Addressing Gentrification: History, Power, and Community in a Dallas Neighborhood
The word gentrifications gets thrown around a lot. It's real and powerful. The lived experience of many in my neighborhood and the vulnerable communities around me speak to this power. As a scholar of history, one of the things that worries me is how discussions of gentrification are frequently divorced from discussions of the systemic forces that make gentrification possible. Knowing how we got here helps define the forces we oppose so that we can more effectively address them.
At the heart of gentrification is racial capitalism, which preys on people of color using the tools of exploitation and dispossession. Indeed, as the historian Walter Johnson has documented, exploitation and dispossession are the foundation of United States history and American race-relations. Combined, they have empowered and enabled the accumulation of capital by a small few. They’ve sustained and protected whiteness, often rendering it invisible to the beneficiaries of its privilege. Gentrification is the latest battleground in this multi-century struggle.
Dispossession is the result of gentrification. It is the modern parallel of indigenous land theft. Like then, the land now is not empty; its not vacant. But it is coveted.
The reasons why people want the land varies. And this is where I think a lot of the disagreement over gentrification come from. Developers like to portray themselves as pure, as harnessing the inevitability of change to pursue seemingly noble ends. They mask the perniciousness of gentrification within some sort of political project. Lately, “urbanism” is the chosen label. Often this orients around environmental issues, using concepts like walkability and urban density, to combat our car dependency. This is smart framing because, after all, who is against the environment? Who doesn’t want to lessen the impact of global warming? But these issues are a red herring; a distraction from the primary goal. Gentrification is about dispossession in order to facilitate profit-making within racial capitalism.
So, how did we get here? Systemic inequality and institutionalized racism created the conditions that have allowed for gentrification to take place. Gentrifiers target areas once deemed “undesirable,” typically urban or urban-adjacent neighborhoods “deserted” or abandoned during the white flight of the 1950s and 1960s, who’s value is now low enough for wholesale redevelopment to produce a sustainable profit. These areas, of course, are not undesirable. They may have decaying infrastructure, poor schools, high crime, and non-white communities, but such realities are the result of historical processes and policy decisions. Inequality is created, sustained, and then used to the benefit of the predominately white power brokers at the center of racial capitalism. Here, race and class are difficult to disentangle. And honestly, I don’t think we need to.
Gentrifiers are those who prey on inequality, put pressure on transitioning communities, and use their status as insiders from historically privileged classes to target and take advantage of those who are not. They employ a variety of methods to do this work. Typically, it starts with capital. Gentrifiers overwhelm members of historically marginalized and impoverished communities with money. They offer life-changing money for homes, businesses, and promises of community investment. Then, once they’ve got a foothold, they use the tools of local politics (which are intricate and opaque), like zoning, code enforcement, and taxation to disrupt the previous status quo. For example, this might include harassing and targeting neighbors and businesses who do not meet code, who can’t afford upkeep and compliance, which was previously overlooked by city enforcers, now lured in by a wave of new gentrifying developers. Development comes next, attracting new businesses and tenants, more affluent customers and residents, and demands for improved infrastructure. Combined, the demand for infrastructure and the increase in property value from development, raises property taxes and forces more people to sell out. Displacement results.
Avoiding displacement and pushing back against the forces of exploitation is the challenge gentrifying communities face. It is particularly difficult when the people who live in these communities have historically not had access to capital, to power, or to the education and leisure time necessary to fight back. The system was intentionally made to exclude them, to take advantage of their precarity, to prey on these intentionally created environments so racial capitalism can continue its cycle. Laws and policies created over the last few years aimed at supporting diversity, equity and inclusion are intended to remedy these past failures, but often do not come with a mechanism to provide full redress. Communities must work to preserve and protect one another, to translate and educate each other, and to end the cycle of exploitation and dispossession.
This cycle has spun throughout American history. The particular details of the exploitation and dispossession, however, look different according to the location and era one is exploring. Dallas traces its history to the creation of the Peters Colony. It established land surveys and parcels for white purchase. Many property deeds today still cite the original Peters Colony surveys (although much of the land has been subdivided multiple times since then). The surveys and movement towards North Texas under the auspices of the Peters Colony occurred between 1842-1849, the tail end of the Republic period in Texas and its early years of U.S. statehood. Settlers like John Neely Bryan, who’s (replica) cabin sits in Founders Plaza in downtown Dallas, arrived in 1842.
