Review of Huron’s wonderful commons book

Today Washington, D.C., seems like a terrain of hyper-gentrification and widespread displacement. Yet D.C. has also been and continues to be at the forefront of grassroots experiments combating these destructive trends and creating new, democratic worlds. Amanda Huron, an assistant professor of interdisciplinary social sciences at the University of the District of Columbia, brings us into this on-going history in her new book, Carving out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C. Read the full book review published in Washington History (Fall 2019, volume 31 (1-2), pp. 100-101) here: Huron review.

Memorials to Socialism in Washington, DC

I was invited to Warsaw to give a talk on memorials to socialism in Washington, DC: "The Other Washington Consensus: Remembering Socialism in Washington, DC."


More great videos here on the conference on memories of the 1989 economic transformations.

Washington, DC, is known as the major center and exporter of neoliberal capitalism and as the center of the Washington Consensus. In 1990, economist John Williamson invented the term the “Washington Consensus” because he understood that Washington had agreed on a set of economic policies that it “urges on the rest of the world.” This set of 10 policies reflected a free-market capitalism with an export orientation. By “Washington,” Williamson meant “both the political Washington of Congress and senior members of the administration and the technocratic Washington of the international financial institutions, the economic agencies of the US government, the Federal Reserve Board, and the think tanks.” According to this view, Washington, DC, has been the force that has successfully spread free markets, free trade, and capitalism around the world. This is an Americanization story.

Many people, including myself, have questioned such Americanization stories, and we have been inspired by post-socialist studies. In this talk, I wish to apply post-socialist studies to the center of neoliberal capitalism, Washington, DC. How might Washington, DC, itself be post-socialist? Post-socialism may seem irrelevant to DC, which is after all a major center of capitalism. However, Zsuzsa Gille (2010) has argued that everyone, and especially major actors in the Cold War, have experienced “the global post-socialist condition” in some form or other. Furthermore, there are many DCs, some of which are, or were, socialist. For example, in the late 1970s, the city of Black Power forged DC into a democratic socialist space, connecting many parts of the city to the socialist and Third Worlds. After 1989, within DC, the city of the IMF and the World Bank implemented the same shock of post-socialist neoliberalism that Black Power fought against.

How might memorials help us to understand this post-socialism? Are there, in fact, memorials to socialism in DC? I am not a scholar of memorials, but rather I conduct research on Eastern European socialisms, multiple globalizations, and the history of DC. I am venturing into a new area, for myself, of memory studies. To answer these questions, I informally asked many DC residents: where are the memorials to socialism in DC? I also walked around town, searching for memorials to socialism. Today, I want to report on what I have found. I argue that these memorials to socialism in DC capture the history of battles between socialism and capitalism in DC itself, a history that is often hidden or forgotten. Thus, attention to the memorials to socialism reveals this battlefield that continues today.

The Ridiculous and Absurd in 1920s DC

It was a great treat to watch a talk by UCLA History Professor Robin Kelley, in which he explains his term "racial capitalism." Among many fascinating things, Kelley said, "The purpose of racism is to control the behavior of white people"; guns and tanks are used to control the behavior of People of Color. The benefits of whiteness -- jobs, wealth, education, etc -- are unevenly distributed. So, even for those who will benefit minimally from whiteness, they will behave in ways that restrict themselves as human beings and even in ways that greatly hurt themselves. While this seems natural or normal to white people, Kelley goes on to say, it sure doesn't seem natural or normal to People of Color. This seems ridiculous and absurd.

This reminded me of a fascinating survey I read on Tuesday at the Library of Congress. In 1929, former Howard Sociology Professor William Henry Jones finished a study titled The Housing of Negroes in Washington, DC for the Interracial Committee of the Washington Federation of Churches. Jones wondered why white people did not want to live near African Americans. So, like any sociologist would, he asked them why. 

Jones systematically asked 200 white families why they did not want to live near African Americans. He found:

The basis of many of the objections to living with Negroes lies so deeply embedded in the realms of social psychology and human nature that few of the persons who were consulted could formulate any clear and lucid statements of their attitudes and feelings regarding Negroes coming into their neighborhoods. (p. 74)

Basically, to Jones, their reasons seemed ridiculous and absurd. As African Americans moved into their neighborhood, these people would immediately sell their houses at any price, leave behind neighbors and cherished community, and shun their fellow human beings.

As a great sociologist, Jones figured out the social forces pressuring these people to act this way: 

1. "the fear of public opinion and the attitudes of the other members of white society" will affect their standing (pp. 74-75). 
2. due to cultural differences (p. 76).
3. "rather general belief among white people that Negroes are highly gregarious, with inclinations to have too many around their homes -- with a special tendency to congregate on the front porches. This tendency was generally referred to as looking "bad for the community." 
4. "power of tradition" -- "not proper for Negroes and white people to live on a basis of equality in the same communities."
5. "the genuine fear of some whites that social intimacies, encouraged by residential association, may lead ultimately to a further breakdown of racial integrity and to intermarriage." (p. 77)

So, here we have racism performing its primary role: controlling the behavior of white people. To everyone else, this situation seems ridiculous and absurd. 

And some white people chose to remain, including "Foreigners" -- like Italians and Russians -- who "seek refuge among other peoples who are also victims of the white man's prejudice" (p. 78). 

This behavior of white people had and has real consequences, often violence and traumatic consequences, on the lives of People of Color.

