Building a Du Boisian Research Agenda on Gentrification

The Wages of White Spatial Capital

In both public discourse and academic research, gentrification is usually implied to be a white-led process. Perhaps due to common societal perceptions of who lives in poor urban neighborhoods and who makes up the spatially mobile middle- to upper-class, the archetype of the “white newcomer” that displaces Black or Brown residents is common throughout the discipline (Fallon 2021). So compelling is this archetype that scholars who have studied the movement of middle-class people of color to disinvested urban neighborhoods have developed specific names for these phenomena—Black gentrification (Moore 2009; M. M. Taylor 1992) and gente-fication (Delgado and Swanson 2021)—to distinguish them from just plain “gentrification.” As Lipsitz (1998:1) writes, whiteness often serves as “the unmarked category against which difference is constructed,” and it serves this purpose among the scholars, journalists, and urban denizens who describe gentrifiers. This dynamic leaves whiteness in a curious position within the gentrification literature: it is both descriptively omnipresent and theoretically underdeveloped (Golio 2023). Although many see gentrification as a “white” phenomenon, we lack many of the theoretical tools to describe how, exactly, whiteness plays a role.

W. E. B. Du Bois was not only a brilliant observer and theorist of the American Black experience but was also a pioneer in the study of white subjectivity and standpoint (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Myers 2022). As Du Bois ([1920] 2021) writes in an essay: “Of [white folk] I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage” (p. 17). This vantage is not incidental nor unique to Du Bois: rather, it is a result of the nature of Black double-consciousness, or the duality between Black internal life and the need to exist and survive in dominantly white space (Du Bois 1903a). Separated by a “veil,” white people are unable to fully perceive those racialized as Black; they regard only their own constructions of Black people, which they project onto the veil (Itzigsohn and Brown 2015). Those positioned behind the veil (i.e., Black individuals) must contend with a sense of “twoness,” referring to both a sense of self and the white projection. Du Bois argues that this “twoness” provides him (and other people racialized as Black) with an intimate knowledge of whiteness that is not reciprocal. I therefore argue that a Du Boisian-focused research agenda can help us explicate the role of whiteness in gentrification. For instance, accepting the premise that gentrification is a process of racial capitalism, wherein a system of racial hierarchy helps to define the distribution of profit and other rewards (Rucks-Ahidiana 2022), how can Du Boisian theory help us to draw out the specific advantages of whiteness within this system? And in turn, how does gentrification reinforce the manifold wages of whiteness, thereby reifying racial hierarchy and white supremacy?

In this section, I argue that Du Bois’s concept of the white “wage” and other gratifications (Myers 2022) helps us to understand the unique positions of both white newcomers and white neighborhood incumbents. The concept of the “white wage” is most commonly associated with Du Bois’s later classic Black Reconstruction in America ([1935] 2007). Here, however, I demonstrate that it is in The Philadelphia Negro that we begin to witness a perspective of whiteness as a privileged category built on the rewards of anti-Black racism. Combining these concepts with Centner’s (2008) theory of “spatial capital” allows us to think about how white newcomers might have privileged access and propriety over urban space. This white spatial capital contains two related elements. First, because of racist policies and practices—such as those that have pervaded the mortgage lending industry—white people and white-led businesses have had greater access to home- and land-ownership (Rothstein 2017; Rucks-Ahidiana 2023; K.-Y. Taylor 2019). This has created key differences in wealth holdings and wealth-building opportunities that allow white people and entities to shape urban space. Second, white people tend to receive the “public and psychological” wage of deference and positive treatment in public space. For these reasons, working-class white incumbent residents in gentrifying areas might not experience some of the affective impacts and feelings of exclusion as acutely as their neighbors of color—even as they experience other forms of financial and physical displacement due to their class position.

Du Bois’s conception of whiteness was built in tandem with his more general ideas on racial capitalism and colonialism. He describes whiteness as “a very modern thing—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed” (Du Bois [1920] 2021]:17), born in the context of chattel slavery-fueled capitalism and European colonization (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020:74). Whiteness is a racial category that references those with structural power and dominance within these systems. As Myers (2022) suggests, a Du Boisian lens on whiteness places emphasis on these structural privileges, or “gratifications,” as she terms them. Most famously, Du Bois ([1935] 2007) described whiteness as a “wage,” a term he deployed to describe the ways in which all individuals racialized as white benefit from their privileged place in a racial hierarchy (Roediger 1991).

