Adrienne Brown, The Residential is Racial, Ch. 4 + 6
10 thoughts on “Feb. 12”
Chapter 6 of Adrienne Brown’s The Residential is Racial considers the role of representation in exposing covert systems of discrimination by comparing methodologies including survey, fiction, and screenplay. An interesting recurring point in the chapter talks about how systemic issues are difficult to represent given no clear singular villain on which to concentrate blame: It may be “easier to reduce the machinery of dispossession to a single immediate foe than to face its enormity” (Brown 290). The main challenge these forms of representation contend with seems to be how to balance the relationship between the micro (individual landlords, realtors, government officials, corporations, developers, banks, third-party lenders, tenants, homeowners, etc. etc. in aggregate) and the macro (the overarching systems of dispossession and discrimination). Testing was the most literal approach, relying on the physical compilation of several individual (although impersonal) encounters to reveal a trend, the resulting shape of which is then interpreted as “the overarching system”. The idea of having no singular villain has interesting implications when carried into the medium of fiction, where the standard protagonist-antagonist dynamic must be subverted to construct a portrait of “the larger system”. In Kristin Hunter’s The Landlord, Elgar is not portrayed as the villain. He can’t even be necessarily read as a symbol of “the larger system”, but is rather a helpless, naive cog within it. Hunter’s method of representation “involves teaching readers to pay attention to the minor details reiterating the omnipresence of the machinery’s presence despite Elgar’s (satirical, ironic) understanding of himself as the star of the show” (Brown 289). Institutional racism’s “saturating uneventfulness” is illustrated through the contrast against a more privileged character’s self-absorption and out-of-touchedness (Brown 289). The Landlord example underscores the efficacy of narrative-based approaches (as opposed to “anti-narratival”/”empirical” approaches like testing) and makes me wonder about how other mediums beyond text (art, music, design, photo-journalism?) can help to paint a clearer, more accessible image of “the machinery”. The Landlord also raises questions about the concept of “the machinery” as a whole. The idea of “no singular villain” to some degree shifts blame from individual agents to some abstract, unconscious entity which Brown calls “the machinery” or “the system”. I feel like this interpretation begins to downplay the undeniably active role these agents play in upholding that very system, instead painting them as at best unwilling and at worst unconscious subjects.
In the selections from The Residential is Racial, I found it difficult not to recall my own upbringing. I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, Park Ridge, nestled just between the city’s boundaries and O’Hare airport. Chicago is known as one of the most segregated cities in the country, and growing up in a northwest suburb I found this to be true. In my elementary and middle schools, I would say there was typically 4-5 people of color in each class. And what I think Brown so succinctly illustrates in The Residential is Racial, at midcentury “who counted as white [was remade] but the very measures of whiteness itself, moving away from blood and ancestry and toward performance, appearance, and location. Likewise, the perceivability of blackness as something describable on a standardized form took priority over anthropological or genealogical racial knowledge driving its measurement decades prior.” (174) Suburbia instills a mandate of sameness on its inhabitants. Though there were a few families and people of color in my neighborhood, to my recollection, their race was secondary to their performance of sameness or their performance of whiteness. I do not pretend to speak for these folks, but looking back on my childhood it’s hard not to ignore how lacking my neighborhood was in genuine demographic diversity because the suburban fabric encouraged sameness.
The reading also reminded me about some contemporary discussions about housing, in particular affordable housing. A dichotomy I am interested in more broadly is how some of the staunchest opponents of affordable housing developments are liberals. While concerns about contextuality and density might be well-meaning, it is hard not to deny much of the conversation about affordable housing implies not wanting a “certain type of person” in the neighborhood. To me, this attitude reveals a level of performative respectability that is encouraged and required within some communities, even some urban communities. And performative respectability is completely rooted in wealth, class, and ultimately, race. Even though we have the Fair Housing Act and open-faced bigotry is unacceptable (at least, for liberals), the individualism central to our understanding of property ownership creates exclusionary attitudes, similar to those described by Brown in The Residential is Racial.
Adrienne Brown’s The Residential is Racial cuts right ot the quick to talk about the proliferation of racist, classist biases through aesthetics. From the1920’s to the 1960’s, this was done by foisting very specific value propositions onto the built environment, elevating the value of modernist ideals and denigrating the value of anything “other”. There’s an obvious danger in empirically examining almost anything that isn’t raw data, and to apply the framework of science to something as subjective as the occupation of space seems wild to “us” now (granted, “we” are in an echochamber that would maybe feel more strongly about this concept than others). Forget the conversation of taste or tradition beyond the confines of Corb plans or Meisian steel and glazing.
