New Books: The Right to Suburbia
Tune in for our conversation with Willow Lung-Amam, author of The Right to Suburbia: Combating Gentrification on the Urban Edge, published in 2024 by UC Press. The Right to Suburbia chronicles the efforts of community activists, political leaders, and community groups in three Washington, D.C.-area suburbs to push back on the displacement effects of new development in their communities.
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Willow Lung Amam
I've only developed a desire to study suburbs in part because it's just this prolific part of our metropolitan environment and something that urban scholars don't like to study.
And so I think it just deserves our attention, especially as the majority of black and brown and immigrant communities and folks who are living in poverty actually live in these environments. And yet we pay them very little attention, or we tend to stereotype them.
Emily
Hi, this is Emily Holloway, and you’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by the journal Urban Affairs Review. You just heard from Willow Lung-Amam, author of “The Right to Suburbia: Combating Gentrification on the Urban Edge,” from University of California Press.
Willow Lung Amam
My name is Willow Lung Amam, and I'm an associate professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland. There I serve as director of the Small Business Anti Displacement Network. I also direct a project known as the Urban Equity Collaborative and my research focuses on issues of urban inequality, especially in areas that are experiencing rapid demographic and economic changes, and broadly around issues of urban inequality, especially racial inequality and immigration.
Emily
Thanks for joining us today, Willow. I guess to get us started, could you talk a bit about why you decided to look at the Washington DC area?
Willow Lung Amam
So, there's a couple reasons, I think. One, I am married to a native Washingtonian, have been lived in and been around the DC region for over two decades. And this is the place that I come home and very much deeply care about its history, its culture, and its future, so as a community-based researcher and someone who likes to use research as a way to shape action on the ground and policy, I also prefer to write about places that I care about, and so DC was a natural one for me. It's also the place that I currently live and I believe in contributing to your local community.
Another reason is simply because I thought the story needed to be written. I wrote my first book on Silicon Valley, another region where I spent a lot of time. I went to undergrad at Stanford University and did my PhD at Berkeley.
So I spent a few years writing the book Trespassers: Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia, that really focused on one Silicon Valley community that had experienced massive immigration and wrote about some of the underlying politics of immigration as it played out in a series of battles over the reshaping of the built environment, over homes and schools and shopping malls, and so forth. And that was a suburban community. So, the thrust of that book was over how suburbs are changing, but the demographics of that book looked a lot different than what the DC area looks like, it was predominantly Asian American new immigrants that were arriving into Silicon Valley, predominantly upper middle- or upper-income immigrants moving into white communities. And when I came back to the DC region after having spent some time away, I thought that I really wanted to do a book about DC. I really wanted to focus on its suburbs, and I thought that there was a different story to be told than what we typically hear about in the DC area, which are the central city narrative, the national capital narrative, and I think that erases a large majority of our region that lives outside of that.
And that that I thought needed a focus. And then I think a third reason is because I'm a gentrification scholar and I read a lot of the gentrification literature, and it mostly focuses on central cities and I think that it's important that we think about a process of neighborhood change as happening outside of central cities and in many different types of places. And when they happen in different places, it's important that we not just know that it happens there, but we know why that's important. And so, I wrote the book to center the question about why it's important that gentrification is not simply a center city problem or process.
Emily
I’m really glad you brought up that last point – there is a ton of literature on gentrification right now from a lot of different fields. But they also tend to share a fairly common narrative and geography – they look at cities and urban neighborhoods. But in your work, you’re interested in the suburbs – how do suburbs challenge this? And really, what I’d like to get into a bit is the geography of the suburb itself – you know, is it really distinct from the urban, is it an extension of urban form and processes, is it a historically specific phenomenon?
Willow Lung Amam
I have long been a scholar of the suburbs, in part because I think it is this area that is not so discrete from the city, and I'm not even from the suburbs. So,I've only developed a desire to study suburbs in part because it's just this prolific part of our metropolitan environment and something that urban scholars don't like to study.
