Anita Keith-Foust (North Carolina Central) has posted Displacing the Poor to Benefit the Wealthy – The Role of Blight Designation in the 21st Century Gentrification of Hayti. Here's the abstract:
This paper presents an exploration of how a municipality designated a physically healthy African American area legally “blighted” to receive tax credits and other financial incentives. Drawing from historical and ethnographic research, it analyzes various ploys used to gentrify Hayti, a Black community on the southern side of Durham, North Carolina. It argues that although gentrification during the 1960s displaced residents under the guise of road improvements, the current gentrification is more blatant in its intent to create more wealth for the wealthy at the expense of the disenfranchised. This strategy denies the current residents the opportunity to benefit from the financial incentives of the blight designation while seizing their property for developers. The end result is displacement of African American residents, businesses, places of worship, and another generation of property owners deprived of their property rights.
Steve Clowney