It feels impossible to talk about blackness and modernism together without talking about Pruitt-Igoe (an obsession of mine). In this case, an entire minority neighborhood of st. Louis was marked as a slum, leveled, and replaced by a complex of high-modernist apartments. In a deeply paternalistic gesture, those in power erased a way of living that they determined to be lesser, built what they believed to go ‘good’ and ‘right’, and left. In some way, this feels like giving the keys to what they consider to be a really nice stick-shift to someone who only knows how to drive an automatic and telling them to drive across the country. Good luck? And if they destroy the transmission it’s their fault. And they’re stupid and tacky for only having driven automatics for generations.
The relationship between state visibility, citizenship, and freedom are structured differently across the analysis of segregation in suburban housing and displacement in the city’s residences, yet compounded within the practices of today. Housing practices today are a legacy of the practices of the past, a combination of a hypervisibility that prevents full citizenship even if given the economical means and an institutional structured to be invisible in order to deny the ability to achieve economic security.
In Chapter 5, which is set in the 1950s, Brown writes that progress, which I infer to be a greater progress as rights as a citizenship, must be gained through property ownership, as it is what structures economic mobility within America. Yet to accept this singular path, a compromise of humanity to assimilate must be made. Browne notes that the reactions to the dehumanizing intolerable condition of the hypervisibility of existing in that state can be found in “acts of rebellion or self-exile.” (237) Visibility in this context enforces what Claudia Rankine might call inability to fully belong when the self is constantly read and felt as a product of history, not as a human with interests, love, and desires.
A decade later, in the 1960’s, Brown analyzes how discriminatory practices within housing rental in the city are made invisible through layers of structure. The invisibility of an antagonist, removing the ability to enact change through direct action, while revealing the institutional practices that the state seeks to disguise. By representing the aesthetics, or ‘producing a commons’ of the new senses required (274) becomes a way to navigate the discriminatory practices.
When I first skimmed through the readings, one question immediately came to mind regarding Rockwell’s illustration New Kids in the Neighborhood: If the theme is integration, why are they apart? At first glance, the image could just as easily depict segregation rather than integration. This is not only due to the physical separation of the children within the composition but also the act of “looking,” which Browne discusses extensively in Chapter 4. The multiple set of gazing creates a sense of collective othering, making the scene feel inherently inequitable—almost voyeuristic. The multiple instances of what Browne terms “revelatory looking” introduce ambiguity into the painting’s message. While the era may have been shifting toward a more equitable future, institutionalized segregation persisted, upheld by seemingly neutral forces such as market practices and reformatory policies.
Chapter four of Brown’s book she highlights how certain scholars and thinkers have interacted and encouraged readers and planners to interact with Black and Non-White spaces. Towards the end she discusses that Jane Jacobs says that White people just need to observe more, but as Baldwin points out police officers in those areas are constantly observing. As someone who was at first impressed by Jacobs book, this book reminded me to think more critically. Just observing an area does not actually allow you to see that area and as Brown highlights it could just desensitize you to those issues. This reminded me of how we are inundated with images and videos of violent police brutality. We claim to bare witness, but change nothing, have these images perhaps just helped us accept this as a reality? I am curious how we can move past these observations and think. through helaing. Being from the South I think often about how segregation created and formed not only my city, but the entire state and region. The south and the entire country never actually had a racial reckoning or an attempt to come together and acknowledge the pain. There were no reparations, there was no healing, and the racial tensions remain. How can city planners and cities themselves help us through these histories, both by giving power back, but also by attempting to show us our shared humanity. I think I also struggle with the fact that private property is to root of many of the issues that we have discussed in this class, but I am still grappling with how to move through these systems and implement healing into the urban form.
Safransky’s City After Property illuminates a modern display of the false narratives around home ownership that Adrienne Brown brings up in her work. Specifically, Brown writes about the feeling of white superiority around owning property, resulting in a financial system that requires home ownership a bedrock of financial stability. This then encouraged Black Americans, forced out of previous home ownership opportunities, to pursue ownership as well – only to find the neighborhoods they move to depreciate in value upon arrival, receive poorly maintained street services, and exploitative home financing. The financial stability all but promised to the residents resulted in financial extraction. All the while, the shift to home ownership formed a social order outcome desired by its architects – a homogenization of how to live: in stable, single family homes. What Safransky then writes about in Detroit shows a recent image of the ways that financial stability of home ownership is a false promise for racialized minorities.