And so I think it just deserves our attention, especially as the majority of black and brown and immigrant communities and folks who are living in poverty actually live in these environments. And yet we pay them very little attention or we tend to stereotype them.
And our politics and our policies, and I think they deserve the attention of our of our scholarship. That said, there isn't sometimes that much to distinguish a city from a suburb except from for sometimes a municipal line. Sometimes the year that the housing was built, it's built in the post war era, we tend to think about it as a suburb or we have certain lines that we draw around here that the housing is built, we have certain lines that we often draw around density we have certain lines that we draw in our urban imagination around, , white picket fences and lawns. But the reality of that is, is that many of those things cross city and suburban lines. If we just look at the Washington, DC area, and I include a map of this in the book. If we just looked at it by housing density, there are areas of DC inside the DC line that appear to be suburban in terms of housing density and areas that are outside the DC border that we would traditionally call a suburb that actually have densities that are quite urban. So these are really false lines between cities and suburbs that we often draw, but there are certain markers that we typically look at in terms of housing density, year built and municipal status. So, I think when we're thinking about urban policy and we're thinking about practices, it behooves us to think outside of those lines that we often draw.
Emily
And so with regards to gentrification as a process we almost instinctively associate with urban geographies, how does the suburb unsettle or challenge these understandings?
Willow Lung Amam
So not only the story of gentrification, but I think I saw it especially in the second chapter of the book, which is a background chapter to really go back and say, not only do we have the tendency to think about contemporary gentrification through the lens of a center city narrative, but we've also sort of thought about the history of displacement as being an urban phenomenon, but redlining didn’t just take place in the city. Urban renewal didn't just take place in the city. Highway clearance of black communities did not just take place in the city. Blockbusting didn’t just take place in the city. These are phenomenon that have worked across our metropolitan area and really have followed black and brown communities wherever they have gone and have sometimes pushed communities from the suburbs into concentrated poverty in the city, but has also displaced suburban communities to other suburban communities. So, I really try to sort of switch the lens through which we see many of these policies because what we're calling contemporary gentrification today is not all that different from policies of the past that have serially dispossessed and displaced these communities and pushed them further into areas of disinvestment and neglect.
And so I really try to refrain this way in which we're centering cities and sort of all of our understandings of various kinds of policies and practices, not dismissing the fact that they have historically predominantly affected urban neighborhoods, but also trying to understand that it hasn't been an exclusively policies that have been about central city neighborhoods.
Emily
Great, that’s really helpful. So, moving into the book itself a bit, you have three case studies in the DC suburbs. Can you talk about how you landed on these places, how they fit into the overall argument you’re making throughout the book?
Willow Lung Amam
So the book itself is a book about gentrifying suburbs. It's about suburban transformation and how suburbs that have undergone processes of massive redevelopment have experienced that redevelopment.
Who it has benefited, who it has hurt and how communities that have borne the weight of that redevelopment have organized to fight back against some of those uneven costs of redevelop.
I profile in the book three communities that have undergone massive redevelopment in the DC suburbs. These are all Maryland communities, and I talked about what the redevelopment process looked like, and how it felt on the ground, and what kind of impacts it had, particularly for affordable housing and small businesses.
Then what the organizing looked like in terms of the grassroots groups that emerged to fight for a more equitable process of redevelopment in these three communities and what changes were made or were not made that the community had asked for in each of the three cases. The communities are downtown Silver Spring in Montgomery County, Maryland; Wheaton, Maryland, which is also in Montgomery County; and the international corridor, which kind of spans Montgomery County and Prince Georges County, but I largely focus on the Langley Park side, which is in Prince Georges County.
And I focus on these three communities because I'm familiar with each of the three communities I lived, worked, or still work in the three communities. There are also three communities that I call connected case studies where the lessons from one case really did inform the organizing and the policy that went into future case studies so they really did show what I hope to show in the book, which is and a growing equitable development movement in the DC suburbs. And I think through the connections among the organizations and through the way that policy and tools were developed over the three case studies we see get to see that quite clearly.
