics ................. 148
16. A group-work practice model in gentrifying neighborhoods ....................................... 169
17. Multiple dimensions of neighborhoods ..................................................................... 193
18. Mapping possible consequences of gentrification ...................................................... 206

viii
 INTRODUCTION
The first time I met Larry, he walked me out of his neighborhood association

meeting and into the crisp December evening to point out the street light at the edge of the

parking lot. “I was born under that lamppost,” he told me. That was years before the

cinderblock community center was built on this land; years before the highway displaced

1000 families and disconnected Cleveland Park from the surrounding neighborhood; years

before white flight, city disinvestment, rising poverty, drugs and gangs hit the area; and

years before the recent gentrification of this half-mile neighborhood conveniently located

just minutes from downtown Nashville. And though the home where Larry was born is no

longer standing, this 60-year-old African American man has lived within five blocks of this

lamppost his entire life.

A few months later, as Larry and his neighbors began working on the Neighborhood

Story Project, he reflected on the changing ways people in Cleveland Park relate to their

homes, neighbors and neighborhood:

when you hear people much older than me speak of home, home was home,

home wasn’t an investment…It’s like roots gripped into the ground, and a

tornado could not move them. Speed didn’t matter to them, only home did.

So, I don’t know why this is mousing around in my head, but people

communicate differently now because - (snapping his fingers six quick times) -

they can’t, they can’t slow down enough to absorb, and when you can’t

absorb, you can’t appreciate…When, these neighborhoods…people used to

have funerals in these houses, as well as weddings. There were births, and

there were deaths in these neighborhoods. Now, psheww...

1
Larry is concerned. He may be concerned, in part, with being able to afford to keep his

home. Between 2002 and 2016, property values increased 110% in Cleveland Park

(compared to a 54% increase in housing values county wide), and large numbers of low-

income renters and fixed-income homeowners have already been priced out by rising rents

and property taxes. But he is also concerned about the relationships he and his neighbors

have to their homes, to their neighborhood, and to one another. He is concerned about an

atrophied sense of care and community, the loss of historic knowledge, and a depleted

investment in the collective future of the neighborhood.

Having spent the last few years listening to residents of Nashville’s gentrifying

neighborhoods, I know Larry is not alone. In June of 2013, my family and I packed up a life

we loved in Missoula, Montana, and drove to Nashville, Tennessee so that I could begin

doctoral study at Vanderbilt University. Trading hiking trails for highways, crisp mountain

air for sweltering summer heat, a mountain-ridged horizon for a skyline dotted with cranes,

the transition was stark and disjointing. Grieving the loss of a beloved place and cherished

people I had willingly removed us from, I tried to get my bearings in the place we had

landed. And as I rode my bike through my new neighborhood, attended community

meetings, and talked to people about their city, I found that many Nashvillians were

grieving the loss of a place and people too, only they hadn’t moved. Nashville was

changing, adding people and jobs at a record setting pace. Entire neighborhoods were being

rebranded and rebuilt to attract a wealthier, younger, and whiter market; and businesses

were moving in to serve these new residents. More times than I can count, people waved

their hands desperately at the ever-encroaching new construction and asked, “who is this

2
being built for?” And while many people laud the development for functioning as an

economic engine, others are suffering its consequences.

Over the last four years, I have immersed myself in the study of gentrification,

grappling with theoretical perspectives on social and spatial inequities in the classroom

while working alongside residents, city-wide organizing groups, and policy-makers

addressing gentrification on the ground. Concurrently, having moved my white family into

one of Nashville’s rapidly changing neighborhoods, I have wrestled with my own

complicity in gentrification, and sought ways to ethically engage in my neighborhood and

with my neighbors. Through this study, research, professional and personal engagement, I

became increasingly troubled that those who were most directly affected by the rapid

economic and demographic changes in Nashville have been the least systematically

involved both in defining the problems they were experiencing and imagining possible

solutions. Further, as I listened to residents who were concerned about the rapid changes in

their neighborhoods, it seemed that existing theories of gentrification fell short of speaking to

the fullness of their lived experience, and that current responses to gentrification were failing

to address their worries. Overwhelmingly, the research, policy, and community

development conversations seemed to restrict spaces of agency to policymakers and power

brokers at the city, state, and federal levels, while discourse concerning the consequences of

gentrification is reduced to a loss of affordable housing.

There is no doubt that many people want to keep their homes. But what else might

we learn from residents of gentrifying neighborhoods? How do they experience the

transformation of their communities? What do they want to see happening in their

neighborhoods? What kinds of changes are within their spheres of influence? And, for those

3
of us studying and working in gentrifying neighborhoods, how might we reimagine research

as a process for residents to co-produce knowledge about, and take action in, the places they

call home?

I designed the Neighborhood Story Project to answer these questions. Between

February and November, 2016, I worked with small groups of residents in three gentrifying

Nashville neighborhoods. Meeting together over 12-weeks, residents in each group

identified guiding research questions about their neighborhood, collected and analyzed data,

and shared what they learned through culminating community-wide events. Studying our

work together, I wanted to understand what the Neighborhood Story Project did to, for, and

with project participants, and how insights from this project might be beneficial to other

communities grappling with similar social/spatial transformations.

It is my hope that this text may help people working in neighborhoods facilitate

and/or amplify residents’ abilities to affect desired change in their communities. As

someone working in community practice—the division of social work focused on changing

conditions of inequality, often at the neighborhood level—I am particularly interested in

contributing to a theory of practice for intervening in gentrifying neighborhoods. However,

findings from this study may be relevant more broadly to people working in community

psychology, community development, and community organizing, as well as for neighbors

serving as formal and informal leaders in their communities.

Although my most urgent interest is in leveraging community practice to improve

neighborhood level well-being, practice is deeply entangled with theory, research, and

policy. As such, this project is both shaped by and speaks back to how gentrification has

been theorized, researched, and responded to with policy. Ultimately, this work has two
4
goals: first, to offer a conceptual framework that considers the more than material dimensions

of gentrification (Thurber, in press), that is, consequences of gentrification that include, but

are not limited to, a loss of housing; and second, to provide a practice model that might

support people like Larry in places like Cleveland Park to keep more than just their homes.

Chapter 1 situates this study, making the case for a broadened conceptual space to

theorize gentrification’s causes and consequences, and then exploring the need for publicly

engaged scholarship and action that is grounded in residents’ lived experiences. Chapter 1

closes with a description of the Neighborhood Story Project as an alternative intervention in

gentrifying neighborhoods. Chapter 2 describes the design of the study, and situates the

study geographically within the City of Nashville. Chapter 3 introduce the neighborhood

settings where the Neighborhood Story Project occurred, and traces each project’s

trajectory. Chapters 4 and 5 present study findings related to participant outcomes, and the

design elements that supported and constrained those outcomes, respectively. The final

chapters consider the implications of this study, with Chapter 6 exploring implications for

community development practice, policymaking, and continued research, and Chapter 7

considering contributions to gentrification theorizing. On the whole, this text hopes to

reimagine what engaged scholarship can do for and with communities undergoing rapid

demographic change, and how it might help all of us live into more just ways of being in

community together.

5
 CHAPTER 1. SITUATING THE NEIGHBORHOOD STORY PROJECT

How society responds to social problems is intimately tied to how its members

understand the causes and consequences of those problems, and where members see

themselves positioned to make change. As such, this chapter situates The Neighborhood

Story Project theoretically and disciplinarily. First, tracing some of the prominent strands of

gentrification theorizing, the chapter explores the lineage of the material focus of

gentrification, and the need for a more than material framework that more fully accounts for

gentrification’s harms. Second, the chapter examines the need for expanded publicly-

engaged scholarship in gentrifying neighborhoods, and the distinct contributions

community practitioners are positioned to make in these settings. Third, the chapter maps

the core elements of one possible community practice intervention in gentrifying

neighborhoods: The Neighborhood Story Project.

The Case for a More Than Material Framework

Gentrification is commonly understood as the transformation of areas with relatively

high levels of affordable housing into areas targeting middle and upper income uses

(Hackworth, 2002; Lees, Slater & Wyly, 2013). These changes provoke a range of losses, as

people may lose their homes, neighbors, and sites of historical significance, along with their

sense of place, belonging, and history. Yet, policy makers and community practitioners often

restrict interventions in gentrifying neighborhoods to the material effects, such as trying to

reduce displacement through the creation and preservation of affordable housing. While

such approaches are critical, they fail to recognize and respond to other harms residents may

be experiencing concurrent with or independent from a loss of housing. This begs the

question: why has gentrification been framed largely in material terms?

6
 Part of the answer is disciplinary. Of the nearly 2500 academic articles published on

gentrification since 2000, the majority (68%) were published in urban studies/planning

journals, which tend to emphasize the built environment, demographic changes and the

political economy.1 Although definitions have evolved over time, Davidson and Lees

suggest that gentrification is distinguished by four key characteristics: (1) the reinvestment of

capital, (2) an increase in high-income demographics, (3) landscape change, and (4) direct or

indirect displacement of low-income groups (2005, p. 1187).2 In their review of the state of

gentrification scholarship, Lees, Slater, and Wyly (2013) note there is widespread agreement

that gentrification is the product of a constellation of political, economic, cultural and social

factors. At the same time, they find a broad recognition among scholars that the political

economy, and in particular capitalism—as manifest in the current area of neoliberalism3—

has a fundamental role in creating geographies of gentrification (Smith, 2002).

Political economists argue that under neoliberalism, geographies of all scales

(including global regions, nation-states, cities, and neighborhoods) are constructed through

processes of uneven development, wherein some places are systematically less developed while

others are more so (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). This serves a variety of functions for

economic elites: people and places within underdeveloped areas can more easily be

1
A Prosearch query for peer reviewed articles of gentrification returned 2438 pieces published since January 1,
2000. Although the majority were published in urban studies or planning journals, geography journals carried 13%
of the articles, political science and sociology journals carried 11%, 7% were published in anthropology/cultural
studies journals, and 1% were published in social work/community psychology/community practice journals.
2
Throughout this paper, I draw on this definition of gentrification as a starting point. These four characteristics
offer a useful rubric, for example, to distinguish increased land values in affluent areas from similar rates of
increase in areas where poor and working-class people live. Though the two settings may be experiencing related
types of change, using the above definition, only the latter constitutes gentrification.
3
Neoliberalism refers to a specific ideology and associated practices of governance which frequently involve the
rollback of regulations intended to protect people and the land from exploitation, and the reduction of state
provided social welfare (Harvey, 2005).

7
exploited for land, resources, and labor; the existence of ‘undesirable’ areas create a market

for high-cost alternatives; and—following the logic of ‘buy low, sell high’—deferring

development in some regions insures the possibility of a high return on investment if the

region is later strategically developed. Further, under the logic of uneven development,

regions may be invested in and divested from—time and again—in order to provide new

opportunities for wealth production (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Smith, 1996).

Each of these functions of uneven development can be seen in the context of

gentrifying urban areas: many neighborhoods home to low-income and poor residents have

experienced systemic disinvestment from the state. When targeted with intense state and

private investment, these areas experience rapidly rising land values, depleting the

affordable housing stock (Smith, 2002). At the same time, cities and states are increasingly

passing preemptive legislation prohibiting rent control mechanisms or banning policies that

require developers to build affordable housing; such prohibitions are currently in place in 42

U.S. states (www.nmhc.org). U.S. urban neighborhoods are now gentrifying at twice the

rate of the 1990s, with 1 in 5 low-income neighborhoods experiencing rapid increases in

median home values (Maciag, 2015). And, as swelling numbers of residents lose their

homes due to rent hikes and rising property taxes, geographer David Harvey’s (2005) notion

of “accumulation by dispossession” offers an apt rendering of gentrification’s consequence.

Indeed, tracing dispossession and displacement has been a core focus of

gentrification literature since geographer Ruth Glass first coined the term in 1964 to describe

the transformation of modest London homes into high-end residences serving the gentry.

Following her pioneering work, a steady stream of scholarship has critiqued the negative

effects of urban revitalization on poor and working-class residents, chiefly, the physical

8
displacement of people no longer able to afford rising housing costs (Marcuse, 1985;

Newman & Wyly, 2006; Zuk, Bierbaum, Chapple, Gorska, Loukaitou-Sideris et al, 2015).

Displacement-focused research has informed policy and community development responses

to gentrification in many important ways, spurring a wide range of interventions related to

regulating, incentivizing, and shaping the housing market in order to increase the stock of

affordable housing. Albeit with mixed results, an increasing number of cities are adopting at

least some of these strategies to advance equitable forms of development in revitalizing

areas. For example, inclusionary housing policies have been adopted by more than 500

jurisdictions. Such policies target multi-unit housing developments, and incentivize or

require the construction of a certain proportion of affordable housing units relative to the

number of market-rate units (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2014).

These efforts to mitigate gentrification’s displacement effects have not been

uncontested. Influenced by neoliberal ideologies, a second wave of gentrification scholars

laud the economic benefit of increasing housing values (and the corresponding tax base),

dismiss calls for housing market regulations, and shrug concerns of widespread residential

displacements—questioning if and how such changes could be measured (Vigdor, Massey &

Rivlin, 2002; Freeman, 2005). 4 Instead, these scholars emphasize the need for improved

housing, infrastructure, and commercial development in declining areas. In doing so, this

wave of scholarship equates gentrification with revitalization (Lees, 2007). The ‘eviction’ of

critical attention to who exactly is helped and who is harmed by gentrification has been

interrogated by many scholars of urban change (Slater, 2006; Lees, 2007), who suggests the

4
I am drawing here on the three generations of gentrification scholarship introduced by Stabrowski (2014), who
argued a first wave focused on physical residential displacement, a second wave championed neoliberal urbanism,
and a third wave has returned to a critical scholarship of gentrification that expands notions of displacement.

9
need to double down efforts to document the negative consequences of gentrification and

investigate models of revitalization that improve well-being for current, as well as future,

residents.

Although the political economists’ accounts of gentrification are illuminating and

have been helpful in shaping policy platforms to advance equity in cities, this framework is

not without vulnerabilities. In recent years, a third wave of gentrification scholarship has

begun to examine and address these vulnerabilities, several of which are introduced below. 5

Pays Insufficient Attention to Racial Struggle

One of the strongest critiques of first and second generation gentrification scholarship

is inadequate attention to the particular vulnerabilities and losses experienced by

communities of color. This absence of a racial analysis is evident in the proclamation from

Lees, Slater, and Wyly: “Gentrification is nothing more and nothing less than the

neighborhood expression of class inequality” (2013, p. 80). Such statements ignore the

entangled relationship between neoliberalism and the racialization of space that informs

where and how gentrification manifests, and fail to account for the particular risks born by

people of color in gentrifying neighborhoods. This is not to suggest that gentrifying

neighborhoods are only and always predominantly inhabited by people of color, and that

incomers are always predominantly white. As Lees observes, “the racial/ ethnic issues

associated with the gentrification process take on a different guise according to the

communities involved” (2000, p. 404), and these complexities matter. However, given the

5
There is a diverse field of scholars in this third wave. That said, many are influenced by LeFebvre’s philosophy of
space and the social-spatial dialectic, which can be understood as they ways the social shapes the spatial and vice
versa (see Davidson, 2009, and Soja, 1980). For a robust accounting of current debates within gentrification
scholarship, see Brown-Saracino, 2010.

10
racialization of space—which can be understood as the spatial ideologies, policies and

practices that have functioned to contain, segregate, and/or remove people of color (Lipsitz,

2007)—people of color are more likely to live in neighborhoods vulnerable to gentrification

and thus are disproportionately harmed (Brookings Institution, 2001).

In response, a number of gentrification scholars are mapping the intersections of

race, class, and place to document the displacement effects of gentrification on communities

of color. As examples, a study of a historically black neighborhood in Portland, OR,

demonstrated that home values tripled between 1990 and 2000, and white homeownership

increased 43% in the same period (Gibson, 2007). Similar trends have been documented

elsewhere; Li, Leong, Vitiello & Acoca find that as a result of the accelerated rate of

gentrification in Chinatowns in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, these neighborhoods

are on “the verge of disappearing” (2013, p.2).

Concurrent with these efforts to make visible the racialized effects of gentrification,

other scholars are working to contextualize and historicize these effects (Blomley, 2015).

Since colonization, white supremacy—whether explicitly stated or operating de facto—has

functioned to create protected spaces for white bodies, while simultaneously containing, if

not eliminating, the spaces of racialized others (Harris, 1993). Given this legacy, urban

scholar Anaya Roy describes contemporary housing evictions as a form of racial banishment,

noting that the legacy of racial violence tied up in and expressed through evictions “cannot

be encapsulated within sanitized notions of gentrification and displacement” (2017, A3).

Importantly, attending to gentrifying neighborhoods as sites of racial struggle illuminates

both violence and resilience, and makes evident that homes are not the only things being lost.

11
 Alongside and in between efforts to contain and/or annihilate people of color—black

people and other people of color have also built neighborhoods within which they have

generated meaningful economic, cultural, and social place-based networks; created webs of

caring relationships between people and places; and nurtured legacies of—and visions for—

resistance to injustice (Collins, 1990; Lipsitz, 2007). Increasingly, third wave gentrification

scholars are attending to the residents’ particular histories with and meanings of place, as

well as attachments to neighborhood sites of significance, which include, but are not limited

to, homes (as examples, see Chidester & Gadsby, 2016; Nam, 2012; Somdahl-Sands, 2008).6

Perpetuates Damage-Centered Views of Places and People

Relatedly, the language of uneven development lends itself to viewing some places

through a damage-based lens. In her critical essay, Suspending Damage, Indigenous scholar

Eve Tuck describes the dangers of damage-centered research, in which “pain and loss are

documented in order to obtain particular political or material gains” (2009, p. 413). Tuck

argues that damage-centered research has failed on at least two accounts; not only has it

been largely unsuccessful in improving conditions on the ground, it has also functioned to

excise agency and hope. Too often, she finds, “After the research team leaves, after the town

meeting, after the news cameras have gone away, all we are left with is the damage” (2009,

p. 415). In a similar vein, geographer Katherine McKittrick cautions against the reliance of

narratives “wherein, particular communities and their geographies are condemned to death

over and over again” noting that such “analyses of racial violence leave little room to attend

to human life” (2011, p. 954).

6
I discuss this body of work more fully in Chapter 6.

12
 Case studies of gentrifying areas often follow a familiar, damage-centered narrative

arc: after generations of systemic disinvestment, white flight, and government neglect, an urban

neighborhood—often home to communities of color—is ‘revitalized’, driving up property values and

displacing poor and low-income residents. Yet, casting pre-gentrified low-income neighborhoods

only as places of disinvestment and displacement masks generations of investment made by

residents themselves (with or without government support), and ignores aspects of

neighborhoods that residents are committed to preserving. Furthermore, studies that focus

attention only on the consequences of gentrification ignore the ways residents resist

displacements and continue to create community alongside and within harmful processes of

spatial transformation.

As feminist scholars have long argued (Rose, 1993), all geographies must be explored

as contested sites. This call is echoed by Tuck (2009), who urges scholars to make an

epistemological shift away from damage toward desire, and McKittrick, who contends that

“our racial pasts can uncover a collective history of encounter—a difficult interrelatedness—

that promises an ethical analysis of race based not on suffering, but on human life” (2011,

948). For McKittrick, the concept of ‘encounter’ recognizes the relational and unfinished

nature of racist violence, and offers “an analytical pathway that pays attention to

geographies of relationality and human life without dismissing the brutalities of isolation

and marginalization” (2011, p. 955). In the context of researching gentrifying

neighborhoods, such an analysis recognizes that neighborhoods gentrify over time (and

often incompletely), and processes of gentrification are also affected by the resistances,

desires, and agency of long-time residents (Feldman & Stall, 2004).

13
Obscures other Losses

Finally, just as any bright light both reveals and shades, political economy accounts

of gentrification illuminate the workings of external forces shaping urban neighborhoods

and their direct consequences on housing markets, while obscuring the distinct histories and

contexts that also shape those neighborhoods, as well as the other sorts of consequences

produced by gentrification. As observed by Smith more than twenty years ago, “The

dramatic shifts affecting gentrifying neighborhoods are experienced as intensely local”

(1996, p. 91). These local transformations do not only impact where people live, they may

also affect where people work, study, socialize, shop, congregate, agitate, worship, and bury

their dead. As such, an increasing number of scholars note the ways that gentrification may

negatively affect well-being through political, social and cultural displacements (Davidson,

2008; Fraser, 2004; Hyra, 2013).

Davidson (2009) considers this attention to the range of ways residents inhabit and

experience their neighborhood as their lived experience of place, which extends beyond the

materiality of a home. As noted by Betancur:

There is an aspect of gentrification that mainstream definitions ignore…The most

traumatic aspect ... is perhaps the destruction of the elaborate and complex

community fabric that is crucial for low-income, immigrant, and minority

communities - without any compensation (2002, p. 807).

Such losses of community fabric are significant. And importantly, residents of gentrifying

neighborhoods may suffer social, cultural and/or political displacements even when they

remain in place (Twigge-Molecey, 2013). Indeed, the negative effects of gentrification on

14
residents who are not (or not yet) physically displaced has been well documented

(Hodkinson & Essin, 2015; Marcuse, 1985; Shaw 2015; Stabrowski, 2014).

When those of us concerned with gentrification look at gentrification only through a

political economy lens, we are likely to hone our attention to changes in land and home

values, and thus reduce our understanding of gentrification’s harms to a loss of affordable

housing. Despite the efforts of third generation gentrification scholars to illuminate the

limitations of such an approach—insufficient attention to racial struggle, perpetuating

damage-based views of poor people and neighborhoods, and ignoring other losses, as

outlined above—these insights have been slow to affect public policy recommendations. In

recent years there have been at least five national policy reports on gentrification and

equitable development that focus almost exclusively on strategies to create or preserve

affordable housing. 7 These reports provide only passing (if any) acknowledgement of the

more than material8 harms of gentrification—such as loss of social ties, spaces of cultural

gathering, or shared place-histories—nor do these documents detail strategies for addressing

more than material harms as ends in themselves (for a summary of these reports, see

Appendix A). As such, there appears to be a lag between third-wave gentrification theory

and policy recommendations.

That is not to say that innovative responses to the more than material effects of

gentrification are not underway. A simple internet search reveals numerous grassroots

7
Equitable development refers to development policies and practices designed to improve the quality of life for
residents of all incomes, in contrast to gentrification, which privileges upper-income residents (Brookings
Institution, 2001).
8
As is explored more fully in Chapter 7, I am using 'material' to refer to materiality of losing a home, as well as lost
opportunities for wealth production (for homeowners forced out by rising property taxes, for example), and other
kinds of material losses, such as lost access to amenities like stores carrying products that long-time residents like
and can afford.

15
efforts led by artists, community organizers, and scholar-activists designed to affect changes

beyond the built environment. As examples:

• In the Mission district of San Francisco, California, a choreographer engaged

themes of displacement and home in an outdoor, aerialist dance piece at a historic

location (Somdahl-Sands, 2008).

• In Portland, Oregon, long-time residents of gentrifying neighborhoods led story-

sharing sessions with new neighbors (Drew, 2012).

• In New York City, young women of color in a gentrifying neighborhood made a

zine, posters, and website to confront the stereotypes affecting their lives (Cahill,

2006).

• In Chicago, Illinois, Puerto Rican youth developed a leadership pipeline to resist

political and cultural displacements (Nam, 2012).

Though engaging different tactics, each of these four initiatives fall under the rubric of what

I consider ‘more than material interventions’ by responding to some aspect of

gentrification’s harms in addition to the material loss of housing. And while more than

material interventions will be discussed in greater depth in Chapter 6, two observations are

worth underscoring here.

First, despite the proliferation of grassroots projects responding to gentrification,

there is a dearth of studies—numbering just over a dozen—of these interventions. Thus, in

addition to the gap between third-wave theorizing and recommended policy, there is also a

gap between practice and research: more than material interventions are taking place, but

such initiatives are either not being studied, or the studies are not being published. As such,

16
there is a very thin knowledge base from which practitioners can understand the

contributions—and limitations—of more than material interventions in gentrifying

neighborhoods.

Second, although more than material interventions are taking place in some

gentrifying neighborhoods, these have not been systematically or strategically encouraged

by city policymakers. This may be related to the previous observation—without a body of

scholarship purporting the benefits of more than material interventions, policymakers may

be reticent to invest resources in supporting these efforts. In any event, cities are doing little

to address residents’ desire to preserve important aspects of their neighborhood beyond

housing. Certainly, residents can and do take action to improve their neighborhoods

without government support. That said, city governments have critical resources—

monetary, material, and human—that could be leveraged to encourage, amplify, and extend

these efforts.

The gaps—between third wave gentrification scholarship and policy responses to

gentrification, and between grassroots interventions in gentrifying neighborhoods and

systematic inquiry—reflect an empirical as well as a conceptual challenge. Empirically,

there is a need for an extended body of publicly-engaged scholarship that can broaden and

ground contemporary understandings of residents’ lived experiences of, and resistance to,

gentrification. This echoes the call within community practice to expand the empirical

foundation of practice-based research, and to engage in well-designed systematic inquiry

aimed at improving the practices of building more equitable communities (Garvin,

Gutierrez & Galinsky, 2006). Conceptually, although a number of scholars have called for

an expanded understanding of gentrification’s effects beyond residential displacement, these

17
arguments have yet to be integrated in a way that policymakers and practitioners can easily

apply in community development.

The Need for Expanded Publicly-Engaged Scholarship in Gentrifying Neighborhoods

Publicly engaged scholarship can be understood as knowledge generated with and for

‘the public.’ The movement towards publicly engaged scholarship is rooted in a number of

critiques of ‘expert driven’ scholarship that locate expertise exclusively within the academe.

Too often, such scholarship ignores the grounded expertise of everyday people in everyday

places, and produces work that is irrelevant and/or illegible to the people it purports to be

about or even for. Reflecting on the legacy of research conducted on indigenous peoples,

indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith concludes, “It told us things already known,

suggested things that would not work, and made careers for people who already had jobs”

(1999, p. 3). Such ‘disengaged’ scholarship often takes final form as journal articles intended

to be read by and influence others in academia, and are, in the words of bell hooks,

“…highly abstract, jargonistic, difficult to read, and containing obscure references” (1994, p.

64). In contrast, in publicly engaged scholarship, academics leverage their particular tools

and resources in partnership with community members to understand and address issues of

mutual concern, and produce research products that are meaningful and relevant to the

community.

In the social sciences, publicly-engaged scholarship often manifests as Participatory

Action Research (PAR). An epistemological approach to inquiry and action, PAR is

informed by international, cross-generational, and trans-disciplinary influences, from Kurt

Lewin to Paolo Freire (Reason & Bradbury, 2008). Early action researchers were committed

to leveraging science for social justice, and engaging non-academic community partners in

18
data collection and analysis. The tradition of community self-surveys is a prime example,

wherein community members collaborated with researchers to conduct city-wide audits of

community conditions (Torre, Fine, Stoudt, & Fox, 2012).

While there are a variety of strands of PAR today—with varied degree of emphasis

on social justice and on public participation—action researchers share a foundational belief

that those directly affected by social problems ought to play a central role in framing,

investigating, and intervening in those problems (Greenwood, 2002). As such, PAR projects

shift the role of the research subject to one of co-investigator, and the role of principal

investigator to that of research facilitator. Together, a PAR team generates questions about the

nature of a problem, collects and analyzes data, and uses what has been learned to plan for,

implement, and evaluate change (Stringer, 1999). It is the insistence on action (Fine and

Torre, 2004) that often most distinguishes PAR, charging scholars to not only document the

contours of social problems, but to bring friends, picks and shovels to chip away at those

problems, along with dump trucks of clay to mold alternative pathways of living. Grounded

in particular contexts, PAR projects are pragmatic by nature, recognizing that we cannot

make a difference everywhere, but we might make a difference in one another’s lives here.

Participatory modes of research have gained traction in many settings (Israel, Schulz,

Parker, & Becker, 1998; Reason & Bradbury, 2008; Speer & Christians, 2013), including in

the study of land justice, broadly defined. For example, Uniting Detroiters brought together

residents, scholar, and activists to study and respond to a city-wide development agenda,

which produced, among other things, a video documentary and People’s Atlas conceived as

tools for movement-building (Newman & Safransky, 2014). Working on a national scale,

The Right to the City Alliance’s “We Call These Projects Home” study engaged public

19
housing residents as research collaborators in documenting the housing needs of low-

income people (Sinha & Kasdan, 2013). A five-year action research project in India engaged

members of the Katkari—a politically and economically vulnerable indigenous group—in

making land claims and protecting their communities from eviction (Buckles, Khedkar &

Ghevde, 2015). Despite these robust examples, participatory methods are notably underused

in studies of gentrification.

The paucity of PAR studies related to gentrification include a small body of work

that involves residents of public or socialized housing in conducting research intended to

impact public policy (Darcy, 2013; Hodkinson & Essen, 2015; Thurber, Collins, Greer,

McKnight, & Thompson, in press), a research project launched by a local Homeless Action

Committee (Kline, Dolgon, Dressler, 2000), and a project mobilizing young women of color

in a gentrifying neighborhood to study and respond to stereotypes that affect their lives

(Cahill, 2006, 2007). In addition to having beneficial effects on those involved (such as

improved confidence, leadership development skills, and strengthened relationships), these

studies suggest that participatory research offers the potential to advance systemic change by

creating organizing networks and producing scholarship that can be used to organize for

better neighborhood conditions (material or otherwise).

To the extent that PAR projects truly engage residents of gentrifying neighborhoods

as research partners, PAR approaches are well-suited to contribute to a base of gentrification

scholarship that is rooted in lived experiences, documents the more than material harms of

neighborhood change, and explores the more than material possibilities for intervening in

gentrifying neighborhoods. Further, such engagement methodologically guards against

some of the vulnerabilities of traditional political economy views of gentrification.

20
 • Vulnerability 1: Pays insufficient attention to racial struggle. As co-investigators,

long-time residents can bring distinct insight regarding contemporary

experiences of racism in the neighborhood (for example, by drawing on their

own and others’ experiences of stigma, marginalization and discrimination),

and may have contextual knowledge about how racial struggle has manifested

in their community over time.

• Vulnerability 2: Perpetuates damage-centered views of places and people. The

engagement of resident experts in conducting systematic inquiry and action in

their own communities reflects a desire-based framework that values

residents’ knowledge, hopes, and agency to affect change. Furthermore,

residents are distinctly positioned to have knowledge of community strengths

and assets.

• Vulnerability 3: Obscures other losses. Residents are likely to be attuned to a range

of consequences of gentrification in their neighborhood. This is not to say that

all residents will have the same perspectives, but that the perspectives

brought—convergent or otherwise—will be contextually grounded, which

may sharpen a collective analysis of how gentrification is manifesting in a

particular time and place.

To be clear, PAR is not a panacea. Participatory modes of inquiry are complicated

by inherent differences in power and privilege among research team members and academic

researchers may still differentially benefit from the research (Thurber, Collins, Greer,

McKnight, & Thompson, in press). Like other forms of research, PAR projects can

reproduce difference/othering of communities, mask heterogeneity within groups, and

21
preserve the epistemic authority of academic researchers (Janes, 2016). Further, although

action research “insists on action” (Fine and Torre, 2004, p.29), there are no guarantees that

such actions will be effective or sustained. Nonetheless, given the need to better account for

the lived experiences of residents in gentrifying neighborhoods, and the importance of

engaging residents as change agents in their own communities, PAR approaches offer an

important complement to other forms of expert-driven research on gentrification. One field

that emphasizes participatory research, and seems to be well situated to contribute to

gentrification scholarship, is also notably underrepresented in the literature: social work (see

footnote 1).

A Role for Community Practice

Social work’s underrepresentation in gentrification scholarship is surprising, given

that neighborhood-based community development has roots within the branch of social

work known as community (or macro) practice. Whereas clinical social work uses a service-

delivery approach to meet individual needs and help people living in poverty develop their

inherent capacities, community practice focuses on addressing collective needs and in

changing the conditions of inequality, often at the neighborhood level.

In the United States, community practice is often traced to the Settlement House

movement of the late 1800s, in which practitioners lived and worked in disenfranchised

neighborhoods and developed context-specific initiatives to address community needs (Finn

and Jacobson, 2008). The Hull House, in Chicago, IL, is among the most well-known

Settlement Houses. A partial list of Hull House activities in 1895 reflects the breadth of

community practice: residents undertook a comprehensive mapping of neighborhood

22
conditions, offered college extension courses to hundreds of neighbors, coordinated a 500-

member working-people’s chorus, organized two unions, helped plan several strikes,

facilitated the working-people’s social science club, and provided free kindergarten (Schultz,

2007). Though the practitioner-residents of Hull House were working some thirty years

before Lewin coined the term ‘Action Research,’ they were embodying many of its core

principles: working in partnership with people affected by social problems to study harmful

conditions and take action to improve well-being. And, as reflected by the activities listed

above, these early social workers were concerned about the more than material aspects of

community from the start.

Although community practice has evolved since the days of the Hull House, the field

remains particularly well suited for theorizing, implementing, and studying more than

material interventions in gentrifying neighborhoods. First, social work’s code of ethics

places “particular attention to the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable,

oppressed, and living in poverty” (NASW, 2008).9 This ethical orientation is critical to

investigating who is helped and harmed by processes of gentrification, and engaging and

mobilizing those directly affected by gentrification in the process. Second, the field of social

work adopts a holistic perspective, recognizing that there are biological, social, cultural,

psychological and spiritual dimensions to well-being, and that human behavior is always

shaped by, and adaptive to, the environment (van Wormer, 2007). As such, the field is

9
Explicit claims of social justice do not always translate into just practice. Indeed, social work has often been
pulled between advancing social justice and being used as a tool for social control. While the Settlement House
movement was flourishing, so were the Charity Organization Societies, another precursor to social work, which
diagnosed poverty as a consequence of individual failings (Finn & Jacobson, 2008). During Urban Renewal, some
social workers helped organize resident resistance to neighborhood demolition, and others diffused dissent and
persuaded resident compliance with displacement policies (Bowen, 2015). Thus, it is important to consider social
work’s orientation toward social justice as aspirational.

23
accustomed to thinking in more than material terms. Third, students of community practice

are introduced to a wide range of interventions relevant to neighborhood-level change,

including community development (i.e. economic development, housing development, and

social development), community organizing (i.e. neighborhood, labor, cultural, and rights-

based organizing), planning (i.e. the design of effective interventions at a variety of scales),

and systems change (i.e. legislative and media advocacy, political and social action, and

action research) (Brueggemann, 2014; Weil, 1996). Finally, community practice has a

distinct responsibility to engage in sites of neighborhood inequality. The Academy of Social

Work and Social Welfare recently launched a call to action, explicating twelve ‘grand

challenges’ for social work (http://aaswsw.org/). Many of these challenges— such as to

end homelessness, to reduce extreme economic inequality, to achieve equal opportunity and

justice, to eradicate social isolation, and to close the health gap—are deeply tied to, and felt

in, neighborhoods.

Given these distinct contributions and responsibilities, social work is uniquely suited

to bridge the current disconnects between third-wave gentrification scholarship, grassroots

practice, and policy responses to gentrification. And yet, since 2000, less than 1% of the

more than 2400 academic articles on gentrification were published in community practice

journals (see footnote 1 for search protocol). Although community practice is well

positioned to shift policy and practice in changing neighborhoods to more fully account for

the lived experiences of residents, the field is not fully leveraging that position.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that social workers are necessary to effectively

intervene in gentrifying neighborhoods. Just as residents do not need government support to

take action to improve their neighborhoods, residents may not require social workers to help

24
them organize and mobilize. However, just as city governments have resources that can be

brought to bear to amplify residents’ efforts, community practitioners have resources that

may be of service. And as a community practitioner new to Nashville, I wondered how I

might best leverage my expertise to assist residents grappling with gentrification. Developing

the Neighborhood Story Project was one way I have answered that question.

Intervention Design

I designed the Neighborhood Story Project as a facilitated three-month action

research project wherein a group of neighbors identify a set of research questions about their

geographic community, conduct place-based inquiry, and use what they learn to take

collective action. The project is intended to engage a self-selected group of members by

virtue of their mutual connection to a particular neighborhood. Broadly defined,

neighborhoods are geographic areas contained within a larger city, town, or suburb.

Federal, state, local agencies, as well as resident groups, all use the neighborhood unit for

research, planning, and the delivery of programs and services. However, these varied actors

frequently use divergent boundaries to delineate a given neighborhood. Furthermore,

residents may have a mental map of their neighborhood, or, in the words of Rob Nixon, “a

vernacular landscape” that does not align with “official landscape[s]” as determined by

various agencies (2011, p.17). Given these complexities, the boundaries of any

neighborhood are in flux and contested, rather than fixed over time or even commonly

understood by all residents. Furthermore, residents of neighborhoods differ from one

another; given their varied social locations and self-interests, residents of the same

neighborhood may experience the neighborhood in vastly different ways (Hughey & Speer,

2002). Yet, despite their contested boundaries and the heterogeneity within them,

25
neighborhoods can constitute a collective unit within which residents have some power to

affect change in plans, policies, and resource distribution. And with or without government

involvement, neighborhoods can become social units that also work to meet collective

needs. The Neighborhood Story Project is deliberately scaled as a small group intervention

within a neighborhood. The following sections describe the core elements of the project, the

anchoring theoretical frameworks, design roots, and guiding values.

Core Elements

The Neighborhood Story Project begins with the formation of a leadership team,

with the goal of recruiting a group of 8-12 team members. These are current or former

residents of a specific neighborhood who are interested in learning more about the

significant people, places, and moments in their neighborhood’s past and present; in

thinking critically about the spatial processes shaping their community; and in being part of

shaping their neighborhood’s future. The group is designed to be small enough to foster

mutual aid, which can be understood as member-to-member helping relationships

(Steinberg, 2014). At the same time, the group is intended to be large enough for members

to share the load of conducting community-based research. All team members received a

stipend (averaging $200) in recognition of their contributions.

The Neighborhood Story Project occurs over the course of 12 weeks, with the team

meeting weekly for two-hour sessions. The fixed time frame is designed to provide sufficient

time for a group to complete a meaningful project, recognizing that some people may not be

able to make a longer-term commitment. Although there is no expectation of continued

work beyond the length of the program, after 12 weeks, members may decide to continue to

work together or to join other existing community initiatives.

26
 As each project is directed by the interests of team members, no two projects are

exactly alike. However, each project follows three phases of work. Phase 1 builds a

foundation for collaborative research by establishing relationships among team members,

cultivating understanding of one another’s interests and concerns. Activities during Phase 1

may include creating a timeline of the neighborhood based on members’ historic

knowledge, and contrasting media representations of the neighborhood with members’ lived

experience. These activities are designed to surface residents’ curiosities and concerns,

which will be synthesized into a guiding research question.

Phase 1: Building foundation for Phase 2: Conducting Phase 3: Documentation

collaborative research Place based-inquiry and dissemination

Figure 1. Three phases of the Neighborhood Story Project

During Phase 2, members work together to answer their question(s). They develop a

research plan, and then collect and analyze data. Activities in Phase 2 may include

developing a survey instrument or interview protocol, interviewing one another and

neighbors, reviewing changes in demographic data in the neighborhood, and collecting

artifacts and images of the neighborhood over time.

In Phase 3, members decide how best to share what they have learned with others,

and plan a culminating community event to disseminate their work and engage the broader

community. Culminating projects may take a wide range of forms, such as a pod cast,

community mural, interactive exhibit, historical marker, memorial garden, video, report,

children’s book, website, or some other mode of documentation/dissemination. For the

three pilot projects, each Neighborhood Story Project had a budget of approximately $5000.

