Gentrification, the calculated reclamation of black urban spaces for financially affluent new homeowners, is spreading through black communities across America. After years of economic oppression and deprivation, the black community now stands at the edge of perhaps the greatest community dispersal in its history. Gentrification transforms the built environment, displaces masses of black people, steals capital from the most vulnerable, and breaks the once-sustaining bonds of community. The Anti-Gentrification Project is committed to fighting gentrification and its consequences by creating an archive that tells the story of how gentrification operates in cities like Cleveland and Durham, and also provides strategies for fighting that process. This is a digital storytelling project grounded in urgent need for action and explicitly designed as a call to action.

The next phase of this project will include the following components. (1) Create a digital, interactive map of stories and oral histories that provide insight into the strategies that make and unmake gentrification. (2) Assist activists, community organizations, and city officials create alternative narratives of sustainable living through inclusive, habitable spaces. (3) Construct a database on how to preserve historical and cultural spaces to provide one example pathway to future options for sustainability.