So there are also three communities that were in different stages of redevelopment. Silver Spring was sort of an earlier case where redevelopment sort of kicked off in the 80s and 90s, and has already gone through at least one major transformative period, Wheaton is a case is sort of where after downtown Silver Spring got finished, it became the next county priority for redevelopment. And saw sort of fits and starts of redevelopment, but would you see in Wheaton today is some of the results of those ongoing efforts and then the international corridor in Langley Park in particular is an ongoing fight over the future of that community. So these are all three communities in different stages of redevelopment where you can see the wins, the losses, what was tried. And how communities work at different stages to organize?
Emily
Right, so you just brought up the importance of these different community organizing efforts, these social movements in the suburbs you study. Again, I think these are really commonly associated, by scholars and the public, with urban spaces. The urban is sort of presumed to have the right kind of geography for organizing, due to the density, diversity, visibility, and so on. So what do you think is unique about suburban social movements? What can we learn from them?
Willow Lung Amam
I started the first chapter by just raising our attention to the Black Lives Matter movement and the that really started in Ferguson or really became an international movement in Ferguson that actually started in Sanford, FL, in a gated community before that, and so I think these are these are actually movements, many of our social movements are not just urban in nature and don't just aren't just sparked off or grow in urban environments but are actually suburban in nature because some of those same inequalities including police violence takes shape and suburbs too, and so one. I just think it's important to bring attention to that basic fact, because even calling them like urban social movements suggest that they don't happen in suburbs. But I do think when talking about anti displacement movement and how communities are organizing around a more equitable development platform, there are certain things that you need to pay attention to in suburbs. And one of the big ones is just capacity of organizing groups, nonprofit groups, folks that have the ability to outreach and engage diverse communities around a certain platform and many of these organizations that led the fights in each of these three communities were very small, had very little capacity, were just growing their roots within these communities because these are not communities that have historically, had a large immigrant, black and brown community, so these are they're very diverse communities. And so organizing is very challenged to reach a community that is diverse and dispersed across a large area and oftentimes without the same capacity that we have built up over decades in the central city, many of the organizations that have worked in central cities have been built over decades and battles that have spanned decades and central cities, and they've built relationships with communities through those battles, build trust and rapport and the ability to do quick outreach to those communities that is not the case in any of the three communities that I profiled in downtown Silver Spring, in fact, Silver Spring was not even an organization at the time that redevelopment began in downtown Silver Spring, it was simply one person that sat on a steering committee and said we need more diverse voices in this redevelopment process in their communities that are being impacted or not being heard, she started Impact Silver Spring to be able to get more voices on there and this organization did make some strides in downtown Silver Spring, but I call it a case of a little bit of “too little, too late,” because this organization was really struggling to get its bearings in the community as it was organizing over things like affordable housing and small business protections. In the case of Wheaton, you had the Latino economic development that led the Fair Redevelopment Coalition, they were initially brought in by the county to provide technical assistance to small businesses and ended up organizing those businesses around a community benefits agreement and larger protections for those same small businesses that they feared were getting displaced by the redevelopment that the county was leading. But they had one person working in an office in Wheaton. They’re a 50-year-old organization that has been organizing and working with small businesses in DC for half a century. And they were able to start one satellite office with one person that really kicked off the fight in Wheaton and in downtown Silver –– sorry, in the international corridor and in Langley Park, you happen to have a larger organization, Casa de Maryland, that led the growth of the Fair Development Coalition there. But they're an organization that,was just getting started when the redevelopment over downtown Silver Spring was getting started. So, they're only a few decades old and really having a large regional profile, not just say, community-focused in the Langley Park area, so there's all these issues over capacity and capacity-building for the nonprofits. There's all these issues over the way that tenants themselves organize and develop voice and agency. There's very few small business associations or tenants associations and many of theirs, these community and the political will and the political representation is often not there in suburbs, so the ability to get a cohesive voice, a cohesive platform built at the grassroots level, but then have somebody to appeal to at the grass tops level is really difficult. And so many of the folks that did pioneer some of the protections for small businesses, for affordable housing, for neighborhood improvements in these neighborhoods, were kind of the first and the only’s on the city councils or the redevelopment agencies, and that kind of political will and that kind of representation for black and brown and immigrant communities is just growing in suburbs, but it's not as established as we have in many central cities.
