Displaced and Erased: What Urban Renewal Did to Black Neighborhoods — and What Healing Looks Like

Michele Mitchell
July 29, 2026

Ubuntu Village · Justice & Advocacy · Land Justice

“They called it urban renewal. The community called it Negro removal.”

Ubuntu Village was born in East Harlem. We know what it means to stand on a block that has been fought over, cleared, and reimagined by people who were never asked. We know that story in Nairobi, in Kampala, in Lagos too — cities whose maps were drawn by hands that did not belong there. This is the story of displacement as colonial continuity. And this is the story of what it looks like when communities refuse to disappear.

“What colonialism bulldozed was not a slum. It was a nervous system — the memory in the walls, the elders on the corner, the garden that knew the family’s hands. You cannot rebuild what was erased. You can only build forward, from the truth of what was taken.”

Ubuntu Village · Justice & Advocacy

East Harlem and the Architecture of Erasure

In 1963, James Baldwin named it plainly: “Urban renewal means Negro removal.” He was not speaking in metaphor. He was describing a federal policy — the Housing Act of 1949, administered by the United States Housing Authority and executed on the ground by men like Robert Moses — that used the language of progress to do something very precise: move Black and Brown people off land that white planners wanted.

Between 1949 and 1968, urban renewal programs displaced an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 families across American cities. Studies consistently found that African Americans made up more than two-thirds of those removed — though they represented a far smaller share of the urban population. This was not accident. The mechanism was “blight designation” — a term applied by city planners to dense, poor, and majority-Black neighborhoods that, by bureaucratic definition, became eligible for demolition and redevelopment. Blight was not a description of buildings. It was a description of people.

In East Harlem, the process was visible and visceral. The Jefferson Houses (1959), the Wagner Houses (1958), the Metro North Plaza — each project displaced existing blocks of Black, Puerto Rican, and Italian residents who had built lives, churches, bodegas, gardens, and gathering places across those streets. The towers that replaced them were deliberately isolated from the surrounding grid: no ground-floor retail, no street access, no connection to the neighborhood’s commercial life. The architecture of urban renewal was not neutral design. It was an architecture of separation, surveillance, and managed poverty.

What was lost cannot be fully counted. You cannot count the block associations. You cannot count the number of times an elder looked out her window and knew every face on the street. You cannot count the gardens — the ones tucked behind stoops, the ones that knew the particular soil of East Harlem and the names of the women who tended them. The data captures displacement. It does not capture dismemberment.

Gentrification is not a sequel to urban renewal. It is the same project, refinanced. What the bulldozer began in the 1950s, the market continues through rent increases, condo conversions, and the quiet pricing-out of families who have lived in the same apartments for three generations. The mechanism changes. The outcome — Black and Brown people removed from valuable land — does not.

A dense, vibrant urban community—the kind of neighborhood erased in Lagos's Maroko clearance of 1990, when 300,000 residents were displaced overnight with no notice or compensation — On July 13, 1990, Lagos sent bulldozers into Maroko without notice, without relocation, without compensation. 300,000 people were made homeless in a single day. The land became luxury real estate.

The African City Was Never Theirs to Plan

The story of urban displacement is not an American story. It is a colonial story — and it repeats, with local specificity, across every city the British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese built on African soil.

Nairobi was founded in 1899 as a railroad depot for the British East Africa Protectorate. From its inception, it was a segregated city: European zones, Asian zones, and a single legally designated African residential area — Pumwani, established in 1921 — where African people were permitted to live. The 1915 Crown Lands Ordinance had already swept the legal ground: it declared all “waste and unoccupied” land to be Crown property, erasing in law the communal tenure systems that African communities had maintained for generations. Land held collectively — tended, cultivated, and governed by community systems rooted in relationship — was reclassified as empty. As available. As ready for British development.

Kibera — today one of the largest urban settlements in sub-Saharan Africa — was originally allocated to Nubian soldiers who had served the British military. They built there. They raised families there. They buried their elders there. More than a hundred years later, their descendants still have no title deeds. Kibera’s residents have lived on that land across multiple generations without legal recognition, subject at any moment to the eviction that formal property law enables and informal settlement perpetuates.

