Community and Urban Sociology

Tanya Golash-Boza, a Professor at the University of California – Merced and the Executive Director of the University of California Washington Center, was co-winner of the 2024 Outstanding Book Award. Tanya’s innovative research agenda focuses on how racism intersects with capitalism and how the legal system creates and upholds inequities. We reached out to ask her to discuss her award-winning book, and we’re including her responses below. Thanks to Tanya for participating in our interview series!

What were the main findings of your research?

Before Gentrification shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in Washington, DC. I explore how DC came to be the nation’s “Murder Capital” and incarceration capital, and why it’s now a haven for wealthy White people. This troubling history makes clear that the choice to use prisons and policing to solve problems faced by Black communities in the twentieth century—instead of investing in schools, community centers, social services, health care, and violence prevention—is what made gentrification possible in the twenty-first.

What motivated you to study this particular topic?

This book is a love letter to the city where I was born and raised. It tells the story of Black dispossession in the nation’s capital. I also include pieces of my own story, as a White woman who grew up in DC. I have rarely discussed my life experiences in relation to my scholarship in my published work, as I have not wanted to use my experiences growing up in a Black neighborhood to legitimize my authority as a race scholar. For this book, I decided that there is value in providing an example for how White scholars might reflect not only on their White privilege but also on the racialized nature of their networks, relationships, analyses, and backgrounds. Also, explaining where I fit into this story feels more honest than pretending as if I don’t know the people in this book.

I moved away from Washington, DC, in the early 2000s, and each time I have returned I have thought about how full my life has been while many of my childhood friends remain behind bars. My relationship to DC’s gentrification is complex. On the one hand, I appreciate the new amenities in the neighborhood where I was raised. At the same time, I share the feeling of many other long-term residents that the city has moved on without reckoning with the significant trauma many residents lived through in the late 20^th century.

My experiences growing up in DC during the War on Drugs make understanding personal and state violence more than just a research endeavor for me. I have a personal investment in understanding how and why my neighborhood became plagued by violence, why so many of my childhood friends were murdered, why a generation of Black boys and men was put behind bars, and why so few of my childhood friends can afford to live in the neighborhood where we were raised.

What surprises did you uncover as you conducted your research?

There are two major surprises, and they are related to one another. The first is that tens of thousands of Black people were able to purchase homes in DC during an era of intense racial discrimination in housing. The second is that homeownership did not secure the financial futures of Black families in the same way it did for White families.

Most research on homeownership in the early to mid-twentieth century focuses on how African Americans were locked out of the housing market due to exclusionary practices. However, my research reveals that Black people were able to access loans both from the private market and from the US Department of Veteran’s Affairs at the prevailing rates and that, between, 1940 and 1980, there was a seven-fold increase in the number of Black homeowners in Washington, DC – from 7,616 to 53,534. 

Nevertheless, homeownership did not translate into intergenerational wealth transmission for many of these families. The reasons for this are: 1) Black neighborhoods experienced significant disinvestment beginning in the 1970s; 2) Home values stagnated in Black communities between 1950 and 2000; and 3) When the public sector finally made significant investments in Black communities, this came in the form of carceral investment.

What impact do you hope that your findings will have?

I have given a dozen talks in community spaces in DC and it has been heartening to see that the story I tell in this book resonates with long-term residents of DC. That is the impact I wanted to have. 

Beyond that, there is so much I’d love to see happen.

I hope that my findings on how carceral investment devastated Black neighborhoods will help us forge a new path as the city continues its struggles to end violence.

I hope that the city will significantly expand its affordable housing developments and inclusionary zoning programs that allow people without intergenerational wealth to purchase homes. 

I hope that this book will be useful for those leaders in DC working to pass a reparations bill. At a recent event, one of these leaders described the book as a “harm report” on DC.

At the same time, I understand that a real solution requires a reimagining of – as Ruth Wilson Gilmore has put it – everything. We have created a racialized economic system where, to the extent that middle class people have any wealth at all, that wealth lies in the value of their home. Yet, the simple fact of a home, and particularly a neighborhood, being occupied by Black people, decreases the value of that home. The barriers to wealth accumulation for Black people are not a bug in the system of racial capitalism, but a feature.

What are some future directions for this project?

I have an article forthcoming in Washington History that addresses a question I was not able to fully explore in the book – which is the role of real estate agents and lenders in White flight from DC.

Our extensive analyses of home sales between 1948 and 1970 revealed several findings: First, the primary catalyst for White flight from Brightwood Park was school desegregation. Although the 1948 Hurd v Hodge court decision that made racially restrictive covenants unenforceable resulted in a few home sales to Black people, we don’t see significant movement until the 1954 Bolling v. Sharpe case that allowed Black students to attend schools that had been previously restricted to White students. This also relates to our second finding, which is that White flight opened up homeownership opportunities for Black people. The mass departure of White residents made homeownership more accessible to Black people. Our final finding is that real estate speculators did not need to profit by buying low and selling high. Instead, they were able to rake in profits by serving in multiple roles – as buyers, sellers, realtors, and lenders. They earned a commission on each sale and interest on each loan. Their rates did not need to be especially extractive in order to extract profits.

Throughout my career, I have pivoted from topic to topic – ranging from Latinx racial identity to discourses of Blackness in Peru to the human rights implications of immigration policies to the role of the global economy in deportations to this project on the history of DC. My next project will also be a pivot – this time to understanding urban gun violence.