I've been revisiting a lot of history about 1960s urban unrest — and kept coming back to the thought that some of those scarred neighborhoods are the sites today of gentrification fights.

In these places, disinvestment cleared the land for reinvestment. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/upshot/riots-redevelopment-gentrification.html

This is especially true in DC.

14th and 7th Streets NW and H Street NE were all devastated in the 1968 riots. And they have become centers of a kind of large-scale redevelopment that’s possible because there was large-scale destruction.

Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine neighborhood suffered decades of neglect – capped by a 2001 riot over a police killing.

“The gentrification that’s happening in Over-the-Rhine is directly related to the violence that took place in 2001,” historian David Stradling told me.

In Over-the-Rhine, private business resolved to redevelop the area, and they had a whole lot of devalued real estate — right next to downtown — to start with.

The point isn’t that all gentrification builds on past unrest. Or that all neighborhoods that burned in the ‘60s inevitably gentrify. The vast majority haven’t.

But in places where luxury buildings rise today on streets that burned years ago, there is an economic logic to it.

When cities devalue a community as completely as many Black neighborhoods have been — through redlining, arson, depopulation, slumlords, predatory lending, overincarceration, aggressive policing — they create the opportunity to amass new value through redevelopment.

“You think of a forest fire, with the clearing of the land," said Nizam Ali, one of Ben’s sons of Ben’s Chili Bowl fame in DC. "Unfortunately, it was racism and murder that was the clearing of the land.”

One headline we considered for this story:

From the ashes of a burned neighborhood rises… a more expensive neighborhood

Because urban history is a circle, we’ve seen critiques of gentrification in a new wave of protest. Old racial inequalities, new forms.

That suggests the work of valuing Black lives means figuring out this enormously knotty task of creating investment without displacement.