27
Half of the funds were reserved for the final project, and the remaining funds were used for

member stipends, project supplies, and snacks for weekly meetings.

Intervention as unfinished alternative

Unlike the medicalized use of the term ‘intervention’—which conjures a rigidly

proscribed set of activities or treatment plan—the Neighborhood Story Project is

characterized by dynamicity and emergent design, following the tradition of the ‘unfinished

alternative’ first theorized by Scandinavian abolitionist Thomas Mathiesen.10 Mathiesen was

concerned about social policies that reproduce the harms they intend to mitigate. He

conceptualized the unfinished alternative as a response to social problem that satisfies two

conditions: First, the alternative must contradict core elements of the existing societal

response to be sufficiently disruptive to the status quo, and second, it must compete with the

current model enough to be considered plausible (Mathiesen, 1974).

The Neighborhood Story Project attempts to contradict current responses to

gentrification first and foremost by centering residents as experts in their communities, and

also by encouraging residents to explore and respond to a range of gentrification’s effects,

including, but not limited to the loss of housing. Although the facilitator plays a critical

guiding role, the project is driven by residents’ preexisting knowledge and curiosities,

shaped by data they collect and interpret, and concludes with a culminating event of their

10
Mathiesen conceptualized the unfinished alternative in 1974 as part of action research with prison abolition
movements in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, countries which were incarcerating people at dramatically
accelerated rates (Mathiesen, 2014). Through facilitated convenings among prisoners, prison administrators and
criminal justice scholars, these movements produced radical experimentations in the prison system. For example,
at Bastoy Prison Island, a Norwegian equivalent of a maximum-security prison, the prison head is now a trained
psychologist, all guards receive three years of training, and inmates grow their own food and live in quarters with
sun decks (McLeod, 2013). The results are staggering; the 16% recidivism rate is well below any in Europe or the
United States (McLeod, 2013).

28
design and implementation. By keeping the costs and time commitments of residents

contained, The Neighborhood Story Project attempts to remain competitive as a plausible

intervention that can be implemented alongside of much needed efforts to build and

preserve affordable housing.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework supporting the Neighborhood Story Project is broadly

situated in the sense of community literature, and in particular, to conceptualizations of the

relationship between place attachments, social ties, and civic action. Since community

psychologist Seymour Sarason first posited the significance of “the sense that one belongs in

and is meaningfully part of a larger collectivity” (1974, p.41), scholars have been exploring

the cognitive, affective, and behavioral factors that contribute to a sense of community, and

how such feelings of belonging relate to individual and collective well-being (Long &

Perkins, 2003; McMillan & Chavis, 1986; Mannarini & Fedi, 2009; Prezza, Pacilli,

Barbaranelli & Zampatti, 2009). Although the language of ‘sense of community’ has been

broadly embraced across disciplines and within the popular culture, debates continue about

how best to conceptualize, operationalize and measure this construct (see Mannarini &

Fedi, 2009). That said, there is greater clarity regarding the relationship between three

components of sense of community—place attachment, social ties, and civic action—and it

is this relationship that theoretically grounds the Neighborhood Story Project (see Figure 1).

In the figure below, place attachment refers to one’s tie to place, social ties refer to feelings of

connection to people, and civic action refers to how one engages in improving the

community.

29
 Figure 2.Theoretical foundation of the Neighborhood Story Project

Place Attachment. In a comprehensive review of place attachment literature over

the last 40 years, Lewicka (2011) notes that a proliferation of studies of place attachments

have drawn on different theoretical and disciplinary traditions, explored the phenomenon at

a wide range of scales (from attachment to home to attachment to country), and used

differing methods of inquiry. While acknowledging that such diversity within the field

“make the accumulation of knowledge difficult” (2011, p. 208), Lewicka nonetheless

concludes that “place attachments continue to be an important part of human existence”

(2011, p. 226). That is, humans form emotional bonds to places of dwelling, and do so at a

variety of scales.11 Manzo and Perkins (2006) suggest that a resident’s relationship to place

spans cognitive, affective and behavioral dimensions; it is related to what we know about

our neighborhood, how we feel about our neighborhood, and how we participate in our

11
Place attachment is generally understood to be pro-social; that is, people with stronger bonds to place are more
likely to be connected to others and have higher levels of life-satisfaction. However, Lewicka (2011) also notes a
number of vulnerabilities of strong place attachments, such as resident resistance to relocating in the face of
limited opportunities or environmental risks. Others have noted the risks of communitarianism that may result
when an individual or sub group enforce their particular view of a place in ways that deny existing heterogeneity
and privilege an exclusionary normative ideal of who belongs (Young, 1990).

30
neighborhood. As a psychological construct, place attachment is conceptualized at an

individual level, recognizing that there are wide variations in the degree to which people

form bonds to place. Length of tenure is among the factors known to mediate one’s degree

of place attachment (Lewicka, 2011).

Social ties. Positive social ties (also referred to as bonding social capital) are

characterized by relationships of trust and reciprocity (Perkins, Hughey, & Speer, 2002).

The importance of social ties to wellness is well-evidenced. Wide-ranging research has

demonstrated how strong social connections function as a protective factor, for example by

promoting recovery from complex trauma (van der kolk, 2001), preventing the transmission

of disease (Compare et al, 2013), and preventing interpersonal violence (Mazerolle, Wickes

& McBroom, 2010). Although many people access social ties outside of their immediate

neighborhoods, the less financial resource, transportation, or technology access one has, the

more important proximal relations are to well-being.

Determining the impact, force, and consequence of social ties within one’s

neighborhood can be difficult to empirically investigate (Mannarini & Fedi, 2009).

Nonetheless, scholars agree that neighborhood relations can provide a critical source of

emotional support and other forms of mutual aid (Perkins, Hughey & Speer, 2002). Both

place attachments and social ties, which can also be described as rootedness and bondedness

(Riger & Lavrakas, 1981), are positively related to health and well-being (Prezza, Amici,

Roberti, & Tedeschi, 2001; Renzaho, Richardson & Strugnell, 2012; Riger & Lavrakas,

1981). Indeed, the concepts are related. Although social ties are often investigated

independently from place attachment, scholars of place attachment recognize physical and

social dimensions of the construct; that it, residents may be attached to the place itself, as

31
well as to the people and interactions that occur within the place (Lewicka, 2011). Further,

the stronger the social ties among members of a geographical community, the stronger the

place attachments (Lewicka, 2011).

Civic action. Civic action (also referred to as civic engagement) can manifest as

individual or collective actions. While both are important, given that achieving broad social

changes requires collectivized action, social scientists are particularly interested in the

mechanisms that support collective action. Both place attachment and social ties are related

to civic action: people are more likely to take action in their communities the stronger their

ties to people (Collins, Walting Neal, & Neal, 2014; Foster-Fishman, Pierce; & Van Egeren,

2009; Mannarini & Fedi, 2009; Mihaylov and Perkins, 2014) and to place, particularly

when they perceive a threat to their community (Mihaylov and Perkins, 2014; Lewicka,

2011). Thus, we can think of rootedness to place and bondedness to people as protective

factors that support individual and collective well-being, and also as necessary conditions

for collective action.12 At the same time, the ability to leverage rootedness and bondedness

for collective action can be undermined by neighborhood conditions. In her review of place

attachment reserach, Lewicka (2011) finds that increased racial and socioeconomic diversity

within neighborhoods is consistently correlated with lower levels of interpersonal trust

among residents. As an important exception to this trend, Lewicka notes that “Stolle et al.

(2008) found that the negative relationship between neighborhood diversity and

interpersonal trust disappeared in those who regularly talked to their neighbors” (2011,

p.211).

12
Importantly, place attachment and social ties are not the only conditions necessary for collective action.
Participation is also predicted by collective efficacy—a collective sense of optimism regarding the possibility of
making a difference, and the knowledge and capacities to make a difference (Foster-Fishman, Pierce, & Van
Egeren, 2009).

32
 These insights regarding heterogenous neighborhoods suggest both the vulnerability

of, and possibilities for intervening within, gentrifying areas. As neighborhoods undergo

rapid demographic transformation, long-time residents are likely to experience a diminished

sense of place attachments and social ties, which may also undermine residents’ ability to

mobilize for change. That said, the body literature in this field suggests that social ties and

place attachments can also be (re)generated, though Lewicka (2011) notes that the processes

through which these attachments to people and place are formed remain under researched.

The Neighborhood Story Project is theoretically grounded in an understanding of the

relationship between place attachment, social ties and civic action. The project is designed

to foster connections among people, and between people and the place they live, while

concurrently facilitating an opportunity for people to gain experience taking action in their

communities.

Design Roots

The Neighborhood Story Project is rooted in several practice traditions: group work,

popular education, critical participatory action research, and public humanities. Although

some of these traditions have similar lineages (see Breton 2004; Finn, Jacobson, and

Campana, 2004) each provides key contributions to the project design.

Group work. As social work scholar Lee Staples has observed, “The group setting is

an ideal access point for most community members to engage in social action” (2004, p.

346). With roots in social psychology and social work, group work is essentially the process

of creating contexts for people to help one another lead more fulfilling lives. There are

different models and types of group work, from bereavement support to parent teacher

organizations, from AA to neighborhood associations. The basis of all group work is a

33
recognition that interdependence is central to well-being, and that experiences in groups can

nurture individual development and a sense of belonging, while helping people to

accomplish together that which they may be unable to do alone (Garvin, Gutierrez &

Galinsky, 2004).

Given social work’s disciplinary commitment to social justice, group work models in

social work are often rooted in an empowerment perspective, in which empowerment is

understood as both an internal sense of agency and the embodied expression of that agency

in action (Rappaport, 1985). The purpose of groupwork, as social work scholar Margaret

Breton describes, “is to change oppressive cognitive, behavioral, social, and political

structures…that thwart the control people have over their own lives…” (2004, p. 59). In

practice, this can take the form of a group coming together regarding a shared set of

personal concerns; learning together how those concerns are linked to broader social,

economic, and political conditions; and engaging in collective action to advance their goals

(Breton, 2004).

Although groups can and do emerge spontaneously, many groups benefit from a

skilled facilitator who understands group dynamics and the stages of group development,

can foster interpersonal communication among members, models effective group

leadership, and can help create an environment of mutual aid among members (Toseland,

Jones, & Gellis, 2004). Key group work contributions to the Neighborhood Story Project

are the empowerment perspective of groups, as well as theories and practices related to

fostering nurturing relationships within groups, including: considerations of group

pragmatics (such as group size, composition, and longevity), group engagement (such as

34
extrinsic and intrinsic motivations to participate), group cohesion and climate, and group

norms (Glisson, Dulmas & Sowers, 2012).

Popular Education. Popular education (also referred to as critical education, or

critical pedagogy) is often traced back to two famous educators: Brazilian educator and

theorist Paulo Freire, and Highlander Folk School founder Myles Horton. Working in

different geographies and contexts, both Freire and Horton reimagined the educational

process from one that indoctrinates people into an existing social order to one that mobilizes

people toward liberation from systemic inequality. In contrast to traditional educational

methods, which encourage students to pursue learning in order to achieve individual goals,

popular education engages people in learning in, with, and on behalf of the community

(Freire, 2000). Popular education intentionally brings together people who have been

marginalized, and, with the help of a facilitator, creates conditions for people to teach and

learn from one another; to critically reflect on their lived experiences; to imagine

alternatives; and to take action to affect change.

Brookfield and Holst (2011) offer a number of criteria for evaluating popular

education: Does our work begin with the pressing demands of the oppressed? Does our

work allow people to understand the interconnectedness of their local situation and the

broader context? Does our work build organization through which the dispossessed can

build power? Does our work develop the skills and knowledge that allow people to lead?

These criteria reflect the critical linkage between processes of learning and doing. Reflective

dialogue that is grounded in participants’ lived experience fosters what Freire termed

conscientization, the development of a critical consciousness. Conscientization in turn spurs

reflective action, which Freire termed praxis (Freire, 2000). The key contributions of popular

35
education to the Neighborhood Story Project are theories and practices of collective

learning, which include an understanding of education as the practice of freedom, the use of

dialogue as method of teaching and learning, and the linked process of learning and taking

action.13

Critical Participatory Action Research. At nearly the same time as Freire, Horton

and others began challenging traditional notions of education, Kurt Lewin was transforming

research practices in the United States with the development of ‘Action Research.’ As noted

previously, although early action research projects were distinguished by a strong

commitment to civic action and the participatory processes of data collection and analysis,

in subsequent iterations of action research the emphasis on social justice and democratic

engagement has varied widely (Torre, Fine, Stoudt, & Fox, 2012). The most robust

application of these principles arises in projects that explicitly adopt a critical race, feminist

and queer analysis, often referred to as ‘critical Participatory Action Research’ (critical

PAR) (Torre, Fine, Stoudt, & Fox, 2012).

Torre and Fine argue that a set of six core commitments distinguish this “critical,

engaged scholarship” (2011, p. 117) from other approaches to systematic inquiry. First,

critical PAR commits to collaborative and democratic knowledge production among people

13
There are many similarities in strategy between popular education, PAR and community organizing. As Speer &
Roberts (in press) note, community organizing—like popular education—leverages existing knowledge in
communities, and—like CPAR—engages the tools of research to inform social action. Some scholars, including
Freire, see education, research, and organizing as one and the same (Horton and Freire, 1990). In contrast, Horton
distinguishes education from organizing, noting that while education might lead to organizing, the goal is distinct,
as organizing is often problem-driven (Horton and Freire, 1990). As he reflects, “If the goal is to solve the problem,
there are a lot of ways to solve the problem that are so much simpler than going through this educational process.
Solving the problem can’t be the goal of education…But if education is to be part of the process, then you may not
actually got the problem solved, but you’ve educated a lot of people. You have got to make that choice” (1990, p.
119). As a short-term intervention, the Neighborhood Story Project is not designed as a community organizing
initiative. That said, it can be used to build capacity among residents for community organizing, or to produce
products that may be useful to existing organizing efforts.

36
traditionally seen as researchers and those traditionally seen as researched, forming research

collaboratives that include members of communities affected by social problems working

alongside people trained as researchers. Second, critical PAR commits to reorienting views

of expertise and then broadening the distribution of expertise, so that differently situated

members of the research collaborative are actively engaged in the processes of inquiring and

interpreting. The third and fourth commitments are related, as Torre and Fine call for the

“complex wrestling with researcher objectivity, subjectivity, and positionality” and also for

an “acute analyses of power, domination, oppression, and resistance” (2011, p. 117).

Although the former can be thought of as inward looking, and the latter as outward looking,

social inequality is not something that exists out there to be studied; researchers, research

practices, and research institutions are also bound up in relationships of oppression, and

must be interrogated. Fifth, critical PAR commits to centering marginalized knowledges.

This reflects an anchoring belief in the ability of people to assess their own conditions and

derive their own solutions, and a dedication to ensuring that those who have been most

marginalized from knowledge production move toward the center of these practices. And

sixth, critical PAR commits to ongoing analysis of the nature and uses of science. This

involves examining how research often fails to help—and even harms—the people and

places that comprise the subjects of study; and, in contrast, developing products of inquiry

that are directly relevant, accessible, and useful to community partners. In the words of

scholar-activists Michael Kline, Corey Dolgon and Laura Dressler, this represents the shift

“from the study of social transformation to study for social transformation” (2000, p. 35).

The Neighborhood Story Project draws on these core commitments as an epistemological

approach to producing collaborative knowledge.

37
 Public Humanities. The interdisciplinary field of public humanities is concerned

with engaging diverse publics in conversation, learning and reflection about art, history,

heritage and culture. Broadly, the objective of public humanities is to promote multicultural,

civic, and/or community literacy (Quay & Veninga, 1990). This is accomplished by

building bridges: between academic humanities scholarship and public audiences, between

grassroots artists/scholars and campus audiences, and more recently, two-way campus-

community partnerships to leverage the humanities to effect positive social change (Jay,

2010). As a field, public humanities is characterized by a multitude of modes of public

engagement, including (though not limited to) film, soundscapes, guest lectures, poetry

readings, historical exhibitions, interactive workshops, and digital mapping.

Although not all public humanities projects are explicitly designed to confront

injustice, the humanities can and do play critical roles in advancing social justice

movements. As educational scholar Lee Anne Bell notes, “The creative dimensions opened

up by aesthetic engagement help us envision new possibilities for challenging and changing

oppressive circumstances” (2010, p. 17). More specifically, Brookfield and Holst suggest five

functions of the arts: to sound warnings, build solidarity, empower, present alternative

epistemologies, affirm pride, and teach history (2011, p. 152). Each of these is potentially

relevant to the Neighborhood Story Project. Though the precise design and function of each

team’s culminating project is to be determined by the team, one role of the facilitator is to

encourage consideration of a range of products beyond the prototypical research report, and

to introduce other possible forms of expression and communication such as photography,

video, and/or performance. The primary contributions from public humanities to the

38
Neighborhood Story Project are the recognition of the importance of aesthetic engagement

in social change, and innovations in documentation and dissemination.

Shared commitments across traditions. Two particular commitments link group

work, popular education, participatory action research, and public humanities within the

Neighborhood Story Project: the significance of stories, and the role of the facilitator. ‘Story’

can be broadly understood as narrative; story is descriptive, in that it offers an account of the

past, present and or future; and also generative, in that people use stories to make sense of

ourselves and the world around us (McKenzie-Mohr & Lafrance, 2017). Stories may be

shared orally, in print form, or through other forms of ceremony, media and expression,

such as visual and performing arts. They also may not be shared at all, held only in the

minds of the story-teller. Although bookstores often separate stories into the categories of

fiction and non-fiction, social constructivists argue that all stories—even those asserting the

highest levels of objectivity—are incomplete and subjective to the perspective of the

storyteller (Walsh, 2010). Stories carry legacies of sedimented ways of knowing—often

referred to as master narratives—as well as imaginative possibilities for knowing

differently—which can be considered counter narratives (McKenzie-Mohr & Lafrance,

2017). As such, stories have the power to reproduce relationships of inequality and also to

facilitate understanding and justice.

Each of the four traditions that undergird the Neighborhood Story Project appreciate

the significance of stories. In social work, narrative theory recognizes the ways that one’s

personal narrative—the stories we tell about ourselves—can activate and/or inhibit a

positive self-concept, the formation of generative interpersonal relationships, and goal

achievement (Walsh, 2010). Narrative approaches to social work practice recognize the

39
therapeutic value for those who have been marginalized and oppressed to deconstruct

denigrating narratives and re-author stories of self that recognize one’s inherent dignity,

worth, and resilience. Similarly, as described above, both popular education and critical

PAR recognize the importance for people who have been marginalized to author their own

stories, rather than accepting the stories that have been told about them, through

collectivizing existing knowledge and conducting systematic inquiry. Story also plays a

critical role in public humanities, particularly in confronting injustice. As Bell notes, “The

aesthetic experience of stories told through visual arts, theater, spoken word and poetry, can

help us think more deeply about racism and other challenging social justice issues” (2010, p.

17). Drawing on these traditions, The Neighborhood Story Project recognizes the multiple

roles story can play—as therapeutic, educational, a mode of research, and artistic

expression—and the potential significance for residents of gentrifying neighborhoods to

author their own stories of what their community has been, is, and might be.

In addition to appreciating the role of stories, practitioners in social work, popular

education, CPAR and public humanities recognize the critical convening and animating

role played by the facilitator. Social work offers the framework of accompaniment to

understand this role. Unlike a medical model of treatment wherein a distant professional

prescribes and monitors treatment, accompaniment can be understood as the process of

joining in solidarity and collaboration with others (Finn & Jacobson, 2008). Similarly,

popular education and critical PAR challenge scholars to break binaries between

teacher/learner and researcher/researched, and to reconstruct relationships in which all

members are actively engaged in the processes of teaching, learning, inquiring, and

interpreting (Fine, 1994). This does not suggest an abdication of responsibility on the part of

40
facilitators. As Freire explains “…although teachers and students are not the same, the

person in charge of education is being formed or reformed as he/she teaches, and the person

who is being taught forms him/herself in this process” (1998, p.31).

Negotiating the role of facilitator requires being ‘in charge’ while seeking to build

mutual trust, egalitarianism, and collaboration (Toseland, Jones & Rivas, 2004). Managing

this balance requires a high degree of self-reflection and interpersonal skill, particularly with

regard to how positionality and power—including the facilitator’s— shape group

relationships, interactions, and overall group process. Our positionality can be understood

as the place from which and toward which we engage our practice, and is shaped by social

location, disciplinary training, political commitments, and personal experiences. The

facilitator must be prepared to grapple with intergroup tensions regarding power and

privilege, including the differential risks and responsibilities of team members who occupy

distinct social locations (Cahill, 2007).

Although the four disciplinary traditions explored above informed the overall design

of The Neighborhood Story Project, their contributions are most salient in some phases of

the project implementation (see Figure 3).

41
 Phase 3:
Phase 1: Building foundation for Phase 2: Conducting
Documentation and
collaborative research Place based-inquiry
dissemination

Group work

Popular Education

Participatory Action Research

Public Humanities

Figure 3. Design roots by phase of project

For example, given group work’s attention to group dynamics (from the beginning stages of

group formation through the conclusion of the group’s work together), theories and

practices of group work are critical throughout the project. In contrast, practices from the

public humanities appear most significantly in Phase 3, when members consider how best to

document and disseminate research findings to the broader community.

Guiding values

Although the design of the Neighborhood Story includes a week-by-week curriculum

(for a summary, see Appendix B), in order to be adaptable to the needs, skills, and resources

of particular people and places, the project is guided more by values than a predetermined

set of activities or practices. This chapter began by making the case for a more than material

framework for conceptualizing gentrification, and then articulated the need for expanded

publicly-engaged scholarship in gentrifying neighborhoods. In many ways, the first two

sections of this chapter—along with the contributions from group work, popular education,

42
Critical PAR and public humanities—can be synthesized into to five guiding values which

scaffold the Neighborhood Story Project:

1) Multiple dimensions of neighborhoods matter. Neighborhoods are often reduced

to the materiality of the built environment, with policy discussions focusing on things such

as roads, streetlights, and housing. And while these things matter greatly, they are not all

that matters to residents. The Neighborhood Story Project encourages team members to

take seriously the multiple dimensions of their neighborhoods, including, but not limited to

the built environment.

2) Power and positionality matter. Power and positionality are intimately

connected: that is our perceived or self-identified social status affects the degree to which we

can affect change in our lives and the lives of others. The Neighborhood Story Project is

designed to cultivate a critical consciousness regarding issues of power and positionality.

This consciousness can be thought of as an “equity lens” through which members filter their

work as they look outward—questioning how power shapes their communities—and also as

they look inward—considering how power and positionality shape members work with one

another. The Neighborhood Story Project is also designed to build power, as members come

together to study and take action in their communities.

3) Who gathers and shares neighborhood stories matters. Traditional modes of

neighborhood policy-making and research have highly constrained, if not altogether

blocked, opportunities for many residents to represent their own experiences. This is

particularly the case for low-income people, people of color, young people, and elders. In

building a team of researchers comprised largely of members from within the community,

43
the Neighborhood Story Project reorients views of expertise (Torre & Fine, 2011). This team

may include people who have formal training as researchers, either as team members or as

facilitators, however, the assumption is that all interested team members have valuable

resources, skills, and experiences that will aid in the group’s work together.

4) What we do with research matters. A primary goal of the Neighborhood Story

Project is for community members to produce knowledge that is valuable, actionable, and

has local benefit (Nagar, 2002). Unlike research created to generate knowledge that will

primarily inform other academics or policy makers, the Neighborhood Story Project aims to

generate information that is of use to participants, produce products that may be useful to

ongoing neighborhood efforts, and provide skill-building and experience in collective action

that can be transferred to other initiatives.

5) Caring for people and places matters. Finally, the design of the Neighborhood

Story Project is built on the recognition that people protect, nurture, and invest in what we

value. As such, the project works to cultivate and amplify bondedness—the sense of

connection people have to one another—and rootedness—the sense of connection people

have to a place itself. By taking seriously the stories, experiences, histories, and perspectives

of residents, the Neighborhood Story Project helps people come to more deeply know and

care for one another and the place they live.

Having situated the project theoretically and disciplinarily, and introduced the

Neighborhood Story Project as an intervention, Chapter 2 grounds this research

methodologically and geographically, describing how I studied the project as well as the

research setting.

44
 CHAPTER 2. METHODOLOGY AND CONTEXT

By engaging residents of gentrifying neighborhoods in the Neighborhood Story

Project, my hope, first and foremost, was that the project would be beneficial to the people

and places involved. In addition, by paying close attention to how the project unfolded in

three neighborhood contexts, with three different groups of residents, I sought to understand

the effects of participation on the ways residents saw themselves as neighbors, how they

relate to others in their neighborhood, and how they understand and enact their capacity for

collective action. In essence, this is a nested project, with three neighborhood-based action

research projects within a larger study (see Figure 4). This chapter describes the

methodology of the larger study and introduces readers to Nashville, broadly, as well as the

three Neighborhood Story Project neighborhoods: Cleveland Park, Edgehill, and Stratford.

Figure 4. Three neighborhood projects nested within study

45
 Methodology

Drawing from the theoretical model introduced and operationalized in Chapter 1, I

approached the study with the following outcome-oriented questions:

• How does participation in the Neighborhood Story Project affect residents’

place attachment?

• How does participation affect social relationships among participants and/or

broader feelings of social cohesion within the neighborhood?

• Does participation lead to continued civic action, and if so, what does this

look like?

• What are the unintended effects of participation?

In addition to tracing what participants gained from the Neighborhood Story Project,

I wanted to understand how those outcomes occurred. Accordingly, I had the following

process-oriented questions:

• What types of group processes engage residents in critically reflecting on their

neighborhood?

• What types of processes deepen social ties?

• What types of processes inform civic action?

One can rightly infer from these questions that I intended a number of intended

effects of the Neighborhood Story Project: to positively affect participants in terms of place

attachment, social ties, and civic action. However, I did not approach these as hypotheses

that ultimately reduce to the question ‘does this intervention work?’ Rather, in the spirit of

46
realistic evaluation traditions (Pawson & Tilly, 1997), I used the above questions to explore

how this intervention works (and does not work), for whom, and in what circumstances. I

was interested in potential changes at both the individual and group level, as well as

assessing whether (and which) outcomes carried across settings.

To investigate the process and outcomes of the Neighborhood Story Project, I drew

on constructivist design principles (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Constructivist inquiry explores

the multiple ways in which social processes, interactions and meanings are constructed and

experienced, often through close observation of naturalistic processes (Creswell, 2007;

Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Constructivist research has long been recognized as a key approach

to studying group work, which is—by design—dynamic, unpredictable, and multisystemic,

in that it reflects interactions between individual, intergroup, and community levels (Papell

& Rothman, 1996; Rubel & Okech, 2017).

Constructivist design is particularly applicable given the exploratory, emergent

nature of the Neighborhood Story Project, and the nature of my research questions.

Although the preponderance of research on place attachment, social ties and civic action

has used quantitative methods designed to measure the degree to which residents are rooted,

bonded, and/or civically engaged (often through use of surveys and scaled instruments),

given my interest is understanding processes of change, a qualitative approach to inquiry is

appropriate (Lewicka, 2011). A constructivist approach is also fitting given the multiple

roles I played in the project: intervention designer, facilitator, and investigator. Although

there are arguably always interactions between the knower and the known, this is particularly

the case in this undertaking, which is simultaneously a study of the Neighborhood Story

Project as an intervention, a study of group process and outcomes, and a study of my own

47
practice. Given these overlapping roles, it was critical that I engage collaborating

researchers. In each setting, I recruited a graduate student who participated as a full team

member in the Neighborhood Story Project, and assisted in data collection and preliminary

analysis.

I studied the Neighborhood Story Project using a multi-case study model. While case

studies can be focused on a single individual, they are particularly appropriate for studying

dynamic and interactional activities (Creswell, 2007) and have a long tradition as an

approach to studying group work (Brower, Arndy, & Ketterhagen, 2004). To the extent that

case studies provide rich descriptions of the group setting, interactions, and facilitation

(Brower, Arndy, & Ketterhagen, 2004) along with attention to researcher subjectivity

(Morrow, 2005), case study research allows readers to assess both the quality of the group

being described and the transferability of the findings.

I piloted the Neighborhood Story Project in three different neighborhoods to explore

how residents might use the project differently in different contexts, to understand how the

distinct settings shape the project outcomes, and to consider what (if any) outcomes carry

across settings. Replicating the intervention in a multi-case design can assist in evaluating

the study’s transferability (Yin, 2011), as insights gleaned across project sites may point

toward broader patterns and trends. At the same time, the use of a multi-case study design

intentionally serves to complicate conclusions drawn from any one site by offering

comparison contexts and group demographics.

Site Selection

48
 In choosing neighborhoods to pilot the Neighborhood Story Project, I sought sites

that shared three basic criteria:

1) The neighborhood is experiencing gentrification (as per the defining

characteristics proposed by Davidson and Lees (2005), introduced in Chapter 1).

2) There is at least one member-driven neighborhood-based organization (such as a

school PTO, a neighborhood association, and/or a faith group) that can serve as an

organizational partner (and assist in recruitment, providing meeting space, and publicizing

the culminating event).

3) There are neighbors interested in participating in the project.

Practically, it was also important that I had some initial connections in the neighborhoods,

in order to vet interest and launch the projects within the time constrains of my academic

program.

I also sought neighborhoods that were contextually different. In particular, I was

interested in how engaging with different types of organizational partners might affect the

project. Further, although all three projects were open to people of all ages, I was interested

in including a school to examine a project that was multigenerational by design.

Ultimately, I piloted the project in three Nashville neighborhoods—Cleveland Park,

Edgehill, and Stratford—collaborating with a different type of organization partner in each

setting (a neighborhood association, church, and school). Site selection for projects was

reciprocal. In all three neighborhoods, I had a number of meetings with local leaders to

consider the goals of the Neighborhood Story Project, the possible benefits and unintended

consequences, and the relationship of this project to my dissertation research. In each case,

49
neighborhood leaders expressed enthusiasm about the project, and suggested a number of

possible participants with whom I followed up individually. I also attended area

neighborhood association meetings to talk about the project, and publicized the project

through social media. Thus, in addition to me choosing a potential neighborhood, the

viability of a site required a neighborhood organization and a core group of residents to also

choose the project.

Participant Demographics

In total, 28 people—excluding myself and collaborating researchers—participated in

one of the three Neighborhood Story Projects.14 All participants consented to participate in

the study, and all but four completed the project (these four reported unexpected health,

work, and/or family conflicts). Participant demographics are summarized in Tables 1 and 2

below. Across the three projects, participants were predominantly black women who had

lived most of their lives in the neighborhood, representing a range of ages, and who were

both homeowners and renters. There are also noticeable distinctions between the three

groups. Whereas Cleveland Park participants were primarily homeowners, Edgehill

participants were primarily renters. With the exception of one college student member of the

Edgehill project, the only youth involved were in the Stratford project. Although half of the

Cleveland Park residents identified as newer to the neighborhood, this was true for only two

of the Edgehill participants, and none of the Stratford participants. Twenty percent of

14
These community members were ‘participants’ in two senses of the word. Here, I am describing the
characteristics of those who participated as subjects of the study of the Neighborhood Story Project. Yet these
same community members were also participants in their respective Neighborhood Story Project, where they
acted as members of a research team. In the following chapters, I use the term “team members” to reflect
members’ active engagement in the projects.

50
participants joined the Neighborhood Story Project though they no longer lived in the

neighborhood.

Racial/Ethnic identity Gender Age group

Project: black white latina asian women men elder mid age youth
Cleveland
Park 5 1 2 0 6 2 5 3 0
Edgehill 7 1 0 0 7 1 4 3 1
Stratford 8 3 0 1 7 5 2 3 7
Total 20 5 2 1 20 8 11 9 8
Percent 71% 18% 7% 4% 71% 29% 39% 32% 29%
Table 1. Summary of participant demographics by race, gender and age

Housing Type Housing tenure

no
renter/former longtime newer longer
Project: renter homeowner resident resident resident
Cleveland
Park 2 6 3 5 2
Edgehill 6 2 6 2 2
Stratford 6 6 12 0 3
Total 14 14 21 7 7
Percent 50% 50% 75% 25% 25%
Table 2. Summary of participant demographics by housing type and tenure

Those absent as participants are also noteworthy: newer white residents. This was a

surprise to me, for a number of reasons. Given that I am a newer, white resident of

Nashville, I had been concerned that my social status might detract long-time residents of

color from participating, while at the same time making the project more attractive for

people who saw themselves as more like me. Further, although my collaborating researchers

and I recruited through one-on-one outreach and at neighborhood meetings, I also used

social media to promote the project, which disproportionately reaches a younger crowd.

Ultimately, my concern was unfounded. And though I later learned (as will be discussed in

51
Chapter 5) that some long-time residents did wonder what this white girl was doing in their

neighborhood, those who joined came in spite of their concern.

Data Collection

Over the course each 12-week Neighborhood Story Project, collaborating researchers

and I collected data through participant observation. This was later followed by focus group

and interviews. Within 24 hours of each session, researchers completed field notes. These

included observational notes from each project event or meeting documenting actions and

interactions (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995); facilitation notes addressing concerns, ideas,

and/or best practices related to the intervention design (for example, suggested

modifications to activity design); and personal notes recording our awareness of any personal

biases which may have surfaced, or other reflections regarding our affective experience of

the people and the process. Beginning during the second or third week, we also collected

audio recordings, occasional video and/or photographic data, and artifacts produced by

and/or related to the group itself (including curriculum notes, handouts or other products

created by members, group text messages, and other social media related to the project).

Within a few weeks of each Story Project’s concluding event, I planned a dinner for

members to celebrate and reflect on our work together. This served as a follow up focus

group, and included a facilitated discussion regarding member’s reflections of the project as

a whole, including what they found most valuable from the experience, what they would

have liked more or less of, and anything they would recommend doing differently in the

future. I also invited discussion of what, if any, future action members might want to take,

separately or together.

52
 Finally, to assess if and how the Neighborhood Story Project had effects over time, I

conducted audio-taped semi-structured interviews with participants 3-12 m. after the

conclusion of the project. Questions explored participant’s preliminary expectations, hopes,

and concerns about the project; their personal and interpersonal experiences as a

participant; and how they thought participation affected their sense of self, their neighbors,

and their neighborhood. I also inquired as to what, if any, relationships and/or activities

have continued since the conclusion of the project (see Appendix C and D for focus group

and interview guides). A transcriptionist transcribed all audio recording, which included a

total of 30 Neighborhood Story Project sessions, two follow up focus groups (one was not

recorded), and 17 post-interviews.

# of Audio Video Primary Co- Images/

sessions recording recording Investigator researcher artifacts
(partial) field notes field
notes
Neighborhood 36 31 14 35 26 502
Story Project
weekly
sessions
Follow-up 3 2 3
Focus group
Post- 17 17 17
interviews
Total 56 50 14 55 26 502
Table 3. Data collected

As summarized in Table 3, collecting a plethora and variety of data related to the

Neighborhood Story Project provided a robust corpus of material for analysis and

interpretation (Morrow, 2005).15

15
As will be described in Chapter 3, within each Neighborhood Story Project, team members also collected data:
interviewing neighbors, gathering images, and analyzing demographic data. In traditional social science research,

53
Analysis

My research collaborators and I began analysis as the projects unfolded, discussing

observations and emergent interpretations in weekly team meetings. Following the

conclusion of the projects (but prior to follow-up interviews in two sites), I reviewed the data

corpus in full, including listening to all recordings while reviewing the transcripts. I then

uploaded all data in the qualitative software, MaxQDA, for coding. While my initial

research questions provided an entry point into themes for coding and analysis, other

themes gained salience as they emerged inductively from the data. After coding a portion of

data from each of the three projects, I met with the collaborating researchers to review

initial code categories and corresponding text segments. Together, we checked for

conceptual clarity, duplicative codes, as well as phenomenon I may have missed in my

initial pass. After this meeting, I created an initial code book that included four major code

categories: what members brought (including the strengths, limitations, and concerns

members brought into the project), project design and facilitation (including the design and

facilitation strengths and challenges), member outcomes (including shifts within and among

members over the course of, or following, the project), and community outcomes (including

shifts in the broader community over the course of, or following, the project). Every text

segment was also coded by the project name, speaker, and the corresponding week of the

project (i.e. Stratford Story Project, Gicola, week 6).

the stories and images that researchers gather often become the property of the researcher. Given the guiding
values of the Neighborhood Story Project, we sought to maximize community member’s control over how their
personal stories were used and stored, and to democratize access to that data. When conducting interviews, the
three Neighborhood Story Project teams provided interviewees with the opportunity to copywrite their interview
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. With this license, the
interviewee maintains ownership over their own interview while setting the terms under which others can access
and use the interview. All data collected by the Neighborhood Story Project teams are now archived at the
Nashville Public Library.

54
 After completing the first-round coding, I completed follow-up interviews with

available participants. In addition to asking questions about the project, I shared some of my

initial observations and interpretations of the project outcomes, asked for their impressions,

and sought alternative explanations. After transcribing and coding these follow-up

interviews, I completed two additional rounds of focused coding (Bryant & Charmaz, 2007).

First, given my interest in the affective dimensions of group interactions and member’s

experiences, I employed emotion coding, explicitly coding the affective dimensions of the

data (Saldaña, 2016). At this time I added a fifth code category for affective codes (including

expressions of excitement, joy, sadness, and indignation). Finally, I reviewed all previously

coded excerpts by person and completed longitudinal coding. In this round of analysis, I

attended to changes (including to identity, relationships, affective states, and agency) by

recording: increases/emergences, cumulations, surges/epiphanies/turning points,

decreases/stoppages, constants, and idiosyncrasies (Saldaña, 2016). Though I had already

captured many of these changes when coding for member outcomes, analyzing these

changes at the individual level over time helped me notice different trajectories among team

members, distinguishing for example, members who came into the group with a strong

sense of responsibility to their community, which remained constant over time, from those

whose sense of agency and responsibility increased over the project’s duration. This also

helped me distinguish outcomes that were broadly distributed across participants from those

that were frequently coded for only a subset of participants.

Throughout the coding process, I evaluated codes using the constant comparative

method to ensure they were consistently applied, and did not mask significant differences

between similarly-coded text segments (LeCompte & Schensul, 1999; Strauss & Corbin,

55
1998). Once coding was complete, I analyzed the data for areas of salience and

inconsistency, looking both at high frequency codes as well as the distribution of codes

across members. A complete codebook with code frequencies is included in Appendix E.

Trustworthiness and Credibility

This study incorporates a number of best practices for establishing trustworthiness

and credibility in constructivist research. As described below, these practices included

prolonged engagement and persistent observation in the research setting (Lincoln & Guba,

1985), attending to researcher subjectivity (Morrow, 2005), and triangulating researchers,

data and methods (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

While there is no standard measure of what constitutes ‘prolonged engagement,’

given that the study was continuous over the length of the Neighborhood Story Project, I

undertook the maximum possible engagement in the research setting. This allowed me to

orient to the members and environment, challenge my preconceptions of participants, and

attempt to build trust (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Relatedly, my research collaborators and I

made persistent, ongoing observations, observing and recording sessions in full, rather than

selecting only a portion of the meetings for data collection and subsequent analysis (Lincoln

& Guba, 1985). As I turned to analysis, this approach allowed me to identify overarching

areas of thematic salience, and increased the trustworthiness of my interpretations.

