Few studies have yet to connect the historic 2008 foreclosure crisis with the massive expansion of gentrification. However, many reports clearly reveal how the subprime targeting of African American mortgage holders, widened the door for creeping displacement and push into areas historians call “second hand” suburbs.

Image result for ferguson report fbi

Carolina Reid and Elizabeth Laderman provided some insight into the racialized impact of sub-primes with their report The Untold Costs of Subprime Lending:  Examining the Links among Higher‐ Priced Lending, Foreclosures and Race in California.

We do know that this is causing a massive drain from urban spaces which feeds the Third Great Migration for African Americans, particularly, and an expulsion of poor and people of color to the outskirts of cities where transportation is minimal, at best. Black suburbanization has radical implications which impact many African Americans now, some of which include:

  1. The Ferguson report demonstrates one of the implications of suburbanization when police become a tool for city income generation. As Kimberley Johnson noted in Black Suburbanization: American Dream or the New Banlieue?, white middle-class suburban sustenance partially fed off “federal spending priorities coupled with the expansion of the U.S. economy.” However, without these small town must turn to its resident to function. Ferguson exampled this approach with its policing and city citations which financially drained the black community and increased tensions, particularly around police harassment.
  2. Limited transportation into the city and the concentration of work and economy in urban spaces.
  3. Historically, black migration into the city forced concentrated settlement into older areas. Similarly, the shift to the outer city rings appears to situate black home owners in declining, older neighborhoods.
  4. Dispersal impacts social, cultural, and political institutions. The pushback of churches significantly reflects this transition as these communal spaces become commuter locations.

As gentrification transforms the urban and suburban landscape, it bares noting that the 2008 housing crisis continues to have a far reaching impact on the black community.