Why 1842? Because until a year earlier, the region was controlled by indigenous Americans. The Trinity River, called the Arkikosa by the Caddo people, facilitated commerce and movement for European colonizers and American Indians. Tension between the two groups reached a fever pitch in 1841. On May 24th, violence erupted at Village Creek. It came after years of Texas raids on indigenous villages and towns as Europeans sought to drive them out of the area. Led by General Edward Tarrant and Captain John Denton, the Battle of Village Creek intimidated the region’s prior inhabitants to move. Initially the Native American resistance scared white militia men, causing them to retreat. Only Denton died in the conflict. Within two years, however, the Caddo and others in the area signed a peace treaty and were removed.
About a decade later, Victor Prosper Considerant led a group of settlers, frequently described as “French utopian socialists,” to the area. He established the “La Reunion” community. It included more than French settlers and followed the philosophy of Fourierism, which developed a following in the U.S. during the 1840s. At its height, roughly 30 such settlements existed, most in the Midwest and Great Lakes region. Narratives of La Reunion typically call the community a failure although its influence remained for decades. Why did it fail? The rocky soil they bought did not support sustainable (read: profitable) agriculture. It is not surprising that the area of West Dallas that they inhabited later became home to limestone quarries and cement factories (inhabited by hard working Mexican Americans).
The agricultural failure of La Reunion is a bit ironic given Dallas’ rich agricultural history. Again, while official histories (and even some of the city’s own parks) like to point to cattle and railroads — that’s Fort Worth History, not Dallas. Sure, the railroad was important to the city and helped it become a commercial center. But why? What were they picking up and carrying? It wasn’t cattle; it was cotton.
Dallas would not exist without cotton. Honestly, Texas would not exist without it either. Anglo-American settlers poured into East Texas in the 1820s and 1830s, lured by the rich and fertile farmland. Between 1830 and 1860s, the U.S. experienced a cotton boom. To profitably produce cotton required large-scale production, which meant extracting labor from enslaved African Americans. In 1860, 2.5 million enslaved people lived in the Cotton Belt (out of 4 million in the U.S. South), many of whom were sold and relocated through brutal slave markets. Early Texans were a part of this migration, and pattern of dispossession and exploitation.
Still a part of Mexico, Texas welcomed Anglo-American residents for several years. East Texans relocated because the region had a similar soil and climate to nearby Louisiana where cotton flourished. Problems soon arose, however, when Anglo-Texans refused to follow Mexican laws. They refused to speak Spanish, practice Catholicism, and after 1828, free their enslaved people. Texans also felt neglected and voiceless within the Mexican government. Slavery was the main sticking point, however. Mexico outlawed slavery entirely in the 1830s, inspiring Texans to revolt. One of my favorite pieces of history trivia is that Texas is the only state to fight two wars to try and preserve slavery.
Texas won the first war, briefly becoming an independent nation. They were initially an independent not because of some unique maverick Texas spirit but because the U.S. rejected them. That’s right. The U.S. initially refused to annex Texas in 1836 because it wanted to avoid a war with Mexico. Ironically, the U.S. instigated a war with Mexico about a decade later — largely as a land grab so it could expand slavery (continuing the theme of exploitation and dispossession). The conclusion of the Mexican-American War also meant that thousands of Mexicans and indigenous people instantly became residents of the United States. The border jumped them. Anglo Americans were not exactly thrilled to welcome them. Yet, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted former Mexicans American citizenship, which was previously restricted to only free whites. Thus, former Mexican citizens were granted a degree of “whiteness” even though discrimination persisted.
The Mexican-American War set the stage for increasing sectional tension and debates over the future of slavery in the U.S, ultimately resulting in the American Civil War. Once again, Texas chose the side of slavery. This time it lost.
Cotton remained, however. Jim Crow laws and sharecropping system facilitated the continued exploitation of African American labor. Poor whites and Mexican Americans also picked cotton, but the predominant racial and class divisions remained. Southern culture lived on, too. Old money plantation owners, like the Caruth Family later became real estate developers and benefactors, giving some of their land for the Southern Methodist University (SMU) campus and selling off the rest for the construction of Dallas’s white-flight suburbs.
Cotton shaped the city and the region. Many of the Reconstruction Era African American Freedom Colonies were located near former plantations. The Elm Thicket-Northpark neighborhood was not far from both the Caruth Lands near SMU and the Cochran Homestead. Founders of the first United Methodist Church in Dallas County, the Cochrans came to Dallas in the 1840s from Tennessee with enslaved people. The family cemetery makes their loyalties clear, including headstones honoring Confederate soldiers.
