Zoning and D[y]splacement: The Frederick Douglass Boulevard Rezoning

This walk is a story about progress. It is a story about the ideas of growth and diversification in a rapidly gentrifying working-class neighborhood against the backdrop of behavior that has led to the displacement of long-term residents of that neighborhood. This walk is about ideology and how it can be exploited to reconcile ideas that are out of sync with behavior: This tour examines a rezoning plan along a single largely uninhabited avenue that brought about change along the streets that intersect with the avenue. This tour asks: how a rezoning plan promoted not by predatory developers and greedy outsiders but instead was conceived and promoted by Harlem’s grassroots establishment ended up serving the interests of the many, while putting the interests of the few, who rely on underdevelopment as a barrier to change, in harm’s way?