Race, power, and neighborhood change: a case study of redevelopment in Freedmen’s Town, Houston, Texas
Creators: name: Bienski, Georgina Rhae
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: Urban redevelopment in the United States is often fraught with tensions. Reinvesting in low-income, inner-city communities can improve the built environment, services, and safety in a neighborhood, but it can and has historically displaced residents. Government supported urban redevelopment in low-income African American neighborhoods in the United States has often compelled Black residents to move elsewhere. This dissertation is a case study of redevelopment in one such neighborhood—Freedmen’s Town in Houston, Texas. It focuses on three distinct, but related redevelopment efforts by private and public actors from the 1970s through the early 2000s to examine how relationships of power played out in space as city leaders and developers wanted to demolish the neighborhood in its entirety, while residents strived to stay in the neighborhood and retain its cultural and historical significance.Freedman’s Town is a neighborhood adjacent to the central business district in Houston. As the name implies, it became home to many African American migrants who moved to the city from nearby plantations following Texas’ Emancipation in 1865. It was the center of Houston’s African American cultural and professional life until the early twentieth century, but then experienced decades of disinvestment, land loss through eminent domain, and population loss. In the 1970s, the city began exploring ways to encourage private investment in the area. Private investors wanted to redevelop the neighborhood in its entirety and relocate the residents to other parts of the city. Despite efforts by residents to preserve the built environment, most of the historic buildings were lost as a direct consequence of the redevelopment efforts put forth by city officials and private developers. Community opposition and activism prevented the destruction of the entire neighborhood, however, and some historically and culturally significant structures remain due to the efforts of the residents and their allies. During this time period, many Black residents moved out of the neighborhood and many white residents moved in.This dissertation aims to increase the understanding of neighborhood change by capturing the nuances of how relationships of power played out in this historically significant Black neighborhood at the local and federal level during the time of the redevelopment periods and beyond. It explores strategies used by the community to oppose wholesale redevelopment in each effort and examines how that opposition changed the way the city and real estate investors approached redevelopment, revealing relationships of power and their continuous evolvement. It is significant to the scholarly community because state-sanctioned demolition and displacement in African American communities has been occurring since at least post World War II with the federal Urban Renewal program. Several scholars have studied those communities and other scholars are studying more recent destruction and redevelopment in low-income Black communities, especially via demolition of public housing in cities across the United States. This project will contribute to other research by studying how so many single-family homes were lost and how some of the structures survived in such an environment.