The Tenth Street Freedman Town and the Joppa Community, located on the southern side of Dallas also have plantation connections. They sprouted up not far from the plantation owned by William Brown Miller, which encompassed much of what is today eastern Oak Cliff. Some reports cite him as one of the largest slave owners in Texas. In addition to his planation, Miller earned money operating a ferry across the Trinity River, trusting one of his enslaved men, Henry Critz Hines, to manage it.
Just South of Dallas, Ellis County produced the most cotton of any county in the world in 1912. Red River County to the Northeast, had a 50% enslaved population in 1860. The region harnessed both the free and enslaved labor of African Americans to exact wealth in the cotton industry.
Dallas became the commercial center of cotton. It eventually grew into the world’s largest inland cotton exchange. For decades the Dallas cotton exchange loomed over the city in a 17-floor downtown skyscraper. Railroads, factories, banks, and investors from all around the world all met in Dallas because of cotton. In fact, the Japanese Cotton Company occupied the building’s entire 15th floor.
Is Dallas still a Cotton city? The standard historian answer to basically any question is: it depends. The wealth, suffering, infrastructure, and reputation developed by cotton all remain. After all, paper money contains 75% cotton. We can never escape it. Economically, industrially, and image wise, Dallas has moved on. It’s rebranded.
After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in downtown Dallas on November 22, 1963, Dallas became known as the “City of Hate.” While civic leaders on the “Citizens Council” were largely able to conceal decades of racially motivated bombings, lynchings, and the terrors of Jim Crow, killing a president resonates a bit differently. Nationally, Dallas could no longer afford to be Southern. The city had to embrace a new ethos, a new image, and a new history.
Dallas leaders rebuilt the city into what historians call a “Sunbelt city.” To be sure, this is a slippery concept complicated by its marriage of geography with political and economic trends that stimulated social and cultural transformations. Bolstered by the suburbs that sprang up near cities, which benefited from postwar government contracts and industrial relocation, the Sunbelt came to represent a distinct region and culture.
The Sunbelt separated itself from the New South and Southern culture. It represents a postwar cosmopolitanism tied to a unique blend of political boosterism that deemphasized race, prioritized economic expansion and recruitment, and sought to cultivate a welcoming culture, which emphasized climate, human capital, and economic promise. As Bernard R. Rice has explained, “the use of the term Sunbelt seems to have been a conscious effort to reject confrontational sectionalism.” He asserts that “sectionalism” versus “regionalism” connotes a value judgement and helps separate the geographic area from the past. It provided cover for the historic injustices of the old South and a sense of modernization that distinguished the Sunbelt from prior perceptions. “The South was unsophisticated and backwards, the Sunbelt cosmopolitan and forward thinking,” Rice concluded.
Language mattered and marketing was important as Sunbelt framing helped hastened the transformation of Southern cities like Atlanta and Dallas as well as up-and-coming places like Phoenix and Las Vegas into air-conditioned oases primed for tourists, retirees, and the aviation and defense industries. But, fancy rebranding does not erase history. It is does not undue historical traumas and right historical inequities. Marketing doesn’t create solutions, it only smooths out edges and glosses over problems. It only makes things look inviting and pretty on the surface.
Like the civic leaders who sought to rebrand Southern strongholds into savvy Sunbelt cities, marketing is a key tool of gentrifiers. For them, history is only useful for marketing. It might add appeal to a neighborhood or a building, but history is to be forgotten in other areas; torn down and destroyed for progress. Gentrifiers like historic charm, old neighbors with depressed values, and quaint narratives to justify higher rents on rehabilitated spaces. Indeed, dispossession and exploitation does not apply just to property and physical assets, gentrifiers often appropriate the history and culture of the communities they’re disrupting. Nancy Leong calls these folks “identity capitalists.” In her 2021 book, she explains how the powerful exploit historically underrepresented peoples to create social and economic value from their identities, using a tokenized embrace of diversity to sustain inequality.
The Oak Cliff section of Dallas — where I live — has witnessed the cycles of exploitation and dispossession as well as the use and abuse of history. The area has evolved and changed over time. In its latest cycle, it is experiencing gentrification.