As a researcher and facilitator, I assume that my practice, scholarly, and personal

experiences always inform my interactions, interpretations, and decisions, whether I am

56
cognizant of them or not.16 I sought a high degree of reflexivity throughout the research

process by incorporating reflective notes into the research teams’ field noting practices (as

described above), and explicitly attending to assumptions I was making about team

members and our interactions. In addition, I intentionally recruited collaborating

researchers with distinct experience and expertise from my own. We met weekly throughout

the course of the project to discuss our observations and nascent interpretations, and my

collaborators were critical in helping foreground my assumptions.

In addition to triangulating researchers, this study triangulated data and methods

through the combination of naturalistic observation, focus groups and interviews, along

16
In designing the Neighborhood Story Project intervention, I drew on practice learnings gleaned over fifteen years
working as the executive director of a non-profit social justice training organization in Montana. In this capacity, I
worked to assess needs, develop interventions, facilitate programming, and evaluate results in dozens of
educational, organizational and community settings. These years provided powerful practice-based evidence
regarding the potential of group-level interventions to reduce bias, build inter-group relationships and
understanding, and foster collective action.

In designing the study, I drew on my academic training in qualitative research as well as locally grounded research
experience in Nashville. This included conducting 18 months of site-based research along-side residents of a public
housing development slated for redevelopment (Thurber, Collins, Greer, McKnight, & Thompson, in press ; Thurber
& Fraser, 2016), and preparing a report for the city of Nashville on Equitable Development (Thurber, Fraser, Gupta
and Perkins, 2014), both of which provided practice experience in research methodology as well as important local
context for this study.

My interests in this work are also deeply personal. I am now, if only briefly, a resident of Nashville, and moved my
white family into one of Nashville’s rapidly changing neighborhoods. I pushed through my anxiety related to being
a ‘gentrifier’ (when the black family next to us put up a for sale sign in their yard days after we moved in, I had a
sinking—and ridiculously self-absorbed—suspicion it was because of us) and build friendships with my black
neighbors. I also reached out to my white neighbors, and noticed the contrasting ease with which I make those
acquaintances. Together, my neighbors and I have watched as in all directions modest workforce housing of the
1960s is demolished and replaced by much larger homes few of us could afford. Through stories of long-time
residents, I have learned how, after school desegregation was finally enforced in the 1970s, white families pulled
their children from public schools; how deindustrialization particularly hurt black workers; and how, not long ago,
taxis would not drive down our now-quiet street out of fear of crime and violence. I have at times spoken out
against decisions made by my nearly all-white neighborhood association that adversely affect the predominantly
black children in our neighborhood schools, and I have also chosen not to send my own daughters to those same
schools. I am in this mix, wrestling with how best to address the complicated legacy of systemic racism,
neighborhood disinvestment, underfunded schools, intergroup tensions, and now gentrification.

57
with the collection of field notes, audio-recordings and meeting artifacts (Lincoln & Guba,

1985). To enhance the credibility of our findings, I preserved all artifacts, including audio

and video recording. Finally, I used the follow-up focus groups and interviews as an

opportunity for member checking (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) my early observations and

interpretations. In addition, I gave all participants the opportunity to review either the

dissertation in full, or excerpts related to their contributions; 18 participants accepted this

invitation. 17 I solicited their feedback on the text, encouraging them to challenge

interpretations they disagreed with or add additional insight. Importantly, while this

dissertation is a study of three PAR projects, the dissertation study itself is not a PAR

project. Though I employed a number of collaborative strategies throughout, and

endeavored to be accountable first and foremost to the Neighborhood Story Project

participants, this dissertation—and its inherent shortcomings, blind-spots, and weaknesses—

are my own.

Though findings of constructivist research may be transferable to similar contexts,

the driving purpose of constructivist inquiry is to provide a depth of understanding of

complex phenomenon rather than generalizability (Creswell, 2007). Yet, though this study

is particular—investigating the effects of a single kind of intervention, on small groups of

neighbors, in a trio of Nashville neighborhoods—I am also interested in what learnings

might travel, in terms of theory and practice. As Lincoln and Guba note, the trustworthiness

of qualitative research is determined by the degree to which sufficient contextual description

is made available for readers "to make transferability judgements possible" (1985, p. 316). So

17
At this time, I also gave all participants the opportunity to choose how they would be named in this document.
As per their requests, some are referred to using their given names and others by pseudonyms.

58
that readers may begin to discern the relevance of the study’s findings to other settings, I

turn now to a brief description of the city of Nashville.

Context: Welcome to the ‘It City’

With its growing diversity, rapid growth, and affordable housing crisis, Nashville is

an apt place to study alternative interventions in gentrifying neighborhoods. Currently home

to an estimated 626,600 residents, Nashville is an ethnically and racially diverse city, and

becoming more so. As of 2010, the Census estimated that Davidson County, in which

Nashville is located, was 53% white, 21% black, and 3% latino, with the latter being the

fasted growing ethnic group in the area (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). Since the 1970s,

Nashville has been an attractive resettlement area for immigrants and refugees, making the

city home to the largest Kurdish population outside of the Middle East, and one of the

largest Somali populations outside of Africa. During the 2015-2016 school year, Metro

Nashville Public Schools reported 120 different first languages among its students

(Gonzales, 2015).

Nashville is also growing at an unprecedented rate. It currently ranks among the

fastest growing cities in the nation both by population (Nelson, 2013) and jobs (Kotkin &

Schill, 2015). Indeed, the “It City” moniker, first professed by the New York Times

(Severson, 2013), has stuck, and the growth does not appear to be abating. Middle

Tennessee is expected to grow by one million people by 2040 (Nelson, 2013), and as the

anchor city of the region, the Nashville area is expected to accommodate much of that

growth. Unsurprisingly, the city’s housing market is also booming. In 2017, Zillow—the

leading online real estate marketplace—named Nashville the hottest real estate market in

59
the country (https://www.zillow.com/blog/hottest-housing-markets-2017-209986/),

providing good news for Nashville developers and real estate agents.

Yet the “It City” is not benefitting everyone. A recent report by the Brookings

Institution (2016) ranked Nashville 5th out of 100 in measures of growth (based on changes

in the number of jobs, the value of gross metropolitan product and aggregate wages). Yet the

same report ranked Nashville 73rd in measures of inclusion (based on changes in median

wage, the number of people in poverty, and percent unemployment). In the midst of

unprecedented growth, the benefits and burdens of development are not being equitably

shared. The rising cost of housing is among the greatest threats to low-income residents.

The Nashville Mayor’s office recently released a comprehensive report on the state of

housing countywide (Office of the Mayor, 2017). In it, the office notes that 30% of county

residents cannot afford the cost of housing. It also reports that since 2000, Nashville has lost

more than 20% of its affordable housing stock, and has current shortage of 18,000 affordable

homes. Given the expected growth in the region, Nashville is on track for that shortage to

increase to 31,000 units by 2025. At the same time, the number of people living in poverty is

rapidly increasing. In 2016, Nashville experienced a 10% increase in homelessness within a

single year (U.S. Conference of Mayors, 2016).

Racial disparities in income make black and latino residents particularly vulnerable

to dramatic shifts in the housing market. Nashville’s black and latino residents are twice as

likely to live below the poverty level as their white counterparts (Metropolitan Social

Services, 2016). Shockingly, the per capita income for black residents countywide is only

$19,920, nearly half that of the white population (Metropolitan Social Services, 2016). Yet,

60
many of these residents live in neighborhoods where housing costs are rising the fastest and

demographics are rapidly changing (as will be explored in Chapter 3).

A certain level of resident mobility is to be expected, but overall, U.S. neighborhoods

tend to be demographically stable, making such significant and rapid demographic changes

noteworthy. In a cluster analysis of census data collected between 1990 and 2010 of every

metropolitan areas in the United States, Wei and Knox note “the most striking finding...is

that metropolitan America is dominated by neighborhoods that are relatively stable in their

socioeconomic attributes” (2014, p. 472). The authors found a distinct typology of

neighborhoods —differentiated by race and ethnicity, household/family income,

educational attainment, unemployment, immigrant status—that have persisted over 30

years across 70% of census tracts (Wei and Knox, 2014).

In Nashville, this stability can be understood, in part, by the persistence of the color

line. This is illustrated in the following two maps, one created nearly a century ago by the

Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), and a racial dot map of the city created from

2010 census data (see Figure 5). The HOLC was a New Deal program charged with

determining locations to refinance loans or approve mortgages within many U.S. cities. The

assessor’s objective was to determine “quality of neighborhood” and the risk each area

posed for mortgage default. Such assessments were based on a number of factors, including

the quality of housing stock, sales and rental rates, physical attributes of the terrain, and,

significantly, ‘threat of infiltration of foreign-born, negro, or lower grade population’ (Greer,

2013). As indicated in red and yellow, the HOLC map of Nashville declared nearly the

entire urban core—then home to all Nashville’s black neighborhoods, as well as other poor

61
residents, people of color, and ‘lower grade’ ethnic immigrants—to be ‘hazardous’ or

‘definitely declining.’

There is debate concerning the degree to which HOLC maps drove decisions (such as

where loans would be approved, and where investments in infrastructure would take place),

and the degree to which the maps merely reflect the results of decisions already made (see

Greer, 2013; Coates, 2014). In either case, the HOLC maps clearly represent a white

supremacist ideology that differentially values people and places along racial and ethnic

lines. Juxtaposing this historic map with the racial dot map for Nashville makes evident the

long-term effects of this ideology and associated practices.

Figure 5. Two moments in time: HOLC map of Nashville, circa 1930,

and the racial dot map, 201018

18
I retrieved the Nashville HOLC map from the National Archives and Records Administration. Copyright
information for the racial dot map is as follows: Image Copyright, 2013, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service,
Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia (Dustin A. Cable, creator).

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 Using 2010 census data, the racial dot map places a single dot per person in the

census track where the person resides. The dots are color coded to reflect the respondent’s

self-reported racial identity: white is coded as blue; black, green; asian, red; hispanics,

orange; and all other racial categories, brown. With its highly concentrated swaths of blue

and green, this map reveals the degree to which Nashville remains racially segregated.

Although Nashville demographics have changed dramatically over recent decades—nearly

50% of residents are now people of color, up from 20% in 1970—as of 2010, nearly 1 in 5

white households still live in census tracts that are over 90% white (U.S. Census Bureau,

1970, 2010).19 Furthermore, people of color overwhelmingly live in areas that were deemed

declining and hazardous nearly a century ago, and very few live in the “best” areas (shaded

green in the HOLC map).

Considering these two maps side by side demonstrates the relative stability of

Nashville’s black neighborhoods over time. Indeed, the racialization of Nashville

neighborhoods has a long history. Although the very first settlement in what was to become

Nashville included a number of free black persons, as those settlements grew, the majority

of black residents of the region were enslaved, working on plantations outside of the city

center, where the wealth of the region was produced by their labor (Lovett, 1999). In 1860,

just 4000 black people lived in the city of Nashville. This dramatically changed with the

onset of the Civil War (Lovett, 1999). Within the first year of battle, the Union army gained

control of the city, and a great migration of freedom-seeking black families found their way

to Nashville; by 1865 the black population had tripled (Lovett, 1999).

19
This reflects Census data at the tract level, geographic areas that generally encompass 2,500 to 8,000 people.

63
 As these new residents were still considered someone else’s property, the Union

army settled them into what were called ‘contraband camps,’ three large encampments

spread around the city: the northwest camp in North Nashville, Edgehill in West Nashville,

and Edgefield in East Nashville (Lovett, 1999). In exchange for lodging, the army enlisted

the labor of black men and women fleeing slavery to build the forts, trenches, and rifle pits

necessary to fortify the city (Kreyling, 2005). The conditions were squalid, subject to

flooding and disease (Lovett, 1999). And yet, these camps held the promise of freedom for

those born into slavery, and after the war these became the first black neighborhoods in

Nashville. As wealth allowed, some black families moved out of these neighborhoods, and

yet these areas remain significant to Nashville’s black communities to this day. Just six

months after the war ended, Fisk University was founded on the edge of the Northwest

camp, and continues to operate as the state’s oldest private HBCU. The first black Baptist

congregation in Edgefield was also started within a year of the war’s close, and celebrated

their 150th anniversary in their historic building in 2017.

Beginning with containing blacks in contraband camps during the war, the

racialization of Nashville neighborhoods has continued over time. This can be traced

through the HOLC redlining of black neighborhoods in the 1930s, the discriminatory loan

practices which provided subsidized home ownership opportunities in the suburbs for white

families for decades, and the urban renewal freeway construction gutted and/or annexed

black neighborhoods from the 1950s-1970s. Although the Civil Rights Movement won

important victories against discrimination, the racialization of Nashville intensified during

the period. As historian Benjamin Houston writes, “The dotted lines of roads now replaced

the WHITE and COLORED signs of the past … an entire city was redrawn and reshaped in

64
order to preserve the legacies of the past” (2012, p.242). These legacies have proved to be

deeply rooted.

As a result, Nashville’s black neighborhoods have long been sites of tension, marked

by deprivation and disinvestment from the city while also being sites of industriousness,

congregation, creativity and resilience. And, with Nashville’s current development boom,

many of these neighborhoods are now radically transforming. To the extent the City of

Nashville has addressed gentrification at all, it is as a housing problem.20 City administrators

are not approaching gentrification as a racialized spatial process that also effects

relationships, knowledge, histories, and visions for the future. It is in this often-ignored

realm of more than material effects that the Neighborhood Story Project intervenes.

20
In the 2016-2017 fiscal year, the city provided $15 million to the Barnes Fund, Nashville’s affordable housing
trust fund, and the Mayor’s proposed budget for next year include a $25 million bond to further shore up funding
to preserve and build affordable housing in the city. In September, 2016, Metro Council passed a voluntary
Inclusionary Housing bill, designed to incentivize developers to build affordable homes for purchase. The current
administration also donated 30 metro-owned properties to be developed as affordable housing. With these
efforts, the city reports that more than 1500 affordable and workforce housing units have been preserved, built, or
are soon coming to market. Although these are all marked improvements, many are concerned these efforts are
insufficient, including the city administration (Mayor’s Office, 2017).

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 CHAPTER 3. TRACING THE THREE PROJECTS

Between February and December 2016, I piloted the Neighborhood Story Project in

three Nashville neighborhoods: the Cleveland Park neighborhood of East Nashville, the

Edgehill neighborhood in Southwest Nashville, and the neighborhood surrounding Stratford

High School, in East Nashville.

Figure 6. Changing housing values (1999-2014) and racial demographics (2000-2010)

within the three pilot areas, overlaid on racial dot map of city

As summarized in Figure 6, each of these areas is experiencing rapid demographic

change that is dramatically out of step with county-wide averages.21 During the time that

housing values across the county increased by 54%, in each of these neighborhoods values

21
See Appendix F for complete description of sources and processing of geographic and demographic data.

66
rose by more than 100%. And while the black population of the county increased by more

than 15% (compared with less than 1% for whites, who, while making up a larger number of

the city’s overall population, are increasing at a slower rate), the black population decreased

significantly in these three areas.

Although only a few miles apart from one another, the neighborhoods in the study

are distinct geographically and historically. Participants in each project brought differing

interests and concerns, and there were significant variations in both research questions and

culminating projects across the three settings: The Cleveland Park Story Project used the

research process to strengthen social ties within their neighborhood, Edgehill leveraged the

project as a tool for organizing residents against displacement, and Stratford employed the

process to retell the history of the school. In the pages that follow, I introduce each setting in

turn, first situating the neighborhood geographically and historically, then describing the

Neighborhood Story Project participants, before tracing the projects as they progressed over

the 12 weeks. After considering the projects separately, I explore similarities in the ways

members theorized gentrification’s effects in their neighborhoods. In the subsequent

chapters, I return to my research questions to explore the effects of participation on team

members, as well as the design elements that facilitated participant outcomes.

Cleveland Park

Today, Cleveland Park references a variety of geographic scales. It is an actual park

located on N. 6th St. on Nashville’s eastside, equipped with a community center that opened

in 1963. It is also the official name of the small neighborhood adjacent to the park, covering

approximately a half square mile between Douglas St. to the north and Cleveland St. to the

south, Dickerson St. to the west and Ellington Parkway to the east. ‘Cleveland Park’ is also

67
used colloquially by many residents to describe a collection of neighborhoods—including

Greenwood, Maxwell Heights, McFerrin Park and Cleveland Park—that surround the park

and community center. The Cleveland Park Story Project ultimately adopted this latter,

larger geographic scale as it attracted team members from each of these areas.

Although there have been black people living in East Nashville since the 1700s,

Cleveland Park truly became an African American enclave following the Civil War. The

Edgefield Contraband Camp was established on the eastern banks of the Cumberland River

in 1864, just south of the neighborhood now known as Cleveland Park. Residents of the

Edgefield Camp built infrastructure for the U.S. government, while simultaneously building

for their own future. Within a year of the war’s end, these new residents had established

First Baptist Church of East Nashville on Main St. (Lovett, 1999). Additional churches,

schools and businesses soon followed, and a number of small black neighborhoods took root

throughout East Nashville, often existing adjacent to white neighborhoods. Such was the

case with Cleveland Park.

In the 1950s, Cleveland Park was home to robust Civil Rights organizing to

desegregate East Nashville schools and businesses, much of which was generated in First

Baptist Church of East Nashville (National Register of Historic Places). During this period,

East Nashville was also targeted for slum clearance, public housing construction, and

freeway construction under a massive East Nashville Urban Renewal Project. Indeed, the

$24 million project proved to be the largest in the Southeast (Erickson, 2016). Businesses,

churches and more than 1000 homes were razed in the process (Carey, 2001). Cleveland

Park was particularly impacted, as family homes were cleared away for a new expressway—

68
now named Ellington parkway—that bisected the neighborhood. As a result of these

projects, the neighborhood was essentially a construction zone for nearly 20 years.

Many residents believe that the combination of neighborhood upheaval, residential

displacement, and the insertion of the highway simultaneously damaged social cohesion

while decreasing the value of area homes (Plazas, 2017). In 1970, Cleveland Park was

comprised of 75% black households (U.S. Census Bureau, 1970). After court-ordered school

desegregation took effect in the 1970s, white flight from the area accelerated (Erickson,

2016), and by 1990, the neighborhood was 90% black (U.S. Census Bureau, 1990). For

many years, the neighborhood experienced high rates of poverty, addiction, and crime, and

an increasing number of residents struggled to find opportunities for educational and

economic advancement (Hartman, 1975). However, a number of anchor churches and

businesses remained. Working through these institutions and a strong Cleveland Park

Neighborhood Association, longtime residents are proud to have brought about important

improvements to their neighborhood over the last 20 years, decreasing crime and improving

schools (S. McCullough, personal communication, 1/9/2016).

Concurrent to these internal efforts to improve the neighborhood, in the early 2000s

the 5 Points area of East Nashville received significant redevelopment attention from the

city and private developers, and the surrounding neighborhoods began to gentrify, including

Cleveland Park (Kreyling, 2013; Rau & Garrison, 2017). Middle and upper income

residents, enticed by the opportunity to live in a walkable neighborhood minutes from

downtown, found relatively affordable homes in the neighborhood. Restaurants and bars

whose price point catered to these new, more affluent neighbors opened. Today, the

neighborhood demographics are rapidly changing. Between 2002 and 2016, the Nashville

69
Assessor of Property reports housing costs went up 110% in the area, inevitably driving up

rents and property taxes, and between 2000 and 2010, black residents decreased by 68%

(U.S. Census Bureau, 2000; U.S. Census Bureau, 2010).

For many long-time residents, it is impossible to separate the past from the present.

Sam McCollough, president emeritus of the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Association,

observes, “If urban renewal didn’t get you in the '60s, the interstate got you. If the interstate

didn’t get you, Ellington Parkway got you. Now, it’s gentrification, housing costs and taxes

that will get you” (Plazas, 2017). In addition, a number of hallmark black businesses—from

barber shops to soul food joints—have closed down, and in 2017, as First Baptist Church of

East Nashville celebrated its 150th anniversary, the historic church also faced questions of

whether it could afford to remain in place (Meyer, 2017).

Within Cleveland Park, tensions have arisen along race and class lines, as residents

of different tenures recall different pasts, experience different presents and imagine different

futures. By 2016, these tensions fissured the neighborhood association, resulting in the

establishment of two neighborhood groups: one led by newer white residents and another by

older, black residents (personal communication, Sam McCullough, 1/9/2016). At the time

the Cleveland Park Story Project launched, members of these two associations were

beginning a mediation process. My collaborating researcher and I conducted outreach for

the project through both neighborhood networks, which served as anchor organizations for

the project. The division within the community was on the minds of many who were

interested in joining the project. At one information session, a long-time resident observed

“this could help close some gaps and build unity again.”

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 Ultimately, eight residents joined the project. Larry, Andrea and her husband

George are black homeowners who identify as longtime residents. All three are elders in

their community; Larry and Andrea grew up in the neighborhood, and George has lived

there more than 30 years.22 Though of an age when some have retired, all three each still

work full time. Larry maintains the grounds at an area university, Andrea works at an

insurance company, and George works at a large factory. Three other team members

consider themselves newer residents of the neighborhood, having moved into the area in the

last decade. Also homeowners, these team members include Ms. Pauline, an elder black

woman who operates a small pre-school in her home; Leslie, an adult black woman who

coordinates research at a medical center, and Dee, an adult Latina woman who recently

retired from the post office and moved to Nashville to marry Larry. The final two members

of the group are former neighborhood residents priced out by rising rents, but who retain

strong ties to the neighborhood. Both in their 30s, at the time of the project Maria, a Latina

woman, was attending divinity school, and Courtney, a white woman, was working as a

practicing artist. This group was joined by Jyoti, my collaborating researcher, and I. Jyoti is

a South Asian woman who has a number of ties to the neighborhood from her previous

applied research related to gentrification. Both she and I live outside of Cleveland Park,

though only a few minutes away.

22
Rather than referring to a precise chronological age (which some members disclosed but I did not systematically
gather) or employment status (as many participants past retirement age were still working), I am using the term
‘elder’ to refer to participants who demonstrated and were granted social status by virtue of their wisdom, lived
experience, and the formal and informal leadership roles they played in their families, faith communities and
neighborhoods. I am using ‘youth’ to refer to young adults in high school or undergraduate college, and adults to
refer to those between these life stages associated with youth and elders.

71
 Figure 7. Members of the Cleveland Park Story Project

As members got to know one another over the first few weeks, they spoke with great

care about their neighborhood. Several—particularly Andrea and Larry, born and raised in

the area—demonstrated rich historical knowledge, and all expressed a strong desire to learn

more about their community. Despite these strong ties to place, only Andrea and Leslie

were actively involved in their neighborhood associations (both acting as their association

presidents). A couple of others participated in their associations, and the remaining team

members were not involved in formal civic groups, though most noted informal social ties in

the community.

Over the first several weeks, prompted by activities encouraging residents to reflect

on the neighborhood, members began to articulate their concerns about Cleveland Park.

Overwhelmingly, they were troubled by the diminished sense of cohesion within the

community, particularly across generational lines. George shared, “If I could change one

thing about my neighborhood it would be, um, young and the old interacting more.” For

many, this decreased cohesion reflected a lost sense of interdependence within the
72
neighborhood. Ms. Pauline noted with irony that many of the new houses in Cleveland

Park are built close in proximity, and yet neighbors are seemingly farther apart. Such a shift

in how people relate to their neighbors and neighborhoods is not without consequence,

particularly as the neighborhood experiences higher turnover. As Leslie reflected, “I don’t

want to generalize too much, but some of the new people, I know they’re only there for a

short time…but there is like a ripping of the fabric of the neighborhood when you kind of

dive in and dive out.” Many members came into the Cleveland Park Story Project

concerned that this ripping of their neighborhood was disproportionately harming some

residents more than others, particularly elders, low-income residents, and residents of color.

They were also curious about patterns of displacement—beginning with Indian removal in

the 1700s, to the removal of homes during urban renewal in the 1950s, to people pushed out

by rising rents and property taxes today.

Grounded in their collective concerns, in week five the group generated dozens of

possible research questions. After a lengthy deliberation, they decided to move forward with

four: What holds Cleveland Park together? How can we make Cleveland Park home again?

How does racial struggle show up in Cleveland Park? And, how can we protect our

neighbors from displacement? Members formed three work groups: an interview team and a

photography team investigated the first two questions by conducting interviews with

neighbors and collecting historic and contemporary photographs of the neighborhood, and a

document analysis team investigated the question of racial struggle through archival

research. To address the final question regarding displacement, the group wanted to

generate a list of resources to share with neighbors, and one member offered to take on that

task independently.

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 Over the next few weeks, the interview team created an interview guide and collected

seventeen audiotaped interviews. They began by interviewing one another, which allowed

members to become comfortable discussing the project, gaining consent, following the

guide, and recording interviews on their phones. They then reached out to people in the

neighborhood. Following each interview, they also took a portrait. The photography team

collected vintage photographs of the neighborhood from longtime residents, and gathered

additional images of the neighborhood today. Meanwhile, the document analysis team

made independent trips to the city archives to look into neighborhood history, read

published books and articles about the neighborhood, and gathered demographic data. As

we began to reflect on what we were learning through our respective efforts, the team

decided to host a multi-media interactive community exhibition as their culminating project.

The team hoped the event would provide opportunities for neighbors to learn about their

community, meet one another, and reflect on their own responsibilities as neighbors. In the

days leading up to the event, Dee reflected:

I’m going to be praying and I’m going to be hoping that, that the people that come

out…that something will touch their inner spiritual being inside that they would say

to themselves, ‘You know, I have been not doing this or not doing that or not reaching out

or not being, um, more sharing and more communicating with my fellow man, my

neighbor,’…That it will be such an impact to them that this community will see that

change.

Her team members shared the hope that the event would foster some of the sense of

community and shared history they believed Cleveland Park was losing.

74
 Held in the gym of the Cleveland Park Community Center—down the hall from

where we had been meeting the past 12 weeks—the exhibition included a display of large-

format portraits of the 17 neighbors who had been interviewed (see Figure 8), along with a

quote from each person related to the questions: what holds Cleveland Park together, and

how can we make Cleveland Park home again?

Figure 8. Sample posters from exhibition

Nearby, a video played, with audio from the interviews overlaid on images of the

neighborhood’s past and present. A large printed timeline wrapped around two walls of the

gym, containing key events in the neighborhood’s history, particularly related to racial

struggle. The timeline included 43 events and/or eras, beginning with the indigenous ties to

Cleveland Park and continued to the present moment. A nearby table offered sticky notes

75
and markers so attendees could add to the timeline. Among other interactive features of the

exhibition, there was an activity table for children, a light reception, and people were

encouraged to write a word on a stone to take home, signifying what they wanted to

remember about their neighborhood.

About fifty people came through the gym over the course of the two-hour event,

perusing materials, adding to the timeline, and visiting with others. Ms. Pauline noted that

many of the ‘foundational families’—elder black neighbors who had multi-generational ties

to the neighborhood—were present, noting that it was a “good reunion…I think that that it

rekindled a bond bringing back good memories.” In a neighborhood where many residents

feel like their neighborhood is changing without them, the event created space for long-term

residents to see their place history affirmed.

The significance of that affirmation became particularly salient to me during an

interaction I had at the table where we had displayed dozens of smooth stones and

permanent markers. I was encouraging people to select a stone and add to it a word or

phrase that they wanted to take with them. An elder in the neighborhood approached the

table, and I asked if she wanted to write a word on a rock. She looked at the stones and then

looked at me, with an expression I couldn’t quite read. “It’s maybe a little silly,” I offered,

and she responded in a teasing tone, “you said it.” I laughed and she moved away from the

table to resume visiting with others. A short while later she came back, found a rock—she

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wanted a large one—and asked me to write, ‘born here.’ She returned to her friends, then

circled back to the table once again and asked me to add a date—her birthday—to her stone.

Figure 9.Cleveland Park neighbor with stone

Though turn-out was modest, team members were pleased with the results. In

addition to long-time residents, a number of newer neighbors came, many of whom

expressed gratitude for the chance to learn more about their community. Also in attendance

were members from both Cleveland Park Neighborhood Associations. As Andrea later

reflected, “I think it needed to be intimate, because there has been a lot of sensitive ... It is

very sensitive right now.” From the start, Ms. Andrea had hoped the project would bring

healing to the fractured community, and she believed the event was appropriately scaled to

achieve that goal. Following the event, the photography exhibit was moved to the hallway

of the community center—to be viewed by those attending the Cleveland Park

Neighborhood Association monthly meetings, among others—and the video was posted

online.23 In addition, the three largest neighborhood associations in the area (Cleveland

23
The video is viewable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohCGG6eJlzM&feature=youtu.be

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Park, McFerrin Park and Maxwell Heights) posted the video and digital versions of the

timeline and other historical artifacts on their social media pages.

Edgehill

The southwest Nashville neighborhood of Edgehill has many similarities to

Cleveland Park. Its growth as a robust black neighborhood can also be traced to the Civil

War, and to a contraband camp that was built near neighboring Fort Negley. Within

months of the war’s end, formerly enslaved residents began building schools, churches, and

businesses, ultimately creating a thriving neighborhood (Lovett, 1999). Like Cleveland Park,

the area is proximal to downtown, and was once a patchwork of black and white

neighborhoods. Edgehill was also targeted by urban renewal freeway construction in the

1950s, experienced white flight and disinvestment in the mid-20th century along with a rise

in poverty and crime, and has experienced rapid gentrification in recent decades. But

Edgehill is also distinct from Cleveland Park in many ways, having particular strengths and

vulnerabilities.

By the 1940s, Edgehill was an established middle class and professional black

neighborhood, serviced by numerous black-owned businesses, and home to a number of

black doctors, lawyers, as well as the state’s first black representative (Houston, 2012;

Nashville Civic Design Center, 2003). As a result, the neighborhood likely had more

political and social power than did lower-income neighborhoods such as Cleveland Park.

But the neighborhood’s location also made it uniquely vulnerable. Urban renewal was

particularly devastating to Edgehill. It completely altered the street system, separating a

previously unified neighborhood by two major freeways, cutting-off the once robust

commercial area on 12th Ave, and razing the homes of more than 2000 people to build

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public housing (Houston, 2012; Nashville Civic Design Center, 2003). As interstates 40 and

65 barricaded the neighborhood to the north and east, Edgehill faced encroachment from

Belmont University to the South (which expanded under urban renewal), and the

increasingly powerful Music Row to the West (Nashville Civic Design Center, 2003).24

Although a number of anchor businesses and churches remained, Edgehill was

squeezed, and the neighborhood was economically and socially frayed. But when the city

announced plans to build a major expansion to Edgehill public housing in the 1960s,

residents pushed back, forming a powerful neighborhood association called the “Edgehill

Committee.” This committee of longtime black residents, supported by Rev. Bill Barnes, (a

white minister who founded Edgehill United Methodist Church as an integrated house of

worship), successfully defeated the expansion on the grounds that mixed-income

neighborhoods were more ethical and effective than large-scale public housing

developments (Barnes, n.d.). In 1968, Edgehill United Methodist Church launched

Organized Neighbors of Edgehill (ONE) as the nonprofit arm of their organizing and

service work. Edgehill residents and ONE remained mobilized through the Civil Rights

Movement and into the current era, working to improve the schools, safety, and well-being

of their neighbors. Though ONE has not achieved all their goals, many long-time residents

have a strong identity as a neighborhood that can fight for its own preservation.

Today, this one square mile neighborhood is bounded by I-65 and I-40 to the north

and east, Wedgewood Ave. to the South, and 17th Ave South to the west. Edgehill still faces

encroachment from Music Row, Belmont and Vanderbilt universities. According to Metro

24
Music Row is the geographic area where many of the city’s recording studios, record label offices and radio
stations are located. It is considered the heart of Nashville’s music industry.

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Assessor’s Office data, between 2002 and 2016, housing costs went up 135% in Edgehill,

and—in a neighborhood that was nearly 90% black from the 1970s through the 1990s,

between 2000 and 2010 the number of black households decreased by 28%. Like Cleveland

Park, there are now two neighborhood associations, ONE—which meets in Edgehill public

housing, and is attended by many of the longer-term black residents of the neighborhood—

and Edgehill Village Neighborhood Association—organized and attended by newer, whiter,

and more affluent residents. However, as in the past, there are people trying to bridge racial

and economic divides. A coalition of neighborhoods groups—including both neighborhood

associations—formed in 2016, and one of their initial efforts was to form a neighborhood

history committee to document the area’s history and advocate for their collective well-

being (personal communication, Joel Dark, 4/5/16). In addition, Edgehill United

Methodist Church continues to serve as an integrated house of worship, and was as the

organizational partner in the Edgehill Story Project. Two members of the church helped

develop a recruitment strategy, which included outreach to both neighborhood associations.

Ultimately, the Edgehill Story Project included eight team members, in addition to my

collaborating researcher and me.

Seven of the team members are black women with deep ties to the neighborhood.

Four of these are adults or elders who rent their homes, and no longer work in the formal

economy. Among the elders are Ms. Mary and Ms. TK, who live in Edgehill public

housing, and Ms. Betty, who rents a home nearby. Juanita also grew up in Edgehill, and

though she rents outside the neighborhood, she has long imagined retiring in Edgehill.

Shirley, a student in a nearby college, also rents. Though she is newly living in the

neighborhood, she has worshipped and volunteered at Edgehill United Methodist Church

80
for several years. The two homeowners in the group are Suzanne and Vanessa, both adult,

working women who spent formative years as members of Edgehill United Methodist

Church, and both have family homes in the neighborhood (though Suzanne now lives in

East Nashville). The only white man in the group was Max, an adult who works at the

church and rented in the neighborhood until he was priced out. The two collaborating

researchers, Mercy and I, are both white women who do not live in the neighborhood.

As was the case in Cleveland Park, all members of the Edgehill Story Project entered

with a strong sense of attachment to place and people in their community, and a foundation

of knowledge about their neighborhood’s history—Ms. TK and Ms. Betty alone had a

combined century of experience in the neighborhood. With the exception of Vanessa, who

had not recently been involved in the neighborhood, all members came in with some

connection to existing neighborhood organizations, though for most, their involvement had

been limited to attending meetings or playing modest leadership roles. Ms. Mary, Ms. TK,

and Ms. Betty—friends before the project began—as well as Juanita, regularly attended

monthly ONE meetings. Shirley, Suzanne, and Max were all involved in Edgehill United

Methodist Church, and both Max and Suzanne played leadership roles in other community

work. Not long before the Edgehill Story Project began, Max helped launch a Nashville

chapter of Homes for All, a national campaign to organize renters and protest displacement.

From the start, Max hoped that the Edgehill Story Project would complement the work of

Homes for All Nashville.

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 Figure 10. Edgehill Story Project team meeting

Though not everyone was familiar with Nashville Homes for All at the start of the

project, concerns about displacement were widely shared among members. At the first

meeting, Juanita explained, “I’m seeing our neighborhood change drastically, even

catastrophically, and I want to do something about that.” She continued, asking if we could

“create a booklet or something that would be able to be used to stop developments” and

others immediately chimed in, echoing the need for materials to advocate against

development-driven displacement in the neighborhood. In this spirited discussion, Vanessa

exclaimed, “in order for us to change stuff we have to be activists. It’s up to us to use our

product to take to the developers, the council, the mayor, and say, hey, you want to destroy

this?” Over the following weeks, it became clear that members had an array of concerns

about development, including a deep worry about people being displaced, concerns about

the negative effects of the changing built environment, and the ruptured social ties as people

move out of the neighborhood and new people move in. Several people referred to a loss of

“togetherness.” Juanita explained, “My concern is that Edgehill is no longer going to

actually be a community…that it is turning into a wasteland.”

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 As the Edgehill Story Project got off the ground, Max was also recruiting for

Nashville Homes for All, and several members of the Story Project joined this effort. In our

fifth week, our planned meeting conflicted with Nashville Homes for All’s first major

event—a Renter’s Day of Action cookout, rally and march staged adjacent to a nearby

development. We shifted our meeting time so members could participate in both events, and

eight of the ten of us attended the day of action. When the group gathered for the Story

Project meeting—dripping sweat after a 2-mile march in 90-degree heat, and voices coarse

from chanting—the excitement in the room was palpable. That energy carried through the

afternoon as we synthesized our concerns from the last four weeks into two multi-part

research questions to guide our remaining work together: 1) How are our neighbors being

displaced from Edgehill, and what can we do to stop it? 2) What are the policies and

funding sources fueling development in Edgehill, and how can we shape the development to

be more equitable? The group saw these questions as two sides of the same coin—with the

first concerned with the effects of gentrification, and the second concerned with the causes.

We began mapping possible sources of data and methods of data collection and analysis,

and members formed two working groups: an interview team and a data team.

In the weeks that followed, the interview team developed interview questions,

practiced interviews with one another, and ultimately gathered eleven videotaped

interviews. Pulling out key themes from the interviews, the team made a 20-minute video to

be used as an educational and organizing tool in the community. The data team collected

and analyzed data on housing values, foreclosures, evictions, and demographic changes.

We pulled key findings, supplemented by illustrative quotes from interviewees, and a list of

resources for renters and homeowners, into a report. The final document also included a

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comic strip explaining how zoning works and how community members can get involved in

shaping development in the neighborhood.

Figure 11. Excerpt from Edgehill Story Project zoning

comic strip
The team’s sense of urgency sharpened in week seven when news broke that Park at

Hillside—a large private apartment building in Edgehill that accepts Section 8 rental

assistance—sold for 20 million dollars, after selling for just 6 million two years prior. This

increased sense of precarity informed the design of the culminating community event, which

the group titled “Edgehill State of Emergency: A Call to Action in Our Neighborhood.” The

group imagined the event as a place for neighbors to learn more about how gentrification

has affected the neighborhood, and to feel better equipped to get involved. As Suzanne put

it, “I hope…that people feel like there's a place for them to get plugged in and that neighbors

feel like they are better connected to each other, but also feeling like there's a way to support

others in the neighborhood. And also a way for them to be supported as needed.” At the

same time, the group had an organizing goal. In Ms. TK’s words, “it was about getting up,

waking your neighbor up, telling them, ‘Come on. Get up. Let's go. Let's get up and talk up

84
for what you want.’ Because see, if we didn't ever talk up for it, we was not going to get

this.”

Attended by more than 80 people, the event featured a showing of the film, the

release of the report, and a social-action fair where attendees could connect with various

organizations working against displacement.25 Members were very pleased with the turnout

at the event. Further, the event received broad press coverage, including an article in the

Tennessean (Humbles, 2016), and stories on the local public radio affiliate and on the three

major news channels. In subsequent weeks, the initial press was followed by two additional

news interviews with members of the Edgehill Story Project. The high level of press

exceeded members’ expectations, as it dramatically increased the reach of the project.

Figure 12. Members of the Edgehill Story Project following their event

25
The film and report are available online at https://edgehillstateofemergencyreport.wordpress.com/

85
 In the months since, Edgehill members have seen an uptick in neighbor involvement

in a number of neighborhood groups, including ONE and Homes for All Nashville. In

addition, four Edgehill Story Project members have maintained strong involvement in

Homes for All, and are continuing to organize neighbors under the banner of the Edgehill

Story Project.