From a racial capitalist perspective, this wage can be quite literal, referring to material goods and advantages. Anti-Black racist practices and policies have consistently provided white people with economic advantages. For instance, in The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois writes that Black workers were routinely denied access to training opportunities and trade unions; their “economic rise is not only hindered by their present poverty, but also by a widespread inclination to shut against them many doors of advancement open to the talented and efficient of other races” (Du Bois 1899:98). Similarly, the housing market has—historically and today—advantaged white actors. For example, in the mid-twentieth century when homeownership became widely attainable to middle-class Americans due to federal policies, Black households were often excluded or deemed too risky in a process known as “redlining” (Rothstein 2017; Rucks-Ahidiana 2023). Still today, the tiered distribution of wealth-building homeownership opportunities persists via regularized market practices like the discriminatory provision of sub-prime mortgages within Black neighborhoods (Rugh and Massey 2010) and the “predatory inclusion” of Black households into home-buying terms that are more expensive and risky (K.-Y. Taylor 2019). Tiered access to homeownership has led to a pernicious racial wealth gap (Rucks-Ahidiana 2023), one of the wages that allow white individuals to more easily purchase or rent urban property during gentrification. These advantages extend not only to individual-level actors like homeowners but also to meso-level organizations, which are themselves racialized entities (Ray 2019). White-led businesses, real estate interests, and developers are therefore also recipients of a wage that allows them to more readily influence gentrification processes.

Although Du Bois focused extensively on the nature of racial capitalism in urban areas, his concept of the “white wage” also extends beyond material advantages. Therefore, a Du Boisian-influenced concept of white spatial capital that is wielded in gentrifying settings must also extend beyond material access to capital and land ownership to more symbolic and affective social control over space. As conceived of in the later chapters of Black Reconstruction (Du Bois [1935] 2007:700), a “public and psychological wage” is bestowed upon working-class members of the white racial group by elites. This wage serves as a form of compensation to prevent inter-racial working-class alliances by, in practice, providing poor whites with certain social advantages over people of color. It refers to whites’ ability to access certain spaces (i.e., “public functions, public parks, and the best schools”), demand certain forms of respect (i.e., “titles of courtesy”), and garner deference and leniency from public institutions and power structures (i.e., “the police” and “the courts”). All of these courtesies are routinely denied to those not racialized as white. Therefore, despite their relatively low economic position, the white working class reaps the psychological benefits of not having to navigate “the peculiar social environment in which the whole [Black] race finds itself” (Du Bois 1899:8).

White “wages” are so endemic, Du Bois later argues, that they also form the basis of a generalized white standpoint that is proprietary in nature. Being racialized as white imbues one with an “embodied faith” (Myers 2019:7) in racialized dominion. Encapsulating this belief, Du Bois ([1920] 2021:18) caustically declares in the voice of an imagined white character: “Whiteness is ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” This sense of propriety, Du Bois reasons, is endemic to whiteness. It recalls Smith’s (1996) perspective on the “urban pioneer,” a gentrifier archetype that embodies a paternalistic and revanchist attitude toward working-class urban space.

Therefore, in Du Bois’s writings, we are left with the impression that whiteness has much to do with one’s relationship to physical space. Tiered opportunities for homeownership and wealth-building allow for greater access to physical influence over space, but whiteness also provides privileged social treatment (E. Anderson 2015). The wage bestows access to certain spaces that are routinely denied to people of color, deferential treatment in these spaces, and a proprietary attitude toward space. People of color, on the contrary, are regularly denied public rights and psychological benefits in white spaces (E. Anderson 2015), manifesting in everyday harassments and microaggressions, like being stopped by the police or told to go back to their own country. From a Du Boisian standpoint, even when white people do not own land, their whiteness itself is a compensatory form of property (Harris 1993), the ability to exert influence over space even when this benefit is “invisible” to those racialized as white (Doering 2016). Scholars must pay attention to how these manifold wages play out in the setting of gentrification, and how the ability to exert influence over contested urban space, both physically and socially, represents a distinct racial privilege within gentrifying areas.