I’m also interested in the role of literature and art in conceptualizing the home ownership experience from racialized views that Brown articulates. Specifically, I’m interested in the role that time plays in how fiction is used to understand broader social experiences. I tend to view fiction as a tool of hindsight – providing examples of a moment, but only known to be taken as a broader experience until time passes and it becomes history. Yet I’m interested in the alternative that Brown describes. I guess I’m left with an idea that the role of a piece in history is up to the readers.
Brown’s chapter on Appraisal Manuals showcased how “Looking” or “Observing” were the primary tools to determine standards of value established in housing markets and neighborhood classifications. This process made clear how these operations disguised the racial and discriminatory violence of these standards through the language of empirical data and a mythical “apolitical figure” in the form of the appraiser who was not to be held accountable for the decisions made. Brown continues this discussion by illustrating how observations in reported accounts of segregated neighborhoods reinforced the standards of “success” and “healthy” places through notions of whiteness seen in the works of Jane Jacobs and Thomas Pynchon, who through their accounts of Boston’s North End and Watts, fail to account for how their own identities create a bias of experience and exposure where their presence as white figures in these spaces entitles them with an inherent “Right to the City”. The concept I refer to is based on the work of Henri Lefebvre who argued that all inhabitants have a right to shape, occupy, and use urban spaces while challenging the idea that these spaces should be fully controlled by market forces. I see this present in the example of Jane Jacobs, who as a white woman, is treated amiably during her visit to the North End and experiences a sense of freedom to exist and complete her observations without anyone questioning her right to be in the space. A strong contrast to the Blockbusting Methods of the administration that reveal how marginalized communities continue to be stripped of these rights with acts of violence enacted upon them through the process of alienation and criminalization as seen through the experience of black bodies during these appraisal periods when they were “invited” or paid to occupy space to lower the value of the home and neighborhood (194).
It’s enlightening to read these chapters of Adrienne Brown’s book, The Residential is Racial and be exposed to the false reality that interpersonal conflict is what a large majority of Americans believe is the primary cause of racism in our built environment, yet behind the scenes, our institutions and policies are the primary factors that covertly divide us. It’s scary to think that as time goes on, racism becomes harder and harder to see within the systems at play. Even when we think things are getting “better” there will always be inherent policies of the past that sneak into the future. Between each data set we’ve studied in class, whether Sanborn Maps, Appraisal manuals, etc. there is always intrinsic bias toward a group of people, and it makes me question what biases are placed on our current tools that are used to analyze the built environment? We still have biased tools like credit scoring systems, and likely property valuations that devalue Black-owned homes, thus it seems like Brown’s ideas of the past are also of the present.
Brown’s chapter on Appraisal Manuals showcased how “Looking” or “Observing” were the primary tools to determine standards of value established in housing markets and neighborhood classifications. This process made clear how these operations disguised the racial and discriminatory violence of these standards through the language of empirical data and a mythical “apolitical figure” in the form of the appraiser who was not to be held accountable for the decisions made. Brown continues this discussion by illustrating how observations in reported accounts of segregated neighborhoods reinforced the standards of “success” and “healthy” places through notions of whiteness seen in the works of Jane Jacobs and Thomas Pynchon, who through their accounts of Boston’s North End and Watts, fail to account for how their own identities create a bias of experience and exposure where their presence as white figures in these spaces entitles them with an inherent “Right to the City”. The concept I refer to is based on the work of Henri Lefebvre who argued that all inhabitants have a right to shape, occupy, and use urban spaces while challenging the idea that these spaces should be fully controlled by market forces. I see this present in the example of Jane Jacobs, who is treated amiably during her visit to the North End and experiences a sense of freedom to exist and complete her observations without anyone questioning her right to be in the space. A strong contrast to the Blockbusting Methods of the administration that reveal how marginalized communities continue to be stripped of these rights with acts of violence enacted upon them through the process of alienation and criminalization as seen through the experience of black bodies during these appraisal periods when they were “invited” or paid to occupy space to lower the value of the home and neighborhood (194).
