From Cultural Displacement to Communal Erasure: Illuminating Gentrification as a Threat to Safety Beyond Gentrifying Neighborhoods in a Mid-sized Chocolate City

Scholars have paid minimal attention to the impact of gentrification on Black Americans’ perceptions of safety beyond gentrifying neighborhoods. This article introduces “safety reimagination” as a way of documenting how conceptions of safety encompass multiple harms that include–but are not limited to–protections from crime and violence. Leveraging insights generated from 83 interviews with Black adults from diverse educational backgrounds and neighborhoods of residence in Cincinnati, OH, I show that Black Cincinnatians in my sample view gentrification as a threat to their personal and communal safety in three domains: (1) within gentrifying neighborhoods, (2) in non-gentrifying neighborhoods, and (3) across the city of Cincinnati. Not only do participants find that gentrification contributes to their displacement and alienation from gentrifying areas, but it also contributes to the City of Cincinnati’s active deprioritization of the safety concerns of non-gentrifying neighborhoods, anti-Blackness, and city-wide Black communal erasure.