To this end, I connect Du Bois’s concept of the white wage to Centner’s (2008) articulation of “spatial capital.” Centner uses a class-based frame centered around Bourdieu’s (1979) concept of habitus to describe dot-commers, a group of young professionals that flocked to San Francisco in the late 1990s during the boom of Internet start-ups. Dot-commers, Centner argues, create and claim exclusionary space within the city. Their demand for high-end living and consumption spaces, combined with the spatial capital to exert both symbolic and material influence over the urban environment, affords them “the power to take—and make—place in the most literal sense” (Centner 2008:197). In the context of Du Bois’s conception of whiteness as an ability to claim and move through space, I suggest expanding Centner’s ideas beyond class to investigate white spatial capital as well.

For instance, in gentrifying Washington, DC, white space is carved out within neighborhoods of color via differing social practices that reflect a white habitus (Bonilla-Silva, Goar, and Embrick 2006), such as dismissive gestures or a lack of eye contact during street encounters (Helmuth 2019). This example reflects the different forms of “public culture” that gentrifiers bring to a neighborhood, which may clash with existing local norms (Deener 2012). The result is often a phenomenon termed “diversity segregation,” or the presence of social segregation even in areas that are nominally or residentially integrated (Hyra 2017). What comes across in these accounts is not an equitable clash of public cultures, but the ability for white space to expand across neighborhoods of color and appropriate space and practices via the broader project of gentrification. In Helmuth’s (2019:756) example of street encounters in DC, white social practice expands to “compound black residents’ feeling of exclusion from the quickly changing neighborhood culture.” Also in DC, Summers (2019) writes on how white appropriation of Black symbols is integrated into the expansion of gentrification.

In order to understand this public deference, whiteness must be thought about not only as a descriptive term but also as an indicator of class status. Rather, a Du Boisian lens calls for us to consider whiteness as a privileged category of gratifications—like spatial capital—within a hierarchy wrought by racial capitalism. This public and psychological wage, as well as a proprietary outlook, provides those racialized as white more ability to transform urban space toward their public culture, at least partially explaining why so much concern has been dedicated to the “white newcomer.” The spatial capital provided even to working-class whites who lack economic privilege—as Du Bois conceived it—also might explain why the impacts of displacement are sometimes more acute for communities of color.

Cultural Displacement and Affective Life behind the Veil

The term “displacement” has become a contested one within the gentrification literature. Historically—particularly in quantitative work (Brown-Saracino 2017)—it has referred to physical displacement, the process of involuntary or coerced residential movement (Carlson 2020). Other scholars, particularly ethnographers and other qualitative researchers, have attempted to expand the notion of “displacement” to also include social, cultural, and political dimensions (Betancur 2011; Chernoff 1980; Davidson 2008; Elliott-Cooper et al. 2020). They argue that gentrification-related changes to a neighborhood’s social environment can leave long-time residents feeling excluded, out of place, and lacking in spaces for social interaction (Torres 2020). These feelings can be particularly acute in situations that involve racial turnover, as residents feel excluded from the now-dominant white spaces that stretch across their neighborhoods (E. Anderson 2015; Helmuth 2019; Hyra 2017; Monroe Sullivan and Shaw 2011; Summers 2019; Tuttle 2022).

Although researchers have taken strides in documenting cultural displacement (a blanket term that I use here to refer to the manifold displacements mentioned above), an engagement with Du Boisian work and theory can help us to more fully conceptualize the violence of displacement and gentrification in at least two ways. First, changes to the neighborhood environment represent a disruption to community-building institutions and other sites of Black placemaking. Second, gentrification can function as a disruption to the internal lives of racially marginalized residents. Thus, there is a need to study cultural displacement at multiple levels—the institutional and individual. Here, I turn to two particular sources—a reading of the role of Black institutions in The Philadelphia Negro and writings on the concepts of the veil and double-consciousness, developed by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903a) and Dusk of Dawn ([1940] 2012)—to put forth an argument about how Du Bois demonstrates both the stakes of losing aspects of social and community life, as well as how this loss can be an affective one for racially marginalized communities.

For centuries, Black communities have responded to exclusion and hostility in white spaces by “develop[ing] a life, economy, and culture that exist in some ways outside of the White gaze” (Hunter and Robinson 2018:46)—a process that is commonly referred to as Black placemaking (Binkovitz 2022; Hunter et al. 2016). The Philadelphia Negro foregrounded this concept by presenting a rich and detailed account of inner-city Black social life and mutual aid around the turn of the century, especially as provided by institutions like churches and benevolent societies. Du Bois’s account is both an expression of the agency of racially oppressed communities—as I will cover in the following section—and a reminder of the role that such institutions have had in maintaining the social fabric of the Seventh Ward.

