Who gets to be ‘revitalized’ in Greenville? How and why Furman studied racial displacement

In concert with The Greenville News series, “The Cost of Unity,” Furman University’s Ken Kolb offers an opinion piece about how large-scale projects such as Unity Park and overall reinvestment in the city impact residents, in particular, Black residents. Kolb, professor and chair of the sociology department, writes, “Greenville’s progress has come at a price. Housing has become unaffordable. Neighborhoods are gentrifying.”

Kolb goes on to explain why he and other researchers at The Shi Insitute for Sustainable Communities prepared a study to lay out the facts and unearth the lesser-told truth about the real costs of revitalization. Using publicly available data, the research team reports that 1) the number of Black residents in the city has dropped every year for the past 40 years, 2) racial economic inequality within the city is among the worst in the Southeast, and 3) Greenville’s historic Black neighborhoods have been hit the hardest.

Kolb notes that while efforts are being made to shore up affordable housing in Greenville, he says, “the rents will still be well above what the median Black family can afford,” and “our current strategy to increase ‘affordable housing’ will not slow racial displacement in the city.”

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