The two pieces before this one trace what a curriculum leaves out and which ideas about capability become common knowledge. This one is about where those ideas land when they combine with real institutional power -- not a syllabus anymore, an actual neighborhood.
Newark, NJ — NJIT and University Heights
The 1967 Newark riots grew directly out of existing bank redlining that already denied Black residents mortgages in the Central Ward.
[1] In the aftermath, the neighborhood was rapidly abandoned -- major insurers cut operations in the city by the mid-1970s, and decades of disinvestment followed.
[2] NJIT's own campus, University Heights, expanded into that same land, and the university's own institutional narrative credits its post-1967 "recovery" to that expansion. Central High School, which had stood on University Heights grounds, was eventually pushed off the campus entirely by 2010.
[3]
Baltimore, MD — Johns Hopkins, twice, fifty years apart
In the 1950s, Johns Hopkins displaced 1,100 families near its hospital, promising a "beautified neighborhood" for the displaced Black residents in return. The promise wasn't kept -- the land became medical offices and staff housing instead.
[4] Starting in 2001, Johns Hopkins co-founded the East Baltimore Development Initiative with the city to build a biotech and science park. Roughly 750-900 Black households, renters, and businesses were displaced across 88 acres of the historically Black Middle East neighborhood, using eminent domain -- the government's legal power to seize private property. The $1.8 billion initiative saw fewer than 1 in 10 displaced residents ever return; some first learned they were being relocated from the news, not from the university or city.
[5]
Los Angeles, CA — USC, ongoing right now
USC's continued expansion, including its "Village at USC" development, is documented as driving real displacement and gentrification in South LA -- an 18% decline in family households in one affected zip code, organized community opposition, residents with median incomes around $23,000 facing rising rents and property values they can't absorb.
[6] This is market-pressure displacement from rising land values rather than direct eminent-domain demolition, a different specific tool than Johns Hopkins used, but the same underlying mechanism: an institution's expansion outweighing an existing community's claim to the ground it already lived on.
The same belief system runs the other direction too -- not displacement, exclusion. Venice Park, in Atlantic City, is a different mechanism inside the same larger pattern. Black families weren't displaced from it; they were pushed into it, because redlining excluded them from buying property almost everywhere else in the city. It was built hastily on thinly filled marshland. In 1959, Elaine Scott's family became the first Black homeowners there. Federally and state-funded flood-protection investment went overwhelmingly to the boardwalk and, later, the casino side of the city; Venice Park's back-bay infrastructure was left to decay.[7] Same underlying belief about which people and which land are worth investing in -- just exclusion into neglected ground instead of removal from valuable ground.
Worth being precise: this isn't only a racial mechanism, even in America, even though race is where it hits hardest and most often here. The same basic pattern -- power deciding a lived place matters less than what it could become instead -- runs through the TVA's dam-building program in the 1930s and 40s, which displaced entire Appalachian communities, largely white, to create reservoirs.[8] It runs through interstate highway construction across the country, which frequently cut directly through working-class neighborhoods of every race because that land was cheaper to acquire and the residents had the least political power to stop it.[9] And it's the same mechanism already documented on this site in the Colorado River piece -- water rights, agricultural allocation, and a foreign company's access to Arizona groundwater, all decided by whoever actually held the power over that specific resource, largely independent of who was living on top of it.