As early as 1837, a Black community in Philadelphia that numbered only a few thousand boasted 100 benevolent societies and 16 churches (Du Bois 1899:31). The churches, in particular, served a number of roles among the community. Du Bois writes:

[The church’s] tribal functions are shown in its religious activity, its social authority and general guiding and coordinating work; its family functions are shown by the fact that the church is a center of social life and intercourse; acts as newspaper and intelligence bureau, is the center of amusements—indeed, is the world in which the Negro moves and acts. (Du Bois 1899:201)

As Du Bois later expands upon in Chapter XII of The Philadelphia Negro, the Black churches of the Seventh Ward were not only religious institutions, but also served purposes related to recreation, mutual aid, information dispersal, and building social ties. From this “center of social life,” other efforts aimed at organizing, education, and information grew: “The Negro churches were the birthplaces of Negro schools and of all agencies which seek to promote the intelligence of the masses . . . Beneficial societies in endless number are formed here” (Du Bois 1899:207). The extent of such activity, Du Bois tells us, is unique to Black churches; the institution is so central to the Seventh Ward’s community life that it is “to a degree unknown in white churches even in this country” (Du Bois 1899:203).

Churches are not the only institutions that functioned in a central role to the social life and advancement of the Seventh Ward. Secret societies like the Masons and Odd Fellows served the purpose of “partly social intercourse and partly insurance” (Du Bois 1899:224). Beneficial societies like the Quaker City Association and Sons and Daughters of Delaware distributed aid, held considerable real estate investments, and provided for community needs, including accessible health and life insurance (see Du Bois 1899:224–225). Other cornerstones of Black institutional life in the Seventh Ward included banks, labor unions, building and loan associations, cemeteries, training centers, and newspapers (see Du Bois 1899:226–233). In this way, the Seventh Ward was able to function as a cohesive “city within a city” (Du Bois 1899:5), a center for community and social capital even when its residents were denied from participating in broader social life.

Like modern scholars of Black placemaking (i.e., Hunter et al. 2016), Du Bois does not provide an overly romantic or sentimental account of these institutions. He recognizes that they are in many ways a response to white antipathy, discrimination, and exclusion. For example, the First African Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia, which Du Bois (1899:22) calls “the first Negro church in America,” was founded in 1794 in direct response to discrimination faced at another prominent church. Although both enslaved and free people of color were able to attend St. George’s Methodist Church along with white worshippers, eventually “the church . . . attempted to force [black communicants] into the gallery” (Du Bois 1899:19). Similarly, racial exclusion “adopted by nearly all trade unions” (Du Bois 1899:128) led to the development of Black-specific trade organizations. White hospitals excluded Black nurses and doctors from practicing or receiving training, which “led to a movement for a Negro hospital” (Du Bois 1899:230), named after Frederick Douglass. Du Bois’s view of the “city within a city” is therefore well-balanced between the white exclusion that necessitates it and the agency of Black denizens in creating spaces for empowerment even amidst this violence.

It is important to remember these points when considering the social impacts of displacement. Gentrification represents a threat not only to affordable housing but also to incumbent retail establishments, non-profits, churches, and other institutions that might have to relocate (Deener 2012; De Verteuil 2011; Hyra 2017; Summers 2019; Torres 2020). Ramírez (2020), for instance, in a qualitative study on gentrifying Oakland, tells of how a Black church—Pleasant Grove Baptist—was consistently fined for excessive noise after complaints rolled in from white neighbors that moved into the community. In a similar case investigated by Hyra (2017), Metropolitan Baptist Church in the Shaw neighborhood of DC actually moved from the location of their changing neighborhood after consistent contentions with primarily white newcomers. These two examples stand stark next to Du Bois’s long passages about the importance of churches as community bedrocks for Black neighborhoods. For racially marginalized individuals, the settings of religious institutions, retail establishments, and other spaces become all the more imperative because of exclusion from white-centric spaces.