Chapter 6 of Adrienne Brown’s The Residential is Racial considers the role of representation in exposing covert systems of discrimination by comparing methodologies including survey, fiction, and screenplay. An interesting recurring point in the chapter talks about how systemic issues are difficult to represent given no clear singular villain on which to concentrate blame: It may be “easier to reduce the machinery of dispossession to a single immediate foe than to face its enormity” (Brown 290). The main challenge these forms of representation contend with seems to be how to balance the relationship between the micro (individual landlords, realtors, government officials, corporations, developers, banks, third-party lenders, tenants, homeowners, etc. etc. in aggregate) and the macro (the overarching systems of dispossession and discrimination). Testing was the most literal approach, relying on the physical compilation of several individual (although impersonal) encounters to reveal a trend, the resulting shape of which is then interpreted as “the overarching system”. The idea of having no singular villain has interesting implications when carried into the medium of fiction, where the standard protagonist-antagonist dynamic must be subverted to construct a portrait of “the larger system”. In Kristin Hunter’s The Landlord, Elgar is not portrayed as the villain. He can’t even be necessarily read as a symbol of “the larger system”, but is rather a helpless, naive cog within it. Hunter’s method of representation “involves teaching readers to pay attention to the minor details reiterating the omnipresence of the machinery’s presence despite Elgar’s (satirical, ironic) understanding of himself as the star of the show” (Brown 289). Institutional racism’s “saturating uneventfulness” is illustrated through the contrast against a more privileged character’s self-absorption and out-of-touchedness (Brown 289). The Landlord example underscores the efficacy of narrative-based approaches (as opposed to “anti-narratival”/”empirical” approaches like testing) and makes me wonder about how other mediums beyond text (art, music, design, photo-journalism?) can help to paint a clearer, more accessible image of “the machinery”. The Landlord also raises questions about the concept of “the machinery” as a whole. The idea of “no singular villain” to some degree shifts blame from individual agents to some abstract, unconscious entity which Brown calls “the machinery” or “the system”. I feel like this interpretation begins to downplay the undeniably active role these agents play in upholding that very system, instead painting them as at best unwilling and at worst unconscious subjects.
In the selections from The Residential is Racial, I found it difficult not to recall my own upbringing. I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, Park Ridge, nestled just between the city’s boundaries and O’Hare airport. Chicago is known as one of the most segregated cities in the country, and growing up in a northwest suburb I found this to be true. In my elementary and middle schools, I would say there was typically 4-5 people of color in each class. And what I think Brown so succinctly illustrates in The Residential is Racial, at midcentury “who counted as white [was remade] but the very measures of whiteness itself, moving away from blood and ancestry and toward performance, appearance, and location. Likewise, the perceivability of blackness as something describable on a standardized form took priority over anthropological or genealogical racial knowledge driving its measurement decades prior.” (174) Suburbia instills a mandate of sameness on its inhabitants. Though there were a few families and people of color in my neighborhood, to my recollection, their race was secondary to their performance of sameness or their performance of whiteness. I do not pretend to speak for these folks, but looking back on my childhood it’s hard not to ignore how lacking my neighborhood was in genuine demographic diversity because the suburban fabric encouraged sameness.
The reading also reminded me about some contemporary discussions about housing, in particular affordable housing. A dichotomy I am interested in more broadly is how some of the staunchest opponents of affordable housing developments are liberals. While concerns about contextuality and density might be well-meaning, it is hard not to deny much of the conversation about affordable housing implies not wanting a “certain type of person” in the neighborhood. To me, this attitude reveals a level of performative respectability that is encouraged and required within some communities, even some urban communities. And performative respectability is completely rooted in wealth, class, and ultimately, race. Even though we have the Fair Housing Act and open-faced bigotry is unacceptable (at least, for liberals), the individualism central to our understanding of property ownership creates exclusionary attitudes, similar to those described by Brown in The Residential is Racial.
Adrienne Brown’s The Residential is Racial cuts right ot the quick to talk about the proliferation of racist, classist biases through aesthetics. From the1920’s to the 1960’s, this was done by foisting very specific value propositions onto the built environment, elevating the value of modernist ideals and denigrating the value of anything “other”. There’s an obvious danger in empirically examining almost anything that isn’t raw data, and to apply the framework of science to something as subjective as the occupation of space seems wild to “us” now (granted, “we” are in an echochamber that would maybe feel more strongly about this concept than others). Forget the conversation of taste or tradition beyond the confines of Corb plans or Meisian steel and glazing.