Oak Cliff started as its own city in the 1880s before being annexed by Dallas in 1903. Separated from downtown Dallas by the Trinity River, Oak Cliff developed a distinct identity. Early developments included the Tenth Street African American Freedom Colony, the La Renuion community as well as farmers and plantation owners. By the 1920s, North Oak Cliff was home to Methodist Hospital and a variety of growing neighborhoods.
Served by a streetcar that traveled from downtown Dallas along Jefferson Boulevard all the way to Arlington, the area quickly grew. The new neighborhoods enforced segregation. Many of the property deeds included restrictive racial covenants, which were common before being declared unconstitutional in 1948. The area’s white supremacy also included a strong Ku Klux Klan presence. In fact, the KKK held a major rally in Oak Cliff, known as a Karnival, in March 1924. The event took place at Gardner Park, which was located at the corner of Jefferson and Colorado Boulevards. Lasting six days, it commenced with 3,000-person march across the Houston Street Bridge from downtown Dallas and featured a burning cross atop a nearby building to signal their presence.
The neighborhood also catered to cars. The Bankhead Highway (also known as US 80 and US 180) the United States’ second transcontinental highway route, which connected Washington D.C. and San Diego, crossed through Oak Cliff. A 1921 travelers’ guide, depicts the road winding from downtown Dallas across the Houston St. to Lancaster St. and then along Jefferson Boulevard before jogging up to Davis St. on Rosemont Avenue. An alternate route, developed later, allowed motorists to avoid the congestion of Oak Cliff’s business district by following Fort Worth Avenue and Commerce St. from downtown. The traffic inspired filling stations, mechanics garages, tires shops, and motels to spring up along the road. The remnants of these businesses still stand in North Oak Cliff, and debates over automotive businesses are at the center of gentrification debates.
Perhaps due to the traffic, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps rated most of Oak Cliff as "definitely declining” in their series of maps. The maps helped banks decide whether or not to extend credit to home buyers in urban areas, denying many and inflating interest rates for others. They also shaped the desirability of neighbors, impacting development. Colloquially, this is known as redlining.
Because it rated as "definitely declining,” Oak Cliff experienced white flight during the 1950s and 1960s. New residents moved into fill the void, however. The federal government relocated over 10,000 Native Americans to Dallas under the Termination and Relocation Policy in 1956. According to historian A.K. Sandoval-Strauss, “during the 1960s, Oak Cliff’s Spanish-surnamed population rose more than five-fold.” They were eligible to buy homes in previously segregated areas and preferred over other minorities because, thanks to the Mexican American War, Hispanic Americans are technically white. Many arrived from Little Mexico, displaced by the destruction and gentrification of Dallas’ historic Mexican-American neighborhood a decade earlier.
School desegregation, accelerated in Dallas following a 1971 lawsuit, sent more white residents fleeing. The 1973 murder of Santos Rodriguez by Dallas Police in Little Mexico further solidified the Mexican American community, fueling its political consciousness and inspiring it to demand representation and redress. By the 1980s, Oak Cliff became home to one in four of Dallas’ Hispanic residents, and the new center of the city’s Mexican American culture.
As Sandoval-Strauss has argued, Mexican Americans as well as Latin American immigrants reshaped Oak Cliff. They also preserved and invested in it. Collectively, they rewrote Oak Cliff’s history, making it their own. This helped Dallas avoid the fate of other cities affected by suburban sprawl. By providing urban residents, a tax base, and avoiding the “blight” of abandoned buildings, the Mexican American community at the heart of Oak Cliff kept the city vibrant.
This work has frustrated and slowed gentrifiers, eager for a mostly blank slate to redevelop. By saving or “preserving” the Oak Cliff abandoned by racists whites and French socialists, the Latino community, while still experiencing the systemic effects of inequality and limited access to capital, education, and power, forged a strong community. Their vibrant community and entrepreneurial residents, have made it possible for others to see its value.
Yet, many of the gentrifiers active in Oak Cliff today overlook these contributions. Rather than partnering with and championing the work of Mexican American business owners and leaders, they’ve reached back to older, French-inspired narratives for their neighborhood rebranding. Mardi Gras and Bastille Day celebrations invite outsiders in, excluding long-time residents as prices rise. Moreover, they bemoan the political and business savvy of a new generation of Mexican Americans, who are unwilling to cede their community and watch their neighborhood disappear like the old Little Mexico did.