A Du Boisian research agenda on gentrification would pay close attention to these losses, and ask what it means for a community to lose this “city within a city,” due to either being physically displaced from it or watching it change from the inside. A more contemporary example of these impacts might be drawn from Mindy Thompson Fullilove’s (2004) conception of root shock. Du Bois (1899:297) also provides some insight:

The Negro who ventures away from the mass of his people and their organized life, finds himself alone, shunned and taunted, stared at and made uncomfortable . . . Thus he remains far from friends and the concentrated social life of the church, and feels in all its bitterness what it means to be a social outcast.

For Black residents and others who are racially marginalized, loss of neighborhood via gentrification is not just a displacement, but a displacement on top of historical and dialectical processes of white exclusion and responsive placemaking. From a Du Boisian standpoint, there is no separating the historical and contemporary processes that exacerbate racialized displacement. ¹

A Du Boisian lens also suggests, however, that we step down from the institutional level to also investigate how gentrification is experienced on an internal, psychological, and affective level within racially marginalized communities. These displacements are examined by scholars like Summers (2019:17), who describes one of the impacts of gentrification as “an affective state of precarity” for neighborhood residents. This language is mirrored by Elliott-Cooper et al. (2020:494), who consider displacement to be “an affective, emotional and material rupture”; something that severs an intimate connection to place. But how and why might these affective ruptures be racialized? Du Bois’s ideas on racialized subjectivity and self-conceptualization might provide a key here. As reviewed earlier, the Du Boisian concepts of the veil and double-consciousness explain how encounters with white folk and the navigation of white space disrupt Black processes of self-formation that exacerbate a sense of “two-ness” (Itzigsohn and Brown 2015).

Scholars have long written about the gentrifying neighborhood as a “frontier” (Smith 1996), an “edge” (E. Anderson 1990), or a “borderland” (Ramírez 2020): a spatial boundary between the historical ghetto and historically white neighborhoods where cursory inter-racial interaction is more common (even if meaningful social interaction is still limited, as denoted in the term diversity segregation [Hyra 2017]). In other words, as urban space changes, Black and other racially marginalized individuals might find white people and institutions in spaces where it was previously unexpected (i.e., Freeman 2006), and must more often navigate white space as it enters their neighborhoods (E. Anderson 2021). If Black placemaking is about the development of social life away from the white gaze (Hunter and Robinson 2018), gentrification therefore threatens to bring the white gaze to Black places. This intrusion into Black and Brown communities (what Freeman and Cai [2015] once referred to as white invasion) therefore puts individuals into closer contact with the other side of the veil, possibly further disrupting internal processes of self-conceptualization and exacerbating a sense of “two-ness.” Building on the work of Fullilove (2004) and others, Du Boisian scholars could use this frame to further understand the unique psychological impacts of gentrification on racialized communities.

Centering the Subaltern Standpoint: The Agency of Incumbent Communities

A Du Boisian frame would seek to center the points of view of incumbent neighborhood residents within gentrification scholarship. In an academic literature that has historically set its focus on the causes of gentrification and effects in terms of displacement, there has often been little room to explore how incumbent neighborhood residents interact with the process, aside from as victims or displacees. There is a racialized component to this characterization as well, as Fallon (2021) demonstrates in her literature review that finds the archetype of the “poor minority incumbent” pervades studies of gentrification. “These typologies reinforce ideas of White dominance and power in the making of space,” Fallon (2021:17) writes, “and Blackness is placed in a vulnerable position.”

Du Bois, on the contrary, maintained throughout his work persistent attention to the agency of people of color in shaping their lives around social processes. This focus is clear from the first pages of The Philadelphia Negro, when Du Bois (1899) lays forth the scope of the issues he studies—“pressing social problems of poverty, ignorance, crime and labor” (p. 5)—and then insists that an investigation of these problems must include a deep and humanist analysis of the full population and environment of Black neighborhoods. This, Du Bois suggests, is a departure from the typical academic approach. After pointing out the issues that plague Black communities, “the ordinary man of affairs is apt to stop there,” Du Bois (1899:6) tells us, before explaining all of the rich variation and social complexities that a cursory treatment of the Seventh Ward is likely to miss. Overall, Du Bois demands that we take what Itzigsohn and Brown (2020) refer to as a “subaltern standpoint,” or an analysis based around the experiences of marginalized groups.

