This podcasts discusses in detail urban renewal, gentrification, its relationship with power, control and immediate solutions. Urban Renewal has been one method that has contributed to the deurbanization of American cities starting in the 20th century and contemporary. Urban Renewal is an important federal policy that affected thousands of communities in hundreds of families causing internal displacement. Urban Renewal has been meant to achieve the ‘clearance’ of ‘blight’ and slum areas so that they can be rebuilt to maximize profit rather than for public land and housing be used for all communities despite economic class or color. Urban Renewal programs have disproportionately affected Afro (Eumelanin) communities leading to a historic slogan of saying “urban renewal is negro removal”. The consequences of this ongoing inhumane atrocity has exacerbated inequities with violence, economic instability, financial hardships, loss of social organizations, and psychological trauma. Furthering the dysfunction in communities or indigenous and native people across the world and nation. However, in the nations capital there is an ongoing threat of social dispossession that has caused a collapse in political action. In addition to this conversation and overview of the DC Comprehensive Plan will be discussed and evaluated. The Comprehensive Plan is D.C.’s largest planning document that guides the development of housing in the District. First created in 2006, it was designed to be rewritten every 20 years and was first amended in 2011. Citing concerns about increasing housing production in the city to match its growing population, Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office began amending the plan once more in May 2016, extending the document to a lengthy 1,500 pages.

An outpouring of public comments and grassroots campaigns delayed the amendments for nearly five years and led to many revisions, mostly focused on the plan’s impact on the displacement of Black and brown residents. D.C. Council is set to vote on the Comprehensive Plan Amendment Act of 2021 on May 4. “We cannot afford to preserve a status quo that has been displacing thousands of Black and brown D.C. families,” Lewis George said. At least 20,000 Black people were pushed out of the city between 2000 – 2013, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. To learn moor tune in now !