In Uganda, the 1900 Uganda Agreement introduced the Mailo land system, which granted formal freehold title to a small class of Baganda chiefs and landowners — while the millions of people who cultivated that land became bibanja holders: tenants on land their families had worked for generations, with no security of tenure. Today, millions of Ugandans still live under Mailo land arrangements, their homes and livelihoods dependent on the goodwill of landlords rather than any legal right to remain.

In Nigeria, the wound has a date. On July 13, 1990, the Lagos State government sent bulldozers into Maroko — a dense, established community of an estimated 300,000 people on Victoria Island. Maroko was not a camp. It was a city within a city: artisans, market traders, civil servants, fishermen, teachers, families three and four generations deep in the same streets. They received no notice. No relocation plan. No compensation. In a single day, 300,000 people were made homeless. The land they had occupied — built on, loved, and buried their dead in — became Victoria Island luxury real estate: hotels, corporate headquarters, embassies. The logic was identical to East Harlem: the community was labeled a “slum,” the community was removed, and the land’s value flowed to those who had not lived there.

Maroko is not an isolated event. Lagos has continued the pattern: Badia East in 2013 (30,000 displaced), Otodo-Gbame in 2017 (30,000 displaced), Tarkwa Bay in 2021. The names change. The waterfront communities — whose land became valuable precisely because of where they had built — are cleared. The residents are scattered. The land is developed. Across Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, the cities whose land was most desirable were cleared of their African residents, generation after generation, by colonial law and its postcolonial inheritors.

What the Body Inherits

Housing instability is now classified as an Adverse Childhood Experience — one of the ACEs that researchers have linked to lifelong health disparities. Children who experience eviction have significantly elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. Families who are displaced show increased rates of chronic illness, interrupted education, and intergenerational poverty. Matthew Desmond’s landmark study in Milwaukee documented what community organizers already knew: eviction does not happen to people because they are poor. People are made poor because eviction happens to them — and because the systems that enable eviction were built to extract wealth from the same communities they destabilize.

But the health consequences of displacement are not only clinical. They are ancestral. They are cosmological.

In Kikuyu cosmology, the land is Gĩkũyũ’s gift from Ngai — not property to be bought and sold, but a sacred relationship between people and the God who placed them in a specific place on the earth. For the Yoruba, Ile — the home, the land, the ground — is the first sacred space. The earth does not belong to the living; it is held in trust for those who came before and those who are not yet born. For the Igbo, Ala is not simply the earth; it is the deity who is the moral foundation of community life — the source of law, of kinship, of the ethical order that holds a people together. When Ala is violated — by murder, by sacrilege, by the forcible removal of people from the land they belong to — the whole community is made ill.

This is not metaphor. This is the framework that African communities carried across the Middle Passage, that survived colonialism’s attempts to replace communal land tenure with individual title, that still informs how elders in East Harlem talk about their neighborhoods — not as real estate, but as body. As ancestor. As self.

When a community is displaced from its land, what is damaged is not only shelter. It is the network of relationships — to the elders on the corner, to the garden that knew the family’s hands, to the church where the grandmother’s funeral was held — that constitutes identity itself. The clinical literature calls this “place attachment.” The African tradition calls it ubuntu: I am because we are, and we are rooted here.

Community members organize around housing justice in East Harlem—the neighborhood where Ubuntu Village is rooted, and where the fight against displacement continues — Ubuntu Village works at the intersection of these histories—in East Harlem, in Kenya, in Uganda, and in Nigeria. These are not separate stories. They are one story: communities that were never supposed to stay, building the frameworks and the power to remain.

What Reparative Housing and Land Justice Actually Look Like

Naming the harm is not the work. The work is building the alternative — and communities are already building it.

Community Land Trusts are one of the most powerful tools for permanently removing land from speculative markets. In a CLT, a nonprofit organization holds land in perpetuity on behalf of the community. Homeowners within the trust own their buildings — but not the land beneath them — meaning their homes remain affordable generation after generation. The Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont has provided this model for more than thirty years. The East Harlem / El Barrio Community Land Trust was founded in 2017 — one of the first CLTs in New York City created by and for a community of color. It is not a program designed for the neighborhood. It is designed by the neighborhood. That distinction is the entire point.

