LAUSR

ABSTRACT Gentrification critiques are often framed around direct displacement from neighborhoods due to rising rents and home values. The loss of affordable housing is depoliticized by contrasting the history of urban neighborhoods against the potential for economic vitality. However, physical displacement is only one facet of changing neighborhoods that has clear policy responses—the preservation and creation of affordable housing. The contests over public spaces that have emerged concurrent to the preservation of affordability in some gentrifying neighborhoods have created social and cultural displacement. Like its physical counterpart, this displacement is also depoliticized as the promise of “vibrant” future neighborhoods and its counterfactual, the dangerous and disinvested neighborhood, is pitted against the loss of culture in gentrifying neighborhoods. This article investigates the ways in which cultural and social displacement occur in public spaces in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC. Not only do no residents use the specters of crime and disinvestment to depoliticize the exclusion of long-term African American and Latino residents from public spaces, but planners and policymakers accept and become complicit in these changes. Specifically, the depoliticization of gentrification in Columbia Heights is done through the use of youth and public safety.