Stratford

The third Neighborhood Story Project was piloted in a school zone. While Stratford

has never been the name of a neighborhood, it is the name of a school that began as, and—

after a period of bussing in the 80s—has returned to, a neighborhood school. Covering a

much larger geographic area than the other two projects, today the school zone stretches six

miles north to south, from the suburb of Madison to the I-24 loop ringing downtown, and is

generally bounded by the Cumberland River to the east and Gallatin Pike to the west. The

school draws from two large long-time black neighborhoods—including Cayce Homes, the

largest public housing project in Nashville—as well as a cluster of historically white

neighborhoods, both affluent and working class. These include the neighborhoods known as

Historic Edgefield, East End, Lockland Springs, Eastwood and Inglewood.

Stratford has long been shaped by the intersection of segregationist ideology and

shifting educational policy. When the school opened as a junior high in 1961, the school

zone was slightly smaller than today, and encompassed a newly constructed suburban

middle-class neighborhood.26 At the time, the area zoned for the school was 98% white

(U.S. Census Bureau, 1960). Despite opening several years after the historic Brown v. Board

26
Throughout this section, I draw on Stratford school zone maps and enrollment information I collected from the
Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools Archives, located at 2601 Bransford Ave, Nashville, TN 37204.

86
of Education supreme court decision, Nashville schools remained entrenched in

segregation, and district officials likely did not consider whether the few black families in

the area zoned for Stratford might want to send their children to the neighborhood school.

A review of early yearbooks makes evident the school received strong parent engagement,

excelled in academics and sports, and earned national commendations for educational

excellence.

In 1970, the Nashville school district was court-ordered to desegregate through

rezoning and bussing. In response, the district added a 30-block island from a black, North

Nashville neighborhood to the Stratford school zone. Many white families resisted

desegregation, moving to the outskirts of the county untouched by the desegregation order

(Erickson, 2016). Others remained in the neighborhood but pulled their children from the

public schools. In 1970, the white population of the area zoned for Stratford remained very

high—89% (U.S. Census Bureau, 1970) — but white student enrollment in the school

dropped to 73%. Although Stratford maintained a reputation for excellence, between 1969

and 1973 overall enrollment at Stratford dropped 30%, leaving not only fewer students, but

less parents engaged in the school as well.

Bussing increased in the 1980s, and the retreat of white families from Stratford

continued. The school district was targeted with lawsuits related to its integration efforts,

and complaints from both black and white communities about the loss of neighborhood

schools (Erickson, 2016). Although some students at Stratford continued to thrive, by the

1990s the school had entered a period of turmoil, with three principals cycling through in

just four years. The district abandoned bussing, though at this point, Stratford had re-

segregated into a predominantly black school, and the neighborhood demographics had also

87
changed. An increasing number of Stratford households struggled financially, and for some

students the increased stresses at home made it harder to come to school. The school had

one of the highest truancy rates in the district, and received increasing negative attention

from the press, particularly after a student brought a bomb to the school in the mid-nineties.

By 2000, Stratford’s facilities were poorly maintained, teacher turnover rate reached

30% annually, the school struggled with issues related to discipline and safety, and reported

very high rates of suspension and expulsion (State of Tennessee Office of Educational

Accountability, 2002). In 2001, Stratford failed to meet criteria established by the Tennessee

Department of Education and was put on the state’s ‘failing school’ list (Mielczarek, 2003).

Though Stratford had returned to a neighborhood school, by 2000, many who could go

elsewhere did. The white population in the Stratford school zone dropped to 44% (U.S.

Census Bureau, 2000), and only 30% of Stratford students were white. Many in Nashville

associated the problems in the school with the student population, rather than with broader

issues of racial and economic inequality and a lack of district and community investment in

the school. As a result, the school and its predominantly black student body were

stigmatized.

With new leadership and district investment, Stratford began to stabilize in the early

2000s. In recent years, Stratford has had more than $20 million in renovations, and begun

distinguishing itself as a STEM school (Langston, 2014). Concurrent to the transformations

within the school, the surrounding neighborhood is also changing. The Stratford zone is

now one of the most desirable places to live in Nashville (Garrison, 2015). Developers and

real estate companies have played an active role in shaping the physical transformation of

the area, while also crafting a new narrative about the neighborhood.

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 In 2015, Aerial Development—one of the largest development groups targeting

“transitional areas” in Nashville— released a promotional film featuring a high-end housing

development in the Stratford school zone. As the camera pans over a modest single-family

home, the narrator says, “some bad news lived here before…” (Trageser, 2015). While the

“bad news” remains racially unmarked, the cast of actors representing those here now—

shown jogging, drinking lattes, doing yoga, and hosting roof-top dinner parties—is all white

(or racially ambiguous).27 Aerial is not alone in equating a revitalized neighborhood with the

replacement of poor people and people of color with affluent, white residents. In 2015,

Armstrong Real Estate ran an advertisement campaign reading, "East Nashville: More

neighbor than hood" (Cavendish, 2015). Messages like these are explicit attempts to

differentiate the neighborhood from its stigmatized past, and make it clear that certain

bodies are imagined to be in place in this changing neighborhood, and others are not.

This new narrative of who belongs in East Nashville is quickly becoming a reality

across the Stratford school zone, where there has been a 110% increase in home values over

the last decade, and a concurrent 20% decrease in black households (U.S. Census Bureau

2000; U.S. Census Bureau 2010). White families now make up 62% of the zoned

neighborhood. However, given that only 22% of Stratford students are white, many of these

families still do not see Stratford as their neighborhood school, and many of Stratford’s

current students struggle against the reputation of attending a low-achieving, high-risk

school.

27
Aerial removed the video after receiving public criticism of the messaging (Paulson, 2015).

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 The Stratford Story Project was the largest of the three teams. The 14 members

included seven current students, four alumni, and one parent of alumni, in addition to my

co-researcher and I. All the students were seniors, and in addition to the cash stipend, the

students had an additional incentive; the school agreed that participating in the project

fulfilled their capstone requirement for graduation. Of the six students who completed the

project, Jaime, Zander, and Nate were white, Mia and Mcaela were black and Dev was East

Indian. Some of the students knew each other prior to the project, though not all. Jaime—a

school ambassador and soccer player—had the most preexisting connections with other

students: she played soccer with Mia, was dating Nate, and friends with Zander and Dev. In

a STEM school that highly values athletics, Nate, Zander and Dev were notably not

interested in sports or STEM—all three were drawn toward creative pursuits such as

photography and videography. Mia, who began as the only black student on the team,

recruited Mcaela and Jazmine (who could not complete the project), both of whom were in

band. Dev was seen as something of a superstar by his peers—he excelled academically and

was involved as a school ambassador, in yearbook, and other creative extracurriculars. He

was the only student I knew prior to the project, and he was eager to participate, though he

had a conflicting work schedule the first month. Indeed, in addition to school and

extracurricular activities, nearly all the students were also working part time, or had child-

care responsibilities at home.

The participating adults represented a range of generations and connections to the

school. Brenda, the first black student to enroll at Stratford as a 7th grader in 1963, currently

serves as a city council representative, and was seen as an elder in the group. The other elder

in the group was Rae, a recent retiree, and mother of two sons who graduated in the 1980s.

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Darnell and Gary graduated in the 1980s, and Gicola, the most recent graduate, is class of

2007. Aside from my collaborating researcher and I, all of the participating adults and elders

were black, and though all remained connected to the school, only Gicola and Rae still live

in the Stratford area. I am a neighbor—I live across the street from the school—and Joseph,

my collaborating researcher, is an Asian man with no prior connection to Stratford or to the

neighborhood.

Of the three projects, the Stratford team had the greatest degree of racial and gender

diversity. Similar to the previous projects, team members entered with existing place

attachments and social ties. However, with the exception of Gary—a self-proclaimed “super

alumni” who participates in nearly every school function—most adult team members were

only peripherally involved in the school. Perhaps unsurprisingly, historical knowledge about

the school and neighborhood was largely held by the alumni and parent, with current

students having little knowledge about the school’s past.

It took over a month to finalize membership in the Stratford group, with two

members—Darnell and Jazmine—starting and unable to continue given outside

responsibilities, and others—Brenda, Mcaela, and Dev—joining several weeks into the

project. Despite these challenges, the group identified a number of shared concerns,

particularly the misrepresentation of the school, students, and neighborhood in the media.

During week two, the team reviewed a number of news articles about Stratford. Of the first

100 returns on a google news search, all but two were related to the football team, and most

were related to a single star player. All the accompanying images were of black male

athletes; there were no images or articles about women students—athletes or otherwise—

and no mention of the recent success of the school’s award-winning robotics team. Further,

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the few articles unrelated to football emphasized deficits in the school, neighborhood, or

students. As Brenda noted, the absence of a more holistic representation “kind of works on

your psyche…for the public, this is what they are seeing, this is how they form their

opinion.”

In week three, the team jelled around their guiding question: How has the changing

reputation of Stratford impacted people’s investment in the school, and how can we change

it for the better? The group formed an interview team and an archival data team. The

interview team set out to collect interviews from students and teachers representing every

decade of the school’s history, ultimately recording 21 videotaped interviews in five weeks.

Meanwhile, the archival data team gathered images from school yearbooks, demographic

data from the district archives, and reports and newspaper articles about the school over

time. They also created a Facebook page for the project, which quickly grew to more than

200 alumni, students, and parents who posted memories, images, and reflections related to

Stratford. In week eight, the team decided to weave these materials together into a feature-

length documentary film. Though this was an ambitious goal to complete in the remaining

four weeks, the students, and in particular Dev—the only member with substantive video

experience—were confident in the timeline.

Ultimately, we decided to bill the culminating community event as an ‘early

screening’ of the film, and use the evening to gather additional feedback to finalize the

documentary. More than 100 people, predominantly alumni and current students, attended

the screening and participated in an animated feedback session with the team.

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 Figure 13. Stratford Story Project Team at early screening

The response was overwhelmingly positive. Many people remarked they learned important

historical context about their school, and that the film provided a refreshingly nuanced story

of an often-stigmatized educational institution. Attendees also offered feedback about

perspectives that seems to be missing; for example, several alumni from the 1990s and 2000s

felt like their generation was cast in a negative light.

Following the screening and a team debrief, a number of members—primarily Dev

and alumni Gicola and Gary—were eager to conduct additional interviews and complete

the film. Over the next two months, they conducted a second round of 16 interviews as well

as supplementary archival research, and premiered the final 43-minute film in February 16,

2017, six months after the start of the project. Again, approximately 100 people attended the

screening. This time, the event was co-sponsored by the neighborhood association, spurring

many more neighbors to attend.

The team had hoped the film would be educational—changing the way students,

neighbors, and teachers saw Stratford—and they largely believed they were successful. As

Dev reflected after the project ended:

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 We started off by at least sparking a little question in people's minds, like ‘what

happened and what can we do to change?’...We have a lot of people who live in this

neighborhood who still don't even know about the school or who have really

outdated feelings about the school. We have a lot of new people coming in, so I think

… the video helps people understand.

The film has since been shown at a number of neighborhood functions, incorporated into

courses by Stratford teachers, and reached more than 2500 people on Facebook.28

Theorizing gentrification

Having traced the Neighborhood Story Project in three pilot settings, a number of

similarities and differences are worth underscoring. The projects were each located in a

neighborhood experiencing dramatic economic and demographic shifts, though these

changes were nuanced by each area’s particular history and context. The projects differed in

terms of demographics and member skills and interests. For example, a greater proportion

of elders participated in Cleveland Park, and a greater proportion of youth participated in

Stratford. Team members in Cleveland Park and Edgehill entered with a higher level of

place knowledge about their communities than did most of the Stratford team; the Stratford

group had the highest collective level of computer literacy skills of the three projects. And

although each group ultimately focused on a distinct set of research questions, there were

similarities in the ways they theorized the effects of gentrification. Team members across the

three projects raised concerns related to housing and changes in the built environment; to

knowledge about, and the reputation of, their neighborhood; and to changing relationships

28
It can be viewed online at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbN9fUS4CL4FH4sMt792oWA.

94
between people and place. As explored below, I consider these as material, epistemic, and

affective concerns, respectively.

Material concerns

Team members across all three projects raised a number of concerns related to how

gentrification was shaping the material conditions of their lives. Members were worried

about rising housing costs and the resulting increase in residential displacement. Members

frequently discussed this through an intersectional lens, reflecting an awareness that

neighbors and neighborhoods were differentially affected by gentrification. Recalling a

conversation with a newer white neighbor, Leslie shared, “he said something to me about

market forces, umm, being why there’s a shift, and I said to him, ‘Well it’s interesting that

things go down if you’re brown, and things go up if you’re white.’” As reflected in this

anecdote, team members were particularly attentive to the impact of gentrification on

people of color. They also noted the vulnerabilities of children and elders. For example,

Gicola worried that Stratford students might be displaced from their school—as well as their

neighborhood—as area rents rose, and Betty worries about losing elders “due to the change

in the so-called Affordable Housing.”

For those members who owned homes, several recognized the generational effects of

displacement. In their practice interview, George and Ms. Pauline had the following

exchange about how gentrification was impaction the neighborhood:

George: Is this something that concerns you or not so much?

Ms. Pauline: It does concern me. It does. Uh, it concerns me on a personal level

because when I, um, let’s say when the Lord helped, enabled me to see that buying a

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 home is better than renting a home, I did that in mind of leaving an inheritance to

my son and his children and their children’s children, for them to have a choice…So

yes it concerns me. It concerns me because I am considered, um, senior, you know?

My age at 65, it’s not as easy to uproot and start all over, you know?

For Ms. Pauline, the changes in her neighborhood threaten her own sense of security, as

well as the legacy she hopes to leave to her children, grandchildren, and great

grandchildren.

Loss of housing was not the only material consequence of gentrification that team

members identified. In both Edgehill and Cleveland Park, members noted that despite the

multitude of new restaurants, there were actually less places in the neighborhood where they

could afford to eat. These new locales had become destinations for people from outside the

neighborhood. On Cleveland Park’s narrow roads, the swell in street parking and traffic

inconvenienced residents and raised fears among some that emergency vehicles may not be

able to get through in event of a fire or health crisis. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief

that new development improves the aesthetic of neighborhoods, there was the feeling

among some members that the aesthetics suffered:

Ms. Pauline: what has been the most significant event or change in the

neighborhood?

George: Um, development of some houses.

Ms. Pauline: …can you elaborate a little bit?

George: Because some of the houses do not blend with the other houses in the

neighborhood…And to be quite honestly, you know, it makes—it makes the

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 neighborhood look, it puts a, it puts a bad, in other words, it makes the

neighborhood look ugly.

On a typical summer Saturday in George’s neighborhood, you can find neighbors

demonstrating their pride of place by maintaining their lawns and gardens. Yet, despite their

efforts, the contrast of the newly constructed modern buildings casts their neighbor’s modest

homes in a less favorable light.

Though team members expressed concerns about these material effects of

gentrification, they were not opposed to change in and of itself:

Ms. TK: Then, a part of me would welcome the new in as well. Like you say,

different people have different ideas, and bring in new changes. Like he said, as long

as a change come in, and those that have been in this neighborhood can be included

in the change, come on. You do not just tax us so outrageously expensive that I

cannot afford to do it, you know?

Ms. Mary: News flash, that is what it is about. Them moving in here and we moving

out.

Unfortunately, members have yet to experience redevelopment where they “can be included

in the change.” For many, the material experience of gentrification is one of exclusion: new

development is causing rents and property taxes to rise, making their future in the

neighborhood more tenuous; houses are being built that existing neighbors cannot afford to

rent or own; restaurants are opening that serve a higher income clientele; and the aesthetics

are changing such that it is harder to see beauty in your own home.

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Epistemic Concerns

Though material changes in the neighborhood were central for team members—

particularly in Edgehill and Cleveland Park—members also had a number of epistemic

concerns. These are broadly related to what is known about, and who is seen as

knowledgeable within, gentrifying neighborhoods.

Team members were concerned by a lost sense of history in their neighborhoods. In

each project, members shared the legacies of their community that mattered to them— deep

social networks in Cleveland Park, a history of civic action in Edgehill, and an

intergenerational alumni pride at Stratford. And yet, as Ms. Mary reflected, as the

neighborhood changes, “that is what is going the fastest—the history is disappearing.”

In its place, team members in all three projects were deeply disturbed by news stories

suggesting that before recent development their neighborhoods were dirty, unsafe, or uncared

for by residents. Several members of the Edgehill Story Project described these articles as

“offensive,” and devaluing of the neighborhood’s past. As Suzanne explained, “It is like

Edgehill is going through this re-branding process, instead of recognizing its importance in

the history of Nashville.” At Stratford High School, the rebranding of the neighborhood has

preceded that of the school, which still faces significant stigma. When I asked team

members what Stratford represents to those outside the school, their first thoughts were

“ghetto,” “loud,” “dumb,” and “projects.” Brenda offered, “you know, a lot of times people

have thought this is a place for low achievers.” Jaime—who transferred in after her

Freshman year—agreed, sharing, “When I came to Stratford, I thought it was going to be

this terrible school…I thought it was going to be awful, and it's not. I'm a lot happier here.”

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 Members of the Stratford Story Project want the school to be known on its own

terms—defined by the people who know it best—and this sentiment was shared across the

three projects. As Leslie concluded, “words have life, have power, and what we say about

the neighborhood definitely colors it a different way…I think we need to be able to change

some of that language.” Yet team members were concerned that the very people who have

knowledge about their communities are often dismissed or devalued.

In all three neighborhoods, whose perspective matters has been highly classed and raced.

News articles highlight new buildings, new business owners, and new residents, and the

voices of longtime residents or those priced out of the neighborhood are often absent. Story

Project team members described their own and their neighbors’ experiences of being

“bullied” and “harassed” to sell their homes. For example, members of the Edgehill Story

Project interviewed Pamela, a black homeowner, who described being pursued by a

developer wanting to buy her home. After clearly expressing she did not want to sell, she

returned from work one day to find a full contract written up in her mailbox. As Pamela

recalled, “That really actually made me angry for someone to insinuate that I'm not smart

enough or I'm not intelligent enough to know when something is being forced on me. That I

can't make a decision as to for what I want for my own home.” Like Pamela, many

members spoke of the pain of being dismissed as knowers and knowledgeable in their own

neighborhoods. Perhaps more fundamentally, they spoke of feeling increasingly unknown in

places that had long been familiar. In Cleveland Park, Leslie—the President of her

neighborhood association—described the time her white neighbors called the police on her

as she walked her dog because her presence on the street appeared suspicious. Members of

the Edgehill Story Project shared similar experiences, leading Ms. Betty to conclude:

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“We need to get to know one another more…I know you, I know your name, I know who

is in your house, you know who is in my house. You just know about me. I think that needs

to come back to the neighborhood.”

Affective Concerns

In addition to team member’s material and epistemic concerns, they were troubled

by how gentrification is affecting resident’s relationships to people and place. As the

composition of the neighborhood changes, many members spoke of a lost sense of

interdependence within the community. Juanita reflected:

…we used to actually take care of each other. Because if I didn't have, and somebody

else had, I had. Because we didn't mind sharing with each other. We didn't mind,

you know, taking care of each other, that way, as well. You know, not just looking

out for each other as far as out on the streets, but in our homes...Now it's like, I guess

it goes along with that individual stuff. I take care of me. I take care of mine. I don't need

you in my business. It's not about being in each other's business, it's about actually

watching out for each other. And cause, when one grows, we all grow.

In Stratford, neighborhood gentrification has intersected with educational policy and

persistent white flight such that there is a wide disconnect between the school and parts of

the community. Rae, whose children graduated from Stratford in the 1980s, mourns the lack

of care Stratford students experience from their school. Reflecting on her hopes for

Stratford, she offered:

I guess I long for Stratford to be a place where students and people can come and feel

safe. They can learn. And I think it's really important for young people to have fun

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 and to own their environment. Not someone or some system always dictating, but

seeing more of a collective environment where you feel a part of it. And, again, it just

comes back to how I felt when I was growing up, even though it was in the

segregated system. I was excited. I felt loved. I didn't realize how much, how

important it was that people knew my family and my community.

As members reflected on the sense of community cohesion that has been lost as a result of

shifting social demographics, they were not reminiscing a nostalgic, imagined past, but

grieving a lived history and actual relationships. Ms. TK explained:

…the people that you have been growing up with all your life, some of them go to

Antioch, some of them go to Hendersonville, everybody is stretched out. That thing

that we called a neighborhood or a family, we feel lost. A lot of them, they had to

move on. We are like, ‘Well darn, I feel so naked. So lost without my other people,

and without my neighborhood.’ That is one of my concerns, that we do not lose each

other because we matter for each other. That is terrible, you know.

As Ms. TK makes painfully clear, gentrification can have profoundly disruptive

consequences on social ties. And as she says, it is not only a loss of ‘my people,’ but also a

loss of a ‘my neighborhood’—a sense of place and belonging.

Clearly, the changing composition of the neighborhood is partially to blame for this

lost sense of cohesion and place attachments, but these losses are exacerbated by the

physical changes in the neighborhood. The Edgehill team articulated the notion of

‘construction fatigue’ to describe the experience of those who choose to leave their

neighborhood because the changing physical environment no longer feels like home.

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Suzanne described a friend who recently moved out “because there's all this construction

around her and of course, of course they're building houses that are two times as big…Yeah,

you're right. They didn't force her-but she felt like her quality of life had decreased.” For

some, this diminished quality of life is accompanied by profound grief. As Ms. Mary

explained, “I could look all the way up to 12th and Wedgewood where I lived. With all the

buildings going up, I can't see that anymore. God, it's so bad. I don't know. It's a feeling...”

Suzanne offered, “it's like a feeling of loss that fills you,” to which Ms. Mary replied, “Yes,

it is. That's exactly what it feels like.”

As team members theorized the consequences of gentrification, they painted a

picture of losses that extended far beyond residential displacement. When Mary shared that

“the quality is being sucked out of Edgehill…it's like we living in, we're going to be living in

an empty shell, because of the building,” she made evident the ways that our material

experience of having or not having a safe and secure place to live cannot be disconnected

from what we know about that place, and how we feel about ourselves, our neighbors and

our neighborhood. Furthermore, residents like Mary do not have to be physically displaced

to be epistemically or affectively harmed by gentrification, to lose their place as

knowledgeable and known, or to lose their sense of place in community.

Ultimately, members of the three Neighborhood Story Projects anchored their

inquiry and neighborhood action in how they were theorizing gentrification’s harms. Each

group honed in on a different element of neighborhood change: Cleveland Park focused

most on restoring relationships, Edgehill on preventing physical displacement, and Stratford

on changing the narrative of their school. Importantly, despite their pain over the material,

epistemic and affective harms of gentrification, members of the three projects had visions for

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how their neighborhoods could be otherwise. As reflected in the exchange between George

and Ms. Pauline below, they imagined their communities—not as places that never

changed—but as places where people have and could again care for one another:

George: If you could change one thing about your neighborhood, what would it be?

Ms. Pauline: …for them to keep in mind the indigent, the poor, the

handicapped…the homeless. Again, to make it as feasible for all of us to live

together, um, and grow together because trying to have one portion of a society

without the other portion, it may seem that it will be okay but it’s not...Seniors need

young people, young people need seniors…if all you want in your circle, in your

neighborhood, are the people that are up-and-coming, and you forget your mom,

your grandmother, your uncle, granddaddy, because they’re old now and they’re

seniors and this is the ‘it place,’ something is going to be lost. Something will be lost.

This vision of building communities of interdependence—where people endeavor to learn

about their neighbors and neighborhood, and strive to be good neighbors to one another—

was echoed across projects. With these aspirations in mind, I turn now to considering how

participating in the Neighborhood Story Project affected team members.

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 CHAPTER 4. OUTCOME FINDINGS

Throughout the Neighborhood Story Project, I played dual roles. Working with each

neighborhood team, I served as facilitator, helping each group to achieve their goals. At the

same time, I served as the principal investigator, paying attention to the intervention as it

unfolded and to participant outcomes as they emerged. Echoing the theoretical model

introduced in Chapter 1, and the research questions introduced in Chapter 2, I wanted to

understand how participation in the Neighborhood Story Project affected residents’ place

attachment and social ties, and if and how participation lead to continued civic action. For

the purpose of this study, place attachment can be understood as the combination of

residents’ knowledge about their neighborhood, emotional ties to their neighborhood, and a

sense of efficacy in their neighborhood.29 I define social ties as positive bonds with others in

the neighborhood, and civic action as formal or informal engagement in the neighborhood.

As detailed herein, by analyzing the observational, focus group and interview data I found

that participation in the Neighborhood Story Project overwhelmingly strengthened

members’ attachment to their neighborhoods, and deepened members’ social ties. By virtue

of their participation, all members increased their civic action over the course of the project,

29
In Manzo and Perkins’ (2006) model of place attachment, the behavioral dimension is theorized to include
formal and informal modes of participating in the neighborhood, demonstrated by behaviors rather than efficacy. I
use efficacy in this operationalization of place attachment as it is a precursor to participation, and also to
differentiate place attachment from civic action, which I explore as a distinct outcome area.

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though the degree to which participation continued beyond the project varied. Figure 13

provides a snapshot of participant outcomes across all three projects.30 In the pages that

follow I explore similarities and differences between the three projects, as well as the

unintended effects of participation.

100
90
80
Percent of Participants

70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Increased place Deepened Increased Increased social Increased Increased
knowledge emotional ties to neighborhood ties indivdual action collective action
place efficacy

Participant outcomes

Figure 14.Summary of participant outcomes

Place Attachment

Given the cognitive, affective and behavioral dimensions of place attachment

(Manzo and Perkins, 2006), I was particularly interested in team member’s knowledge

about their neighborhood, their feelings toward their neighborhood, and their sense of

30
In this figure, changes to participants’ place attachment is captured in the first three columns from the left:
increased place knowledge, deepened emotional ties to place, and increased neighborhood efficacy. Social ties are
reflected in the fourth column, as indicated. The last two columns in the figure relate to continued civic action:
increased individual action, and increased collective action.

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efficacy within their neighborhood. Though most team members entered the project with

some foundation in each of these areas, all participants expressed value in gaining

additional knowledge about their communities, and for most, this learning strengthened

their attachment to, and sense of agency in, their neighborhoods.

Place Knowledge

All but one team member reported significant increases in place knowledge over the

course of the 12 weeks (see Figure 13). This is notable given that some—particularly the

long-time residents in Cleveland Park and Edgehill, and the Stratford alumni—brought a

great deal of historical knowledge to the project. Even so, these long-time residents found it

meaningful to learn more about their community. Though Larry was born and raised in the

Cleveland Park neighborhood, he was unaware of the history of the Edgefield Contraband

Camp prior to the project. As he reflected:

I found out something the first time I was here that startled me…the, the slaves, the

camps, came here. I, I did not know that. That blew me out of the water and uh so

everything has a, has a lineage, just like all of us, just like any plant. Put a seed,

comes up, it has many roots and it just grows.

Numerous team members remarked that tracing their community lineage helped them

make sense of the challenges—and the possibilities—of the present moment.

During one of the Stratford Story Project sessions, the team hosted a focus group

with some of the first staff to work at Stratford. These elders described what it was like for

them to be teaching at the school while its reputation rapidly declined. Jaime, a high school

senior, shared with the guests, “you said, ‘I don't know if we're teaching at this school that

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they are talking about.’…That's kind of how I feel, and I'm sure some of the other students

feel too. It's like, we don't feel like we're at the same school that the media portrays this

school as.” For Jaime, it was affirming to hear a retired teacher give voice to an experience

the two shared across generations. Following the same focus group, Gicola was struck by

the ways the school had worked to engage the community in the past. She noted:

One thing that really stuck out to me…was how both of you emphasized that this

was a new community when this school first started, and it's come back to that phase

again where it's a new community. Those same tactics and intentional outreach to

the community, communication to the community, is what needs to happen to make

it a family and not just a building.

Learning the history of the school—particularly how the school staff sought relationships

with neighbors when Stratford forst opened—helped the Stratford team imagine what might

be needed to improve relationships between the school are community now, learnings they

carried into their community project.

Although learning their neighborhood history was meaningful to many, so too was

gaining greater insight about the contemporary spatial processes that were shaping the

neighborhood. For many, this form of place knowledge involved learning new vocabulary

and concepts—such as gentrification, market-rate, tax increment financing, and zoning—

which allowed them to understand and participate in community discussions about their

neighborhood. Midway through the Edgehill Story Project, Betty reflected on her own

learning process:

I feel like me not knowing something is like I'm right here (she placed her hand on

the table, signifying herself, and covered it with a notebook), and all these people that
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 knew all this information, I feel like they were incog, I think the word is incognito

where you lay back, watch them and look at other people suffer. I feel like this

information is like, okay I caught you. I'm coming up out of it, I'm going to embrace

this, I'm going to embrace change and I'm going to help everybody understand that.

For Betty and many others, participating in the Neighborhood Story Project offered a form

of political education. As members learned about the mechanisms driving development,

they had a better understanding of what was shaping their neighborhood, and how and

where they could intervene.

Emotional ties to place

As reflected in Betty’s quote above, for many, learning about their community

strengthened team member’s commitment to the people and place of their neighborhood.

Though they entered the project with a range of relationships to their neighborhood, nearly

every member expressed deepening their emotional connections to their neighborhood (see

Figure 13). For example, Gicola, a Stratford alumna, entered the project with a strong

affective connection to the school. Reflecting on the project, she shared, “I think what was

so rewarding was just being able to reconnect with my school, learn the history of my

school. Being able to share that and put that in a historical piece.” In contrast, Mercy, the

research assistant on the Edgehill Story Project, was relatively new to Nashville, and lived

outside the Edgehill neighborhood. Several months following the project’s conclusion, she

noted “When I go past, I feel a connection to Edgehill, and a care for it that feels really

meaningful. But it also feels like, being a part of this has helped me to see how I can be a

part of a neighborhood that I live in.” Not only did she develop emotional ties to Edgehill,

participation shifted her relationship to her own neighborhood. Those who entered the

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project with an ambivalent relationship to the project setting also expressed an increased

sense of connection and commitment to place.

Several months after the Stratford Story Project ended, Dev and I sat in my backyard

reflecting on the project. He confessed he used to “hate” the school: “I would always think

of the school as like, ‘what is wrong with this school?’” He talked about the importance of

learning about the history of the school, white flight and disinvestment. As he explained:

We often forget. Okay, why did this happen, or what's the cause behind the school

being at the place where it is? …What I learned in this project about my school was

that the neighborhood doesn't like the school, or they didn't like it for a very long

time…Just show a little more love to this school, and I guess you could change the

school up.

Participating in the Stratford Story Project helped Dev feel and show a little more love to

the school.

While the overwhelming trend was that team members became more emotionally

connected to place over the course of the project, there was one notable exception. Towards

the end of the Cleveland Park Story Project, Leslie reflected:

I started this process thinking, um, that this was my forever home. This was

the…the house I retire in, the house that will be there, and in the course of the last

month that feeling has changed. Um, it seems like the more movement there is, the

more unstable I've felt and, um, it doesn’t frighten me but it has certainly changed

how I was planning.

Leslie was the only Neighborhood Story Project team member who perhaps became less

place attached as a result of engaging in the project. While she remains an active member of

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her neighborhood association (and has no plans to leave the area), learning more about the

historic and contemporary shifts in the neighborhood have caused her to reevaluate the

longevity of her residence.

Neighborhood Efficacy

Over the course of the Neighborhood Story Project, every participant took action to

move their team’s work forward, and became more involved in their community (see

discussion on long-term involvement below). For many, the experience of taking action

within the project strengthened their belief that they could make a difference in their

neighborhood, providing them with an enhanced sense of neighborhood efficacy. Efficacy

can be understood as a building block to intentional action; a belief that one can affect

change is foundational to doing so. Bandura (2008) contends that efficacy can be developed

in a number of ways: People gain efficacy through mastery (i.e., having successful practice

experiences); social modelling (i.e., seeing similar people succeed); social persuasion (i.e.,

receiving the combination of encouragement and skill development); and finally, through

physiological wellbeing (i.e., experiencing physical and mental health). Many team

members came into the project with an existing sense of efficacy. For some, that belief was

relatively unchanged over the course of the project. Yet more than half of the team members

expressed gaining an increased sense of efficacy through their participation (see Figure 13).

Gains in efficacy were evidenced in Betty’s description of “coming up out of it” and

ready to help others, and by Andrea, a member of the Cleveland Park project who

exclaimed, “I’m excited about taking what I’ve learned from this research and…sharing it

among my community, not just make it a 12-week, but make it a lifetime goal for my

community.” Participating in the project created an experience of mastery for members.

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 In addition, team members frequently noted being inspired one another, signaling

the importance of social modelling to building efficacy (Bandura, 2008). Ms. Pauline noted

the high level of collective investment in the Cleveland Park Story Project:

I was always amazed because everybody worked together and they did their portion

and it was an eagerness, you know, for the people that went to the archives and did

their research and how they were still, you know, coming together and pulling from

one another…everybody stayed involved. And that's one thing—to assign someone

to do something, to give those assignments—and for everyone to really take hold and

own it. And that's what everybody did. Everybody owned their assignment and that

was a good thing…we really took ownership of the portion we were supposed to

play.

Ms. Pauline’s quote also reflects a shift from individual efficacy to collective efficacy.

Members increasingly saw themselves as capable of making change, and by working with

one another, they also recognized their collective abilities to reach their goals (Collins,

Walting Neal, & Neal, 2014).

Across the board, team members expressed a high level of pride and accomplishment

in their collective work. Many people talked about wanting to build on the work of the Story

Project, either individually or as a team. When the Edgehill Project was at the half-way

point, Vanessa was already thinking about what comes next:

I don't like to just do stuff and then it just, that's just the end of it. It's up to us. It's up

to this group to continue. Say if we decide to do a block party, festival, whatever, we

have to continue to interact with each other every so often…with or without Amie.

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 You know, we'd love for her to be with us forever but we can continue to meet. We

can continue to come up with events and do things in the neighborhood.

As discussed below, how members acted upon their sense of efficacy varied greatly. But

overwhelmingly, team members expressed strong and meaningful gains in their knowledge

about, attachment to, and belief that they could make a difference in, their neighborhoods.

Social Ties

At the outset of each Neighborhood Story Project, all members knew at least one

other person in the group, though most members were new to one another. Over the 12

weeks, team members formed strong bonds within their teams. This was evidenced week-

by-week as members lingered together in the parking lot after sessions, exchanged hugs at

the start and end of meetings, sent encouraging text messages to our group chat between

sessions, and remembered and celebrated one another’s birthdays. Indeed, every member

spoke of the significance of gaining new relationships over the course of the project (see

Figure 13). As Ms. Pauline reflected in the final meeting of the Cleveland Park Story

Project, “we became family, and just from the little bit of time, I really am going to miss you

guys. But the important thing is…we don't have to go our separate lives anymore.” The

language of becoming ‘family’ was echoed across the three projects, and was particularly

poignant in the Stratford Story Project, which offered team members the rare chance to

work as equals across generational lines. Just two weeks into the project, Jaime commented,

“I like how the group is very respectful of each other because I feel like yeah, I'm in a group

of adults, but they don't look down on me because I'm 17. They see me as their peer, not a

child. I definitely like that.” Several weeks later, Gary, an alumnus, reflected, “I remember

when we first came together and how we were kind of separated, young and the mature...It's

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no longer, these are kids and we're the adults, and listen to us. We're all contributing. That's

my favorite thing…we're all a family.”

While the relationships formed among team members were meaningful to team

members, they are perhaps unsurprising, as group work—by design—fosters interpersonal

relationships. In addition to within-group relationships, some members expressed gaining a

broader sense of community cohesion. This was particularly true for those who interviewed

their neighbors. Months after the Cleveland Park Story Project ended, both Dee and Pauline

noted they had continued to build relationships with neighbors they interviewed during the

project. Others gained a sense of community cohesion through interacting with neighbors

who attended the culminating community event. Overall, participation in the Neighborhood

Story Project strengthened social ties, both through the relationships formed within the

team, and for some, the relationships formed in the broader community.

Civic Action

Over the course of the project, all Story Project members engaged in some form of

action to improve their communities. However, the degree to which civic action was

sustained after the project’s conclusion varied along three trajectories: continued individual

action, continued collective action with other team members, and a lack of continued

action.

Continued Individual Action

More than half of team members used the ideas and practices learned during the

Neighborhood Story Project in their continued neighborhood engagement (See Figure 13).

Ms. Andrea, who was a leader in her neighborhood association before joining the Story

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Project, offers a prime example. As we gathered each week in the Cleveland Park

Community Center, Ms. Andrea would note aloud facilitation techniques she wanted to

bring back to her association—from encouraging phonetic spelling on name tags, to using

painter’s tape to safely adhere butcher paper onto walls. She was also soaking in some of the

more subtle elements of facilitation. When I visited with Ms. Andrea several months after

the project had ended, she reflected on how she drew on what she learned in the project at a

recent neighborhood meeting:

It has made a difference in us, and we are pouring into our community what has

been poured into us. It may not come out maybe the first two months, we may not

use it, but it is planted inside of us. The presentation that I did when we had our

meeting Friday night, [what] I learned through Cleveland Park Project, it started to

come out of me. I felt very comfortable. It is like it became natural for me to stand up

there and to talk, and to control the meeting when there was kind of like some

friction there.

While Ms. Andrea continued her community action through a formal leadership role

in her community, other members continued less formally. As Ms. TK and I met at her

apartment to reflect on the Edgehill Story Project, a handful of her neighbors popped in to

give or receive community updates, see if she had anything cooking, or to seek her advice. It

was clear she is seen as a lay leader in her neighborhood. Since the project ended, Ms. TK

has been using her influence to encourage her neighbors’ involvement in the community,

particularly as her public housing neighborhood is now slated for demolition and

redevelopment. As she put it:

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 when you all helped me to understand—opened my mind to understand—then it

was like, ‘Oh ya'll, come on. Now we know this’… And you know, we're not afraid.

We feel empowered and not afraid because you understand what's going on. That's

amazing how it just took, what? Two or three people to wake up these other people.

Ms. Andrea and Ms. TK are examples of how members leveraged the knowledge and

confidence they gained in the Neighborhood Story Project to continue making a difference

regarding issues of gentrification in their neighborhoods, by working within formal and

informal community networks.

Continued Collective Action

A smaller portion of team members—just under a third—were inspired by the

Neighborhood Story Project to continue collective action together. This was most robust

among the members of the Edgehill Story Project. Three months following the conclusion of

the project, four members were still working together as part of Homes for All Nashville. In

this capacity, they were attending and testifying at city council meetings, organizing

neighborhood gatherings, and meeting with groups of renters about tenant rights. Vanessa is

one of those still engaged in that work. In week four of the Story Project, she reflected on

her yearning to be involved in her community:

… in a lot of ways, I just feel like it's almost some kind of divine intervention

…because I've been in this neighborhood for a long time…these past, you know, 10-

15 years, I have been watching the neighborhood…It's like ‘what can I do, what can

I do? How can I get involved?’ Then all of a sudden, it's like I'm involved and this is

just, I'm just so blessed…even though I don't know, I don't feel like I've done

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 anything that outstanding so far, but I just feel, I feel some sense of empowerment. I

just feel like I'm not just sitting around watching all of this happen and doing nothing

about it.

For Vanessa, that feeling of empowerment has fueled her continued engagement. Similarly,

once Ms. Betty got engaged with other Edgehill neighbors, she was eager to continue their

work together. For Betty, the experience of the Story Project prepared her for leadership in

Homes for All:

I've learned how to be an organizer…When Max said, ‘Betty, you want to come on

the steering committee?’ I'm like, ‘Yeah, I'm ready for everything’…That's what we

did at Story Project. We really steered our own event. We had our event. We

planned that event. We found who we was going to bring, how much food we was

going to have. That's really all they do in the steering committee. And figure out who

we want to come, was there going to be some camera people, all of that.