To this end, Japonica Brown-Saracino (2016) points out several underexplored areas of gentrification scholarship, naming “resistance” as one such field. Indeed, gentrification scholars have made strides in calling for and producing work on resistance, and this should continue. For instance, studies show how locals resist neighborhood change via organizational efforts (Curran 2018; Lichterman 2020; Martinez 2010), protests (Summers 2021), occupations and sit-ins (Summers and Fields 2024), place-based social media accounts and hashtags (Summers 2021; Weeden, Rich, and @ParkdaleLife 2024), and everyday social networks and interaction (Perez 2004).

Despite this body of work, however, there remains an overall gap in understanding the agency of residents within neighborhoods undergoing gentrification. An alternate viewpoint focuses not on incumbent resistance but on incumbent participation. Scholars have shown how and when certain people of color—like middle-class Black or Latine residents—participate in and contribute to gentrification processes. As mentioned earlier, Black gentrification (Moore 2009; M. M. Taylor 1992) and gente-fication (Delgado and Swanson 2021; Huante 2021) are the terms often used to describe these respective phenomena. In these works, we find an emphasis on the heterogeneity within communities of color that is part of a Du Boisian frame. As Hunter (2015) points out, The Philadelphia Negro argues against the commonly held (white) assumption that Black communities like the Seventh Ward are monolithic. “There is always a strong tendency,” Du Bois (1899:309) writes, “to consider the Negroes as composing one practically homogenous mass.” The result of this tendency is that scholars are unable to conceive of class divisions within Black communities—indeed, “the very existence of class among [people of color] is ignored” (Du Bois 1899:316). Similarly, Pattillo (2003:63) echoes Du Bois’s arguments against an academic “assumption of homogeneity” in her writing on middle-class Black gentrifiers on the South Side of Chicago.

Despite this assumption, in The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois identifies four distinct classes, or “grades” as he terms them, in the Seventh Ward. This includes an “aristocracy,” a group of highly educated and relatively wealthy Black Philadelphians. Du Bois (1899) regularly refers to them as the “best class” (p. 316). As Itzigsohn and Brown (2020), along with others, have pointed out, many of Du Bois’s early texts had a distinctly elitist tone. In texts like his essay “The Talented Tenth” (1903b), he argued that this “best class” of African Americans must take leadership for the sake of overall social advancement. Although he later reneged on this idea (i.e., Du Bois [1940] 2012), this viewpoint is still present today—including in our gentrification politics, which can be defined by contradiction and nuance. Namely, though the Black middle-class may be relatively privileged in intra-racial setting, they are still racially marginalized among the population as a whole. Du Bois was keenly aware of these dynamics. “Here too are social problems,” he (1899:7–8) reminds us, referring to the “best class” of the Seventh Ward, “differing from those of the other classes, and differing too from those of the whites of a corresponding grade, because of the peculiar social environment in which the whole race finds itself.” This leads to tensions within the contested discourse of gentrification. For instance, elites may claim that Black gentrification is “defensive” in nature (Boyd 2008), or a source of racial solidarity propelled by the idea that within-race development is marginally better than white invasion (see also Delgado and Swanson 2021; Moore 2009; Pattillo 2003). Others, however, point out that this development is still a driver of class displacement and source of intra-racial class conflict (Hyra 2008; Johnson 2015; M. M. Taylor 1992). Similarly, while institutions like churches can be vital centers of organizing and resistance, they can also serve as major housing developers and instigators of development—as is the case with the Apostolic Church of God in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago (Parker 2018) and the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem (Hyra 2008).

I believe that a subaltern standpoint, and a full accounting of resident agency, however, would go beyond the simplistic categories of resistance and participation to document the complexities of Black life and placemaking within gentrifying space. “In focusing on the forms of agency of the subaltern,” Itzigsohn and Brown (2020:127–28) write, “[Research] would not lionize or romanticize ‘resistance,’ but carefully observe how these communities aim to shape their own lives, with their achievements, their limitations, and their defeats.” How do people shape their lives around changing urban space? Surely, most are not actively resisting or participating but rather adjusting their patterns of survival, joy-seeking, and other behaviors around alterations to their physical and social environs. Here I draw particular inspiration from Corey J. Miles’ (2023:6) concept of vibe, which he describes in part as “the process in which Black [folks] use the felt experience of their social location to understand social structures.” How do folks vibe with gentrification, and the manifold changes to their neighborhood? To truly write and research the agency of incumbent communities, I argue that we need to consider daily life with gentrification, not just how people seek to make money and power with it.