Opportunity hoarding on H St NE

In preparation for my urban class today, I was looking at Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis and saw this quotation that rang true to me here in DC:

Sociologist Charles Tilly describes "opportunity hoarding" as one of the major contributors to historical inequalities -- and the story of American metropolitan areas, like Detroit, is a history of the ways that whites, through the combined advantages of race and residence, were able to hoard political and economic resources -- jobs, public services, education, and other goods -- to their own advantage at the expense of the urban poor. (p. xxxvi)

This made me think of the amazing photos of H St NE by Joseph Young and his commentary about disinvestment, today's forms of white segregation (and opportunity hoarding), displacement, and anti-gentrification protests. His photo essay is worth going through slowly and reading carefully. 

Gentrification on Capitol Hill Revisited

The wonderful archivists at GWU Special Collections have posted online Anita Rechler's fascinating MA thesis: https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/5h73pw42p (Click this link, scroll to the bottom, under Actions click Select an Action and choose Download).

Below is my discussion of the thesis when I read it in Special Collections in 2011. Remember Anita Rechler is talking about changes on Capitol Hill over 44 years ago.

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In her fascinating 1974 M.A. thesis on the Capitol Hill renovation movement, Anita Rechler finds that, while DC and Ward 6 population declined from 1960 to 1970, the number of households actually increased. This shift resulted from:

• the renovation movement, which began even by the late 1940s and attracted white, young professionals often with no children.
• the movement of white families with children to the suburbs (since 1920) and to predominantly white areas elsewhere in DC, which increased after the 1954 court ruling desegregating schools. The change was quite abrupt. As I found in my own research, in 1954 when integration began, the Stanton Elementary School in Ward 8 had a 100% white student population; by 1960 it had 75% African American and 25% white students.

Using Census data and real estate transactions in the Lusk Real Estate Directory, Rechler examines the changes across the Hill between 1960 and 1970. In this map of 1970, the purple-blue are areas with many renovations (Restoration area), while the light blue are transitional areas with fewer, though numerous renovations (Transition area) and the yellow areas have few renovations (Unrestored area).


View Ward 6 Renovation Map (1970) in a larger map

She states that by 1958 over 100 houses each year were being renovated. Of course, renovating and improving buildings is a good thing. Yet, this trend had several problematic consequences. Areas became more segregated by race and class between 1960 and 1970. The renovation movement allowed certain groups -- white professionals and real estate developers -- to benefit from or take advantage of racist attitudes and racial/class inequalities to hoard opportunities. (Sociologists Charles Tilly and Douglas Massey discuss opportunity hoarding more generally.) In the Restoration and Transition areas, black homeownership and renting decreased, while white ownership increased. In the Transition areas, black and white renting declined, while ownership increased. In the Unrestored area, white ownership and renting decreased. In addition, the Restoration areas had households with higher incomes than the other areas. The renovation movement led to increased racial segregation, income inequality, and wealth inequality (due to shifts in homeownership).

On Capitol Hill, Friendship House, Group Ministries, and other groups voiced great concern about the economic impact of the renovation movement on the low- and moderate-income families. Many of these families could not afford renovations (or were renters). In 1972, the DC government proposed that south of North Carolina Ave and east of 1st St SE be made a Federally-Assisted Code Enforcement Area (FACE), which would have provided cash grants and low-interest loans for home improvements, thus allowing low- and moderate-incomes families to take part in the renovation movement. This proposal was never adopted.

Rechler also interviewed real estate agents, community leaders, and residents. She shows that renovation was not a spontaneous activity. Rather, from the late 1940s, real estate agents were deeply involved in renovation and reshaping neighborhoods. Real estate agents had long been renovating houses themselves as investments. By the time Rechler conducted her research, larger developers started working on Capitol Hill. St. Clair Investments, a large suburban development corporation, began buying and restoring in 1973.

Especially with the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities around the 1930s to the 1960s, discussed in an earlier post, real estate agents stoked the fears among white families that their neighborhoods were being taken over by African Americans. Real estate agents even hired African American women to walk around the neighborhood with baby carriages and did other tactics to motivate white families to sell their houses at a low price. The real estate agents would then sell the house at an inflated price to African American families, whom agents knew could not obtain regular mortgages. So, the agents would provide high-interest loans directly to them. The African American families often could not afford these inflated loans and pay for the maintenance of these still unrenovated houses. This is called blockbusting, which led to decay.

On Capitol Hill, according to Rechler, there was an additional trend of reverse blockbusting: "Real estate agents, brokers, and speculators use sales tactics and pressure practices to displace the poor and black from their homes in order to attract the white middle class." She was told that a real estate investor might call the DC government to report a house for possible housing code violations. Low-income owners could not obtain loans to make the needed renovations and thus faced the possibility that their house might be condemned. The speculator, however, would provide cash and thus pressure the owner to sell quickly. Speculators also quickly flipped houses to each other, driving up prices. According to Rechler, the restoration movement

is encouraged by a hyperactive real estate market which vigorously solicits property to sell, real estate speculation which promises high profits for those who can afford the investment, and financial arrangements which favor the investor over the average homebuyer. In Capitol Hill restoration operates in a market where speculation is virtually uncontrolled and public access to information is greatly curtailed.

The traditional real estate market for those seeking shelter and the speculative real estate market for those seeking profits have converged more and more lately. As we rely on our houses as part of our retirement or some form of insurance, we require that our houses increase in value. Yet, as they increase in value, it means that cities become too expensive for those with low- and moderate-incomes, even those who maintained and developed community in neighborhoods, which now draws people to move to these neighborhoods.