For those who continued in collective community action, the Neighborhood Story Project

provided a launching pad for their future work together.

Lack of Continued Action

Although just over half of Neighborhood Story Project team members have

continued to engage in community action—individually or collectively—just under half

have not. For some, it was simply not a priority to do so. All the Stratford students were

seniors, and though not all have left Nashville, all left East Nashville within months of their

project’s completion. Yet other members who had not engaged in community action

expressed a desire to be more involved.

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 When we met individually, both Dee and Ms. Pauline articulated concern about the

vulnerability of elders in Cleveland Park, and both had a number of ideas about how to

assess this population’s needs and create more opportunities for elder engagement. Both had

also attended their neighborhood association in the past, and believed this organization to

be an appropriate venue to bring their recommendations, yet neither had done so. Despite

the leadership they had shown during the Story Project (and their leadership roles within

their faith communities) the women expressed some reticence to taking on leadership in the

neighborhood at large.

The differing trajectories in continued community action have a number of possible

explanations, including differences in individual member goals, desires, and confidence;

distinct neighborhood contexts; the relative strength of existing neighborhood organizations;

and the degree to which the project itself facilitated continued action. As Breton observes of

the limitations of group work, “Once a group terminates, ex-group members cannot protect,

consolidate, and build on these achievements if they are socially isolated; they need a

supportive environment” (2004, p. 64). As the facilitator, I realized in retrospect that I had

done little to prime the Cleveland Park team members—the first of the three projects—to

consider continued action, something I became more intentional about in the remaining two

projects. Although a handful of Stratford members continue to engage in the school and

surrounding neighborhood, the Edgehill group was differentiated by a particularly high level

of continued individual and collective action.

What was different in Edgehill? First, from the start the Edgehill Story Project had

the strongest existing social and organizational network. A greater number of members

already knew one another and were already engaged in their neighborhood. Other studies

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have found that residents are more involved in their communities where there is a greater

social norm of involvement (Foster-Fishman, Pierce, & Van Egeren, 2009), which may be a

factor in Edgehill. Second, as the Story Project was underway, a number of highly

publicized developments were occurring in the neighborhood, creating a heightened sense of

urgency to get involved. Third, Max’s role in the group as a team member and an organizer

with Homes for All created an easy segue for those who wanted to continue working

together. Finally, as evidenced in Vanessa’s prior reflection, more members in Edgehill were

simply asking themselves, “what can I do? How can I get involved?”, and looking for a

long-term way to engage in their community. Fueled by the seriousness of the present

moment, they were able to actualize their desire to stay involved by easily transitioning

from the Story Project to working with another local organization alongside people they had

come to know and care about. I presume that it was this combination of factors that

differentiated Edgehill.

As noted in Chapter 2, one of the intended effects of the Neighborhood Story Project

was to foster continued civic action. In considering the three trajectories related to this goal,

I do not mean to typologize continued collective action as the ‘best’ outcome and lack of action

as the ‘worst.’ Given the Neighborhood Story Project’s commitment to centering

marginalized knowledges, the degree to which members continue to take action is important

to the extent that it is necessary for them to achieve their individual and collective goals.

Members of the Edgehill group articulated their goals in terms of movement building from

the start. As such, it is appropriate to measure the project’s success, at least in part, by its

ability to nurture sustained collective action. Although members of the Cleveland Park and

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Stratford projects hoped their work would make a difference—and believed that it had—

they did not set long-term goals for their work together.

Nonetheless, many of the participants that did not report continued action still

described their experience in the Neighborhood Story Project as having long-term,

transformative effects. Dee described the project as “on her bucket list” - one of the most

impactful experiences in her life. Ms. Pauline explained, “… it changed us… It's so much

beyond what we really think, and to be a part of it is almost life-changing because your

thought process has changed.” These reflections from two members who did not continue

involvement in their neighborhood are reminders that sustained action is not the only

measure of meaning. Having said that, the different trajectories of continued action have

implications in understanding the impact of interventions such as the Neighborhood Story

Project, which I return to in Chapter 6.

Unintended Outcomes

The previous sections of this chapter explored outcomes related to the Neighborhood

Story Project’s intended effects: to positively impact team members in terms of their

relationship to their neighborhood, social ties, and civic action. These were also the three

outcome areas that team members identified making the most significant gains. There were,

however, a number of unintended effects that occurred at a lesser frequency. Three are

particularly noteworthy: the adult educational value of the project, the significance of

participation for elders, and the mental health benefits for people traumatized by the

changes in their neighborhoods.

First, a number of team members expressed gaining technological literacy skills

during the project. This was particularly true for members with limited formal education
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and/or technology access, and older members whose prior educational and work experience

did not include use of computers or other ‘smart’ technology. Throughout the project, many

members were excited to learn to use the technology they already had in new ways, for

example using their phone to take and send pictures, or to record and save interviews.

Others gained experience with new technologies. Betty, who on several occasions said she

wanted to enhance her computer skills, worked with me to develop a comic strip explaining

how zoning processes work. Using an online program, Betty and I learned to drag and drop

characters in place, change their expressions and postures, and add speech bubbles. While

developing confidence and competence in using technology was not a primary goal of the

project, this was a particularly rewarding aspect of the project for a number of team

members. Further, given the degree to which civic engagement increasingly relies on

electronic communication, these skills also created access points for future community

involvement.

Second, the project appeared to have particular value for elders. Each of the three

projects included elders who had recently retired or were nearing retirement, and many

expressed some degree of isolation within their communities. Ms. Pauline commented on

several occasions that it was good to have a reason to get out of the house. Dee, a retiree

who was newer to her neighborhood, noted that the Story Project was a way for her to make

friends and get involved in the neighborhood. During our last gathering, George, the

quietest member of the Cleveland Park team, recalled with humor his reaction when Ms.

Andrea (his spouse) first encouraged him to join:

I, myself was brought out of my comfort zone, because all I did was go to work,

come back, go to work, come back. And um, Andrea went, she came and said ‘do

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 you want to go,’ and I said ‘no’. She said, ‘no, you'll like it.’ I said, ‘no, I won't.’ I

said, 'a lot of women in there?’ And she said ‘yes’. I said, ‘I don't want to go.’

[laughing] I said okay, I came, and I never left, and, thank you.

Indeed, by this point George had become a caring and dedicated member of the team, and

the fact that he and other elders in the group ‘came and never left’ speaks to the meaning

they found in their participation. It may be that the design of the Story Project lent itself to

the developmental need of older adults to continue to feel generative, and that their wisdom

is valued and useful to their communities. The project’s effectiveness at strengthening social

ties among older adults is particularly noteworthy given that loneliness is increasingly

recognized as a predictor of health risk and mortality (Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2007; Heinrich

& Gullone, 2006; Qualls, 2014). In addition, elders are an important and perhaps untapped

resource in the community, with life experience, historical knowledge, and—in many

cases—time to give. Several members noted that their younger neighbors, who were busy

with work, school, and raising children, had a more difficult time staying involved and

informed in the neighborhood.

Third, though the Neighborhood Story Project was not designed as a mental health

intervention, a number of team members expressed gaining an increased sense of wellness

through the project. For some, the project first amplified their stress related to the changes in

their neighborhood, particularly as they learned more about the scope and consequences of

gentrification. A month in to the Edgehill project, Ms. Mary expressed her pain over the

changes in her neighborhood:

I'm not one to rain on anyone's parade but the quality is being sucked out of

Edgehill. And, um, it's like we living in, we're going to be living in an empty shell,
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 because of the building…It's changing right before our eyes. So I don't want to be in

denial about what's going on. I'm not in denial. The building right across from where

I live, on the corner there, it exists. I can't deny that.

As the project progressed from mapping concerns to designing the research, Mary’s spirits

lifted, and she commented, "I don't feel like it’s a losing uphill battle no more.” A couple of

weeks later, Suzanne, another Edgehill Story Project member, articulated her experience of

frustration in response to an interview we had conducted with a planning professional:

I feel like Ms. Mary felt a few weeks ago. At the moment I'm kind of at a down

place… I wanted to just quickly reflect on what I felt like after the interview last

week…I walked away from that and I thought to myself it feels like neighborhood

groups are being asked to play nice. I felt diminished…That play nice piece that just

stuck with me. I feel like I play nice in a lot of other aspects of life and a lot of other

people do too and yet it feels like we get crapped on in doing that.

Two weeks later, as we were closing out our weekly session, Ms. Mary checked in with

Suzanne:

Mary: I need to ask a question Suzanne, if I may. I remember you said something

about …’oh this ain't going nowhere and I don't want to continue fighting a losing

battle,’ so to speak. So, do you feel that way, do you still feel that way?

Suzanne: The way I felt a few weeks ago? Yeah yeah yeah, it ebbs and flows...You

might have to take a little, you sit on the chair and rest for a few minutes and then,

okay you have to get back up and keep going. There's no other way, and it's too

good. There's too much power in what I feel like is just regular people. There is.

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For both Ms. Mary and Suzanne, it appears that the increased stress that accompanied the

initial learning phase was developmental, and that the process of continued work together

helped them reconcile the stress and gain renewed hope and energy for action.

Another member, Ms.TK, entered the project during a particularly challenging time

in her life, both personally and as an Edgehill resident. As she later told me, participating in

the Story Project “was the thing that grounded me and kept me from - I don't know, kept me

from being insane almost.” Eight weeks into the Edgehill Story Project, Ms. TK shared with

the team the effect the project was having on her. To capture the fullness of her experience, I

quote her at length:

What I've got out of this, oh lord, is so much little stuff that I don't know how to

begin it but, let me say this. When I first came here I was going through a lot of stuff

and a lot of thinking in my mind, it seemed like I was losing stuff—I don't know if

you understand what I'm saying—train of thought for one thing. Seems like when I

came here, and I watched Amie and everybody, and especially Amie how she would

take something we would say and fix it and break it all down where it made sense. It

seems like it gave me life again. You know, to say, okay girl, don't you sit down.

There's plenty of things to do. And I know if I feel this way, then I realized that some

of the other people in my neighborhood probably feel the same way. Shut down and

feel like well maybe there's nothing I can do. But it is. It's something that everybody

in this neighborhood can do and that has really given me hope, really, really hope for

myself and for the situation of Edgehill…And again, I say that some of the other

people that may have been frustrated, with them being able to understand something,

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 it gives life back again and I guess that's what we're really trying to do anyway—is

give life back again.

Through learning new things, being affirmed, and taking action in her neighborhood,

participating in the Neighborhood Story Project gave her life again; she regained a sense of

hope and motivation to help herself and her community.

Synthesizing Outcomes and Limitations

The previous sections have highlighted the three most significant outcomes (as well

as some of the unintended effects) for participants of the Neighborhood Story Project. First,

in neighborhoods where many long-time residents are feeling increasingly out of place, team

members deepened their relationship to place. Second, in settings where many have lost

friends due to rising rents and property taxes, participation strengthened social ties. And

third, facing conditions where many people feel hopeless and helpless to affect change, team

members developed an increased capacity to take action, which nearly half of the team

members credit with fueling their continued engagement several months after the conclusion

of the project. Although I presented these three outcomes separately, team members often

spoke of them in an integrated fashion. During our follow-up interview, I asked Gary what

was most rewarding for him as a member of the Stratford Story Project. He responded:

Well, obviously gaining new friendships and relationships but I learned some history

that I didn't know…The fact that learning more information on statistically what was

going and the demographics of race and class during certain eras was very, very

important and enlightening. So, I got more out of that, learning more of the nuts and

bolts of how segregation and relocation affected the school in a different way. And

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 then how the school changed from different decades. That was a really amazing. So,

just the fact that at the finished project it was something that was very well done and

the fact that it could've been just something we read on paper but it turned in to a

visual project that really drew you in and made you feel some of the passion behind

the project and it gave you an opportunity to see how Stratford evolved. You lived it

and you were able to see that creation come to fruition.

Like Gary, many team members answered this question of “what was most rewarding?” by

jumping from relationships gained, to information learned, to producing something

meaningful for their community.

Limitations

Despite member gains, there are also notable limitations to the Neighborhood Story

Project. First, impacting 8-12 people per project, the Neighborhood Story Project is modest

in reach. The intended beneficiaries are the team members themselves, and although their

collective work may reach a broader audience, the intervention is designed to effect change

at the group level. That said, the outcomes can certainly be scaled through replication; and

such efforts are currently underway.31

Second, the project was limited with regard to which residents it reached. Despite my

efforts at recruiting a mix of newer and longer-term residents, team members across the

three projects were predominantly black women with longstanding ties to the neighborhood.

Thus, with some important exceptions, the project did not build substantive connective

31
Humanities Tennessee, a regional humanities organization, is launching a state-wide Neighborhood Story Project
initiative. They are funding five pairs of facilitators from different cities to attend a facilitator training in early 2018,
who will then launch the Neighborhood Story Project in their own communities.

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tissue between older and newer residents, or bridge divides of race, class, or tenure. Rather,

the Neighborhood Story Project played an important role in mobilizing those most often

marginalized in gentrifying neighborhoods, and connecting these neighbors to one another.

Third, and perhaps more significantly, the project is limited in its ability to sustain

civic action. The Neighborhood Story Project can raise awareness, build relationships,

develop skills and agency, and in some cases, inspire continued collective action. Members

may choose to use the Neighborhood Story Project to support community organizing

efforts—as was the case with the Edgehill team—but that is ultimately up to each team’s

discretion. Turning the tide of gentrification’s negative effects requires sustained pressure

and engagement. This 12-week, neighborhood-based intervention makes a humble

contribution toward that effort. With appropriate support, small wins can be leveraged

toward longer-term goals (Foster-Fishman et al, 2006). The greater the degree to which the

Neighborhood Story Project mobilizes long-term community engagement, the more

effectively the project outcomes can be leveraged toward broader community change.

These limitations notwithstanding, for residents feeling weary from and battered by

frayed social ties, uncaring development, and persistent stigmatization, the Neighborhood

Story Project helped them to learn more about the place they live, deepen connections to

others in their community, and increase feelings of capability to make a difference. And for

many, the project provided important scaffolding to extend their engagement in

neighborhood change efforts.

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 CHAPTER 5. PROCESS FINDINGS

As explored in the previous chapter, during the Neighborhood Story Project, team

members learned more about the place they live, built relationships with others in their

community, and gained an increased sense that they could make a difference in their

neighborhoods. But what about the project facilitated these gains? When I asked Ms. Betty

what made the Neighborhood Story Project impactful for her, she explained:

All the studying that we did. If I was in there and we were just sitting there and just

talking—and plus we got to work and start doing things. All the studying that we

did, the cooperation that we had, with all the research that we did. Once I seen that

research form up and found out information, that made me want to do things. Does

that make sense?

Betty describes three central project characteristics that map onto the participant outcomes:

team members strengthened their understandings of and attachment to place through a

learning environment (“the studying that we did”), deepened social ties through a caring

environment (“the cooperation that we had”), and increased their civic action through an

empowering environment (“doing things”). Through analysis of observational, focus group

and interview data, I found that it was the cooccurrence of these three characteristics that

facilitated project outcomes.

For practitioners, evidence of intervention outcomes has limited replication-utility

without an accompanying description of what facilitated participant gains (Sandlin,

O’Malley, and Burdick, 2011). As such, I approached this project with a number of process-

oriented questions: What types of group processes engage residents in critically reflecting on

their neighborhood, deepen social ties, and inform collective action? To answer these
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questions, I coded data for both outcome and process, noting when a particular outcome—

such as strengthened relationships between members—was related to a particular activity or

facilitation practice. In the pages that follow, I consider the three central project

characteristics—a learning environment, a caring environment, and an empowering

environment—focusing on the program design elements that were most critical to

facilitating change among members. In addition, I discuss the role of the facilitator in

enabling, amplifying and at times constraining the effectiveness of the project, as well as

how facilitation was reciprocated among members.

A Learning Environment

Although the term ‘learning environment’ can be used to describe physical

educational settings (i.e. classrooms or libraries), I use it here to refer to the conditions of

and approach to learning within the Neighborhood Story Project. Within action research

scholarship, considerable attention has been paid to the importance of seeking marginalized

knowledges while at the same time creating environments that surface heterogeneity and

facilitate critical reflection within groups (Janes, 2015; Buckles, Khedkar & Ghevde, 2015).

Similarly, within the scholarship of teaching and learning, there is increasing emphasis on

recognizing student’s pre-existing knowledge, providing curriculum relevant to the contexts

of student’s lives, and utilizing active learning practices (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking,

2004). These themes also emerged in this study: team members’ learning was activated by

opportunities to 1) engage existing knowledge, 2) reflect critically on neighborhood change,

3) consider other perspectives, and 4) develop and deploy research skills.

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Engage Existing Knowledge

Engaging pre-existing knowledge serves multiple purposes. From a practical

perspective, learners scaffold new information onto what we already know. As such, it is

helpful to surface and share the knowledge present within a group, as well as any

incomplete understandings that might need to be addressed (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking,

2004). From a liberatory perspective, mapping existing knowledge recognizes the expertise

of team members, which is particularly significant when members’ perspectives have been

marginalized by virtue of their age, race, and/or class.

Within the Neighborhood Story Project, a number of the earliest activities were

designed to tap into the knowledge within the group. For example, in the first or second

week of each project, we created a neighborhood timeline. Members worked in pairs to

identify key moments in the neighborhood’s history and recorded them on a long sheet of

butcher paper covering the wall. Following the timeline activity with the Edgehill group,

Mary commented, “I think I was a little surprised of the stuff that I knew that I didn't think I

knew, especially since I'm the youngest one here, as far as I've been living here about 10

years.” With an air of pride, she continued, “I've been involved. I've definitely been

involved.” Not only did members learn from one another in this activity, it also affirmed

resident’s wisdom about their own communities.

Reflect Critically on Neighborhood Change

Learning was also supported by activities designed to foster critical reflection on

neighborhood change, with explicit attention to issues of equity. By critical reflection, I am

referring to a dialogic process through which members begin to connect their personal

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experiences to broader sociopolitical and economic forces, also referred to as consciousness-

raising (Breton, 2004; Gutierrez, 1990). For example, an activity early in the Story Project

was designed to assist members in exploring the dominant narrative about their

neighborhood, as reflected in current news articles. As members reviewed printed articles

about their neighborhood in pairs, I encouraged them to consider both the text and images,

and to highlight words or phrases that stood out. Ms. Pauline and her partner read an article

describing the influx of ‘tall and skinny’ houses in Cleveland Park, where developers are

currently siting multiple two-story homes on lots that previously contained a single, one-

story home. Reporting her findings back to the group, Ms. Pauline explained:

The thing that kind of stuck out for me is um there was a statement that says is

they’re developing with ‘millennial-minded.’ Um, this excludes elderly,

handicapped, nothing is handicapped-accessible, nothing is for per se the elderly

because millennial-minded, they can hike those steps, you know…So those were the

things that kind of stuck out for us, that, you know, it’s millennium-minded. I’m not

a millennium.

As an elder, Ms. Pauline was particularly attuned to the housing needs of people who were

aging or living with disabilities. Her insights helped the group challenge the master narrative

that neighborhood development is universally beneficial, and to develop a grounded

analysis of who was being left out of current development in the neighborhood.

In the example above, Ms. Pauline helped her team develop an equity lens. At other

moments, as facilitator, I raised questions designed to foster critical reflection with respect to

issues of equity. For example, early in the Cleveland Park Story Project, Ms. Pauline had

mentioned that she appreciated the way that people used to look out for one another by
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paying attention to who was on the block, and alerting each other of suspicious activity.

Several others agreed that this was part of the cohesion they valued in the neighborhood.

The following week, Leslie—president of her neighborhood association—described being

viewed with suspicion by her newer, white residents, and shared that neighbors had called

the police about her as she walked her dog in the neighborhood. Sensing an opportunity to

help the group develop a deeper analysis about what kinds of neighborhood surveillance

contributed to cohesion, I queried Ms. Pauline about her earlier reflection:

Amie: You know I think maybe it was you, Ms. Pauline, that talked about last week

being observant and looking out for each other and maybe that’s part of the appeal of

the neighborhood, too. Because that being responsible, you know, for caring for

each other.

Ms. Pauline: Yeah, you see someone that’s kind of out of place at a certain time

during the day and they may be walking down the avenue, but you haven’t seen that

person before or, you know....

Amie: How, how do we um kind of square that or with this piece that um Leslie was

talking about of neighbors who are intolerant, you know, and basically racist towards

their black neighbors, you know, like every black person looks like they’re out of

place, right? Because that’s not the same thing you’re talking about.

The exchange started a broader conversation concerning resident surveillance. Members

concluded that when you know your neighbors, neighborhood surveillance can create safety;

without this knowledge, surveillance too often functions as racial profiling. Through such

dialogues, the Neighborhood Story Project helped members develop a critical consciousness

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about how gentrification was affecting their communities.

Consider other Perspectives

Learning was further stimulated through activities that encouraged members to

consider other’s perspectives and/or reevaluate assumptions. This often occurred during the

analysis phase of the project, as members reflected on interviews they had collected. For

example, after interviewing one of her Edgehill neighbors, Ms. Mary reflected, “The

interview I had yesterday it went wild. Because, fear had never come up. This lady she was

afraid. She wouldn't go sit outside anymore because of the building on the end of the street.”

Ms. Mary continued to describe how the new, multi-story construction had left her neighbor

feeling vulnerable. Her neighbor’s house now sat in shadow most of the day, and she could

no longer see who was coming down the block. Both her view and physical space were

constricted, such that she no longer felt comfortable sitting on her porch. Listening to Ms.

Mary recount the pain in her neighbor’s voice, the group was struck by how this story

countered the dominant narrative of who fears who or what in their neighborhood. Referring

to the assumptions of those outside Edgehill, I reflected back to the group, “when people

talk about fear and safety often in this neighborhood they have a picture in their head about

what people are afraid of, and it's young black men. It's not construction.” This insight,

gained from an interview with a neighbor, helped all of us deepen our understanding of how

people were experiencing gentrification in ways we had not fully appreciated, and in ways

that reframed popular narratives about their neighborhood.

Other members gained information that challenged previously held beliefs.

Following her interviews with neighbors in Cleveland Park, Ms. Pauline was particularly

struck by the experiences of economic vulnerability voiced by her young white neighbors.

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She reflected, “you may think, well, okay, honestly, you're Caucasian and never would I

have thought that you were concerned that you might have to leave out of this

neighborhood because you can't afford it.” Listening to her neighbors helped her to

reevaluate her assumptions, and nuanced her understanding of how gentrification was

impacting her neighborhood.

Develop and Deploy Research Skills

Finally, reflecting the pedagogic principle that people often learn best by doing

(Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2004), team members highly valued the opportunity to

develop and deploy research skills. Within group meetings, members collaboratively

developed interview guides, practiced conducting interviews, generated principles for ethical

research, conducted thematic coding, and interpreted graphs. Between meetings, members

reinforced their learning through additional data collection and analysis activities. In

addition, some members learned new technologies through the research process. Reflecting

on his time with the Stratford Story Project, Dev noted, “I learned how to use a whole new

software…I learned how to fix audio. I learned how to set up interviews with individuals. I

did like three interviews in one day…like the film itself has taught me more than a class

would teach me.”

An example from the Edgehill Story Project demonstrates how the various learning

activities—mapping existing knowledge, fostering critical reflection, reevaluating

assumptions, and developing research skills—often built upon one another. Once the group

identified its research question, ‘How are our neighbors are being displaced?’, we began

brainstorming potential causes of displacement. The conversation was lively and fast-paced,

with every member offering observations—often accompanied by stories of friends and

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family—while I recorded the ideas on a flipchart. In the end, the list of causes of

displacement included: rising rents, evictions from public housing and private apartments,

foreclosures, rising property taxes, predatory developers, hostile/racist neighbors,

discontinuation of Section 8, and the previously described phenomenon we framed as

“development fatigue.” From this list, we identified sources of data to explore our

hypotheses, and delegated data collection tasks. As members gathered data, we then

analyzed results together. Sometimes, the findings supported our hypotheses. For example,

data from the assessor’s office indicated a spike in home sales in the last decade, as well as

rapid increases in home values and rental rates in the neighborhood. Other findings

contradicted our hypotheses. For example, members had assumed that foreclosures were

part of what was driving black residents from the neighborhood. I gathered foreclosure data

from the Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County Assessor’s Office and the group

compared the rate of foreclosure in Edgehill to the rate in Davidson County overall.

Reviewing data from 2000-2015, members noted that the trends in Edgehill mirrored those

in the county, and that foreclosures were actually relatively rare in the neighborhood—

averaging four a year in this period. Clearly this was not enough to produce the changes

they were witnessing in Edgehill. Through mapping existing knowledge and hunches,

gathering data, and analyzing patterns and trends, Edgehill Story Project members built a

shared, informed analysis of how gentrification was impacting their community. These

activities also fostered an intellectual community within each team (Kline, M., Dolgon, C.,

& Dresser, L., 2000), as they increasingly saw themselves as resident experts within their

neighborhood.

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 A Caring Environment

Care can be understood as a cluster of practices and values necessary to sustain and

repair life (Held, 2006; Tronto, 1993). Although the specific practices that constitute care

vary across cultures and contexts, there is no doubt that people require caring relationships

throughout the life course to survive. While there are periods of time, such as at the

beginning and end of life, where caring relationships may be distinguished by one person’s

dependence on another, care is more often characterized by interdependence. Family,

friends, colleagues and even acquaintances can meet one another’s needs for emotional

connection, the sense of being valued, or for help gaining perspective. Yet while caring is

relational, not all interpersonal exchanges are caring. The Neighborhood Story Project was

characterized by the intentional creation of a caring environment among members. Drawing

on the work of feminist philosopher Virginia Held, in such an environment “the carer and

the cared-for share an interest in their mutual well-being” (2006, p. 35), and all group

members are both carers and cared-for.

The significance of a caring environment has long been recognized within the

tradition of group work, and is central to the creation of mutual aid, which Shwartz

described more than sixty years ago as “… a helping system in which the clients need each

other as well as the worker” (1961, p. 19). The concepts of care and mutual aid were also

incorporated into what renowned psychiatrist Irvin Yalom (1970) termed therapeutic factors

in group work. These are conditions which, when present within a group, contribute to a

sense of well-being among members, such as: group cohesion (feeling a sense of belonging),

the installation of hope (seeing others be helped by the group), universality (the sense that

one’s experience is shared by others) and altruism (being of service to others). The process

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elements that contributed to a caring environment within the Neighborhood Story Project

were those designed to 1) foster intergroup relationships, 2) encourage appreciation of self

and others, and 3) create opportunities for members to help one another.

Foster Intergroup Relationships

A group cannot function well unless members have a sense of cohesion and

belonging (Yalom, 1970). As such, the overall structure of each session was designed to

foster intergroup relationships. For example, I frequently set up pair and triad activities,

encouraging members to join with new partners and take turns reflecting on a question or

prompt. In one follow up interview, Rae noted, “I like how you got us the first three weeks,

I think, to get to know each other, to let our guards down, establishing roots, breaking us

up, not allowing us to attach to each one little cluster.” We also started meetings with a

welcoming check-in, during which I encouraged members to share something ‘new and

good’ since we met last (or ‘whatever’s on top’, if members were struggling to find

something good). During follow-up interviews, a number of people remarked on the value

of the opening check-ins. For example, Vanessa noted:

I think that was a nice icebreaker, a nice way to give everybody a chance to in a way,

exhale a little before we got into all the screws and bolts, nuts and bolts. Also, there

may have been a time or two where there was somebody was really struggling to find

something good to say about that week. As long as you're honest, that's okay too. I

think that would help us to understand each other better, if somebody was really

struggling to say something that had happened that was good or positive, then we

know they had really had a rough week. I don't know, maybe we wouldn't

necessarily do anything about it, but the more information I have, the better I can
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 interact with someone...and then it's a way to help get to know people, because the

things that are good are related to whatever the priorities are in their life. Just by

asking a simple question like that, it helps you - over the course of 12 weeks, I think

it helps to get you to understand somebody better because they'll talk about family,

or their job, or the community, or whatever. I thought that was a good way to open

up.

As evidenced in Vanessa’s reflection, pair activities and check ins—in both content and in

process—fostered relationships by creating the opportunity for members to listen to and

learn about one another.

For the listener, this can create a sense of universality—that one’s personal

challenges are shared by others. For the speaker, such activities offer a powerful affirmation.

After a particularly high-energy session midway through the Edgehill Story Project, Ms. TK

commented “I like how each and every one of us listens to the other person's ideas that they

have, and they're so eager to listen and they want to know. That's what make it easier for

somebody to say something, because the next person want to know, so I like that about this

team.” Similarly, while reflecting on her highlights from the Stratford Story Project Mia

offered, “I'm not the type of person to work in a group with anybody. I like to single myself

out. And, um, a take away is… being able to work with adults and actually having them

listen to what I have to say. I don't know, it just feel good to have somebody listen to me.”

And in Cleveland Park, George observed, “we can go ahead and talk about so many things.

That, you know, nothing’s stupid or whatever, and everything is like, ‘Hmm. I never

thought about it like that.’” As members learned about and affirmed one another, cohesion

formed within each group.

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 To help members learn to listen to one another, I offered formalized practices for

listening—for example, using a timer during a pair activity and directing members to each

take two minutes to reflect on the prompt while their partner simply listened. I also

normalized and ritualized listening practices by using rounds to start and end each session,

and suggesting that each person speak once before anyone spoke twice.

Encourage Appreciation of Self and Others

The cohesion within each Neighborhood Story Project team was deepened through a

number of activities in which members appreciated themselves and others. For example,

within the first few weeks we began ending each meeting with a round where members

could identify a personal highlight from the gathering, and offer an appreciation of the

person sitting to their left (or right, on alternate weeks). Sometimes members offered general

compliments about what a colleague contributed to the group, but they were often specific,

noting the difference that person had made to them. Early in the Stratford Story Project,

Mia reflected, “what I appreciate about Rae is she listened and she understood where I was

coming from when we were doing our little interview. It made me feel good...” Mia’s

appreciation of Rae both reflected, and contributed to, the caring environment of the group.

Also within the first few weeks, we completed an activity that involved mapping

each group member’s assets. I drew large stars along a stretch of butcher paper, one for each

team member. I encouraged members to identify the strengths they brought to the project,

as I recorded their answers inside their stars. Other members quickly added in, and the stars

filled with strengths, self-identified and observed by others. Though a few team members

expressed initial hesitation in articulating their own skills, this activity became animated in

all three groups, with members eager to appreciate themselves and one another. The day we
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completed this activity in the Edgehill Story Project, Shirley reflected in closing, “I know it

is a given to say, ‘Do not brag about yourself,’ but it is a good feeling. You know, appreciate

what God gave you, telling people what you got, so I like that.” Months later, a number of

participants reflected on these opportunities to appreciate themselves and others as among

the most helpful in the group. Celebrating their strengths boosted members’ confidence in

their ability to make a positive difference in their community.

Create Opportunities for Members to Help One Another

Finally, a caring environment resulted from the many ways members helped one

another. As the Edgehill group circled up at the close of our community event, Ms. TK

looked around the group and, pointing at each of us, said, “What I really love is that it took

ALL OF US to get it done.” This recognition of the mutual aid that developed within the

group was echoed across the three projects, as team members reflected on the many

activities that necessitated collaboration and interdependence, such as the timeline activity,

peer interviews, and planning the community event. Considering his work in the Stratford

Story Project, Zander offered, “I think it was great that we kind of had to rely on each other.

There weren't people that were like, ‘I just didn't do it.’ We all did our part.” As these

reflections make evident, members appreciated not only the product(s) of their collective

labor, but the process of working together to accomplish their shared goals.

Taken together, activities that fostered intergroup relationships, encouraged

appreciation of self and others, and created opportunities for members to help one another,

created a caring environment characterized by mutual aid. Importantly, while facilitation

and semi-structured activities supported the development of a caring environment, members

also actively contributed to creating this environment with and for one another.
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 An Empowering Environment

Finally, the Neighborhood Story Project was characterized by the formation of an

empowering environment, by which I mean an environment within which people became

increasingly aware of and confident in their capacity to affect change. The concept of

empowerment bridges beliefs and action. As Badura describes, “Unless people believe they

can produce desired results and forestall detrimental ones by their actions, they have little

incentive to act or to persevere in the face of difficulties” (2001, p. 10). Empowerment is a

core function of social group work, popular education, and critical PAR, which all—to

varying degrees—seek to develop an individual’s capacity to affect change through the

experience of working together (Breton, 2004; Gutierrez, 1990; Horton & Freire, 1990).

While the Neighborhood Story Project can be understood to have fostered efficacy broadly

through the action research process, I focus here on three micro-processes: activities and

prompts designed to 1) encourage member leadership, 2) facilitate the uptake of member

ideas, and 3) formalize member roles.

Encourage Member Leadership

At the start of each Neighborhood Story Project, I assumed the primary leadership

roles. However, I encouraged increasing amounts of leadership from members early in the

process. For example, in the opening weeks, when group membership was still in flux, I

frequently asked returning members to introduce the Story Project—even if they had only

been to one meeting, or had only been at the meeting for a half hour before a new member

arrived. In subsequent weeks, when team members missed sessions or came late, others

readily brought their colleagues up to speed. As members explained the project, their

language reflected increasing ownership of the work. For example, in the course of a single

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meeting, Dee shifted from asking the group what ‘you’ are going to do, to describing to a

late-arrival what ‘we’ are doing together. These early leadership experiences developed

efficacy in members by creating mastery experiences while also functioning as social

modeling (Bandura, 2008); as members practiced taking leadership they were also

demonstrating to one another that they could take initiative within the group.

Facilitate the Uptake of Member Ideas

In educational settings, there is a robust body of evidence that uptake of learner ideas

supports student achievement; that is, the more students have their contributions ‘taken up’

in the classroom—their questions answered, their ideas given air time, and their language

reflected back by the teacher—the more efficacious they are in school (Nystrand, Wu,

Gamoran, Zeister, & Long, 2003). This resonates with Bandura’s (2008) contention that

social persuasion—in this case, demonstrating encouragement of member participation

through uptake—can foster efficacy. As much as I was a leader in my role as facilitator, I

simultaneously positioned myself as a follower of each group’s collective leadership, and

demonstrated uptake in a variety of ways. For example, from the outset, the Edgehill team

was deeply concerned with countering the negative effects of residential displacement. At

our first meeting, Vanessa said, “I know the point of this isn’t to be political, and I don’t

want to get Amie in trouble, but in order for us to change stuff we have to be activists.” The

discussion became very spirited, with Max countering that he actually wanted “to start

some trouble” and recalling the neighborhood’s history of trouble-making to protect resident

rights. Several people chimed in affirmatively. I reminded the group that how they wanted

to focus the project was their decision. In each project, I encouraged members to see me as

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their secretary and support team—someone to document their progress and get them the

materials they needed to do their work.

As we moved through the 12 weeks, I engaged both the content and the form of

members’ contributions, so they could see how they were actively shaping the team’s work.

For example, early in the Cleveland Park Project, Ms. Andrea suggested a printed agenda

each week would be helpful, and others agreed. I brought agendas to the following

meetings, and carried the practice into the remaining projects. Other times, I responded to

metaphors rather than material recommendations. In the second week of the Edgehill Story

Project, Ms. Mary described the project to a new member by using a cooking metaphor. She

began, “We wanted to know, with everybody coming together working on the project, what

it would look like at the end,” before continuing, “Of course, it's going to determine what

we put in. It's like ingredients for a cake or something. Make sure we got all the ingredients

that needs to go in.” I reinforced this comment, offering, “That's a great way of thinking

about it. I think we're at the point now where we're just opening up our cupboards to figure

out what do we even have in the house and do we need to go to the store?” In the weeks

that followed, members frequently returned to this metaphor. As each Story Project

progressed, uptake of member ideas became more explicit, as members generated their own

potential lines of inquiry, selected a research question to guide their work, and made

decisions about what data to collect and how to disseminate their findings.

Formalize Member Roles

In addition to encouraging leadership and demonstrating uptake of member ideas, as

the research project moved into the data collection phase, we formalized member roles,

which contributed to a sense of mastery (Bandura, 2008). Each member joined data
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collection teams in which they assigned themselves specific goals, such as conducting a

certain number of interviews within the following week, or researching a particular period of

history. I supported members by providing them with both training and materials needed to

complete their tasks. For example, as the interview team was developing questions, we

conducted practice interviews within the group, during which I encouraged interviewers to

call a ‘time-out’ whenever they felt unsure of how to proceed. At the close of these practice

sessions, I offered affirmations of what they did well and specific recommendations to

consider in the future. After the interview team agreed on their final questions, I typed them

into an interview guide, made copies, and dropped them off at team member’s homes. This

support was critical in scaffolding increasing leadership in the project, and reflects Bandura’s

(2008) contention that social persuasion—receiving both encouragement and guidance—is

necessary for developing efficacy.

Assuming leadership roles and completing tasks generated a sense of personal

accomplishment among members. At the close of the Stratford project, Jaime reflected, “I'm

really proud of my interview. I feel like I might have given just a little bit of something that

could be useful.” And as members saw the project through to completion, many articulated

a great deal of pride and mastery. When the Edgehill group gathered to debrief, Ms. TK

remarked:

Finishing feels good, ya'll, for the first time in a long time. Finishing feels good. You

know, you can't never forget the place that you - like you say, ‘we been born again.’

You know, somewhere where you got your strength and power from again. You

know? Yeah. That's nice, ain't it?

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 Although the Neighborhood Story Project was intentionally designed to create an

empowering environment, members own efforts, both individually and collectively,

contributed to this environment. In each Story Project, some members took unprompted

initiative between sessions to visit the library for resources, bring in their family artifacts, or

begin creating data collection instruments. These actions inspired others, including me and

my collaborating researchers. Several weeks into the Cleveland Park project, Jyoti, a fellow

PhD student, shared:

Ms. Andrea, you are definitely one of those people who just like gets right down to

it. Like Amie told me last week how you had gone to the archive. I was like,

‘What?’ Like I’m supposed to be a researcher and I haven’t gone to the archive like

once in my time here, and so that spirit and dedication is really incredible.

In addition to drawing inspiration from one another’s individual actions, many found

inspiration in the process of working together. Just as self-efficacy is foundational to

individual action, collective efficacy—the belief that a group together can achieve their

goals—is central to collective action (Bandura, 2008). At one point, Rae shared that she had

recently used the Stratford Story Project as “a good example of what a team really looks like

when they work together.” She explained:

I have worked with many adults in my life. Some challenge you, but this group has

been - I mean, you all don't know how easy you've made this happen. There are

adults that would be struggling, fighting, have their own agendas, and I didn't feel

that…I never walked out of here with any stress. I always knew that I had to be

somewhere on Monday, and was excited about it.

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By encouraging member leadership, demonstrating uptake of member’s contributions, and

formalizing roles within the group, members increasingly saw themselves as agentic—first

in their ability to shape processes within the group, and then in their ability to shape their

broader community.

Facilitation Challenges

The previous sections explored the design elements and facilitation processes that

animated member gains throughout the Neighborhood Story Project. However, I am not

suggesting that the Neighborhood Story Project only or always offered a learning, caring and

empowering environment. I focus here on specific challenges that undermined the creation

of these conditions, and how I attempted to navigate those challenges. As I was responsible

for the program design and facilitation, this section is necessarily self-reflective, offering a

critique of my own practice. As the renowned community psychologist Seymour Sarason

notes “the community interventionist is a very complicated variable” (2004, p.276).

