David Rotenstein,
Atlanta, GA.
In April 2012, I sat in an elderly African American woman’s Decatur, Ga.,dining room with a digital recorder asking her questions about gentrification in her neighborhood. For more than a decade, developers have been buying small homes and tearing them down to build large new homes some people call “McMansions.” The small homes typically belong to elderly African American women struggling to pay the city’s escalating property taxes as property values rise with each house that falls. I asked the 80-year woman, “Has anybody asked you or some of the older people how you feel about the development?” She replied, “Not really. Because it’s sort of – you know, it’s kind of a shock. You know, all of a sudden the next thing you know the house is torn down and another one is put up quickly.” You can hear excerpts from the 2012 interview and see the teardowns she was describing at the National Council for Public History’s blog: http://bit.ly/ZzptBu
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