Anti-gentrification advocacy is difficult. It requires not only robust educational efforts, but building trust; a trust strong enough to overcome a history of repeated violation. Cities and communities shaped by redlining, white supremacy, and systemic inequality must reconcile with it. Gentrification efforts often tear open old wounds, compromise tentative alliances, strain trust, and remind us of the cycles of dispossession and exploitation in American history. It also challenges us to think of a new future.
Gentrification is process. For many, it is about creating a new futures. This is the appeal of gentrification to many. It’s linked to efforts to promote environmental movements, urbanism, affordable housing, and a variety of other political projects aimed up at disrupting the status quo. These futures stand upon the past, however. They build on land that is not vacant, utilize and remix systems that have not been equitable, and rely on economics that are largely undemocratic and historically exploitative.
Efforts to craft the futures of neighborhoods and cities require creativity. They also require cooperation and inclusion. Otherwise we risk falling into the traps of gentrification — the cycle of exploitation and dispossession — that too often facilitates a “white return” to urban areas at the expense of the cultures and communities that sustained them during the interim. We risk unilaterally imposing a future vision upon a community that doesn’t want it and doesn’t benefit from it.
The scholar Dolores Hayden reminded us to challenge old views. “The belief that planners should invest taxpayers’ dollars to produce a climate for profit-making has been the view of the local growth machines and the national real-estate-banking-building-automotive lobby, since the 1920s,” she wrote. “It should be challenged by those who believe that the role of public spending is to benefit the community as a whole.”
Public history was one of the approaches in her toolkit. “When family history is shared with a larger public, newcomers hear complex economic stories linking private and public life,” Hayden suggested. She recognized the power of place, and how history can be a part of advocacy — not just marketing. Young, diverse, and creative leaders understand this. In Oak Cliff, tales of Mexican American entrepreneurship and community organizing inspires action.
Leading those advocacy efforts is not easy. Opposing gentrification is complicated as well. It’s a messy issue fraught with different visions, different goals, different identities, and different approaches. And those goals, those visions, and those approaches can change in the middle of the process — as development takes place — disrupting previous agreements and collaborations. This is why many of those who lead these efforts, who are the most effective at making change, come from the communities impacted by gentrification. They know the residents first-hand, experienced the perils of systemic inequality and racism, speak the language and cultural norms, and understand the traumas deeply embedded in the communities.
Although I live in a gentrifying neighborhood, I do not possess this intimate connection. I moved to Dallas in 2020 to teach history at Mountain View College (Dallas College). I chose to live in the area where I taught. I’ve always felt a responsibility to live in the area where I am working; where I am serving. When looking for somewhere to live I drove around, asked a few of my new colleagues for suggestions, and weighed the costs. Ultimately, I settled in North Oak Cliff as an outsider hoping to graft into the larger community.
My role as a historian and interloper, someone who lives in the community but does not own property, is two-fold: 1) do no harm, 2) support and uplift others however I can. I have the training to construct historical narratives that help us unpack the roots of gentrification and connect the dots on how system inequality and racism have enabled it (which I have tried to do here). I also have the tools to record, preserve, and save bits and pieces of neighborhood culture, to help ensure that their voices do not remain silent, and their lives are not rendered invisible.
Several years ago when I was an instructor of African American Studies at Purdue University, a guest speaker advised me to be more than an ally, to join the movement, to be an active and involved participant. Of course, lending my white, male, PhD privilege also requires self-awareness, reflection on my positionality, on my limitations, and knowing that I can help fight without making it my personal fight. I can defend others, and stand up for others, without speaking in place of others. The goal is to increase and amplify their agency without overshadowing or limiting it.
In the struggle against gentrification, to be in community with one another, and craft a new future that is more just, equitable, and sustainable, history plays a critical role. It helps us understand where and how we got to our present moment. It reveals unspoken and latent tensions, blindspots, and obstacles that prevent progress. It helps us understand our place — both physical and positional — so that we can better share it and improve it with others. And, it helps us see the larger process so we can influence it as its occuring in real-time.
The ongoing struggle in Oak Cliff is shaped by the history I have outlined here, and the conflicting visions of developers, politicians, business owners, community members, and residents. Power plays a pivotal role. In creating a new future — one that is equitable, just, and sustainable — we have to find ways to diffuse power. Combating gentrification also requires diffusing capital. Both of those are radical ideas. They require us to wrestle with what power and capital look like and reflect on how power and capital operate in our communities. Ultimately, we may not like what we see but there is opportunity in discomfort and promise in the stories of our neighbors.