Suburbs are gentrifying—and communities are pushing back

In recent decades, historical patterns of Black and brown suburban settlement have been met with rapidly rising immigration and spiking poverty rates. At the same time, a slate of forces calling for the remaking of sprawling suburbs into more dense urban landscapes have converged. While presumably marginalized groups might benefit from more compact suburban neighborhoods, they often rightfully fear the impact of large-scale redevelopment. Projects that many urban planners and policymakers see as needed investments in underdeveloped neighborhoods are often experienced by communities as a recipe for displacement that spurs heated backlash and debate.  

Much of the discourse about gentrification, however, has emerged from studies of major cities. Studies that helped to conceptually define gentrification—the factors that contribute to it, how communities are impacted, and how they organize in response—have focused largely on the central city. For some scholars, gentrification’s very definition relies on its urban location. Suburbs, it might seem, add little new understandings of gentrification processes and politics. In my new book, “The Right to Suburbia: Combating Gentrification on the Urban Edge,” I argue otherwise. 

“The Right to Suburbia“ investigates battles primarily waged by Black and Latino communities in the Washington, D.C. suburbs over the uneven costs and benefits of redevelopment. In case studies of three neighborhoods that have recently undergone a suburban renaissance, I ask how those most likely to bear the weight of suburbia’s transformation have tried to balance the scales. To what extent have the processes and products of suburban redevelopment disadvantaged marginalized groups? And how have these groups mobilized to assert a more equitable stake and place in their suburban futures?  

The book makes clear that new urban renewal, which references the latest period of gentrification in U.S. cities, does not fit tightly within the narrow bounds of our urban imaginary. Similar processes are also at work in suburbs, producing and reproducing patterns of uneven, racialized development. But what I term the new suburban renewal has not simply added a prefix onto an old concept. With a new cast of characters and spatial dynamics at play, suburbia has reshaped urban redevelopment processes and politics. Suburbia’s unique brand of redevelopment has added to, rather than alleviated, the challenges that marginalized communities, especially Black and Latino Americans, face.  

“The Right to Suburbia” illuminates the key role of the state in processes of suburban renewal. Suburban municipalities have been critical to plans, policies, and public investments that disinvested and neglected Black and brown suburbs and that enabled and encouraged profitable reinvestment within them. To spur dense mixed-use development in former sprawling suburbs, state and county governments aided and directed new developments aimed at white middle-class residents and consumers. They assembled parcels, raised height limits, changed zoning, and otherwise used their public power and purse strings to entice private investment. The new suburban renewal is not a natural process of neighborhood change; it is racialized redevelopment in which the state plays a pivotal role.  

It is also a highly disruptive process in which marginalized communities hold little power. Suburbia’s consolidated and privatized land uses facilitate redevelopment processes that are often large in scale and deep in impact. Political fragmentation as well as increasing suburban segregation and sprawl isolate communities and render the struggles of one neighborhood invisible to and unconnected to others. Struggling suburbs often lack high –capacity, established nonprofits and advocacy organizations that can readily engage residents in sustained redevelopment battles. Organizing and coalition building is further hampered by suburbia’s changing composition. Compared to their urban counterparts, gentrifying suburbs tend to have more diverse residents dispersed across larger areas. 

Black and Latinx suburbanites, particularly immigrants, often lack well-established organizing platforms. They often hold less political power and representation than what I term old-school suburban activists, represented by suburbia’s traditional civic and business elite, and less than that which has been built over decades of struggle in central cities. When redevelopment arrives, residents in neighborhoods originally designed to exclude them face an uphill battle to build the politics and policies to remain in place. They confront a dearth of anti-displacement policies, a lack of political will, and scant financial capital. But just as Black and Brown communities have always done, they are fighting not only for access to suburbia and its opportunities but also for more just and equitable communities in suburbs.  

“The Right to Suburbia” reveals the vigorous organizing efforts emerging in one of the most rapidly and intensely gentrifying metropolitan regions in the United States. It tells the tale of how grassroots activists, community groups, and political leaders mobilized across race, ethnic, and class lines to fight for communities’ right to suburbia—their right to stay put and benefit from new neighborhood investments. This right, I argue, recognizes marginalized communities as important constituents in shaping suburbia’s future. It advances a more equitable distribution of the risks and rewards of redevelopment and prevents vulnerable groups from being pushed farther beyond the urban edge.  

Communities who had fought long and hard to get to the suburbs, however, often lacked the organizing infrastructure to combat the latest wave of suburban displacement. Building on a legacy of suburban protest, their reanimated movement borrowed capacity and strategies from former battles in both the city and suburbs. They fought to create community and common cause across their differences and mobilize the interests of new groups. They grew from the grassroots and the grasstops—developing vital community organizing and institutional capacity as well as political will to push new anti-displacement policies. Their efforts brought visibility to suburban gentrification and built the bones of a powerful suburban equitable development movement.  

Their wins were critical but hard fought and limited. Given their difficult starting points, these precarious coalitions struggled to mobilize on multiple fronts, leverage new tools, and empower diverse communities and voices. Taking shape over several decades and disparate communities, their fight makes clear that a right to suburbia requires acute attention to conditions that prevent marginalized groups from imagining, let alone realizing, a future for their beloved communities. And though processes of uneven metropolitan development may shift their locus, they rarely go away—at least not without a good fight.