A key component of placemaking—or the practice of transforming spaces to better serve the people who use them—is community input. Determining who that community is, however, isn’t simple. It often requires reckoning with power dynamics and understanding that who is or is not included affects whether a project will reinforce or break down inequities.

This work is particularly important in gentrifying neighborhoods, where unregulated development, real estate speculation, and revitalization efforts made without addressing residents’ needs threaten to displace entire communities. Gentrification occurs when changes are inserted into a community with the goal of raising values and profits (PDF), rendering the neighborhood a physical and cultural blank slate for developers and new residents to shape. As more affluent residents and businesses move in, gentrification makes longtime or legacy communities invisible.

Local governments can help mitigate the effects of gentrification by supporting placemaking efforts led by legacy residents and by shifting more power in government-led efforts to the community. Placemaking can help communities at risk of displacement reassert their sense of belonging to, ownership of, and connection with a place.

How to support placemaking projects led by legacy communities

Once the geographic center of Brooklyn, New York’s Black community, Bedford-Stuyvesant has undergone significant gentrification over the past two decades. In 2000, 75 percent of the neighborhood’s residents were Black, and only 2 percent were white. By 2021, the Black population had shrunk to 40 percent, while the white population had grown to 33 percent. Unregulated development and infrastructure improvements geared toward middle- and upper-class newcomers have fueled these demographic shifts and the displacement of longtime residents and local businesses. For the Black residents who remain, gentrification erodes their sense of belonging in the place they call home.

With financial support from local governments, community-led placemaking efforts are working to keep legacy residents connected to the neighborhood and counter the socioeconomic effects of gentrification. Established in 1972 by the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, Restoration Plaza has played a role in nearly every facet of the Central Brooklyn community with the goal to advance community development and racial equity for decades. In response to gentrification, the plaza has added space and programming dedicated to addressing structural barriers to economic prosperity among Black residents, such as the Center for Personal Financial Health. 

With the cost of living in the neighborhood continuing to skyrocket, in February 2023, Restoration Plaza announced the creation of an Innovation Campus that will focus on closing the racial wealth gap and creating wealth-building opportunities for longtime Black residents. Spearheaded by community leaders, Restoration Plaza is funded in part by three New York City agencies—the Department of Cultural Affairs, the Department of Youth and Community Development, and the Human Resources Administration—as well as the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City. The city’s discrete role in Restoration Plaza’s work demonstrates how local governments can support community-led placemaking by providing the funding and resources communities need to implement and sustain their efforts.

As in Bedford-Stuyvesant, local governments in other gentrifying areas can help culturally and economically bolster legacy communities by supporting placemaking efforts led by community-based organizations or coalitions. This support can take the form of funding, technical assistance, public resources, or space that the community can then determine how to use best.

Shifting power to legacy communities

To mitigate the effects of gentrification, local governments can couple direct investment in community-led placemaking efforts with strategies to more equitably engage legacy communities in government-led placemaking efforts.

Community engagement methods exist on a continuum (PDF). On the low end of engagement, a local government informs the community about an initiative with one-way communications methods like town halls and community meetings. On the higher end, a community holds power over or leads a project, while the government provides resources for its implementation. Local governments and other public-sector actors who strive to combat gentrification-induced displacement should empower legacy communities as equal partners in their placemaking efforts. To help shift resources and decisionmaking power, governments can include community members in data analysis, hire community members as senior paid staff at a relevant agency, and create community action boards.

When leading a placemaking effort in a gentrifying area, it’s also important for governments to critically consider how their own policies and practices promote gentrification. Neglecting antidisplacement measures and landlord regulations, offering tax breaks to developers, and funding development-directed policing can erode trust between local governments and communities at risk of displacement. Placemaking is a powerful tool local governments can use to keep legacy communities connected to a place, but it alone will not stave off gentrification-based displacement.