Following Langhout (2015), I endeavor here to make myself visible as an interventionist,

knowing that the facilitation challenges described herein are at times generic (they could

arise in any group, with any facilitator) and at times personal (resulting from my particular

strengths, weaknesses, biases, and positionality). My aim is here is not to offer ‘fixes’ to the

challenges I experienced, but rather to make transparent the difficulties I observed, as well

as my process of responding to those, so that others might anticipate similar dilemmas and

contemplate possible responses.

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Challenges to Creating a Learning Environment

In designing the Neighborhood Story Project, I had a number of learning goals in

mind: 1) that members would gain an increased sense of themselves as knowers—both in

that they had valuable existing knowledge, and that they had the capacity to learn more and

deepen their knowledge base, 2) that members would gain meaningful knowledge about

their neighborhoods, and 3) that members would gain knowledge of and confidence in the

research process. Taken together, I hoped the learning environment would provide

transferable confidence, knowledge and skills. Although these learning goals were broadly

met, as facilitator, I struggled at times to appropriately scale learning goals within with the

project time-frame. I was also challenged to help each group develop a collective analysis of

their neighborhood, while keeping in mind that this analysis was still partial and subject to

scrutiny and revision. Furthermore, learning was hampered at moments by overly ambitious

and/or unclear facilitation on my part.

Scaling learning goals. The Neighborhood Story Project was constrained, both in

terms of the number of sessions, and the length of each group meeting, and aspects of the

research process received unequal attention. Given the eagerness of team members to

conduct interviews, gather images, and collect archival data, data collection often bled into

days previously allocated for analysis. As we also needed sufficient time to prepare

dissemination materials and plan the concluding community event, robust analysis of data

was often shortchanged.

For example, I provided each Story Project team with transcripts of their collected

interviews, and spent some time working with teams to consider how they could code

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interviews to answer their research questions. However, no team had time to complete a

comprehensive coding of all interviews, opting instead to complete a first-round review of

all transcripts and pull out key quotes that spoke to their questions. As another example, the

Stratford team conducted an online survey of community perceptions of the school. They

received 200 responses over a two-week period, but given the demands of editing the

videotaped interviews for the documentary, the survey data was largely ignored. Overall,

the analysis phase of research was rushed, minimal, or in the case of the Stratford survey,

left undone.

One way I addressed this challenge, particularly with regard to analyzing

quantitative data, was to complete some computations independently and bring results in

the form of a graph that team members could analyze. For example, while the Stratford

team had a hunch that the neighborhood demographics were not reflected in school

enrollment, the data was not easily accessible. I visited the Metro Nashville Public Schools

archives and located maps of the school zones for each of the decennial Census years. In

addition, I gathered school enrollment and racial demographic data for each of these years. I

then analyzed census data for the census tracts corresponding with the school zone for each

decade. I plotted a line graph of Stratford enrollment by race over a bar graph of the

neighborhood demographics by race, and brought this in for the team to analyze. The graph

painted a stark picture of white flight from Stratford High School, even as white families

remained in the neighborhood. This visual aid helped members build a grounded

understanding of the trends they experienced firsthand.

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 Figure 15. Relationship of neighborhood demographics to enrollment demographics

The Stratford team’s discussion of this graph was highly animated. I had wished

members of the Stratford Story Project could have learned how to complete the

computations themselves to gain a fuller experience of data analysis. Yet, by completing

initial computations and bringing in graphs for the team to review, members learned some

data analysis skills, such as identifying and interpreting trends over time. That said, they

likely would have been proud of and satisfied with their work without this additional piece

of analysis. Indeed, for the most part it was me, not members of the projects, who wished

we had more time for data analysis. Given that the Neighborhood Story Project is designed

as an action research project, and my learning goal that members gain knowledge of and

confidence in the research process, I was concerned that the time constraints limited our

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ability to deepen learning about the process of conducting research. The challenge for me as

the facilitator/educator was to appropriately scale my learning goals to the length of the

program.

Differentiating counter stories from “true” stories. A second challenge to creating

a learning environment concerned the balance between helping members gain meaningful

knowledge about one’s neighborhood, while recognizing there are a multiplicity of ways to

know and understand a place. For example, the Stratford Story Project was primarily

concerned with countering the dominant, stigmatizing narrative of the school and students.

However, as members collected interviews they encountered conflicting views of Stratford

from alumni, students, teachers, and neighbors. At the same meeting where we reviewed the

graph above (see Figure 14), I closed the session by asking members to share their hope for

the project. The first to answer was a Stratford senior, who offered, “That we just get the,

finally get all the facts straight. Get the true story.” I returned to his comment after the

round had concluded:

your hope is that we get the facts straight and tell the true story, and I appreciate that.

And, where I sit, there is no true story, and there are no ‘facts’ - there are many

stories and there's many ways of interpreting data. Like, people could look at this

and say, ‘oh this school went to hell because it was all black people’, and people have

done that. And in fact, they will do that again, and say the school is better because

there's more white people and that's the danger with a graph like this absent the

context of the story, because when you have the story about what's happening, it's

actually a story of racism. That's a different telling, and it is a different story, and my

hope is we can tell a different story, not because it will be the only story or the right

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 story but a different story, and it's one that hasn't been told, and we can tell it in a

way that doesn't make people feel bad, but that makes people think critically about

why they're carrying the narratives they carry about the school and who it harms and

who it helps.

We returned to this distinction—between telling “a” Stratford story and telling “the”

Stratford story—time and again, and it prepared the team for some of the critical responses

they received from viewers who felt the documentary film was incomplete. In each of the

three projects, a critical aspect of the learning environment was helping members develop a

thoughtful analysis of their neighborhood while recognizing that their understandings will

always be partial.

Clarifying facilitation. A final challenge to the learning environment was unclear

or overly ambitious facilitation on my part. For all three projects, generating research

questions was one of the most confusing activities for team members. Having charted our

core concerns as a group, I provided minimal instruction about how to formulate research

questions before encouraging people to work in pairs to “turn our concerns into questions.”

When I brought the group back together to record their ideas, contributions ranged from

overly specific questions of historical fact (i.e. “when did the freeway go in?”) to overly

broad questions (i.e. “why doesn’t the government care about seniors?”), to potential

interview questions for neighbors (i.e. “what do you want to see different in your

neighborhood?”). Clearly, I provided insufficient scaffolding for team members to

understand the function of a research question, and what makes a ‘good’ question. While

we ultimately worked through this learning together, the process was confusing for

members.

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 While the above example refers to a specific activity that was unclear, at other times

I compromised the learning environment by being overly ambitious as to the amount of

material I wanted to cover during a given session. Although I endeavored to attune to

members’ comprehension and readiness to move onto a new topic, my assessment was not

always accurate. In an early gathering with the Edgehill group, I said, “I have this problem

where I try and do too many things in one meeting, so I am trying to make a decision: do I

squeeze in another thing right now before the last thing?” Ms. Mary quickly responded

“No!” and the group broke out in laughter. Ms. Mary softened, explaining:

It is hard sometimes when you're trying to process it later. You are like, okay, we did

talk about this here, and then I get lost in this here, and cannot go back to that there.

So, that is what I am talking about.

This feedback was helpful, and let me know that this was not the first time Ms. Mary (and

likely others) had experienced difficulty keeping track of our collective process.

To mitigate confusion from unclear instruction or overzealous planning, I frequently

paused to check for understanding (asking, “does that make sense?” or “what are your

thoughts?”). I also aired on the side of transparency (as evidenced in the example above) as I

considered whether to introduce a new activity, and sought feedback from my collaborating

researchers, who often observed things I had missed. For example, working in pairs with

other team members, collaborating researchers had insight into the degree to which

instructions were clear to others, and let me know when additional time or explanation was

needed.

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Challenges to Creating a Caring Environment

In addition to navigating challenges related to creating an effective learning

environment, there were a number of challenges to building a caring environment,

particularly related to trust-building, addressing biases and dominant behaviors, and

managing shifting group membership.

Building trust. The first challenge was to establish my own trustworthiness with

members. A number of members brought with a healthy skepticism toward the project and

me. Some of this was expressed as curiosity. At his first meeting, before sitting down, Larry

wanted to know my motivation for starting the Cleveland Park Story Project. He asked,

“Everything has a nucleus – nothing can live without a nucleus, so what’s the nucleus?”

Others were more overtly suspicious of my involvement in their communities. At the first

gathering of the Edgehill Story Project, Vanessa asked pointedly, “I want to know how this

is going to benefit the neighborhood, and not just be some project that helps you get your

degree.” Months after the project concluded, Ms. TK reflected on her suspicion of me:

Amie: When you were first thinking about being a part of it, did you have any

concerns about participating?

Ms. TK: At first. I was like, ‘Who are these people? What do they want?’ Those was

my concern. ‘Is they trying to put us in a trick bag or what? Can we trust them?’

Amie: And these people is me, right?

Ms. TK: These people is Amie, this is you Amie I'm talking about. You the people.

Although Ms. TK did not explicitly mention my whiteness, several others did. During our

follow-up interviews, Vanessa said she had initially wondered, “who’s this white lady?”

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Establishing my trustworthiness necessarily took time. I navigated this by being forthright

with members about my own concerns and commitments—sharing the ‘the nucleus’ of the

project, as Larry had suggested. As a relative newcomer to Nashville, and an outsider in two

of the three areas, I deferred to members knowledge of their neighborhoods and both

encouraged and followed their leadership in shaping a line of inquiry about their

communities. At the same time, I endeavored to be a contributing member of the team by

offering facilitation, technical assistance, and sharing content knowledge about

gentrification, when appropriate. And perhaps most importantly, I strove to be vigilant

about how my own biases might be affecting how I perceived and interacted with members,

tracking and interrogating my interactions in field notes.

For example, as we began the second session of the Edgehill Story Project, I was

disturbed that few people from week one were in attendance. That night, I wrote in my field

notes:

I was feeling some anxiety at the start of the meeting…where is everyone? Thoughts

flashed through my mind: had they got scared away somehow? Had they only come for the

money last time? These were interesting to notice – everyone had seemed genuinely

engaged last time, so neither of these made sense, and the latter immediately felt like

a record – an internalized message that the public housing residents were only in it

for the money…

As it turned out, the anxiety was unwarranted; by the end of the meeting, all but one person

had returned. However, the internalized message that had seeded in my consciousness

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persisted throughout the two hours. My field notes continued, “When Ms. TK came in,

with less than 30 minutes left, my first thought was, ‘she just came for the stipend.’”

Ms. TK had indeed arrived late, and had quickly joined our discussion of significant

people in Edgehill’s history. Drawing from her deep knowledge of the community, Ms. TK

contributed more names and stories than anyone else around the table. We closed the

session with administrative business, discussing how to distribute stipends—weekly or at the

end of the twelve weeks. Ms. TK advocated for waiting until the end, when we could fairly

allocate the amount according to how many meetings people had attended. She also

apologized for her late arrival, tearing up as she shared that she had been at the funeral of

neighborhood elder.

That Ms. TK had come, in spite of having experienced this loss, was a testament to

her commitment to her community and her investment in the project. It was both painful

and humbling to recognize that I had unconsciously criminalized rather than empathized

with Ms. TK’s lateness. As I concluded in my field notes, “This was a powerful opportunity

for me to catch my projected racial bias.” To the extent that I was able, catching my biases

was critical to building authentic relationships with members. However, given that implicit

biases operate “unwittingly, unintentionally, and unavoidably” (Hardin & Banjaji, 2013,

p.14), I have to assume that I did not—and cannot—catch them all.32

Addressing dominant behaviors. An additional challenge to building a caring

environment was addressing behaviors within the group that reinforced relationships of

32
Implicit biases are stereotypes held at the unconscious level. Despite the widespread belief that racism is in the
past, research indicates that most Americans—and a vast majority of whites—possess and act on implicit biases
against people of color and other marginalized groups (Sue, 2012).

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inequality. Although members of the Stratford Story Project spoke often of their

appreciation of the opportunity to work across generational lines, the adults in the group—

in their eagerness to contribute—frequently interrupted youth. The intentions of the adults’

were simply to engage (enthusiastically) in the activity at hand. And yet, this behavior

marginalized the voices of youth team members. At times, I indirectly managed these

expressions of dominance by redirecting the conversation back to the young person who

was interrupted. Other times I was more direct: while debriefing the screening of the

Stratford Story Project film, a pair of particularly animated adults were continuously

interrupting youth. After several unsuccessful attempts to return the conversation to the

young person trying to speak, I interrupted an adult saying, “hold up – kids aren’t talking.”

The group quickly self-corrected, and became more mindful of their participation. Yet, the

challenge to hold space for youth voices—despite the strong ties that had formed over the 12

weeks—demonstrates the persistence of this pattern of dominance.

Managing inconsistent participation. A further vulnerability to developing a caring

environment was the shifting membership of each group. Across all three projects,

membership was in flux the first several weeks, with people starting who were unable to

continue, others joining mid-way, and others participating inconsistently. This was most

apparent in the Stratford Story Project, where members would occasionally agree to tasks

one week and then be absent the following session.33 This was particularly hard on Dev,

who—as described below—was the lead videographer for the Stratford documentary; when

others did not pass along their work in a timely fashion, it made his job more difficult.

33
There were a number of reasons for this. All the high school students had jobs and several were participating in
sports or band. In addition, all but one of the adults was also working full time. These outside commitments at
times conflicted with the project.

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Given that mutual aid is created, in part, by members being able to rely on one another, the

shifting membership at times undermined the sense of interdependence among team

members.

Challenges to Creating an Empowering Environment

Finally, although many members experienced gains in efficacy over the course of the

Neighborhood Story Project, a number of tensions shaped the degree to which the project

fostered an empowering environment, in particular the degree to which I directly led the

group, and the degree to which leadership was dispersed and collectivized among members.

Moderating levels of leadership. As facilitator, I was continuously navigating when

to directly lead the group, when to seed ideas for the group to consider, and when to follow

the leadership of others. Ultimately, I aimed to foster a high-level of group investment in

and ownership of the Neighborhood Story Project, and endeavored to lead, seed, or follow

based on what best facilitated that outcome. At times, a strong suggestion from me felt

appropriate. At other times, I wondered in my field notes whether I had shortchanged a

discussion or imposed my perspective. For example, following the Stratford Story Project

session in which the group decided to create a film, I reflected:

I asked about how to organize the film – over time or by theme. In the interest of

time, I heavily suggested that we organize it historically, which made sense to the

group. I played a more decisive/leadership role here than I would have liked should

we have had more time. While I think the group would have come up with the same

outcome – we have been circling around this plan for a while – in the end it felt a bit

like ‘my decision’ or at least my suggestion.

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At other times, I was aware of member suggestions that I did not take-up, or encourage the

group to consider. Critical reflection, both independently and with collaborating

researchers, helped me to discern when I might be overusing my influence, or when

additional structure and leadership was necessary. That said, the tension between when to

lead, seed, and follow remained unresolved.

Collectivizing action. A second challenge to building an empowering environment

involved the tension between individual and collective action, which manifested both

ideologically and practically. Ideologically, many Story Project team members were unused

to making collective decisions, or completing work collaboratively. It took time for

members to acclimate first to the fact that I, as facilitator, was not going to ‘do’ the research

project for them, nor were they going to ‘do’ it by themselves. In the first few weeks, Dee

frequently used the language of “you” to describe the project—for example asking questions

like, “when are you going to have the final event?” I replied by giving ownership back to the

group, offering “it’s up to us to decide as a team.” In other moments, when members had

strong opinions about what needed to happen, it was important to create space for

alternative perspectives. For example, when the Edgehill group was preparing to edit their

film, one member strongly stated the film should be no more than five minutes in length. I

encouraged others to weigh in, and eventually the group reached consensus on a 20-minute

film.

This shift from ‘you’ or ‘me’ to ‘we’ was significant, but also challenging to maintain.

Practically, in order to foster a sense of collective efficacy and project ownership, it was

important that many members be able to trace their contributions to the final product.

However, the process of creating final products—such as reports, videos, and posters—is

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often individual. Furthermore, to the degree that the products require specialized

equipment, software and skills, fewer people who can participate in their creation. In each

project there were individuals who played lead roles in preparing final products. This

included me and other members of the research team: In Cleveland Park, Jyoti designed the

final printed timeline, in Edgehill I completed the final report, and in Stratford I finalized

the narrative that structured the film. However, in all cases the content for these final

products was collaboratively produced and edited. Further, team members also played key

roles in preparing final products. Most significantly, the two film projects were led by Max

in Edgehill and Dev at Stratford. The Edgehill project was less ambitious (they interviewed

fewer people, and produced a shorter video), and a number of members collaborated with

Max in the film’s production. Though he did all the recording and editing, other members

participated as interviewers and interviewees, and also helped select key themes to highlight

and excerpts to include. In contrast, The Stratford Story Project was much more ambitious,

and in the end, Dev conducted most of the interviews independently. Though a number of

other students expressed interested in learning video editing skills, given the constraints of

time and software, Dev also completed most of the editing and design work alone. In

retrospect, it appears that the more sophisticated the final product, the less collaborative it

can be.

In summary, although members learned a great deal during the projects, their

learning was limited by the project’s inherent time constraints, and at times stifled by my

unclear or overly ambitious facilitation. While members valued the strong social ties that

formed over the course of the project, building and maintaining a caring environment

required navigating distrust, biases and dominant group behaviors, as well as inconsistent

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membership. And despite many team members gaining a sense of efficacy through their

participation, the degree to which the project fostered an empowering environment was

shaped by tensions between leading, seeding and following, and tensions between individual

and collective action. Some of these challenges resulted from the program design—such as

the difficulty of completing work within a fixed time period, which could be addressed by

extending the timeline to allow more time for analysis. Other challenges related to process—

such as the degree to which some member ideas were embraced and others were not—or to

positionality—such as how I read and was read by members given our respective social

identities. Challenges related to process and positionality cannot be fully planned for or

anticipated. In practice, I found that that Neighborhood Story Project members navigated

these challenges together, often taking ownership for creating conditions in which we all

could complete our best work.

Relationships of Reciprocity

This chapter has explored the design and facilitation processes that both animated

and at times stifled member gains, yet members themselves also actively shaped the

environment, teaching and supporting one another, and inspiring others with their own

initiative. The degree to which members also encouraged and supported me is also

noteworthy; just as they invested in one another and in their communities, they invested in

me.

My first session of the first Story Project offers an example. Despite a variety of

outreach efforts, only three people came to the initial meeting in Cleveland Park, and for

nearly the first hour, Ms. Andrea was the only one present (aside from me and my

collaborating researcher). Though we had only just met, I expressed my uncertainty about

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how to proceed, and my worry over the low turnout must have been palpable. She

encouraged me to keep going, offered to help with recruitment, and expressed her belief that

the project was needed. Months later, in one of our final team meetings, Ms. Andrea

reflected back to this first gathering:

Well, Amie… I’ve been thinking about this through the whole thing, that my mind

went back when we first, we first came in here and it, not many people showed up

and it appeared you … may have gotten a little discouraged and you was trying to

decide whether we should go forward. So, I just want to say thank you for moving

forward and, and trusting in what, what was in your heart for you to do...

In Edgehill, Ms. Mary similarly encouraged me the first session, making eye contact and

saying “it takes courage to show up at a group you don’t know and invite people to be part

of something.” At our last meeting, she too reflected back on that first session:

And, Amie, God bless you. I love you. I want to say you have done a wonderful job.

I saw fear on you when I came in. I'm sorry—it wasn't a fear, but it was concern. Are

they going to come? Are they going to stay? Are they going to behave? And you have been -

your leadership has just been inspiring. And I've been able to go back with that same

spirit of leadership…I have y'all to thank for that. God bless you. I love you.

Nearly a year later, when I reviewed an early draft of this manuscript with Ms. Mary, she

said, “I remember that first meeting, you was the only little white girl there, and most the

rest of us already knew each other. It was obvious to me that you were the one that needed

encouraging.” She was right. Having my vulnerability seen by these team members was

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both affirming and reassuring; they buoyed my resolve to keep pushing myself and the

projects forward.

Over the course of the Neighborhood Story Project, just as members frequently

appreciated one another, they also appreciated me. Several weeks into the Edgehill project,

Ms. TK reflected in a closing round, “Well, I like how Amie teaches us how to you know,

how to look forward to something. She does that a lot. How she stands up and…she just

generates the mind, and at least she do mine, and I like that.” As an educator and

community practitioner, hearing that the project was producing hope and ‘generating the

mind’ was deeply impactful. Through their encouragement, appreciation, and engagement,

members of the Neighborhood Story Project not only invested in their communities, they

invested in me. During the tearful closing session with the Cleveland Park team, I tried to

put into words to the difference the team made to me:

I just feel so incredibly grateful to you. And this has been super fun and awesome

and great, but it's also—if I get a Ph.D., it's because of you. Seriously. This is my

dissertation research, and I'm doing this project to see what do these kinds of projects

do, what difference do they make, and this is the first one. I'm going to hopefully do

a couple more… and I've been the leader in some ways, but I am a student and you

are my teachers here. I'm learning from you how this works, if it works, if it makes a

difference, how to make it better, and so I'm incredibly indebted to you for this

opportunity. You are all part of my—what we call—committee. You're all on my

committee…You're helping me grow in huge ways, so thank you for taking the risk

and making the commitment and investing the time and investing your heart, and

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 reaching out to your neighbors. And, you know, it was just really, really lovely. I feel

super lucky to get to have these relationships.

As the projects progressed, I continued to feel grateful, indebted, and lucky to be mentored

by such an outstanding group of neighbors who created a learning, caring, and empowering

environment for me, as well as for their neighbors.

Synthesizing Process Findings

Cultivating a learning, caring and empowering environment created conditions for

consciousness raising, relationship building, and civic action within the Neighborhood Story

Project. This was accomplished by intentional design and facilitation, navigating challenges,

and the reciprocal efforts of members. Ms. Betty’s transformation during the course of the

Edgehill Story Project exemplified the themes of the last two chapters, linking the

Neighborhood Story Project processes to team member outcomes.

At the first meeting, Ms. Betty expressed reluctance to join. At the end of that initial

session, Betty held up her consent form and addressed the group:

I haven’t signed this yet, I need to soak it in, because this is important, it’s real

important. I don’t want to do anything that will hurt my neighborhood, and I want

to help my neighborhood. If I sign this, I don’t want anything to be misinterpreted,

like ‘what is she doing over there with them white people getting her little stipend’. I

am taking this seriously.

Ms. Betty was clearly committed to her community, and expressed a healthy skepticism of

me and the project. Yet, over the coming weeks, as she learned about my motivations as a

facilitator, and about her peers in the project, she became increasingly engaged. She was

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quick to participate in weekly sessions, and eagerly volunteered for leadership roles outside

of our weekly meetings. She was hungry to learn new concepts and words, and reflected

mid-way, “I appreciate this team because I came in here, like I have told y'all before, not

knowing anything, and as we have been doing our Saturdays…it's like a puzzle to me and

now the puzzle is coming together...” When discerning which data collection team to join,

she chose the data analysis team over the interview team explicitly to learn new skills. As

she put it, “I like dealing with people but I want to change up. I can handle the people, I

want to deal with that right there,” pointing to the words ‘data analysis’ on the board. Later,

as the team finalized the report, we deliberated whether or not to list our names on the

document. Ms. Betty listened respectfully to the discussion, commenting, “I'm looking at it

two sides, and I'm not taking sides because I already know my side, I want my name.” The

following week she was more adamant, “You know you can put my name on it. Put my

name all over it, please!” At the close of that session, she noticed the change in herself –

from the first session to the current moment:

I am proud of that I stopped being afraid and having fear that I had in the beginning.

Because, once I got to feel the love and really see the seriousness of this and just

really got to see what we were doing, that took away the fear. I'm just so glad that

that left me. Because, remember, I didn't want to sign my name.

Months later, when I reflected with Ms. Betty about her participation in the project, I asked

her what it made such a difference for her. As noted at the start of this chapter, she replied:

All the studying that we did. If I was in there and we were just sitting there and just

talking—and plus we got to work and start doing things. All the studying that we

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 did, the cooperation that we had, with all the research that we did. Once I seen that

research form up and found out information, that made me want to do things.

Hearing the combined themes of learning (“the studying that we did”), caring (“the

cooperation that we had”), and empowering (“doing things”), I reflected back to Betty my

observation about the seeming importance of these three dimensions:

Amie: One of the things that came to my- that seemed to me, is that part of what

made it work, there were three different things happening at once. There was a space

for learning and it seems like it was really powerful for people to just learn things

about their neighborhood, and learn the terms, and learn what these different things

mean. It was also really important that we had a supportive group, that encouraged

each other, supported each other, and it was really important that we were doing

research. We weren't just receiving information, but we were out collecting

information and taking action. It seemed like it was that-

Betty: That's what I just got through saying.

It was, in fact, what she had just got through saying, and what many team members

articulated—often in a single breath—when expressing the project’s impact. The intentional

co-creation of a learning, caring and empowering environment propelled member gains

throughout the Neighborhood Story Project, and for many, beyond.

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 CHAPTER 6. IMPLICATIONS FOR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Nearly 15 years ago, Garven, Gutierez and Galinsky, the editors of the Handbook of

Social Work with Groups, offered the following challenge:

We need to promote research designs that capture real-life practice situations and

also give us an accurate assessment of effectiveness. We need to go beyond

practitioner descriptions and free-flowing subjective evaluations to well-developed

ethnographies and well-formulated evaluations” (2004, p.7).

As noted in a recently published text dedicated to group work research, the need for

empirical study of group works remains pressing today (Garvin, Tolman, and Macgowen,

2016). In the previous chapters, I have endeavored to meet this challenge by providing a

sufficiently rich description of the Neighborhood Story Project to make transferability

judgements possible, explicating: the intervention design, the context in which the project

was implemented, participant outcomes, group processes, and project limitations. With this

accounting, my hope is that scholars, practitioners, and neighbors can evaluate the

appropriateness of the Neighborhood Story Project for other settings. And yet, while I

respect and echo the call for accurate assessments and well-formed evaluations, there are

inherent tension between exactness and emergence, between fidelity and unfinishedness.

On one hand, as a practitioner, I am ever mindful of the need to skill-share, and want

to provide tools to those who are eager to try out a version of the Neighborhood Story

Project in their communities. As such, in addition to this text, I have created a facilitation

guide that provides detailed week-by-week session outlines.34 On other hand, although I

have highlighted specific activities in the preceding chapters (and detailed these and others

34
This facilitation guide is available from the author by request.

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in the aforementioned guide), there are invariably alternative activities that could have been

equally (if not more) effective. I am reminded of the conversation between popular

educators Miles Horton and Paolo Freire, in which Freire—reflecting on his literacy

education work in Brazil—observed, “you could start without too much preoccupation

concerning methods and techniques and materials because you had the principal ingredient,

which was the desire of the people…” (1990, p. 78). I too found the ‘principal ingredient’ to

be the desire of the people. And, though I sought to maintain implementation-fidelity across

the three projects,35 I also believe there is something important about this (and all)

interventions continuing to live, adapt, and evolve.

I designed the Neighborhood Story Project in the tradition of the unfinished alternative

introduced in Chapter 1. Unlike a highly proscriptive intervention, an unfinished alternative

satisfies two conditions: it contradicts core elements of tan existing approach to a social

condition to be sufficiently disruptive to the status quo, and second, it competes with the

current model enough to be considered realistic (Mathiesen, 1974). The Neighborhood

Story Project emerged as an ‘alternative’ to the status quo, which too often excludes

residents from identifying the consequences of, and responses to, gentrification. As a low-

cost, time-limited intervention, The Neighborhood Story Project also offers a plausible

model for intervening in gentrifying neighborhoods that may complement existing efforts to

build and preserve affordable housing.

In describing the importance of ‘the unfinished,’ Mathiesen cautions that once an

alternative becomes finished (i.e., packaged, copy written, scaled), it by definition becomes

the status quo, and is resistant to change. He writes:

35
For example, each of the three projects followed the same curriculum summarized in Appendix B, used the same
activities, and followed the same general timeline.

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 I have gradually acquired the belief that the alternative lies in the unfinished, in the

sketch, in what is not yet fully existing. The ‘finished alternative’ is ‘finished’ in the

double sense of the word (2014, p. 47).

Mathiesen’s words have resonance with Kathleen Stewart’s call for “weak theory in an

unfinished world” (2008, p. 72.), suggesting there are possibilities within and around us we

cannot yet see or measure. A certain amount of dynamism, emergence and possibility is

built into the Neighborhood Story Project, in that the members determine the questions they

ask, the data they collect, the interpretation of findings and form of dissemination. Even

still, given the unfinished-ness of the world, and the incompleteness of our own

understandings, both our theorizing and intervening must be always living, always draft,

always contextual, and never quite right.

With this tension between fidelity and unfinishedness in mind, this chapter takes a

step back from the particularity of the Neighborhood Story Project to offer three broad

implications of this study for community development practice and policy. First, drawing

from the outcome and process findings detailed in the Chapters 4 and 5, I offer a generalized

practice model for group level interventions in gentrifying neighborhoods. Second,

recognizing that the Neighborhood Story Project is just one of many possible interventions,

I consider this study’s findings in relationship to other alternative interventions in

gentrifying neighborhoods, suggesting an expanded role for community development

practice. Finally, I consider the role of policy-makers and ongoing research in supporting

these efforts.

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 A Practice Model for Group Work in Gentrifying Neighborhoods

As I concluded in Chapter 5, it was the co-occurrence of a learning, caring, and

empowering environment, rather than any one of these dimensions alone, that supported

participant gains in the Neighborhood Story Project. By providing all three, the

Neighborhood Story Project offered an entry point for residents to learn about their

communities, build meaningful relationships with neighbors, and work together to achieve a

collective goal. This suggests a practice model complementing the theoretical model

described in Chapter 1 (see Figure 1). The stronger a person’s ties to place and other people,

the more likely they are to come together to advocate for their communities (Collins,

Walting Neal, & Neal, 2014; Mannarini & Fedi, 2009; Mihaylov and Perkins, 2014).

Importantly, place-attachments and social ties are some of the very dimensions of

neighborhoods that may be harmed by gentrification, but this study suggests they can also

strengthened by place-based interventions, such as the Neighborhood Story Project, and

these dimensions can be leveraged to intervene productively in changing neighborhoods. As

Lewicka (2011) concluded in a comprehensive review of studies of place attachment, the

processes through which attachments to people and place are formed have been under

researched. This study begins to address this gap: Through creating a learning, caring, and

empowering environment, The Neighborhood Story Project offers a group work practice

model for fostering attachments to people and places, and facilitating collective action in

gentrifying neighborhoods (see Figure 15).

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 Figure 16. A group-work practice model in gentrifying neighborhoods

Although aspects of these environmental conditions are common in a variety of

settings, they are less common in spaces in which people come together to take action in

their neighborhoods. Indeed, in all three Neighborhood Story Project groups, members

noted that our work together felt “different” than other community initiatives they

participate in, such as neighborhood association meetings. Such spaces are often designed to

facilitate civic participation (for people to give input, advocate for or against something, or

plan a community event or protest). Learning may be a byproduct of these engagements, but

it is rarely the primary function. As a number of Neighborhood Story Project members

explained, it is difficult to track and participate in neighborhood gatherings related to

gentrification when terms such as ‘zoning,’ ‘tax increment financing,’ ‘market-rate,’ and the

ubiquitous ‘affordable housing’ are used without explanation or definition. Without explicit

attention to learning, many neighbors cannot find purchase in these conversations; nor is

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there an obvious inroad to offer their expertise. In contrast, as studies of participant

engagement in other low-income communities conclude, residents are more engaged in

community work when they believe they have knowledge and skill to contribute (Foster-

Fishman, Pierce, Van Egeren, 2009).

Furthermore, caring is often absent from spaces of neighborhood civic action. A

number of Neighborhood Story Project team members described attending neighborhood

meetings where organizers put more attention on following Robert’s Rules of Order than on

building relationships. Vanessa noted that many meetings she participates in are “grueling”

and “contentious.” In contrast, she found that in the Edgehill Story Project “people were

willing to listen to each other, people were tolerant of different ideas, and patient with each

other. It was kind of miraculous in a lot of ways.” While there are important critiques of

community development initiatives that emphasize community-building at the expense of

civic action (deFilippis, Fisher, & Shragge, 2006), for members of the Neighborhood Story

Project, building supportive relationships amplified their learning and action.

Finally, although spaces of civic engagement are intuitively empowering in that they

are often volunteer-driven and action-oriented, many rely on the presence and continued

engagement of people who already see themselves as leaders, rather than facilitating the

development of agency.36 In contrast, the Neighborhood Story Project intentionally built

member’s skills, comfort, and confidence in taking leadership. The learning, caring, and

empowering dimensions of the project were mutually supporting; by providing all three, the

Neighborhood Story Project offered an entry point for residents concerned about

36
Neighborhood-based community organizing models that intentionally develop leadership across all levels of
membership are an important exception (Ahsan, 2008).

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neighborhood change to develop an analysis of their community’s past and present, to build

meaningful relationships, and to take action to improve their neighborhoods. Importantly,

The Neighborhood Story Project was not designed to independently eradicate gentrification;

it is a small-group and time-limited intervention that engages residents in addressing some

of the effects of gentrification while developing the knowledge, relationships, and skills

needed to sustain efforts beyond the projects conclusion. It is up to participants to decide

how to leverage those gains—for personal development, local neighborhood engagement, or

comprehensive community organizing.

Although The Neighborhood Story Project was designed as a response to a specific

type of spatial and social transformation—gentrification—the tripartite practice model

described above may have relevance for community practice more broadly. Indeed, findings

from this study are consistent with previous theorizing and empirical work on community

development. For example, in a seminal study of grassroots activists, Kieffer (1984) finds

that empowerment is characterized by an improved self-concept, enhanced understandings,

and cultivation of resources for social action. He concludes, “While empowerment is, at

root, an individual demand, it is nurtured by the effects of collective effort” (1984, p.28).

Similarly, Maton’s (2008) theory of empowering community settings suggests that

individuals become individually and civically empowered as a result of participating in

environments that emphasize skill-development, caring, and self-efficacy (among other

characteristics). In both cases, learning, caring, and taking action are all essential. Indeed,

the spirit of this tripartite practice model is captured in Myles Horton’s reflections on

educational practice:

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 If I had to put a finger on what I consider…a good radical education, it wouldn’t be

anything about methods or techniques. It would be about loving people first…and

then next is respect for people’s abilities to learn and to act and shape their own

lives…The third thing grows out of caring for people and having respect for people’s

ability to do things, and that is that you value their experience (Horton & Freire,

1990, p. 177)

Given the apparent generalizability of these core elements—creating conditions for learning,

caring, and taking action—insights from this practice model can inform and/or strengthen

the design of other neighborhood interventions. For example, existing neighborhood

associations or other civic groups might reflect on how they foster a learning, caring, and

empowering environment, and how these dimensions of their practice might be

strengthened. This self-assessment might include questions such as:

• How do we structure and pace our meetings to help people share their expertise,

identify gaps in their knowledge, and learn more about their community?

• How do we facilitate opportunities for members to build relationships with one

another, recognize each other’s strengths, and demonstrate care for one another?

• How do we create opportunities for all members to develop and practice

leadership skills, and experience taking collective action?

These same questions can be adapted by those designing new neighborhood interventions.

In addition to providing a practice model for group work in gentrifying neighborhoods, this

study suggests the need to broaden the landscape of community practice responses in

neighborhoods experiencing rapid demographic change.

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 An Expanded Role for Community Development

As Neighborhood Story Project team members made abundantly clear, residents of

gentrifying neighborhoods are concerned with keeping more than just their home. They are

also interested with preserving relationships and histories, with mobilizing resident

resistance and power, and with transforming neighborhood reputations and levels of

neighborhood engagement. As such, there is a critical need to reimagine the role of

community development practice beyond helping people find or keep housing. While these

roles remain absolutely critical, they fail to account for the range of residents’ losses and

desires.

As introduced briefly in Chapter 1, there are already a multitude of grassroots efforts

led by artists, community organizers, and scholar-activists responding to gentrification’s

negative effects. To the extent that these initiatives focus on more than just

building/preserving affordable housing, they can be considered ‘more than material’

interventions. In conducting a comprehensive literature search for empirical studies of more

than material interventions in gentrifying neighborhoods, I found 17 articles, documenting

14 distinct projects. 37 Adding the Neighborhood Story Project brings the number of projects

included in this review to 15 (for a complete list of projects, see Appendix G).

37
I conducted a comprehensive search for interventions that respond to more than material effects of
gentrification. I first completed a simultaneous database search of all 59 Pro Quest databases, which index
thousands of titles across multiple disciplines, restricting my search to peer-reviewed journals, and keeping it
unrestricted with regard to geography and year of publication. Recognizing that these interventions do not emerge
from a single discipline, draw from a single theoretical tradition, or use shared language, I utilized multiple
combinations of search terms to acquire a sample. I began by searching all possible combinations of the following
search terms, as found in the article abstracts: Gentrification OR redevelopment OR neighborhood change, AND,
Community Practice OR Participatory OR action research OR place-making OR dialogue OR memory OR public
history OR cartography OR civic. I reviewed abstracts or all articles returned from this search with the following
criteria for consideration in this review: (1) that the article provide an empirical account (2) of an intervention
(operationalized as any organized response to changing neighborhood conditions) (3) focused on addressing the
more than material effects (4) of neighborhood gentrification. When an abstract met these inclusion criteria, I
reviewed the article in full.

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 Surveying these studies, there appear to be four general approaches to more than

material interventions in gentrifying neighborhoods (though a number of projects—as the

Neighborhood Story Project—span multiple approaches):

• creative placemaking projects engage the arts to transform how people feel

about, relate to, and interact in their neighborhood;

• public pedagogy initiatives create opportunities for people to learn about their

neighborhood;

• public science projects engage people in studying and taking informed action in

their neighborhoods; 38 and

• community organizing efforts mobilize residents to build and exercise power to

affect change in their neighborhood.

Though a relatively limited sample, the 15 projects included in this review provide a starting

point for considering the applications of more than material interventions in gentrifying

neighborhoods. Synthesizing results across studies suggests four central findings.

Beneficial Outcomes

First, in all but one project, authors provided evidence of beneficial outcomes of the

intervention, including raising neighbors’ collective consciousness about gentrification and

processes of neighborhood change (Cahill, 2006; Drew, 2012; McClean, 2014;

McLean2014b; Thurber & Fraser, 2016), strengthening relationships among residents

(Chidester & Gadsby, 2009; Thurber, Collins, Greer, McKnight, & Thompson, in press),

38
Given disciplinary differences in how participatory modes of research are termed, I have elected to use the term
public science as a broad umbrella that includes projects conceptualized as PAR, public archaeology, and
collaborative ethnography, as examples.

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and transforming residents’ relationships to place (Somdahl-Sands, 2008), all of which were

also reflected in the Neighborhood Story Project.

Interventions that engaged residents as artists, teachers, and researchers—like the

Neighborhood Story Project—had the additional benefit of democratizing knowledge

production. This has individual effects, as residents increasingly value their own knowledge

and abilities to theorize (Cahill, 2006; Drew, 2012; McLean 2014), as well as community-

level effects, as residents use their knowledge to shape representations and/or narratives of

their neighborhood that can influence neighborhood change (Darcy, 2013; Hodkinson &

Essin, 2015; Thurber, Collins, Greer, McKnight, & Thompson, in press; Thurber & Fraser,

2016; Sinha, 2013).