It feels impossible to talk about blackness and modernism together without talking about Pruitt-Igoe (an obsession of mine). In this case, an entire minority neighborhood of st. Louis was marked as a slum, leveled, and replaced by a complex of high-modernist apartments. In a deeply paternalistic gesture, those in power erased a way of living that they determined to be lesser, built what they believed to go ‘good’ and ‘right’, and left. In some way, this feels like giving the keys to what they consider to be a really nice stick-shift to someone who only knows how to drive an automatic and telling them to drive across the country. Good luck? And if they destroy the transmission it’s their fault. And they’re stupid and tacky for only having driven automatics for generations.
The relationship between state visibility, citizenship, and freedom are structured differently across the analysis of segregation in suburban housing and displacement in the city’s residences, yet compounded within the practices of today. Housing practices today are a legacy of the practices of the past, a combination of a hypervisibility that prevents full citizenship even if given the economical means and an institutional structured to be invisible in order to deny the ability to achieve economic security.
In Chapter 5, which is set in the 1950s, Brown writes that progress, which I infer to be a greater progress as rights as a citizenship, must be gained through property ownership, as it is what structures economic mobility within America. Yet to accept this singular path, a compromise of humanity to assimilate must be made. Browne notes that the reactions to the dehumanizing intolerable condition of the hypervisibility of existing in that state can be found in “acts of rebellion or self-exile.” (237) Visibility in this context enforces what Claudia Rankine might call inability to fully belong when the self is constantly read and felt as a product of history, not as a human with interests, love, and desires.
A decade later, in the 1960’s, Brown analyzes how discriminatory practices within housing rental in the city are made invisible through layers of structure. The invisibility of an antagonist, removing the ability to enact change through direct action, while revealing the institutional practices that the state seeks to disguise. By representing the aesthetics, or ‘producing a commons’ of the new senses required (274) becomes a way to navigate the discriminatory practices.
When I first skimmed through the readings, one question immediately came to mind regarding Rockwell’s illustration New Kids in the Neighborhood: If the theme is integration, why are they apart? At first glance, the image could just as easily depict segregation rather than integration. This is not only due to the physical separation of the children within the composition but also the act of “looking,” which Browne discusses extensively in Chapter 4. The multiple set of gazing creates a sense of collective othering, making the scene feel inherently inequitable—almost voyeuristic. The multiple instances of what Browne terms “revelatory looking” introduce ambiguity into the painting’s message. While the era may have been shifting toward a more equitable future, institutionalized segregation persisted, upheld by seemingly neutral forces such as market practices and reformatory policies.
Chapter four of Brown’s book she highlights how certain scholars and thinkers have interacted and encouraged readers and planners to interact with Black and Non-White spaces. Towards the end she discusses that Jane Jacobs says that White people just need to observe more, but as Baldwin points out police officers in those areas are constantly observing. As someone who was at first impressed by Jacobs book, this book reminded me to think more critically. Just observing an area does not actually allow you to see that area and as Brown highlights it could just desensitize you to those issues. This reminded me of how we are inundated with images and videos of violent police brutality. We claim to bare witness, but change nothing, have these images perhaps just helped us accept this as a reality? I am curious how we can move past these observations and think. through helaing. Being from the South I think often about how segregation created and formed not only my city, but the entire state and region. The south and the entire country never actually had a racial reckoning or an attempt to come together and acknowledge the pain. There were no reparations, there was no healing, and the racial tensions remain. How can city planners and cities themselves help us through these histories, both by giving power back, but also by attempting to show us our shared humanity. I think I also struggle with the fact that private property is to root of many of the issues that we have discussed in this class, but I am still grappling with how to move through these systems and implement healing into the urban form.
Safransky’s City After Property illuminates a modern display of the false narratives around home ownership that Adrienne Brown brings up in her work. Specifically, Brown writes about the feeling of white superiority around owning property, resulting in a financial system that requires home ownership a bedrock of financial stability. This then encouraged Black Americans, forced out of previous home ownership opportunities, to pursue ownership as well – only to find the neighborhoods they move to depreciate in value upon arrival, receive poorly maintained street services, and exploitative home financing. The financial stability all but promised to the residents resulted in financial extraction. All the while, the shift to home ownership formed a social order outcome desired by its architects – a homogenization of how to live: in stable, single family homes. What Safransky then writes about in Detroit shows a recent image of the ways that financial stability of home ownership is a false promise for racialized minorities.