Right to return policies have begun to acknowledge that displacement is not inevitable — and that those who were removed have a claim to come back. Portland, Oregon’s N/NE Neighborhood Housing Initiative provides down payment assistance specifically for families displaced from the Albina neighborhood during urban renewal — and for their descendants. It acknowledges the lineage of harm and begins, formally, to repair it. The principle is transferable: every city that carried out urban renewal has a list of who was displaced. That list is a reparative housing waiting list.

In Kenya, the Community Land Act of 2016 created a legal framework for communities to collectively register ancestral and communal land, providing formal title denied under colonial law. For Maasai, Samburu, Ogiek, and other pastoralist and forest-dwelling communities whose land was declared “Crown property” a century ago, this is not a legal technicality. It is the possibility of permanence.

In 2017, the Ogiek people — an indigenous forest-dwelling community evicted from the Mau Forest — won a landmark ruling from the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The court found Kenya had violated the Ogiek’s rights to land, natural resources, religion, and development. The Ogiek did not simply survive displacement. They organized, documented, litigated, and won. That is community power operating at the highest level available to it.

In Nigeria, organizations like SERAP Nigeria and Social Action Nigeria have documented forced evictions and built the evidence base for reparative housing claims. The communities displaced from Maroko, from Badia East, from Otodo-Gbame are still present, still organized, still naming what was done to them and demanding acknowledgment and repair.

What these efforts share is an insistence that communities are not problems to be managed or populations to be relocated. They are the protagonists of their own land — and the protagonists of their own healing.

Ubuntu and the Land: The Framework We Actually Need

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. I am because we are. But the we is not abstract. The we is rooted — in a neighborhood, a corner, a community garden, a language spoken on a specific block in a specific city. Ubuntu is not a philosophy of anywhere. It is a philosophy of somewhere. It is a philosophy of belonging.

What the African land ethics that survived colonialism understand — and what Western property law was designed to prevent — is that land is not a commodity. It is a relationship. The Maasai say that land belongs to the children who are not yet born. The Igbo understand Ala as the ancestor beneath all of life’s arrangements. The Kikuyu recognize that when Ngai placed people on the land, the placement was not accidental. People belong somewhere. And when people are removed from where they belong, something fundamental is broken in the order of things.

What healing looks like is not only a returned deed. It is a returned relationship — the community garden replanted on the block where it was bulldozed, the oral histories of displacement taught to children who were born after the clearance, the elders who remember what the neighborhood smelled like in 1962 being asked, finally, formally, to help design what it becomes.

East Harlem is still here. The community that Robert Moses displaced in the 1950s did not disappear — it reorganized, rebuilt, and continued to fight. Community Voices Heard has been organizing East Harlem residents around housing justice for more than thirty years. The El Barrio CLT is acquiring buildings. Tenant organizing continues block by block. It is the same fight that Kibera residents have waged for a century, that the Ogiek won in an African court, that Maroko survivors are still demanding be named and addressed. These communities are not recovering from the past. They are making the future — on land they refuse to leave.

Ubuntu Village works at the intersection of all of these histories — in East Harlem, in Kenya, in Uganda, in Nigeria. We do not see these as separate stories. We see them as one story: the story of communities that were never supposed to stay, building the frameworks and the power to remain.

What Land Justice Looks Like Right Now

Find or start a Community Land Trust in your city — CLTs permanently remove land from speculative markets and keep housing affordable across generations.
Know your right of first refusal — many cities require landlords to offer buildings to existing tenants before selling to developers. Find out if your city has this law and whether your building qualifies.
Document displacement history in your community — oral histories from elders are primary sources. The memories of who lived where, before the towers came, are irreplaceable.
Connect descendants of displaced families to right-to-return programs where they exist — and demand they be created where they don’t.
Support African communities asserting land rights under Kenya’s Community Land Act and through organizations like SERAP Nigeria.
Name the lineage of harm in policy advocacy and community organizing. Gentrification is not natural. Displacement is not inevitable. They are choices. And choices can be unmade.

Support the Communities That Refuse to Disappear

Ubuntu Village works with communities in East Harlem and across Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria to build the conditions for health, healing, and self-determination. When you support Ubuntu Village, you support communities that were never supposed to stay — and are building the frameworks and the power to remain.

Donate to Ubuntu Village →