Contributions of Creative Placemaking and Public Pedagogy Interventions

Second, the greatest contribution of creative placemaking and public pedagogy

approaches is the ability to catalyze consciousness-raising among potentially large groups

through relatively short-term interventions. The Mission Wall Dances—a multimedia

performance responding to gentrification in San Francisco’s historically Latino Mission

district—serves as an example. Designed by choreographer Jo Kreiter, the project included a

commissioned three-story mural depicting the 1975 Gartland Apartment arson, which many

believe was intentionally set to evict low-income residents from the district. In recent years,

this disturbing pattern of evicting-by-arson has reemerged in the Mission, displacing

residents and eliminating affordable rentals, most of which have not been rebuilt (Somdahl-

Sands, 2008). Kreiter choreographed an aerialist dance performance staged against the

mural. The piece was designed to evoke this legacy of arson and displacement, as well as

resident resistance to removal. Over a period of a few days, approximately 1000 people

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attended the performance. Somdahl-Sands surveyed attendees immediately after the event,

and distributed a follow-up questionnaire a year later. She concluded that the performance

cognitively and affectively transformed the attendees’ relationships to the Mission district by

creating a “communal memory of the neighborhood” which “made the displacement of

Mission District residents an intellectual, physical and emotional reality for the audience.”

(2008, p. 349). In the tradition of memory-work advocated by geographer Karen Till

(2012), creative-placemaking and public pedagogy approaches can bring attention to the

history of racial struggle, help residents make connections between the past and the present,

and engage residents in reflecting on their responsibilities as neighbors in gentrifying

neighborhoods. However, given their ephemeral, one-off nature, these approaches are

limited in terms of fostering either individual or collective action.

Contributions of Public Science and Community Organizing Interventions

In contrast, public science and community organizing approaches, though requiring

a greater investment of time, can be effective in fostering consciousness raising as well as

civic action. Echoing findings from the Neighborhood Story Project, studies find that public

science and community organizing approaches advance social change by developing a

pipeline of leaders (Nam, 2012 ), creating organizing networks (Darcy, 2013; McLean,

2014b) and producing materials that can be used to organize for better neighborhood

conditions (Darcy, 2013; Hodkinson & Essin, 2015; Sinha, 2012; Thurber & Fraser, 2016).

This is not to suggest that public science and community organizing activities achieve all of

their goals. In contrast, all the projects included in this review document ongoing sites of

struggle. However, these activities are designed to advance that struggle by creating tools,

relationships, and networks that immediately feed into civic action work.

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 The Residents’ Voices Project (Darcy, 2013), which blends community organizing

and public science, offers a particularly robust example. This international collaborative

research project was co-located in Sydney, Australia and Chicago, U.S., and involved

residents of public and socialized housing, as well as community workers and scholars in

both settings. Michael Darcy and collaborators designed the project to counter the ways that

resident perspectives are “systematically devalued or excluded from the so-called ‘evidence’

deployed to justify redevelopment of public housing and sometimes destruction of

communities” (2013, p. 370). The organizing agenda was simultaneously multi-local and

global. Using a shared web-space and connecting via technology allowed collaborators to

learn and share best practices that can build local capacity, while also drawing connections

across contexts. As Darcy explains, “This project aims to create a space where tenants are

able to express, exchange and theorise about the impact of the places they live on their lives,

to validate their own knowledge, and to use it in ways which best suit their interests” (2013,

p. 371). Although the potential contributions of Residents’ Voices appear to be significant, it

is less clear whether these efforts have been sustained. The project web address is no longer

functional, and little additional information is available online.

Indeed, only one of the public science and/or community organizing efforts included

in this review appears to be ongoing: the Right to the City Alliance, a national coalition of

organizations working for racial, economic and environmental justice

(www.therighttothecity.org). This raises a number of questions: were the other projects

designed to be time-limited, or ongoing? If the projects were cut short, what were the

causes? In the case of partnerships between the academy and community groups, how did

the academic clock (including academics’ desire to complete projects within the constraints

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of the semester, and/or quickly collect and analyze publishable data) impact the life of the

project? In the case of projects with strong local leadership, has sustainability been thwarted

by the displacement of involved residents, as has been documented elsewhere (Lees, Slater,

& Wyly, 2013; McLean, 2014b)?

While interventions need not, and indeed cannot, last forever, among the cases

included in this review, the conditions of social inequality outlasted the intervention

strategy. This is not to say that these efforts did not produce significant gains. As found with

the Neighborhood Story Project, it is likely that these efforts built capacity, skills, and

knowledge that can fuel other social justice efforts. But attention to sustainability does raise

questions about the life-span of public science and community organizing initiatives, and

how such initiatives can be crafted to collectivize and share learnings, best practices, and

resources when their efforts come to a close.

The Need for an Equity Lens

The final finding from this review is that effective interventions in gentrifying

neighborhoods require explicit attention to equity. An equity lens is better understood as an

approach to practice than a rigid set of practices. As described by Grantcraft, applying an

equity lens means “paying disciplined attention to race and ethnicity while analyzing

problems, looking for solutions, and defining success” (2012, p. ii). More broadly, applying

an equity lens implies asking questions about who can participate in a given intervention,

and who is left out; who benefits and who is harmed; and/or whose interests are prioritized

and whose are ignored or secondary. One study of a neighborhood-based intervention in

Toronto, Canada demonstrated the importance of bringing an equity lens to bear when

addressing gentrification.
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 Concerned about rapid redevelopment and concurrent loss of street-level interaction

in their neighborhood, a group of residents and business-owners began hosting monthly

pedestrian-only street festivals as a tool of resistance to gentrification. As McLean and

Rahder (2013) report, however, organizers failed to consider the impact that blocking car-

traffic had on some of the working-class residents and businesses, and designed the festival

activities to appeal to middle-class residents and tourists. Businesses that require traffic for

deliveries and pick-ups, such as the meat and hardware store, suffered, while niche coffee

shops and gift stores profited. Further, the festival increased interest in the neighborhood

among middle and upper-class residents, likely accelerating the rate of gentrification.

Although the initial impetus of this initiative was to resist perceived negative effects of

gentrification—in particular, diminished social ties—the authors conclude that “uncritical

and unquestioned ideals of public involvement, community, and creativity may reproduce

the very exclusions, both symbolic and material, that they claim to challenge" (2013, p. 95).

Absent a comprehensive analysis of who the street festival was designed to benefit, and who

might be harmed, this creative placemaking intervention deepened rather than diminished

the social harms it attempted to address. While this example foregrounds the role of those

who design and implement interventions, other studies suggest that those who participate

must also bring a critical consciousness regarding issues of equity, or develop that

consciousness along the way (Drew, 2012; McLean, 2014).

What More than Material Interventions Offer

Chapter 1 introduced three criticisms of reducing gentrification’s harms to a loss of

affordable housing: such an approach pays insufficient attention to racial struggle,

perpetuates damage-based views of poor people and neighborhoods, and ignores other

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losses experienced in communities. Although there are important distinctions between

creative placemaking, public pedagogy, public science and community organizing

approaches (as highlighted above), more than material interventions are well-positioned to

address these criticisms. First, as all four approaches are place-based, each reflects a

commitment to context. Through exploring the particular spatial relationships within a

neighborhood over time, more than material interventions (that adopt an equity lens) are

likely to pay attention to the legacies of racial struggle. Second, each approach disrupts a

damage-based approach by relocating authority and experience from institutions into

neighborhoods. By bringing art out of museums and theatres, learning out of schools,

science out of labs, and social change out of city hall, each approach claims neighborhoods

as critical sites for experiencing, knowing, and acting in response to gentrification. Finally,

each approach reflects a commitment to widening the lens of what is seen, known, and felt

about gentrification. More than material interventions reveal losses resulting from

gentrification that can be concealed by a singular focus on the loss of housing. Relatedly,

each approach (albeit to differing degrees) engages people cognitively, affectively, and

experientially. This reflects a recognition that human development—and by extension,

social development—requires changing what people think about gentrification, changing

how people relate to their neighbors and their neighborhood, and increasing their capacity

to care for one another and the places they live.

In summary, more than material interventions can complement efforts to build and

preserve affordable housing in important ways, engaging neighborhood histories and

context, mobilizing resident’s desires for their futures, and attending to a range of losses in

addition to the loss of housing. Yet, it is critical to understand the strengths and limitations

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of different approaches, and perhaps blend approaches to address their respective

vulnerabilities. As described above, creative placemaking and public pedagogy interventions

can be used to spark individual and collective development, though these approaches are

limited in fostering collective action. Public science and community organizing initiatives

are designed to foster collective action, though they can face difficulties in sustaining

change. And importantly, the effectiveness of any intervention often hinges on the degree to

which intervention designers and participants attend to issues of equity.

With these insights, practitioners working in community development—such as staff

of city departments that focus on housing, development, and health; or those working in

neighborhood-based non-profits—can reimagine their role with respect to gentrification.

Where housing values are rapidly rising, and neighborhood demographics are in flux, a

survey might assess resident’s:

• needs for rental assistance, property tax abatement, and emergency housing

• knowledge of neighborhood history, understanding of gentrification, and

awareness of how to engage in planning processes

• desire for strengthened social ties, assistance addressing intergroup

conflict/bias, or help mobilizing resident organizing

Widening the assessment beyond material needs expands the possibilities for intervening in

gentrifying neighborhoods. Practitioners can strategically draw on creative placemaking,

public pedagogy, public science, and/or community organizing approaches—in addition to

traditional housing development, case management, advocacy, and referral services—to

meet community needs. In response to displaced homes and businesses, rental evictions,

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and rising property taxes, additional interventions might mobilize and/or support existing

resident organizing efforts, engage residents in participatory action research to investigate

and respond to their concerns, and provide technical assistance to resident advocacy efforts.

In response to the dismissal of long-time residents’ knowledge, diminished opportunities for

their civic engagement, or disregard for culturally significant places, additional interventions

might seek to amplify residents’ place-stories, create spaces of resident representation, and

commemorate important places, moments, and/or people in the neighborhood. And in

response to disrupted social ties, escalated social stigma, and ruptured place-attachments,

additional interventions might serve to build relationships among neighbors, reduce bias

and discrimination, and create contexts for people to care for and enjoy their neighborhood.

The Place of Policymakers

Policymakers—in particular, leaders in city government—also have a role to play in

expanding efforts to prevent and mitigate gentrification’s effects. Importantly, every city is

comprised of actors with different and competing interests and varying degrees of access to

power. In the context of gentrification, people working in development and real estate

prosper by virtue of the same processes that harm others; they have an incentive to see

gentrification continue unchecked, and often have greater means and influence over policy-

makers than do the poor, working-class, and elderly people most vulnerable to

gentrification. In response, residents in many communities are organizing those harmed by

gentrification and unequitable development to collectivize their efforts.39 Indeed, though the

following recommendations are aimed toward policy change, implementing these

39
For example, there are more than 30 member organizations within the Right to the City Alliance
(www.righttothecity.org); and numerous other organizations fighting for tenant rights and affordable housing
within local, state and national spheres.

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recommendations requires a strong organizing base that can agitate policymakers and

compel city government to adopt equitable development initiatives.

First, city governments must make an explicit and actionable commitment to

advancing equity, and operationalize that commitment throughout local government. This

requires attending to disparities in outcomes across a wide range of indicators, including

access to housing, education, transit, greenspace, and jobs. City departments that are

charged with addressing issues of affordable housing must collect and analyze the data

needed to track disparities in housing-access and displacement experienced by people of

color and other marginalized groups. Further, they must evaluate the equity impacts of all

housing policies and programs, and mitigate for existing disparities.

Second, city governments must invest in more than material interventions in areas

that are already—or at risk of—gentrifying. At a policy level, this study suggests the

continued need for mechanisms to create and preserve affordable housing, while also

attending to and investing in more than material dimensions of place. This could involve

creating program similar to % for arts, in which a percentage of overall redevelopment cost

is designated for community development. Local organizations could then submit proposals

to fund place-based projects addressing community concerns. To be clear, I am not

suggesting funding for arts-based, educational, research or organizing efforts in place of, but

rather alongside of, resources for housing. In areas where residents are facing displacement

due to rising housing costs, ivesting in place-making projects honoring the area’s cultural

heritage without committing necessary resources for affordable housing would be grossly

negligent. And yet, as the Neighborhood Story Project made evident, residents of

gentrifying neighborhoods have serious concerns about fractured social relationships, loss of

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place-knowledge, and shifting narratives of their neighborhood, in addition to the loss of

affordable housing. As such, funding for housing alone is insufficient to addressing

gentrification’s harms.

Third, city governments need to foster greater interdisciplinarity across departments

and between government and community groups. Most initiatives related to gentrification

are situated in either planning departments or housing commissions. Yet, if gentrification

constitutes more than a loss of homes, it is clearly a mistake to lay the burden of addressing

gentrification only at the feet of these departments; new kinds of partnerships are needed.

One might not expect a city planner to be facile in developing a creative placemaking

initiative with a strong equity lens—though there are likely people working in the city arts

commission or local arts organizations who would welcome this opportunity. Nor might we

expect staff at a local housing commission to be equipped to facilitate participatory action

research—though there are likely members of the health department, or a nearby

educational institution that can assist in this capacity.

An example from Portland, Oregon illustrates the role of policymakers is responding

to geographies of gentrification, reflecting a number of best practices as well as opportunities

for innovation. In 2012, the city adopted “The Portland Plan,” a comprehensive plan that

includes a ‘Framework for Equity’ with measurable goals to guide the city towards equitable

outcomes for all residents (www.portlandonline.com/portlandplan). The City of Portland

Bureau of Planning and Sustainability contracted with Portland State University geographer

Lisa Bates to conduct a comprehensive geographic analysis of gentrification in the city

(2013). With a city-wide equity commitment and Dr. Bates analysis in hand, the Portland

Housing Bureau—which is broadly charged with solving the city’s unmet housing needs—

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adopted a Racial Equity Plan detailing the Bureau’s specific goals, objectives, and actions to

advance equity in housing (http://training.portlandoregon.gov/phb/article/653143).

One of the Bureau’s most significant equity initiatives is the $20 million N/NE

Neighborhood Housing Strategy. This robust project is sited in a historically vibrant black

neighborhood where gentrification has led to the out-migration of half the area’s black

residents within a decade (Portland Housing Bureau, 2014). The core elements of the N/NE

Neighborhood Housing Strategy emerged from a comprehensive community engagement

process, and combined strategies to build and preserve affordable housing with policies that

provide priority access to displaced residents. This attempt to rebuild the black community

through repatriation reflects a strong application of an equity lens. And yet, as of now, the

Bureau is not incorporating more than material interventions into its strategy; its efforts are

limited to building and preserving housing.

Recognizing that bringing people back into area homes is only one element of

rebuilding black community, what might it look like to incorporate more than material

interventions in this strategy? Is there a role for local arts projects that document and or

contribute to the cultural life of the neighborhood, or for education projects that build a

shared analysis of the ways the neighborhood has been shaped by sociopolitical and

economic forces over time? Might a public science project help re-engage residents to study

and take action in their neighborhood, or a community organizing initiative help residents

to stay mobilized over the course of what will inevitably be a long, bureaucratic

implementation phase? Importantly, I am not suggesting that the Housing Bureau do more,

but that they partner with others to adopt an integrated, holistic approach to rebuilding what

has been lost, and restoring a sense of community that will last.

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 A Continued Role for Research

Although I am advocating for an immediate uptake of more than material

interventions in gentrifying neighborhoods, there is also a need to concurrently expand

research of these interventions. As noted previously, more than material interventions are

under-evaluated. At the same time, a simple internet search suggests a proliferation of

grassroots activity in this area. Systematic inquiry can assist in cataloguing these various

modes of intervention, understanding their differing effects, and considering if particular

intervention approaches are more appropriately suited to communities at different stages of

change (Mallach, 2008). For example, community organizing might be best deployed when

neighborhoods are in early stages of gentrification, as building power at this point increases

the likelihood that neighbors can shape the trajectory of change. Relatedly, public pedagogy

interventions might be most effective in neighborhoods that are already incorporating a

critical mass of newer residents, who may lack place knowledge and neighborhood-based

social ties. Continued research can help practitioners better match interventions to their

specific contexts.

There is a particular need for longitudinal studies that can provide insight into how

more than material initiatives in gentrifying neighborhoods can affect change over time, as

well as the vulnerabilities of such interventions. For example, there is some evidence that

creative placemaking initiatives documenting the cultural legacy of a particular

neighborhood may affirm long-term residents place knowledge and place attachments in the

short-term, while simultaneously making the neighborhood more desirable, and thus more

vulnerable to gentrification, down the road (McClean, 2014). Tracking and understanding

these changes is essential to ethical practice.

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 Finally, although the focus of this chapter has been on community development

responses to gentrification, additional research is needed to consider the applicability of

more than material interventions to other sites of neighborhood change, such as regions

rapidly incorporating new immigrants or migrants, or communities experiencing population

decline. It may be that interventions, such as the Neighborhood Story Project, can be

beneficial in strengthening place attachments, develop community cohesion, and spark

collective action in other settings. Ultimately, the more we understand what more than

material interventions can offer, the more strategically and effectively they can be utilized.

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 CHAPTER 7. RE-THEORIZING GENTRIFICATION

I was motivated to develop the Neighborhood Story Project by a belief that there was

much more that we—as social workers, community psychologists, community organizers,

and other neighborhood leaders—could be doing to help residents resist, respond to, and—

wherever possible—prevent the multitude of losses experienced in gentrifying

neighborhoods. Although my interests are deeply anchored in practice, this project is also

entangled with theory, for how we understand social problems makes possibilities for

transforming them legible.

As traced throughout the preceding chapters, residents of gentrifying neighborhoods

experience a constellation of losses related to changes in the built environment and shifting

neighborhood demographics, including losses in history, relationships, safety, a sense of

belonging and a sense of place. Yet the fullness of this experience is often obscured in

conceptualizations of gentrification that focus narrowly on a loss of housing. As introduced

in chapter 1, third-wave gentrification scholars have argued for the need to think holistically

about the stakes of gentrification, offering a variety of conceptual models for doing so. For

example, Hyra (2013) offers the three-tiered framework of residential, political and cultural

displacements, and Twigge-Molecey (2013) uses the typology of social, cultural, and

housing market displacement. Davidson (2009) suggests an epistemological shift away from

equating the loss of abstract space with a loss of sense of place (Davidson, 2009). As R&B

legend Luther Vandross croons, “a house is not a home…”; if we reduce gentrification to

only a loss of space (houses), me miss the effects on place (a resident’s feeling of being at

home). However, these insights have been slow to be conceptually integrated in ways that

can inform public policy. For example, The City of Nashville defines gentrification as:

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 the process of buying and renovating traditionally low-income areas, thus appealing

to middle and upper-class residents and patrons. The result is an increase in the

property value of the area that often displaces local residents who can no longer

afford to pay housing and other increased costs. (http://www.nashville.gov/Mayors-

Office/Housing/Basics.aspx)

Residential displacement is the sole effect of gentrification theorized in this definition.

Indeed, among most city planning departments and housing bureaus, gentrification

continues to be reduced to a loss of affordable housing. To be clear, political struggles for

increased affordable housing are hard fought, and not won nearly often enough. Yet a

singular policy focus on building and preserving affordable housing is insufficient. How can

we theorize gentrification to better account for its more than material consequences?

I explore this final question in two ways, using two definitions of the adverb ‘how’.

First, I consider the manner in which we theorize gentrification, in particular, with whom. My

interest here is process: how we might democratize spaces of theorizing to center

perspectives of those most harmed by gentrification? Second, I consider with what meaning

we theorize gentrification. My interest here is content: how we might broaden our

conceptualization of gentrification’s effects to better understand and more effectively

intervene in gentrifying neighborhoods?

Who Theorizes Gentrification’s Effects?

In the words of Dr. Maya Angelou, “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe

place where we can go as we are and not be questioned” (1986, p. 196). Although the

yearning for a sense of place may be a universal, the space of theorizing its loss via

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gentrification has been fairly exclusive. Almost 20 years ago, preeminent gentrification

scholar Loretta Lees hinted at this when she wrote, “Gentrification researchers need to

think more carefully about how their research methods – as well as their theory – inflect

their understandings” (1998, p. 2258). A decade later, geographer Tom Slater—one of the

leading gentrification scholars today—echoed this insight in more specific terms, “asking

people about their experiences of displacement is just as important as asking how many people

have been displaced” (emphasis in original, 2008, p. 218). Indeed, our understanding of

gentrification’s effects has been deepened by ethnographic accounts of residents’ lived

experience (see Fraser, 2004; Stabrowski, 2014), but who is asking and interpreting also

matters. We are all seeing from somewhere, and looking toward somewhere (Haraway,

1988). Feminists and critical race scholars have long critiqued the exclusion of those most

directly affected by social problems from producing knowledge about their lives (Collins,

1990; Harding, 1991; Smith, 1999). As introduced in Chapter 1, collaborative research can

serve as an antidote to these exclusions (Fine, 2016). And yet, its use appears scant in

studies of gentrification. 40 This is problematic for a number of reasons.

First, those most directly affected by gentrification have relevant expertise. As Fine

contends, “a particular wisdom about injustice is cultivated in the bodies and communities

of those most intimately wounded by unjust conditions” (2016, p.358). Social

40
To determine the scope of participatory studies in this area, I conducted a simultaneous search within all
databases included in the ProQuest search engine using the following inclusion criteria: (1) articles were published
in a peer-reviewed journal, (2) published after January 1, 2000, and (3) satisfied the final search terms within the
article abstract: (gentrification) AND ((“participatory research”) OR (“action research”) or (PAR). Review of
abstracts found only five studies related to gentrification that purported to use participatory methods. I do not
conclude from this search that there have in fact only been five participatory studies on gentrification; indeed
several others that were not returned in this search are referenced in this text. However, given that replicating the
search for (gentrification) AND (interview) produced 234 results, and (gentrification) AND (survey) produced 122
results, this does suggest a relative dearth of participatory studies in the area of gentrification.

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epistemologists describe this as an epistemic advantage accrued by those who are adversely

affected by their particular social location (Alcoff, 2007). As such, those who have been

harmed by gentrification may better understand the nuances of how gentrification is

experienced than those who have not experienced these harms first hand. Conversely, those

who are seemingly unharmed by—or benefit from—gentrification are, at the very least,

epistemically disadvantaged. Some understandings or insights may be more difficult to

attain. As Alcoff concludes:

this is not to say that women or marginalized peoples will have absolute epistemic

advantage in having more critical questions in regard to every conceivable line of

inquiry, but that the pattern of epistemic positionality created by some identities has

the potential for relevance in broad domains of inquiry, perhaps in any inquiry (2007,

p. 47).

In addition to possessing relevant expertise that can contribute to theorizing gentrification’s

effects, residents of gentrifying neighborhoods likely have insider knowledge of how their

neighbors are already resisting gentrification, and insights into what interventions are most

needed in their communities. This knowledge is critical to conceptualizing responses to

gentrification that are meaningful to the local context. In sum, without resident engagement,

gentrification theorizing risks being invalid and irrelevant.

Second, excluding those harmed from developing theory about gentrification is itself

an injustice. Consider the compounding impact when those marginalized by

gentrification—dismissed in and/or displaced from the places they call home—are also

foreclosed from producing knowledge about their lives. Furthermore, their perspectives are

often obscured in abstract accounts that purport to be ‘about’ their lived experiences.
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Moreover, much urban theorizing—particularly that which is anchored in a political

economy approach—argues that the problems experienced in neighborhoods can only be

affected upstream, often at the level of state, national and global economic relations

(DeFilippis, 2008). Such a conclusion diminishes, if not altogether excises, residents’ agency

to affect change in their communities (Thurber, 2017).

The local/national and downstream/upstream arguments create an artificial binary.

Strategic efforts to achieve change upstream are not incompatible with interventions

implemented at the neighborhood level, and different scales of intervention are accessible to

differently positioned actors. The more marginalized residents are (by virtue of gender, race,

age, class, ability, sexual orientation, immigration status, and education), the more barriers

they face to gaining entry to upstream points of decision-making. It is critical to expand

access to spaces of intervention at regional and national levels, while appreciating the

unique insights and influence neighborhood residents may have in affecting change locally.

As we open up spaces of theorizing to include residents, our theories of gentrification will

better account for the fullness of resident’s lived experiences.

The Multiple Dimensions of Neighborhoods41

Drawing on insights from Neighborhood Story Project members, and integrating

findings from other empirical work in gentrifying neighborhoods, the following pages offer a

conceptual framework intended to be accessible and actionable for those theorizing—and

responding to—gentrification’s effects within neighborhoods. As described in Chapter 3,

Neighborhood Story Project team members raised material concerns related to housing and

41
An earlier version of this section is forthcoming as a chapter in the book Urban renewal, community and
participation: Theory, policy and practice, edited by Julie Clark and Nicholas Wise (Thurber, in press).

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changes in the built environment; epistemic concerns related to knowledge about, and the

reputation of, their neighborhoods; and affective concerns related to changing relationships

between people and place. These areas of concern offer a starting point to consider the

multiple dimensions of neighborhoods that can be impacted by gentrification (see Figure

16).

Figure 17. Multiple dimensions of neighborhoods

In the interest of conceptual clarity, in the following sections I describe the material,

epistemic, and affective dimensions of neighborhoods in turn, artificially teasing apart that

which is entangled. In reality, if I am kept up at night filled with anxiety about whether I

will be able to keep my home, hurt by neighbors who look at my children as if they are

strangers on their own street, and long to see the face of a friend recently priced out of her

nearby apartment, I will not experience these as distinctly material, epistemic, or affective or

concerns. Thus, I close the chapter by returning to a call for considering neighborhoods

holistically.

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Mapping Material Harms

On the most basic level, neighborhoods are places of residence (which may include

houses, apartments, shelters, and homeless encampments). They are also a primary setting

where people access resources and are exposed to environmental conditions—such as air

and water quality—that impact health. The greater an individual’s economic resources, the

less she must rely on her immediate neighborhood to meet her material needs. Conversely,

the lesser an individual’s economic means, the more she needs her neighborhood to provide

the resources needed for daily living. For low-income residents, gentrification can adversely

impact the material conditions of life in terms of housing, resource access, and health risks.

Housing instability. When neighborhoods gentrify, the most obvious form of

material harm is displacement. As property values increase, individual and corporate

landlords may raise rents (Brookings Institution, 2001; Zuk et al, 2015) or stop traditional

renting altogether in favor of short-term rentals targeting tourists (Lee, 2016). Increasingly,

displaced residents must move away from the urban core to find affordable housing. This

suburbanization of poverty can result in increased costs for the already cost-burdened; while

housing costs may decrease, residents pushed away from the city may now spend more for

transit to and from work, grocery stores and school (Brookings Institution, 2010). Even

when neighborhood revitalization is designed to improve areas for some of the original

residents, as the HOPE VI redevelopments of public housing in the 1990s claimed to do, the

most vulnerable residents, such as those living with disabilities, were the most likely to be

displaced (The Urban Institute, 2004).

For homeowners, rising neighborhood property values in turn increases property

taxes (Brookings Institution, 2001; Zuk et al, 2015). In today’s economy, few people

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experience correlating increases in wages. That said, low-wage workers and people living on

fixed incomes are particularly affected by tax increases; indeed, members of the Edgehill

Story Project interviewed neighbors whose property taxes had increased by nearly $700 in

just six years. The displacement of homeowners forced out by tax increases they cannot

afford has a compounding generational effect. Traditionally, homeownership has been a

critical avenue for American families to build wealth. Yet, through preferential lending to

white people and predatory lending to people of color (versions of which continue to this

day), the field of homeownership opportunities has been racially skewed to

disproportionately benefit white people (Wyly, Ponder, Nettling, Po, Fung et al, 2012). As

of 2011, the average white household had $130,000 greater net worth than their black and

latino counterparts, and the lack of homeownership is a significant cause of this glaring

wealth gap (Shapiro, Meschede & Osoro, 2013).

Wealth has profound implications, allowing families of moderate income to help

children through college, to make a down payment on a home, or to weather a period of

unemployment or illness. As is the case in the Cleveland Park and Edgehill, many working-

class neighborhoods experiencing gentrification today were once among the only locations

in the city where people of color could own homes, and their residents were some of the first

generations that did so. Given the legacy of restricted opportunities for wealth production in

communities of color, the displacement of homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods is

particularly troubling, and has repercussions for the economic well-being of future

generations.

Loss of Neighborhood Resources. In addition to residential displacement, local

businesses and organizations may be displaced due to rising rents and property taxes,

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reducing jobs for and amenities targeted to lower income residents (Brookings Institution,

2001). As Neighborhood Story Project members reported, new businesses may exclusively

target (by price-point and types of products) middle and upper income residents, and lower-

income residents will have to travel further to shop (Shaw & Hagemans, 2015). Other

changes to the built environment may materially privilege newer residents, such as replacing

street parking for historically black churches with bike lanes (Stein, 2015). Thus, even when

residents do not lose their homes, they may lose access to other material resources in their

communities.

Health disparities. Because of racial and class disparities in social and political

power, an increase of white and/or higher income residents may increase the effectiveness

of neighborhood efforts to improve safety. Some of these initiatives many have universal

health benefits, such as environmental cleanup and safer roads. Yet, gentrification may also

increase risks to health and safety for some residents. The Cleveland Park Story Project

member who reported a white neighbor calling the police because they were concerned to

see a black woman walking her dog in the neighborhood is not an anomaly. Gentrification

has been correlated with increases in landlord surveillance (Stabrowski, 2014) and

neighborhood policing (Smith, 2002). Given that on average, unarmed black men are 3.49

times more likely to be shot by police than of unarmed white residents (Ross, 2015),

increased surveillance heightens risks of violence for black residents. In addition to the

bodily harm or loss of life that may result from police violence, living with the threat of such

violence increases stress, which has adverse health impacts on people of color (Paradies,

2006).

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Mapping Epistemic Harms

Neighborhoods also have an epistemic dimension in that they constitute a

fundamental geographic scale in which people may come together to build and share

knowledge, to participate in civic life, and—in the context of persistent racism—to imagine

alternative ways of living.42 As evidenced within the work of the Neighborhood Story

Project, the epistemic terrain of gentrifying neighborhoods is shaped by what narratives of

place are remembered and amplified, inequalities of who is known and knowable, and

whose knowledge counts and is considered in shaping the future of a neighborhood.

Dismissed knowledge and history. Not everyone can be an expert in city planning

or national economic policy. However, many people become resident experts of their own

neighborhood. Some residents may serve as story-keepers, passing on tales of anchor

families and businesses, beloved cultural spaces, and neighborhood turning points (such as

the encroachment of a freeway or building of a new community center). Other residents

gather to share insider knowledge about where they live: the best routes to travel at different

times of the day, the names of the children on the block, and who in the neighborhood can

help with car repair. These examples of knowledge production result from social and spatial

interaction over time (Mills, 1988). Yet, gentrification alters neighborhood interactions.

As neighborhoods become occupied by people of different racial and economic

backgrounds and life experiences, there is an increase in what social epistemologist Jose

Medina (2013) terms epistemic friction. Such friction can be beneficial. When people of

different backgrounds interact across difference, neighbors may be prompted to critically

42
This is not to say that neighbors are homogenous in what they know, the civic positions they take, or futures
they imagine – but simply that neighborhoods are places where people engage epistemically.

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reflect on their assumptions and develop greater insight. However, Medina cautions that

friction can also be detrimental and result in “censoring, silencing, or inhibiting the

formation of beliefs” (2013, p.50). In gentrifying neighborhoods, detrimental friction can

manifest in the dismissal of longer-time residents as knowers. Public portrayals of lower

income people and people of color as "the other" of society simultaneously perpetuates

harmful stigma (Fraser, Burns, Bazuin, & Oakley, 2013) and creates conditions in which

long-time residents are dismissed as having expertise about their own lived experiences

(Thurber & Fraser, 2016).

This dismissal was reported by Neighborhood Story Project members, and has also

emerged as a theme in other case studies of gentrifying neighborhoods. In Cahill’s

participatory study of a gentrifying New York City neighborhood, one researcher reflected

on how young women, such as herself, are ignored by society: “They’re just not considered.

There’s no space made. They’re not considered for anything at all…They’re just there”

(2007, p. 215). Similarly, in her study of a gentrifying neighborhood in Portland, Oregon,

Drew offers the account of one black resident, who shares:

This neighborhood used to be ours, the one place I could go to escape the problems

of being Black every day. And now when I come home, I am ignored by White

adults and harassed by White kids, and I am made to feel like an outsider on my own

block (2012, p. 110).

Not thought of, ignored, treated as outsiders: in gentrifying neighborhoods, this results in a

blanket silencing of a large portion of residents, and concurrently, a loss of contemporary

and historic knowledge.

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 It is worth noting that newer residents of gentrifying neighborhoods may not be

consciously aware that they devalue the knowledge of their long-time neighbors. In fact,

given that most people have been socialized into color-blind ideologies and thus trained not

to see oppression, it is more likely that they do not recognize themselves as biased (Bonilla-

Silva, 2014). Nonetheless, studies are conclusive that most Americans—and a vast majority

of whites—carry and act on implicit biases against people of color and other marginalized

groups (Sue, 2010). In the context of knowledge claims, these biases result in newer

residents discounting or dismissing the contributions of their longer-term neighbours.

Marginalized from participation in civic life. When some residents are dismissed as

legitimate knowers, it follows that these same residents may be marginalized in, or excluded

from, participation in civic life. Within the context of the Neighborhood Story Project, this

marginalization was evidenced in the transformation of the Cleveland Park Neighborhood

Association. During 2015, the association’s membership went from nearly 75% black to less

than 20% black, and ultimately the group fissured into two: one association focussed on the

needs of the neighborhood’s low-income, elderly, and predominantly black residents, and

the other represented a newer, younger and whiter neighbourhood demographic (Gupta,

2017). A number of studies have documented the limited opportunity for poor people and

people of color to be involved in shaping development within their neighborhoods,

particularly in the context of public housing redevelopments (Bennett, 2000; Chaskin, Khare

& Joseph, 2012; Duke, 2009; Fraser, 2004). When residents are able to participate, their

engagement is often limited to giving input rather than having any actual decision-making

authority. The more socially marginalized and economically vulnerable the residents—such

as tenants of public housing—the more likely they will have to fight to have any role in the

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public process (Thurber and Fraser, 2016). Even in settings that have the appearance of

being democratically open (such as a neighborhood association), the perspectives of poor

residents and residents of color may be so consistently ignored as to render that participation

meaningless. Urban studies scholar Derek Hyra finds that this political displacement is not

without consequence, cautioning that “the loss of political power among longstanding

residents can lead to increased mistrust and civic withdrawal by low-income people, further

exacerbating pre-existing social inequalities and isolation” (2013, p,125). In other words,

marginalizing long-time residents from civic life threatens the efficacy of American

democracy.

Constrained spatial imaginaries. As community psychologist Paul Dokecki writes,

“…communities derive meaning from the narratives that community members tell

themselves and others about their community’s history, traditions, current functioning, and

future goals and aspirations” (2001, p.510). These narratives can also be understood as

spatial imaginaries, which American Studies scolar George Lipsitz describes as a

“metaphorical construction that reveals actual social relations” (2007, p. 13). These

meanings are particularly important in Black and other communities of color where survival

has depended on residents’ abilities to first imagine—and then build—places in which

individuals, families, and communities might thrive (Collins, 1990; Lipsitz, 2011). Such has

been the case in the Cleveland Park and Edgehill neighborhoods, as well as parts of the

Stratford school zone, where collective memories of resilience and continued practices of

imagining alternatives have been central to the advancement and uplift of black

communities over generations.

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 Yet, gentrification constrains long-time residents’ ability to both honor the memory

of, or imagine and act towards alternatives in, their neighborhoods. As noted by

Neighborhood Story Project team members who bristled at the neighbourhood “re-branding

process,” gentrification is frequently accompanied by political and social elites re-narrating

historical meanings of the neighborhood (Chidester & Gadsby, 2016). From members’

perspective, this rebranding relied on a false narrative of the past, a post facto territorial

stigmatization (Wacquant, 2008) of their neighborhoods in order to naturalize

redevelopment as beneficial. Other forms of symbolic erasures in gentrifying neighborhoods

might manifest as the changing of place-names (Hodkinson & Esson, 2015), or—as

described previously—the absence of black people from a promotional video marketing a

housing development in a historically black neighborhood (Trageser, 2015).

Mapping Affective Harms

In addition to having material and epistemic dimensions, neighborhoods are

affectively charged. Residents attach range of emotions to their neighborhood, including

feelings of belonging and connection to people and to the place itself, both of which are

central to individual and collective well-being (Manzo & Perkins, 2006). Clearly, many

people access social connections outside of their immediate neighborhoods. However, the

less financial resources, transportation, or technology access one has, the more important

proximal relations are to well-being. The significance of these relationships was introduced

in Chapter 1, as it formed the theoretical basis for the design of the Neighborhood Story

Project. Gentrification can damage social ties and place attachments.

Diminished social bonds and sense of belonging. Echoing the strong ties reported

by members of the Neighborhood Story Project, a number of case studies of low-income

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communities find that residents often have strong interpersonal networks within their

neighborhoods (Darcy, 2013; Hodkinson, 2015). Yet, as low-income residents are priced out

of neighborhoods, gentrification disrupts these relationships, increasing social isolation, and

limiting the possibilities of collective action (Clampet-Lundquist, 2010; Marcuse, 1985).

While in theory, new social ties could be established between older and newer residents, in

practice they rarely do.

The concerns expressed by Neighborhood Story Project members over diminished

social ties are supported by a significant body of research on social interactions within

mixed-income developments. A review of this research found that proximity alone does not

foster interaction across group lines (Thurber, Boehmann & Heflinger, 2017). Further,

intergroup relationships are hampered by the biases of higher income residents and/or

property managers toward low-income neighbors (Fraser, Burns, Bazuin & Oakley, 2013).

In a survey of 31 mixed-housing developments across the U.S. and Canada, 61% of property

managers (or respondents with comparable knowledge of the development) expressed high

agreement with the statement “Effectively managing the social relations is an important

issue for the long-term future of this development,” with only 6% strongly agreeing that

“social relations at this development will take care of themselves” (National Initiative on

Mixed-Income Communities, 2013). Although prejudices may be multi-directional (older

residents may carry assumptions about newer residents, for example), newer, wealthier, and

whiter residents often wield greater power to translate their beliefs into behaviors that can

harm their neighbors.

As described previously, these behaviors might manifest institutionally in the

marginalization of poor neighbors from participation in the civic life of the neighborhood.

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On the level on individual interactions, biases may manifest as micro-aggressions—such as

receiving suspicious looks from white residents while walking in the neighborhood (as

described by Neighborhood Story Project members). As another example, a recent analysis

of one gentrifying neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee found a significant uptick in

residents reporting their neighbors to the city for codes violations, such as having high grass,

or cars parked on lawns (Gupta, 2015). More concerning are calls to the police in

gentrifying neighborhoods (Cahill, 2007; Smith, 2002), which, as previously discussed, can

put residents of color at greater bodily risk. Yet, in addition to the material consequences,

these ostensibly singular acts—suspicious looks, reporting code violations, calls to the

police—compound to create hostile climates for long-time residents, and can have

measurable physical and mental health effects on people of color (Sue, 2010).

