Giving Them the Old One-Two: Gentrification and the K.O. of Impoverished Urban Dwellers of Color
![handle is hein.journals/howlj46 and id is 441 raw text is: Giving Them the Old One-Two:
Gentrification and the K.O. of
Impoverished Urban Dwellers
of Color
JOHN A. POWELL AND MARGUERITE L. SPENCER*
INTRODUCTION
A Fresh Fields has come to my neighborhood, and in spite of my
instincts I'm tickled and excited. I walked down the street, the day
after the store opened, to be dazzled by the open space, wide aisles,
shining fruit. I snacked on cheeses and vegetables .... It has, a
neighbor says to me... improved the quality of life in the neighbor-
hood. I want to ask him if it improves the quality of life for every-
one, but I am too busy munching to engage in debate. The fact is
that his comment has made me uneasy, as has the coming of Fresh
Fields. It signals a change in the neighborhood, a shifting demo-
graphic, a different population .... I have even developed an index
of demographic shift, which is the white boy walking dog index
[and] it is rising . . . . Will those who see the neighborhood as
gleaming and upscale now try to get rid of others who see the neigh-
borhood, simply, as the place where they live and survive? How
does a gleaming Fresh Fields accommodate the men who begin to
line up at the mission on 14th and R, trying to find out if they have a
bed for the night. How does it coexist with the two or three men
who fold themselves and their belongings into the top of the stairs
at the Methodist church on 14th and Corcoran? While we who
* john a. powell is former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union,
and Founder of the Institute on Race & Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School. He
is currently the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at Ohio State
University's Moritz College of Law, as well as the Founding Director of the University's Kirwan
Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.
Marguerite L. Spencer, A.M.R.S., J.D., is Senior Researcher at the Institute on Race &
Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Adjunct Lecturer in Theology at the
University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota. Her most recent course offerings include Theol-
ogy and Public Discourse and the Christian Faith and the Legal Profession.
2003 Vol. 46 No. 3](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/howlj46&div=21&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
Giving Them the Old One-Two: Gentrification and the K.O. of Impoverished Urban Dwellers of Color
Giving Them the Old One-Two: Gentrification and the K.O. of Impoverished Urban Dwellers of Color