I’m also interested in the role of literature and art in conceptualizing the home ownership experience from racialized views that Brown articulates. Specifically, I’m interested in the role that time plays in how fiction is used to understand broader social experiences. I tend to view fiction as a tool of hindsight – providing examples of a moment, but only known to be taken as a broader experience until time passes and it becomes history. Yet I’m interested in the alternative that Brown describes. I guess I’m left with an idea that the role of a piece in history is up to the readers.
Brown’s chapter on Appraisal Manuals showcased how “Looking” or “Observing” were the primary tools to determine standards of value established in housing markets and neighborhood classifications. This process made clear how these operations disguised the racial and discriminatory violence of these standards through the language of empirical data and a mythical “apolitical figure” in the form of the appraiser who was not to be held accountable for the decisions made. Brown continues this discussion by illustrating how observations in reported accounts of segregated neighborhoods reinforced the standards of “success” and “healthy” places through notions of whiteness seen in the works of Jane Jacobs and Thomas Pynchon, who through their accounts of Boston’s North End and Watts, fail to account for how their own identities create a bias of experience and exposure where their presence as white figures in these spaces entitles them with an inherent “Right to the City”. The concept I refer to is based on the work of Henri Lefebvre who argued that all inhabitants have a right to shape, occupy, and use urban spaces while challenging the idea that these spaces should be fully controlled by market forces. I see this present in the example of Jane Jacobs, who as a white woman, is treated amiably during her visit to the North End and experiences a sense of freedom to exist and complete her observations without anyone questioning her right to be in the space. A strong contrast to the Blockbusting Methods of the administration that reveal how marginalized communities continue to be stripped of these rights with acts of violence enacted upon them through the process of alienation and criminalization as seen through the experience of black bodies during these appraisal periods when they were “invited” or paid to occupy space to lower the value of the home and neighborhood (194).
It’s enlightening to read these chapters of Adrienne Brown’s book, The Residential is Racial and be exposed to the false reality that interpersonal conflict is what a large majority of Americans believe is the primary cause of racism in our built environment, yet behind the scenes, our institutions and policies are the primary factors that covertly divide us. It’s scary to think that as time goes on, racism becomes harder and harder to see within the systems at play. Even when we think things are getting “better” there will always be inherent policies of the past that sneak into the future. Between each data set we’ve studied in class, whether Sanborn Maps, Appraisal manuals, etc. there is always intrinsic bias toward a group of people, and it makes me question what biases are placed on our current tools that are used to analyze the built environment? We still have biased tools like credit scoring systems, and likely property valuations that devalue Black-owned homes, thus it seems like Brown’s ideas of the past are also of the present.
Brown’s chapter on Appraisal Manuals showcased how “Looking” or “Observing” were the primary tools to determine standards of value established in housing markets and neighborhood classifications. This process made clear how these operations disguised the racial and discriminatory violence of these standards through the language of empirical data and a mythical “apolitical figure” in the form of the appraiser who was not to be held accountable for the decisions made. Brown continues this discussion by illustrating how observations in reported accounts of segregated neighborhoods reinforced the standards of “success” and “healthy” places through notions of whiteness seen in the works of Jane Jacobs and Thomas Pynchon, who through their accounts of Boston’s North End and Watts, fail to account for how their own identities create a bias of experience and exposure where their presence as white figures in these spaces entitles them with an inherent “Right to the City”. The concept I refer to is based on the work of Henri Lefebvre who argued that all inhabitants have a right to shape, occupy, and use urban spaces while challenging the idea that these spaces should be fully controlled by market forces. I see this present in the example of Jane Jacobs, who is treated amiably during her visit to the North End and experiences a sense of freedom to exist and complete her observations without anyone questioning her right to be in the space. A strong contrast to the Blockbusting Methods of the administration that reveal how marginalized communities continue to be stripped of these rights with acts of violence enacted upon them through the process of alienation and criminalization as seen through the experience of black bodies during these appraisal periods when they were “invited” or paid to occupy space to lower the value of the home and neighborhood (194).