Emily
What was the most unexpected, or maybe surprising thing you learned during this research?
Willow Lung Amam
I think it is probably just how hard communities had to fight for this small protections that were gained. And maybe that's not surprising to me as a scholar of urban inequality. But these were battles that lasted over decades in these communities and are still ongoing. I think that was another core lesson for me, is just sort of thinking about redevelopment as an ongoing process, that's not a one and done deal and the capacity of communities to be able to organize at the right times and be able to sustain that is something that is built over a very long period of time. And what it takes for communities to organize and really trust each other in order to be able to work together to advocate for certain tools. It's a process, and so you can't just ask communities to one day stand up and say this is what we want and this is how we want it, that that capacity has to be invested in over time, and for communities that are for new immigrant communities, for communities that have not lived in places for a very long time that have not been built, the institutional infrastructure, that's a really hard ask. So when we ask why communities don't just show up, there's good reason for that, and we should be investing in making sure that communities have what they need. But it's particularly difficult and challenging in suburban communities simply because of the age of the communities, but also because of this dispersion of this communities and whether they even think about themselves as a community.
Emily
And finally, what do you hope readers will take away from this? What are the major interventions you’re working through here?
Willow Lung Amam
I really enjoyed writing the book. It was a chance to get to know places that I had lived and or worked in in a closer way, but I've also seen that by writing intimately about communities that I know of and have worked in, that it has resonated a lot with communities across the nation that are facing similar challenges, and so I hope that it is a book that travels beyond the DC area and that really helps struggling communities to sort of see themselves and to see what is possible with additional capacity and investment and vision and organization on the part of communities.
I hope that they take away some of their stereotypes about suburbs. I hope that they are surprised by some of the things that they see in terms of the resistance of communities and suburbs, so some of these same phenomenon that we see in cities. I think I hope they are curious about what else happens in suburbs that they don't that they tend to think about as only happening in cities, and I hope that there's a good sense that a lot of investment is needed in order to keep these communities in place and that the capacity that and the investments that need to be made are at all levels that is not just about the housing tools, and there are many housing tools, but there are small there is a real need for small business tools and one of the reasons that I started the small business anti displacement network which I lead today is by sort of just understanding who is most harmed in these communities in which I was working and how very few tools that we have to actually support small businesses from being pushed aside and how essential they are to the constitution of the community, to the identity, to the economy of these communities. But they are often those that are most impacted, because we've really built our suburbs in single use districts and so in order to rent the retrofit them into the kind of dense urban mixed-use walkable places that we supposedly value as urbanist today, that means you have to add housing onto existing areas of commercial districts and so small businesses are going to be those that are most in acted, but I hope that it shows us that in many regards these lines kind of back to where we started from these lines of city and suburb are often false and we need to be following the processes of urban inequality wherever they land in communities or I said I should say the processes of inequality wherever they land in communities and not just presume that they learnt land in certain places and so those are some of the things that I hope readers take away.
Emily
My thanks to Willow Lung Amam, author of The Right to Suburbia from University of California Press. You can find a link to the book in our show notes.
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to Drexel University and the editors at UAR. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was mixed and produced by Aidan McLaughlin and written and produced by me, Emily Holloway. You can find us on Bluesky at @urbanaffairsreview.bsky.social for updates on the journal and the show. Please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.