Wealth Extraction
Articulating the reasoning behind the terminology of "wealth extraction":
If wealth is built through home ownership and we understand that the white black wealth gap
We have described Wealth Appropriation in various papers in the archive. The term wealth appropriation was pursued as a community member, Dwayne Keyes asked what was known and documented of wealth appropriation during a lecture/presentation on urban renewal in 2020. With this prompt, it was decided to pursue this line of inquiry, research, in our first Providence Housing Course on Development, Displacement and Gentrification. We found that there is a paucity of research in the area of calculation of wealth appropriated in various acts of displacement of Black communities throughout the country and thus little methodological methods developed to calculate. As we research in different years, the sense of targeting can be seen in the displacement and loss of wealth replicated through time. Thus, it can more appropriately be called wealth extraction, where the property and wealth accumulated by Black families is targeted by the larger community and various processes are developed often through predatory practices, ie, the predatory lending practices of 2007, is extracted from Black communities. Thus as we researched documented wealth appropriation during urban renewal we now prefer to see it as the repeated practices of wealth extraction from Black communities.
Our initial inquiry was on Wealth Appropriation, a term used by a community member wondering about the history and asking if there had ever been an analysis of this in terms of what occurred in Lippitt Hill in Providence. In 2020, research had not revealed such calculations in any communities where Urban Renewal had occurred. Our work is one of the first attempts to do so and should act as models to build on. But in addition our work evolved to consider much displacement of Black Families as another process of wealth extraction by predatory practices on vulnerable oppressed peoples.
We started our discussion of Wealth Appropriation as follows. American city, communities of color have been repeatedly displaced, preyed upon, villainized, destabilized while experiencing the eradication and appropriation of their businesses and their homes.. This report’s chapter on Wealth Appropriation defines “a process where governments or private organizations deprive communities of color of wealth and opportunities to build wealth,” examining this phenomenon “through the lens of intentional housing policies on the part of local and state governments and private organizations,” including but not limited to, “redlining, disinvestment and intentional “blighting,”and urban renewal projects” (Butler and Korfmacher). Understanding Brown’s role in the process of Wealth Appropriation involves a recognition of its indirect effects. The demolition and displacement of the Lippitt Hill community, which this chapter examines in depth, paved the way for the University Heights development. Though the university did not itself conduct the demolition, it benefited from the development’s presence in the immediate area, with a consistent source of tenants perhaps incentivizing the project. This chapter highlights the ways by which the value of land in Providence, and the appropriation of that value, are processes deeply interconnected with the presence of the university.