Creating communities amid crisis: Racial capitalism, school gentrification, and resistance in Seattle

Abstract

Metropolitan racial demographics in the U.S. are shifting. Racialized processes have brought more White people to urban areas, while suburbs have become more racially diverse, changing the racial composition of schools. Within, outside, in spite, and because of these processes, people “make place.” Place-making is a political process in which people create places and their attached meanings within an uneven terrain of power (Manzo & Desanto, 2021), of which schools are significant factors (Lipman, 2011). This place-making occurs under racial capitalism, or a political economy organized around and productive of racial difference. This study investigates the nexus of residential zoning and schools to understand the work which sustains school communities. While education scholarship has paid much attention to issues of spatial equity like racial segregation, less attention has been paid to the ways shifting metropolitan demographics and housing affordability impact schools and possibilities for racial equity (Pearman, 2020). In response to spatial inequity, scholars have cited the need for community organizing to create equitable neighborhoods and schools (Anyon, 2014; Gilmore, 2022; Warren, 2005). This study examines these everyday actions by people connected to schools to understand how they respond to changing demographics.The literature review and conceptual framework brings together literature on racial capitalism, critical spatial analysis, and schools in gentrifying areas. I aim to contextualize gentrification within longer histories of spatial injustice, relate this to spatial justice in schools, and the ways people and policy inform and shape these places. From this literature, I build my conceptual framework, which draws from racial capitalism, placemaking, and spatial imaginaries to trace how power flows in school-communities from macro-policy contexts to micro-everyday activities and back again in a dialectical process. This literature review and conceptual framework highlight how further research can illuminate the possibilities for just school-communities situated in racialized, capitalist systems. Using Seattle as a case of school gentrification in a multiracial city, I investigate how policy and people’s everyday actions have shaped school-communities across the city, but particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods with majority people of color. In terms of policy, I focus on the Comprehensive Plan, a major land use policy revision, with planning beginning in 2022 and the final policy due to pass in 2025. For schools, I focus on the district’s enrollment policies, involvement in housing (and lack thereof), and the response to the school budget deficit. Seattle is one of the fastest gentrifying cities in the United States, with the White population growing rapidly (Balk, 2019). This case study uses racial capitalism to understand how long histories of place-making show up in the policymaking process for residential rezoning. I ask the following research questions: 1) How has Seattle’s housing and land use policy influenced schools and their political and economic contexts?; How do people on the ground conceive of schools’ political and economic contexts? 2) Do people such as parents, teachers, or school leaders connected to schools in gentrifying neighborhoods engage in placemaking and surface racialized ideas about space? If so, how? 3) How does race and class shape people’s placemaking in gentrifying school-communities? I find that city planners’ and the school district’s engagement with racist policy history does not create opportunities for change or repairing harm. Despite the ways housing and school policy mutually reinforce one another, SPS and OPCD do not collaborate across what I identify as a policy silo. This silo leads to a mismatch between rhetorical goals and actual implementation. I argue that, as Seattle policymakers fail to change exclusionary zoning and address its racist roots, they have contributed to the school enrollment crisis. Continuously increasing property values spurred by exclusionary zoning, coupled with the school enrollment and funding crises, show cracks in the logic of progressivism. I find people across Seattle engaged with both OPCD and SPS policy processes see schools as community anchors. This conception is racialized, with neighborhoods with more people of color more likely to describe their schools as community anchors. For interview participants, I find that they saw schools more readily as community anchors if families and teachers could live in close proximity to the school, if a significant amount of Black people were present at the school, and if schools had the cultural resources to support students of color. In terms of placemaking strategies, I find families rely on histories of experiencing racism to create a sense of belonging in the present, own a home, opt out of public school, and create parent networks. I find that principals and school staff in Seattle enact disruptive practices to keep schools accessible to students of color amid gentrification, but that these practices have limitations in their scope and reach. This study provides evidence that the experience of gentrification, displacement, and enrollment decline are historical, racialized, and classed projects. These findings confirm that gentrification impacts school-communities, despite the lack of targeted policies to address this. This study extends analyses of gentrification and schools by considering schools within their historical, political, and economic contexts. This study has implications for school-communities, school districts, city planners, and community organizers. As most major metropolitan areas face school enrollment decline and many also face housing crises. These implications, while specific to Seattle’s political and economic context, could therefore be relevant to other school-communities facing similar or interrelated challenges.