4. The Reproduction of Babylon and the Gentrification Dilemma

Abstract

This chapter focuses primarily on Richmond and Oakland and the military-industrial spaces of the Bay Area, on important African American places that struggled with the long legacy of ghettoized segregation and its geographic relationship to highways and heavy industry. It examines the struggles of downtown development, brownfield redevelopment, and the lost opportunity that has been the redevelopment of the old military bases. It examines the interlinked violence of air pollution and homicide that plagued these communities, part of a set of issues which the fiscally challenged cities were unable to meet. In doing so, it highlights the same mix of local responsibility and collective failure that marked the previous chapters. But it also discusses a profound dilemma particular to these communities.