Zoning and Displacement: The Frederick Douglass Boulevard Rezoning

This walk is a story about progress. It’s a story about the ideas surrounding growth and diversification in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood against the backdrop of behavior that led to the displacement of the indigenous people of that neighborhood. This walk is also a story about how the ideology of revitalization was used to reconcile ideas that were out of sync with behavior: a story about a rezoning plan along a single largely uninhabited avenue that brought about change along the streets; a story about how a rezoning promoted not by predatory developers and greedy outsiders, but, instead, a rezoning that was conceived and marketed by Harlem’s grassroots establishment who ended up serving the interests of the few while putting the interests of the many in harm’s way to revitalize a critical commercial corridor.