We chatted with Dr. Willow Lung-Amam to discuss (mis)conceptions about suburban community development and the organizers fighting for equity in their communities.
To kick off, can you tell me about yourself and your work?
Willow: I am an associate professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland, and I run the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network, which helps practitioners support communities in managing change, particularly keeping small businesses in place in gentrifying neighborhoods. I’m also Director of Community Development at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education. A lot of my research focuses on questions of neighborhood change and inequality, and the politics of redevelopment – especially in rapidly changing, often gentrifying, neighborhoods – and the racial, ethnic, and immigration politics that happen on the ground in these places.
I bring a framework of anti-racism into every aspect of my work. I come from a family of activists, from both an immigrant background and a Black American family, so I see it as the work of my generation to help make the world better for those who have the least.
So you have a new book that came out recently! Can you share more about the topic and its origin story?
Willow: My latest book is called The Right to Suburbia: Combating Gentrification on the Urban Edge. DC is dear to my heart – it’s where some of my extended family has been for generations. I felt called to tell a story about this place, one that hasn’t been told very often.
When we think about gentrification, we often picture urban centers, and most of our scholarship has focused on cities. But when we center our scholarship on one geography, that means we’re missing a whole host of actors, conditions, and politics that matter to how we respond. We might miss the investments we need to make into tenant organizing or small business protections.
Having spent a lot of time in the DC suburbs, I knew there were places outside of the urban core that were gentrifying, that families and workers and small businesses were struggling to survive. I wanted to tell a story about what’s happening on the ground, how communities are responding, and with what tools. Suburbs are today where most Black and Brown people, immigrants, and people living in poverty live. But it’s a neglected area in scholarship and policymaking because of its history and stereotypes. Inequality is moving; it’s not stuck in the inner city. As suburbs change, so do the spaces where inequality takes shape, yet many of our assumptions and policy responses are stuck in stereotypes around suburbs.
Can you speak more to those narratives that you’d like to challenge about the suburbs, and what are the true stories you’re hoping to uplift?
Willow: Even that poverty exists in the suburbs. We have this narrative of white picket fences, middle-class families, stability. But the foreclosure crisis hit Black and Brown families in the suburbs harder than anywhere else, because those families had long been denied opportunities to buy, then were flooded with unsustainable mortgages. We need to question the narrative of universal prosperity in the suburbs – opportunity for whom? What does it take to access that opportunity? These places were built originally for the middle class, so they are car dependent with limited public transportation, but families may not have cars. It’s harder to target social service supports in suburbs since communities are more dispersed and diverse. There’s an idea that everyone is doing well in the suburbs, that individuals can pull themselves up from their bootstraps and become part of the American middle class. But opportunity moves around the metropolitan region, and it follows communities that are privileged. And those populations are moving too. There’s a real danger in not paying deep attention to the landscapes of inequality and how and where they move. And the fact is that inequality has historically followed Black and Brown people wherever they go. In order to change that, we have to be deeply invested in understanding the conditions of different communities and how they take shape.
What are some of the ways that Black and Brown communities are making their communities more just and equitable, in spite of the challenges?
Willow: I center my story on three communities in Maryland: downtown Silver Spring, Wheaton, and Langley Park. I show an arc of equitable development organizing as communities learn from one another and do the work of building bigger, bolder, and better anti-displacement policies.
In downtown Silver Spring, Impact Silver Spring was born out of the fights over redevelopment in the 1990s. They built an organizing vehicle to respond to the displacement of residents and small businesses and helped push the county to stand up a small business support program. But in Silver Spring, this policy did not support that many businesses to remain in place.
But in Wheaton, Maryland, that same policy was already in place, and organizers were able to leverage it more and improve it to meet more of the needs of small businesses, especially Latino-owned ones. In the third community, Langley Park was being impacted by a new light rail line. More than a decade after its original inception, activists could leverage that policy to stand up more robust protections for small businesses. Some of the early policies that communities fought for are the same policies that organizers today are working to improve upon. We need to build the bones and tools, and that often happens by organizations responding to a community need.
What do you want community development practitioners to know about your work?
Willow: Pay attention to where inequality is moving. The old narrative no longer fits, that suburbs are places of prosperity and inner cities are disinvested. Inequality shifts constantly, and our interventions need to follow. The challenges facing suburban Black and Brown communities today parallel the intentional disinvestment urban communities faced in past decades. We must realize these changes aren’t inevitable; they’re shaped by policy and investment decisions. What looks like opportunity for some can also push communities out. I hope folks see the need to defy their notions about where we should be doing the work and what the work looks like, in order to center the communities that are starving for the resources and attention needed to really change this trajectory.
It’s crucial to spotlight what communities are doing on the ground – tenants forming associations for better conditions, longstanding small businesses acting as resources to others, folks providing legal help to one another because of predatory landlords. These efforts keep communities alive through disinvestment. When reinvestment finally comes, these same people are often treated as dispensable, as if they couldn’t adapt. But they kept their neighborhoods afloat. So why aren’t they the beneficiaries or drivers of that change? We should challenge that narrative of inevitable change, and look at whose expense that change is happening. These stories need to be uplifted and these communities supported – not left behind.
Dr. Willow Lung-Amam is an Associate Professor in the Urban Studies and Planning Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she also serves as Director of Community Development at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education and Director of the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network. Her scholarship focuses on how urban and suburban policies and plans contribute to and can address social inequality, particularly in neighborhoods undergoing rapid racial and economic change.