Literary Review

From this reading, we took two very important ideas that can help us better understand food and housing insecurities and their relationship. First we came across the idea of “Rent eats first,” presented by Matthew Desmond in his book Poverty, By America. He talks about the many people across our nation who, when money is tight, are forced to decide between paying rent, and paying housing costs like rent, utilities, and others. This situation is defined as an opportunity cost, when households face the opportunity cost of paying rent before buying food, meaning every dollar spent on housing directly reduces what they can afford to eat.

Bowen, Sarah, et al. “The structural roots of food insecurity: How racism is a fundamental cause of food insecurity.” Sociology Compass, vol. 15, no. 7, 3 May 2021, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12846

In Beyond Gentrification by Brett Williams, we read numerous personal accounts of DC residents in wards 7 and 8 struggling to escape poverty. These people live in areas directly on the Potomac or the Anacostia River, areas that historically have been low income, but are now being concidered by developers as potential payouts, with waterfront developments racing for city approval. However, Williams contends that further development of the waterfront will only lead to gentrification and climate issues. We focused on gentrification. Williams in this paper refrences numerous studies that concluded that pushing low-income residents out of an area they historically lived is much worse than previously thought. "Solutions" like the dispersion of poverty across wards is actually worse for low-income citizens, as it contributes to the loss of a social network and increased discrimination/stigma .

Williams, Brett. “Beyond Gentrification:  Investment and Abandonment on the Waterfront.” Capital Dilemma Growth and Inequality in Washington, D.C., 2016.

In the reading for Maharawal, we read the story of Alex Nieto, who was shot and killed by police as he sat in a park. The killing sparked many police brutality protests, with signs reading "Gentrification = Police Brutality." Maharawal perfectly articulates what happened, saying "the person who called 911 feared Nieto because of the way he looked: a young Latino man in a rapidly whitening neighborhood" (Maharawal, 349). These killings of Maharawal were only the tip of the systemic iceberg. Because of the California tech boom, housing and living costs skyrocketed, leading to evictions and displacements across the state. These rising costs, combined with the policing systems today -- which criminalize many support systems like street vending -- limit low-income communities' resources purposely to further drive them out.

Maharawal, Manissa M. “Black lives matter, gentrification and the security state in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Anthropological Theory, vol. 17, no. 3, 27 Sept. 2017, pp. 338–364, https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499617732501.