Lost sense of place. When Ms. Mary of the Edgehill Story Project painfully

described feeling like her neighborhood was becoming “an empty shell,” she was speaking

of a lost sense of place. Psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove, who studies the relationship between

the environment and mental health, poignantly describes the individual and collective

trauma black communities experienced as a result of the Urban Renewal projects that

decimated their neighborhoods in the 1950s, writing:

…buildings, neighborhoods, cities, nations—are not simply bricks and mortar that

provide us shelter. Because we dance in a ballroom, have a parade in the street, make

love in a bedroom, prepare a feast in the kitchen, each of these places becomes

imbued with sounds, smells, noises, and feelings of those moments and how we lived

them (2004, p. 10)

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Fullilove finds that black communities targeted by Urban Renewal experienced root shock, a

“traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem”

(2004, p.11). Her research suggests this trauma is experienced inter-generationally, and

whether or not black residents of gentrifying urban communities lived through Urban

Renewal, they may remain affected by the shock of earlier displacements.

In this context, outrage over gentrification as a perceived threat to the well-being of

communities of color can be understood as historically accurate and psychologically

predictable: a trauma-response to the prospect of another uprooting. Though Fullilove

focussed her study on historically black neighborhoods, case studies in other settings echo

the conclusion that history and context powerfully shape residents’ experiences of

gentrification. For example, Blomley (2015) finds that indigenous activists in Vancouver,

B.C. draw on the legacies of colonization and land theft in protesting gentrification.

Similarly, and in a study of Huntington Park, Chicago, a historically Puerto Rican

neighborhood, Nam concludes that:

gentrification was regarded as a serious attempt to demolish their ethnic identity and

presence in U.S. mainstream society...preserving Huntington Park was about more

than simply occupying a physical space. It strongly symbolized resistance to U.S.

colonialism and actualization of Puerto Rican independence in the community

(2012, p. 69).

As these examples illustrate, places are affectively charged, and gentrification can harm

long-time resident’s place attachments, even when they remain in place as the neighborhood

around them changes (Drew, 2012; Hodkinson & Essin, 2015; Marcuse, 1985; Shaw 2015;

Stabrowski, 2014).

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 Clearly not all long-time residents have strong ties to their neighbors and/or their

neighborhood, nor are those ties always positive (see Martin, 2005). Cahill (2007), for

example, finds that young women of color in a gentrifying New York City neighborhood

were attached, though not sentimental, toward the often-challenging conditions of their

childhood. Yet place attachments need not be positive to be powerful, and it is critical to not

underestimate the affective impacts of neighborhood change for those whose roots are laid

in place.

The Hands, Head, and Heart of Neighborhoods

In bringing the material, epistemic, and affective dimensions of neighborhoods back

together (See Figure 17), several points are worth underscoring. First, these three

dimensions are mutually constituted: what we materially experience, know, and feel are

bound together, held, like the hands, heads, and hearts, in one body.43 The material

experience of having (or not having) a secure place to live cannot be disconnected from

what we know about that place, and how we feel about ourselves, our neighbors and our

neighborhood.

Second, gentrification can cause harms in any of these dimensions, in combination

or in isolation. Residential displacement is clearly one of gentrification’s most serious

harms, yet it is not the only harm. Residents may mourn the loss of housing as well as a loss

of relationships and sense of community. Further, residents do not have to be physically

43
Note, though this metaphor has been used by a number of scholars, I first encountered it in a reference to a text
written by Anthony Kelly and Sandra Sewell (1988), titled “With head, heart and hand: Dimensions of Community
Building,” now out of print.

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displaced to be epistemically or affectively harmed, to lose their place as knowledgeable and

known, or to lose their relationships to neighbors and their sense of place.

Figure 18. Mapping possible consequences of gentrification

Third, residents are differentially impacted by, and they differentially rely upon, their

neighborhoods. As such, not all long-term residents of gentrifying neighborhoods will

experience all of these harms explored above, or only these harms, or experience these harms

in the same way. Thus, I am not contending a set of universal effects of gentrification, but

rather suggesting that when we do not reduce gentrification’s effects to a loss of housing, we

open up the conceptual space to inquire more broadly into how residents might be

experiencing gentrification.

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 Finally, in highlighting the material, epistemic, and affective dimensions of

neighborhoods, I am not suggesting these are the only dimensions.44 My broader contention

is that we apply a “more than material” framework to understand and intervene in

neighborhoods, particularly those experiencing or vulnerable to gentrification.

While I traced some of the practice and policy implications of taking a more than material

perspective in the preceding chapter, suffice it to say that broadening the sphere of inquiry

opens new possibilities for how we might respond to gentrification’s effects.

Given the affordable housing crisis gripping much of the country, some might find it

unwise to broaden theorizing of gentrification’s harms beyond the scope of housing needs.

There may be concern that doing so distracts attention away from meeting the basic needs

of shelter for the most vulnerable among us while offering an ‘easy out’ by suggesting what

some might cast as superficial feel-good alternatives to building affordable housing, such as

interventions directed at strengthening relationships. In response, I would reinforce that the

more than material framework proposed here is additive in nature. I am suggesting that we

widen the lens of what is seen in gentrifying neighborhoods—to take seriously the concerns

of residents like Ms. Betty, Ms. Andrea, and Jaime—in addition to, not in the place of, the

need for housing. Furthermore, the affective and epistemic work required in gentrifying

neighborhoods may be less financially costly than building housing, but it would be naïve to

consider the work easy. Intergroup biases and deeply embedded relationships of inequality

are among the most pernicious problems of our time. Challenging the legacies of systemic

racism and classism which continue to shape the material, epistemic and affective terrain of

44
For example, I considered including a social dimension, and concluded that the material, epistemic and affective
dimensions of neighborhoods are enacted through social practices—the social is not distinct from, but rather an
expression of, the other dimensions. One might also consider adding the political, which closely relates to how I
construct the epistemic dimension, and/or the cultural, which relates to how I construct the affective dimension.

207
gentrifying neighborhoods will take investment and innovation. Finally, just because we

have not yet met the need for shelter does not mean we should refrain from advocating for

something more than housing. Geographer David Pinder encourages us to continue

imagining “a better way of being and living” while also using these utopian visions as

“social and political criticism, questioning aspects of the present, bearing witness to and

pressing home the sense that something is missing from conditions and should be the basis

for struggles” (2002, p. 237). Thus, I am intentionally aspirational when suggesting that we

attend to more than material dimensions of well-being, while recognizing that, in Nashville

alone, 118 homeless people died in 2017 (Marshall, 2017), and a loss of affordable housing

displaced countless others. The need for housing is urgent, and for far too many, does not

come soon enough.

A holistic understanding of gentrification does not subjugate the need for housing,

but it does require that we more fully consider the humanity of those inhabiting gentrifying

neighborhoods. Critical race theorist Christopher Lebron considers this a matter of justice,

arguing for a “mode of ethical inquiry…that is motivated by the moral urgency of experienced

injustice” (emphasis added, 2008, p. 127). Indeed, the injustice of gentrification is not

simply a matter of an unfair distribution of material goods (Young 1990). Gentrification is

experienced—materially, affectively, and epistemically—by human beings. When we

understand that the experience of injustice may be in part, though never exclusively,

‘material’, we are compelled, in Lebron’s words:

to be attentive to the moral salience of persons’ shared capacity for pain, love,

longing for respect, for experiencing destabilizing disappointment, and a wide range

of other fundamentally human responses to the world (2014, p. 127).

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Although Lebron’s work is driven by a particular concern for an ethical framework that

addresses the fullness racial inequality, his call for a more deeply humanistic ethics has

resonance within a love-driven politics that is woven across history, faith traditions, social

movements, and throughout many caring professions (Dokecki, 1992; Freire, 1998; Palmer,

2007). Love-driven politics seek justice by increasing our collective capacity to recognize

and respond to one another’s humanity. As sociologist Mordechai Rimor explains:

because we do not act lovingly toward one another, we use laws and constitutions as

obligatory road signs, which guide our behavior towards our fellow persons. We

endlessly pile laws upon laws in order to catch the ever-flowing varieties of our

behaviors in a positive fashion...They direct us to behave toward our neighbors ‘as if’

we love them. However, intimate friendship makes justice redundant, and generosity

makes justice unnecessary. If we were to love our fellow persons, no laws, judging,

police, jails, or armies would be necessary. Justice would necessarily prevail (2003, p.

170).

Put simply, we protect, nurture, and invest in what we value deeply. Recognizing that just

social arrangements naturally follow from care, a love-driven politics takes seriously the

challenge to create opportunities for people to come to know and care for one another and

the places they live.

Although a love-driven politics has not fully found its way into the gentrification

literature, traces have appeared within urban planning. In 2012, the Journal of Planning

Theory and Practice carried a provocative collection of essays under the title, ‘What’s love

got to do with it?’ within which urban scholars Zitcer and Lake asked, “what might it mean

for a planner to love the people and communities that are the subject of planning?” (2012,

209
p.606). At the very least, to love people and communities that are experiencing or

vulnerable to gentrification is to care for all aspects of their well-being, and to honor

residents’ desire to keep more than just their homes.

Integrating the Who and How of Theorizing Gentrification

Residents of gentrifying neighborhoods have a right to produce knowledge about

their lives. This is what Appaduri (2006) has called ‘a right to research’, and what Freire

termed, “a right to know more better what they already know” (1990, p.157). Engaging in

inquiry into and analysis of social problems can be empowering. A year after the

Neighborhood Story Project ended, I sent a draft of this manuscript for team members to

read, provide comment on, or review with me in person. Ms. TK opted to meet with me and

read through the text together. Before we had cracked open the binder to begin, Ms. TK

asked, “You’re gonna tell them about everything we figured out, about everything we’re

losing over here, right? About how I’m having to know my neighborhood all over again?”

Long after the project had ended, the theorizing endured, it mattered to Ms. TK, and

continued to motivate her to stay involved in her community. The process of theorizing can

be an intervention in and of itself, both individually—as reflected by Ms. TK—and

collectively, as it was leveraged by the Edgehill Story Project to mobilize communities, by

the Cleveland Park Story Project to foster relationships of care for people and places, and by

the Stratford Story Project to transform narratives of place.

I am not (yet) suggesting that every research question must be answered

collaboratively, or that all theorizing must be a joint venture. However, it seems to me that

if the question is related to how gentrification is experienced and the possibilities for

mitigating/resisting/thwarting gentrification in neighborhoods, to proceed in the absence of

210
meaningful collaboration with those directly affected is unethical. This is not to say that

academic researchers do not have important tools to bring to bear. We invariably do,

including: training in methods of inquiry that can assist communities in investigating social

problems, content expertise that may help residents make connections between local

experiences and broader patterns and trends, and institutional resources to invest in

community change efforts. Nonetheless, those who study gentrification’s effects are

obligated, as a matter of research validity and a matter of justice, to meaningfully engage

with the people living those effects.

Engaged scholarship took a particular form with the Neighborhood Story Project,

but it is certainly not the only form. There is a rich tradition to draw from historically and

globally, and a preponderance of new analytics and technologies emerging daily. Most

importantly, let us reimagine research as a process for residents to coproduce knowledge

about, and take action in, the places they call home. And let researchers reimagine our role

as facilitators in processes of social inquiry which help communities become curious about

social conditions, study their environment, and better their neighborhoods. Ultimately,

democratizing spaces of knowledge production will help us to better understand and more

effectively intervene in gentrifying neighborhoods.

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 EPILOGUE

As the facilitator of the Neighborhood Story Project, I was frequently struck by how

little team members needed from me to achieve their goals: they did not need a facilitator to

spark their curiosity or desire to affect change; most team members entered the project

already invested in their neighborhoods, and compelled to make a difference. Yet members

highly valued being part of a facilitated process. Broadly, the Neighborhood Story Project

facilitated engagement by offering an intervention that was accessible to residents with

varying skills and abilities, required a manageable investment of time, and was action-

oriented. The overall project curriculum facilitated goal-accomplishment by providing the

necessary scaffolding for each team to move from ideas to action, while being flexible

enough to be adapted to each group’s distinct interests. And the finer grain aspects of

facilitation—the micro activities and prompts—created a learning, caring and empowering

environment within which participants were able to educate themselves and others, build

meaningful relationships, and intervene in their neighborhoods.

Although all neighborhoods need facilitation to organize for change, not all need

outside facilitators to do so. One evening soon after the Neighborhood Story Project

wrapped up, I happened to tune my radio into The Moth—true stories told live—to hear

Aaron Naparstek recount the story of honku (https://themoth.org/stories/honku). After

months of working from his home-office on the third floor of a Brooklyn apartment, Aaron

lost his cool over the incessant honking from the intersection below. Realizing the need to

find a productive outlet for his increasing distress, he made a decision. Whenever he found

himself agitated by the honking, “I decide to sort of sit down, take a deep breath, and

observe the honking on Clinton Street. And then I take those observations, and I start

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boiling them down into three-line, twelve-syllable, 5-7-5 haiku poems. And I call them

honku.” He found the process therapeutic, and then began to share his honku, sneaking out

one night each week to tape copies of honku to lampposts up and down Clinton Street. A

month into what he calls his “honking therapy regimen,” he was greeted late one night by a

neighbor who excitedly referred to him as “the bard of Clinton Street.” She shared that her

family—also exasperated by the honking—loved his work, and that her daughters had

started writing honku. Indeed, seeing other honku taped to lampposts, Aaron realized there

were others in his neighborhood with shared concerns.

Aaron decided to add a website to the bottom of his next honku—www.honku.org—

on which he created a message board called ‘the lamppost.’ Within days, dozens of

neighbors had posted—sharing concerns, trading honku, suggesting solutions—and Aaron

invited them to an in-person meeting. One Saturday, a dozen neighbors who had never met

before gathered on his stoop. Realizing the city had a ‘no honking’ ordinance, they decided

to take action. Aaron made up letterhead for ‘the honku organization,’ and they sent letters

to their city council leaders and attended community meetings. Eventually Aaron’s city

council representative took the group’s case to the local precinct, and the police agreed to a

three-week blitz enforcement of the no-honking ordinance. Officers took to the streets,

talking to people in cars, and alerting them of the neighborhood concerns about honking.

Aaron acknowledges, tongue in cheek, “the honku organization—I’ll just be honest

with you—we did not accomplish our ultimate mission of ending horn-honking in New

York City. Like, that battle is still there to be fought for someone else.” But, they did stay

involved—with each other and with their neighborhood—and went on to make tangible

improvements for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users. As he concludes:

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 the real success though, of honku…was just that, when I was walking down Clinton

Street, and when my neighbors were walking down Clinton Street, instead of sort of

being in our little bubbles of honk-anger, we started talking to each other, we were

really trying to fix something. Clinton Street wasn’t just a street anymore; it was a

neighborhood.

Though the concerns on Clinton Street are a bit afield from those of the Neighborhood

Story Project, aspects of the intervention are the same—bringing people together to give and

receive support, build a collective understanding of their problems, and organize for

solutions. And, Aaron’s story serves as a reminder that neighborhoods are full of people

with creativity and frustrations and skills to contribute. Clinton Street did not need a social

worker, community psychologist, community organizer, or neighborhood association to

facilitate their work together—they had the Bard of Clinton Street. But there are

neighborhoods where outside facilitators can be helpful—neighborhoods that are also full of

people with creativity and frustrations and skills, though perhaps not the skill of facilitation.

And these are important places for those of us working in communities to engage,

particularly when issues of equity and well-being are at stake.

There is no doubt that neighborhoods are often the landscape within which racial

and economic disparities take root. Gentrification exacerbates these injustices,

disproportionately making poor people and people of color vulnerable to a wide range of

losses that threaten well-being. Yet, these neighborhoods can also be viewed as sites of

resistance and positive transformation. When community practitioners explicitly engage the

more than material—through a Neighborhood Story Project, honku, and more—we open

up possibilities for responding to place-based injustice, including those related to

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gentrification. As I learned from Larry, with whom I began my journey through the

Neighborhood Story Project, “every neighborhood has a soul, and we’re all part of that

soul, part of keeping it alive. If I know you, and I care about you, then I can’t let something

bad happen to you and not respond.” Ultimately, it is up to all of us to expand the ways that

community members might come to know, care for, and fight on behalf of one another, and

the places we call home.

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Appendix A. National policy reports on gentrification: Identified harms and recommended

strategies

The The Urban Mallach Urban Land Neighbor-

Brookings Institute (2008). Institute Works
Institution (2006). National (2007). America
(2001). Housing (2005).
Institute.
Identified Harms of Gentrification
Resident
displacement
Loss of future
affordable
housing
Cost burden
current
residents
Loss of local
businesses
Decreased civic
participation
Conflicts over
history, values
and meaning
Social conflicts
Primary Strategies Recommended
Affordable
housing
production
Affordable
housing
retention
Asset-building
Inclusive
planning
Community
organizing
Conflict
resolution
Community
building

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 Appendix B. Neighborhood Story Project: Curriculum summary

Week 1: Introduction to project, group and neighborhood

• Introduction to project
• Participatory mapping of neighborhood boundaries (group brainstorm and
charting)
• Asset mapping of members (personal reflection and group brainstorm)
Week 2: Mapping the neighborhood

• Creation of neighborhood timeline (group brainstorm and charting)

• Reflections on personal experience of neighborhood (personal reflection handout)
• Analysis of dominant narratives of neighborhood (pairs news article analysis)
Week 3: Developing research agenda

• Generating questions about neighborhood (individual reflection, pairs, group

brainstorm)
• Developing research identities (group discussion)
• Selecting guiding questions (group decision-making)
Week 4: Building research plan and skills

• Developing research plan (small group work)

• Peer interviews (pairs)
Week 5-8: Concurrent data collection, analysis, and imagining action

• Data Collection: walking tours, visit to archives, interviews, photovoice, etc.

(Individual and group work)
• Data analysis (pair and group work)
• Brainstorm actions and disseminations (group brainstorming)
Week 9: Action decision-making

• Select final actions and disseminations (group decision-making)

Weeks 10-12: Action planning and implementation

• Create needed materials

• Identify additional resources and expertise
• Promotion and outreach
Public, culminating community event

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 Appendix C. Focus group guide

1. It seems important for us to come back together to celebrate and reflect on our work
together, and to take note of key learnings from the process. Let’s start with talking
about what worked best. What were the successes from our action?
a. Were there any surprises?
b. What would you have liked more or less of?
c. If we were going to do something similar in the future, what would you
recommend doing differently?
2. Thinking back on the project overall, what-if anything- do you think you gained?
3. What was most rewarding about the process?
4. What was most challenging?
5. What would have strengthened the project overall?
6. Coming out of this work together, are there ways you want to keep any of this
learning, relationships, or action moving forward? If so, what might that look like?
7. Is there anything else you all think we should reflect on together?

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 Appendix D. Interview guide

1. Why did you choose to participate in the Story Project?

2. What did you expect or hope to gain from participating?
3. Was there anything you hoped to be able to give or share through your participation?
4. Did you have any concerns about participating?
5. Did you know other participants before the project started?
a. What were your relationships like before the project started?
6. Thinking back on the project, are there specific moments that jump out as significant
to you personally – in terms of your own experience or the work of the group?
7. What was most rewarding about the project for you personally?
8. What was most challenging?
9. When you think back on the group of neighbors that participated, do you think that
being part of the project effected people’s sense of their neighbors and/or
neighborhood?
a. If so, how? If not, why might that have been?
10. What about for you personally - do you think participating changed the way you
think or feel about your neighborhood?
a. If so, how? If not, why might that have been?
11. When you were part of the Story Project, what did you hope the broader
neighborhood would gain from your work?
12. What is your sense of the actual effects - intended and unintended?
13. Have you had any contact lately with other members of the project?
a. What are your relationships like these days?
14. Do you think that being part of the project effected the way people’s behaviors – the
way they interact with one another, participate in neighborhood activities, or other
kinds of behaviors?
15. Has the work you all started led to any other kinds of activity or plans in the
neighborhood?
16. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

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 Appendix E. Codebook

Code frequencies
1 Affective codes
1.1 limited agency/hope 2
1.2 heavy/angry 3
1.3 sad 12
1.4 enjoyment/pleasure 36
1.5 excited 117

2 Project limitations
2.1 conflicting views of place 4
2.2 length of project 2
2.3 CBO partner expectations 6
2.4 missing stories 9
2.5 limited ongoing contact- members 6
2.6 limited ongoing contact -neighbors 1
2.7 limited reach of project 9

3 What members brought

3.1 limitations
3.1.1 follow through 1
3.1.2 learning new terms and concepts 1
3.1.3 getting there 1
3.1.4 technology access 3
3.1.5 difficulty reading 6
3.1.6 dominance 7
3.1.7 limited time 15
3.1.8 limited past involvement 2
3.1.9 reticence 2
3.1.10 anxiety working with adults 2
3.2 strengths
3.2.1 historian 1
3.2.2 desire to take action 5
3.2.3 experience with other organizing 9
3.2.4 responsibility 28
3.2.5 Place attachment 58
3.2.6 Place history 37
3.2.7 desire to learn 12
3.2.8 social ties 22
3.3 concerns
3.3.1 Epistemic
3.3.1.1 misrepresentation 22
3.3.1.2 lost place knowledge/history 13
3.3.2 Affective
3.3.2.1 lack of community cohesion 32

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 3.3.2.2 lack of place attachment 8
3.3.2.3 humanity/interdependence 13
3.3.2.4 disrespect from new residents 5
3.3.3 material
3.3.3.1 exclusion 5
3.3.3.2 privilege certain social class 4
3.3.3.3 homelessness 5
3.3.3.4 need for opportunity 1
3.3.3.5 changes to built environment 15
3.3.3.5.1 gathering places 3
3.3.3.6 loss of housing 28
3.3.3.7 profit driven development 15
3.3.3.8 corporate landlords 2
3.3.4 youth well-being 12
3.3.4.1 school quality 6
3.3.5 participation 10
3.3.6 inheritance/legacy 5
3.3.7 racial struggle 11
3.3.8 safety 12
3.3.9 elders' well-being 16

4 project design and facilitation

4.1 activities
4.1.1 appreciations 19
4.1.2 listening 24
4.1.3 final product creation 3
4.1.4 mapping neighborhood 1
4.1.5 small group work 2
4.1.6 mapping concerns 2
4.1.7 new and goods 5
4.1.8 member asset mapping 10
4.1.9 contrasting narratives 4
4.1.10 timeline 6
4.2 design and facilitation strengths
4.2.1 provide structure 9
4.2.2 foster relationships 7
4.2.3 member self-check 2
4.2.4 tapping existing knowledge 9
4.2.5 considering other perspectives 2
4.2.6 critical reflection 32
4.2.6.1 equity lens 15
4.2.7 encouraging participation 5
4.2.8 synthesis 2
4.2.9 facilitator transparency 1
4.2.10 member encouragement 5
4.2.11 Different from other groups/mtgs 13

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 4.2.12 snacks 1
4.2.13 bringing in expert 2
4.2.14 financial incentive 5
4.2.15 diverse participants 2
4.2.16 press coverage 1
4.2.17 closure/termination 1
4.2.18 building shared analysis 26
4.2.19 preparing materials/systems 28
4.2.20 encouraging leadership 26
4.2.21 building research skills 19
4.2.22 co-researcher 5
4.3 design and facilitation challenge
4.3.1 facilitator bias 3
4.3.2 healthy skepticism of project 6
4.3.3 time constraints 7
4.3.4 managing conflict 2
4.3.5 too ambitious/unclear facilitation 12
4.3.6 balance leading and seeding 15
4.3.6.1 Facilitator dominance 6
4.3.7 independent v. collaborative 6
4.3.8 inconsistent membership 9
4.3.9 dominant behaviors 6
4.4 turning point 5

5 member outcomes
5.1 racial equity lens 3
5.2 improved mental health/wellbeing 6
5.3 sense of responsibility to community 6
5.4 hope 9
5.5 learning 149
5.5.1 group facilitation skills 7
5.5.2 place learning/knowledge 75
5.5.2.1 past/present 17
5.5.2.2 reframe 4
5.5.3 learning about spatial processes 33
5.5.4 learning process for research & action 44
5.6 belief project will spark change 43
5.7 increased stress/crisis 14
5.8 increased self-efficacy 88
5.8.1 mastery 9
5.8.2 pride 38
5.9 Project-based collective action 143
5.10 commitment long-term collective action 37
5.11 engaged elders 7
5.12 capacity for individual action 34
5.12.1 desire to continue research 6

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 5.13 desire for more community building 8
5.14 Social cohesion 158
5.15 fostered place attachment 36
6 community outcomes
6.1 tool for education 5
6.2 awareness of resources 1
6.3 empowered others 3
6.4 strengthened community collaboration 2
6.5 social responsibility 4
6.6 change narrative 2
6.7 tool for organizing 12
6.8 fostered place education/attachment 20
6.9 Community cohesion 15

Code descriptions
1 Affective codes
codes when feeling words used to describe group experience

1.1 limited agency/hope

limited agency of residents to affect change in face of development

1.2 heavy/angry
heavy

1.3 sad
sad

1.4 enjoyment/pleasure
members express nonspecific enjoyment in participation

1.5 excited
excited

2 Project limitations
Intervention limitations

2.1 conflicting views of place

conflicting views of place

2.2 length of project

project too short

2.3 CBO partner expectations

Tension between project goals and CBO partner expectations

2.4 missing stories

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 Story Project not exhaustive or complete.

2.5 limited ongoing contact- members

Story Project members do not sustain relationships after project

2.6 limited ongoing contact -neighbors

Story Project members do not have increased contact with neighbors after project

2.7 limited reach of project

Story Project may not reach people beyond members

3 What members brought

Strengths, concerns, resources, limitations members brought to project

3.1 limitations
Member identified limitations/challenges in participating

3.1.1 follow through

follow through

3.1.2 learning new terms and concepts

learning new terms and concepts

3.1.3 getting there

challenge getting to mtg

3.1.4 technology access

no computer access, limited skills

3.1.5 difficulty reading

difficulty reading

3.1.6 dominance
patterns of internalized dominance

3.1.7 limited time

Limited time to participate/contribute

3.1.8 limited past involvement

Limited past involvement in community

3.1.9 reticence
Member reticence to get involved

3.1.10 anxiety working with adults

youth anxiety working with adults

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3.2 strengths
Member strengths

3.2.1 historian
historian

3.2.2 desire to take action

orientation towards action

3.2.3 experience with other organizing

experience with other community organizing, neighborhood leadership

3.2.4 responsibility
sense of responsibility to community/desire to help community

3.2.5 Place attachment

member attachment to place

3.2.6 Place history

Member knowledge of place history

3.2.7 desire to learn

member desire to learn

3.2.8 social ties

member existing social ties

3.3 concerns
member expressed concerns about community

3.3.1 Epistemic
concerns related to what is known about neighbors/neighborhood, civic
knowledge (and action)

3.3.1.1 misrepresentation
concern about stigma/representation of community

3.3.1.2 lost place knowledge/history

Concern with loss of place knowledge

3.3.2 Affective
Concerns related to feelings about people, place

3.3.2.1 lack of community cohesion

concern with weak social ties within community

244
 3.3.2.2 lack of place attachment
Lack/lost sense of community and responsibility to place

3.3.2.3 humanity/interdependence
concern that losing sense of responsibility and care to collective, sense
of humanity

3.3.2.4 disrespect from new residents

newcomers don’t share place history, values

3.3.3 material
changes related to housing and the built environment

3.3.3.1 exclusion
being left out of development, neighborhood, community

3.3.3.2 privilege certain social class

building for certain group

3.3.3.3 homelessness
homelessness

3.3.3.4 need for opportunity

opportunity for work, personal advancement in neighborhood

3.3.3.5 changes to built environment

concerns about the built environment

3.3.3.5.1 gathering places

concern about maintaining community spaces

3.3.3.6 loss of housing

concern of people being displaced-by loss of affordable housing, in past
by urban renewal,

3.3.3.7 profit driven development

working with developers, process of development

3.3.3.8 corporate landlords

corporate landlords

3.3.4 youth wellbeing

Well being of youth in community

3.3.4.1 school quality

245
 desire to see school quality improve

3.3.5 participation
desire to see increased community member participation

3.3.6 inheritance/legacy
concern with preserving the legacy of a place, idea of inheritance to
pass on

3.3.7 racial struggle

concern about racial inequities, biases, and divides

3.3.8 safety
concern regarding safety of neighborhood

3.3.9 elders' well being

concern for impact of changing neighborhood on elders

4 project design and facilitation

strengths, challenges, and lessons learned re: facilitation of the project

4.1 activities
key activities

4.1.1 appreciations
appreciation activities

4.1.2 listening
listening activities

4.1.3 final product creation

final product creation

4.1.4 mapping neighborhood

mapping neighborhood

4.1.5 small group work

small group work

4.1.6 mapping concerns

mapping concerns

4.1.7 new and goods

news and goods

4.1.8 member asset mapping

246
 mapping skills, talents, resources members bring

4.1.9 contrasting narratives

contrasting narratives activity

4.1.10 timeline
timeline activity

4.2 design and facilitation strengths

strengths in facilitation

4.2.1 provide structure

provide structure

4.2.2 foster relationships

practices to build relationships

4.2.3 member self-check

member self-check on participation to create space for others

4.2.4 tapping existing knowledge

mapping/tapping existing knowledge

4.2.5 considering other perspectives

considering other perspectives, reevaluating assumptions

4.2.6 critical reflection

fostering critical reflection re: self, neighbors, neighborhood; making
connections between personal experience and patterns/trends

4.2.6.1 equity lens

bringing racial equity lens into dialogue

4.2.7 encouraging participation

encouraging member participation

4.2.8 synthesis
bringing threads of ideas together, restating participants' comments

4.2.9 facilitator transparency

sharing own commitments, values, struggles

4.2.10 member encouragement

member encouragement of facilitation

4.2.11 Different from other groups/meetings

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 difference of NSP

4.2.12 snacks
snacks

4.2.13 bringing in expert

bringing in expert

4.2.14 financial incentive

financial incentive

4.2.15 diverse participants

diverse participants

4.2.16 press coverage

press coverage

4.2.17 closure/termination
preparing for group to end

4.2.18 building shared analysis

co-educational process of building a shared analysis , popular education

4.2.19 preparing materials/systems

facilitator outside work preparing materials and/or systems for group

4.2.20 encouraging leadership

practices that encourage member leadership within group

4.2.21 building research skills

activities to develop research skills and comfort

4.2.22 co-researcher
impact of co-researcher on project

4.3 design and facilitation challenge

facilitation challenges

4.3.1 facilitator bias

bias toward group members

4.3.2 healthy skepticism of project

healthy skepticism of project

4.3.3 time constraints

not enough time for research

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 4.3.4 managing conflict
managing conflict among members

4.3.5 too ambitious/unclear facilitation

planning too much material

4.3.6 balance leading and seeding

balancing taking leadership/making decisions/creating materials, and
facilitation discussion, decision making and creation by members

4.3.6.1 Facilitator dominance

Facilitator privilege, internalized dominance, bias

4.3.7 independent v. collaborative

managing members pull towards working independently

4.3.8 inconsistent membership/engagement

keeping missing members engaged

4.3.9 dominant behaviors

responding (or not) to silencing, marginalization, etc. within group

4.4 turning point

turning point in work of group

5 member outcomes
outcomes for Story Project participants

5.1 racial equity lens

racial equity lens

5.2 improved mental health/wellbeing

improved mental health/wellbeing

5.3 sense of responsibility to community

fostered greater responsibility to people in community

5.4 hope
increased hope

5.5 learning
significant member-identified learning outcomes

5.5.1 group facilitation skills

group facilitation skills

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 5.5.2 place learning/knowledge
learning about place/neighborhood

5.5.2.1 past/present
understanding present through past

5.5.2.2 reframe
reframing dominant narrative of place

5.5.3 learning about spatial processes

fostered learning about spatial processes (ie. gentrification, development,
etc.)- rather than knowledge about a specific place

5.5.4 learning process for research and action

members appreciate process to research and action

5.6 belief project will spark change

belief project will spark change

5.7 increased stress/crisis

project-induced crisis, increased stress, vulnerability, hopelessness

5.8 increased self-efficacy

Member identified personal growth/leadership development through participation

5.8.1 mastery
skill development

5.8.2 pride
member reported pride in project

5.9 Project-based collective action

member taking action outside of group time

5.10 commitment to long-term collective action

member identified increased capacity and/or desire for collective action

5.11 engaged elders

engaged elders

5.12 capacity for individual action

member identified increased capacity and/or desire for additional individual action

5.12.1 desire to continue research

member expressed desire to continue research as a mode of action

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 5.13 desire for more community building
member expressed desire for more socal cohesion

5.14 Social cohesion

intra-group relationships

5.15 fostered place attachment

fostered place attachment among members- sense of commitment and tie to place

6 community outcomes
outcomes beyond members

6.1 tool for education

tool for education

6.2 awareness of resources

awareness of resources

6.3 empowered others

empowered those interviewed

6.4 strengthened community collaboration

strengthened community collaboration

6.5 social responsibility

fostered sense of social responsibility, social action

6.6 change narrative

changing community perception of place

6.7 tool for organizing

project recognized as tool for organizing

6.8 fostered place education/attachment

project fostered place education/attachment among other community members

6.9 Community cohesion

fostered neighborhood level relationships between members and neighbors and/or
among neighbors

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Appendix F. Sources and processing of geographic and demographic data

Determining changes in housing values: To determine changes in housing values, I

analyzed GIS layers provided by the Nashville Metro Planning Department (which include
Tax Assessor data for 2002 and 2016, and neighborhood boundaries). First, I created a layer
for each Neighborhood Story Project Area using boundaries from the ‘neighborhood’
shapefile. The neighborhoods included in each project are as follows:

Cleveland Park Story Project Edgehill Story Project Stratford Story Project
Cleveland Park Edgehill CWA Apartments
McFerrin Park Edgefield Manor
Cayce
Historic Edgefield
Parkway Terrace
Maxwell Heights
East End
Shelby Hills
Lockeland Springs
Eastwood
Rolling Acres
Rosebank
Porter Heights
South Inglewood
Inglewood
Using the selection feature in ArcGIS, I then compared home values from 2002 and 2016
for each of the Neighborhood Story Project areas, as well as for the county as a whole. I
excluded properties appraised at zero and those having zero dwelling units, and determined
an average total appraisal of all remaining properties. I then calculated the percent change in
average appraisal value, unadjusted, and adjusted for inflation.
Average Total Appraisal Value 2002 2016 % Change
All Davidson County 150,510 231,397 54%
Cleveland Park 55,792 117,083 110%
Edgehill 107,399 251,936 135%
Stratford Cluster 92,201 189,615 106%
Average Total Appraisal Value 2002 2016 % Change
Adjusted for CPI
All Davidson County 213,012 231,397 9%
Cleveland Park 67,052 117,083 75%
Edgehill 141,487 251,936 78%
Stratford Cluster 122,494 189,615 55%

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Determining changes in racial demographics: I analyzed demographic data from the U.S.
Census at the level of census tracts. The Tracts included in each project are as follows:

Cleveland Park Story Edgehill Story Project Stratford Story Project

Project
Census Tract 118 Census Tract 162 Census Tract 111
Census Tract 163 Census Tract 112
Census Tract 117
Census Tract 121
Census Tract 122
Census Tract 114
Census Tract 115
Census Tract 116
Census Tract 119
Census Tract 120
Census Tract 123
Census Tract 192

Using racial demographic data drawn from the 2000 Census (NP003A, Population by Race)
and 2010 Census (P1, Race), I calculated a percent change in black and white residents for
Davidson County overall, and within each of the three areas:

All Cleveland Edgehill Stratford

Davidson Park Cluster
County
2000 Total 569,891 7,782 8,504 40,642
2000 White 381,783 241 936 24,222
2000 Black 147,696 3,672 4,588 14,301
2010total 626,681 2,673 5,488 37,447
2010 White 385,039 365 1,537 23,441
2010 Black 173,730 2,192 3,598 11,871
% Change Total 9% -191% -55% -9%
% Change White 1% 34% 39% -3%
% Change Black 15% -68% -28% -20%
N Change White 3,256 124 601 -781
N Change Black 26,034 -1,480 -990 -2,430

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Appendix G. Summary of studies included in review

Project Name Article Title Author Location Purpose of paper Project Design
(Year) Creative Public Public Community
Placemaking Pedagogy Science Organizing
1. Mission Wall Citizenship, Civic Somdahl- San To explore
Dances Memory and Urban Sands (2008) Francisco, experiences and
Performance: CA (USA) impacts of Mission
Mission Wall Wall Dances
Dances
2. Restorative Listening Through Drew (2012) Portland, OR To explore the
Listening White Ears (USA) impact of racial
Project dialogues and the
possibility for
antiracist
placemaking
3. Rebuild Theaster Gates’s (Reinhardt, Chicago, IL To describe the
Foundation Dorchester 2014) (USA) placemaking
Projects in Chicago projects of the
Rebuild Foundation
4. Toronto Free Digging into the (McLean, Toronto To explore the
Gallery creative city: A 2014b) (Canada) contradictory roles
feminist critique artists play in
gentrification
5. Manifesto Cracks in the (McLean, Toronto To explore the
Community Creative City: The 2014) (Canada) contradictory roles
Projects: Contradictions of artists play in
Streetscape Community Arts gentrification
Practice
6. Pedestrian The Exclusionary McLean & Toronto To unpack
Sunday's Politics of Creative Rahder (Canada) contradiction
Kensington Communities: The (2013) between goals and
(P.S. Case of Kensington effects of artistic and
Kensington) Market Pedestrian activist led
Sundays intervention
7. !Huntington Implications of Nam (2012) USA To explore praxis-
Park NO SE Community (Chicago) based citizenship
VENDE! Activism among
(project) Urban Minority

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 Project Name Article Title Author Location Purpose of paper Project Design
(Year) Creative Public Public Community
Placemaking Pedagogy Science Organizing
Young People for
Education for
Engaged and
Critical Citizenship
8. Over-the- Affiliated Practices Dutton & USA To describe agit-
Rhine and Aesthetic Mann (2003) (Cincinnati) prop interventions
People's Interventions:
Movement Remaking Public
Spaces in
Cincinnati and Los
Angeles
9. Residents From high-rise Darcy (2013) Australia To reveal
Voices projects to suburban (Sydney) and transnational
Project estates: public USA elements of poverty
tenants and the (Chicago) deconcentration
globalised discourse agenda, call for
of deconcentration resident-led research
10. Myatts Field Grounding Hodkinson & UK To ground Harvey’s
North accumulation by Essin (2015) (London) concept of
dispossession accumulation by
dispossession in
specific case
11. We Call Inserting Sinha & US (7 cities) Present findings of
These community Kasdan, PAR project
Projects perspective research (2013)
Home into public housing
policy discourse:
The right to the city
Alliance’s "We call
these projects
Home"
12. Cayce Disrupting the Thurber & USA To analyze material,
United- Order of Things Fraser (2016) (Nashville) political and
epistemological
work of tenant
organizing.

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 Project Name Article Title Author Location Purpose of paper Project Design
(Year) Creative Public Public Community
Placemaking Pedagogy Science Organizing
13. The Fed up Negotiating Grit Cahill (2007) USA (NYC) To fill ethnographic
Honeys and glamour void in
gentrification
literature
The personal is Cahill To explore the
political: developing (2006) development of new
new subjectivities subjectivities among
through participants
participatory action
research
"AT risk" The Fed Cahill (2006) To analyze spatial
up Honeys and social
exclusions of
women of color,
explore political
possibilities of PAR
project
14. Hamden One Neighborhood, Chidester USA To describe process,
Community Two Communities: & Gadsby (Baltimore) successes and
Archeology The Public (2016) challenges
Project Archaeology of
Class in a
Gentrifying Urban
Neighborhood

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