Still Prescient Thesis — Selling Shelters: Public Property Gentrification in Washington, D.C.

SELLING SHELTERS: PUBLIC PROPERTY GENTRIFICATION IN WASHINGTON, D. C.

Public property in Washington, D.C. is being sold quickly, quietly, and without a systematic method. Shelters, libraries, and firehouses have become boutique hotels and luxury condos. Perhaps no place better exemplifies these practices than the Franklin School homeless shelter. Public shelters, as a specific type of public property, offer an inroad to public property redevelopment. Franklin School appears as an historical landmark ripe for redevelopment in the urban landscape, but its presence as a “surplus” public property only hints at the breadth of aesthetic, political, and economic conditions underlying its long record of failed sales and contested use. This thesis uses the recent events surrounding Franklin School shelter’s hotly contested sale and the public property management system to support a central argument about the changing relationship between public property and the urban landscape and its implications for the geography of gentrification. I argue that Washington, D.C. is experiencing a new and neoliberal form of gentrification: the gentrification of public property. I contextualize this
phenomenon within neoliberalism and explore its inner logic of revaluation and dispossession, which I contend work respectively through mechanisms like historic preservation and public property disposal. Franklin School shelter’s genesis and the resistance that has stalled its sale illuminate the tensions under advanced capitalism between homelessness and gentrification in particular and struggles over accumulation and social justice in general. The empirical work is based on literature reviews, archival research, open-ended interviews, and cartographic methodologies.

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