Whose City?: Examining the Correlation Between Development and Policing in the City of Paterson

As politicians work with corporate and business partners to reinvent Paterson’s economy, increased policing is raising concerns for Patersonians trying to reclaim their right to the city

The city of Paterson in northern New Jersey has been at the crossroads of US racial urban politics since its founding. Established as the first industrially-planned city in the United States, Paterson’s history has been defined by its contentious terrain and the economic forces that have long shaped the city, leading to various generations of Patersonians’ struggling for social, economic, racial and environmental justice.

In 1964 riot broke out on August 11 in Paterson, following a pattern of similar uprisings in neighboring Elizabeth, Newark, and New York City. These uprisings were in response to increasing disinvestment and poor living conditions in the city. Photo from The 1964 Paterson Riot: Three Days that Changed a City.

As Paterson emerges from the shadows of post industrialisation, it is increasingly seen in the up-and-coming real estate market in New Jersey. A recent analysis by the Asbury Park Press, reveals that over the last 10 years, Paterson witnessed a huge increase in corporate, investment, and development buyouts of residential properties, a trend that is driven by the city’s attempt to revitalize the city and jumpstart its economy. However, corporate buyouts are raising concerns among community organizers and Patersonians who have lived in Paterson for generations, claiming that corporate buyouts often lead to housing insecurity and put low income residents at risk of displacement. These claims are not just speculative, a growing body of research on the long-term effects of corporate buyouts on local residents have found that corporate landlords are more likely to “increase rent, evict tenants, and poorly maintained their properties.” Corporate buyouts also harm first-time homeowners. According to a recent report by Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality, and Metropolitan Equity about nearby Newark, corporations had been purchasing 1-to-4 unit homes and converting them into rentals a trend that not only affects rent prices in these neighborhood, but it also makes it difficult for those who want to become homeowners as they are priced out of the market.

In Paterson, the boom in the real estate market has coincided with state and federal funding being redirected to increased policing, with money going to the police department and police patrol, specifically in downtown Paterson and its commercial area. In 2023, Paterson plans to spend 1.5 Million of urban enterprise zone money on commercial district police patrols as part of the strategy plan to deter crime and ensure public safety.

“With the unprecedented level of economic development taking place in Paterson, we are adamant about making Paterson a safer city, which will make us a stronger city.” — Andre Sayegh, Mayor of Paterson

Reflecting and analyzing the rapid change in Paterson brought me back to The Gentrification-to-Prison Pipeline, a personal narrative written by Lacino Hamilton. Hamilton is a Detroit native, writer, and thinker who was wrongfully incarcerated for 26 years before he was released in 2020. Detroit, a post-industrial city with a comparable history to Paterson, has also undergone similar changes. In his personal narrative, Hamilton provides a lived-experience and a human account of the tool that profit-driven development takes on native residents by reflecting on his own experience living in Cass Corridor, Detroit at a time of rapid gentrification. Hamilton’s personal narrative provides a deeper understanding of the way in which the interconnected forces in urban cities often end up targeting and displacing low-income and BIPOC communities from their neighborhoods in order to make way for new development and more often higher-income white residents. While Hamilton names this process as “capitalist-sponsored development”, this process is more commonly known by the term “gentrification”. What I found particularly intriguing about Hamilton’s piece is that it places a strong emphasis on the connection between mass incarceration, police surveillance, and gentrification, a process he calls the Gentrification-to-Prison Pipeline. In this process many displaced native residents end up in prison as a result of hyper policing. According to Hamilton, “studies confirm that many neighborhoods in Detroit, Brooklyn and Chicago, among other places that have undergone gentrification, have produced large populations of internal refugees and displaced and disappeared people. However, such studies do not seem to account for “where they disappeared to”.

In attempting to gain a better understanding of the changes happening in Paterson, I wanted to investigate whether there was any correlation between policing and the concentration of upcoming projects in Paterson? And if so, what populations may be the most vulnerable to displacement and criminalization?

To answer this question, I borrowed the methodology from a similar report by the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs Office of Policy and External Affairs to define corporate buyouts and extract corporate-owned properties from the NJ MOD IV Historical Database. In their analysis, NJ DCA defines corporate ownership as residential properties with an owner name that contains any of the following words: LLC, INC, Incorporated, Trust, Development, Group, Company, Corporation, Partners, Capital, Holding, Property, Properties, Investment, Rental, Real Estate, Association, Venture, Realty, Homes. Using RStudio, I processed the parcel data and filtered for corporate ownership as defined above. To measure police surveillance, I focused my analysis on ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses microphones to cover certain neighborhoods. ShotSpotter claims to be able to distinguish the sound of gunshots from other noises and reports alleged gunshots to local police stations — detailed methodology.

Using QGIS, I started by calculating the average rate of corporate ownership in the city to highlight the areas with high concentrations of corporate properties, and I referred to them as corporate-owned zones, because they contain the majority of corporate-owned residential properties in the city.

The following analysis shows the disproportionate rate of police surveillance inside and outside of majority corporate-owned zones and highlights the communities that live in these areas, places at risk of displacement, or in other words, the gentrification-prison-pipeline.

Rate of Surveillance Is about 3 times Higher Inside Corporate-Owned Zones than outside of them

Shotspotter rates per square miles inside corporate-owned zones and outside corporate-owned zones.

The Paterson Police Department has an extensive record of aggressive surveillance, harassment, and use of force. The concentration of ShotSpotter in areas that are also experiencing an increased number of corporate buyouts is an alarming trend for locals who live in these areas. The city is currently bringing together a pro-development and pro-police narrative that had been found to contribute to the cycle of gentrification in the experiences of Oakland, Detroit, and many other cities. An extensive analysis of New York City’s neighborhoods from 2009–2015 have found that increased policing often followed a boom in the real estate market, suggesting that corporate interests could direct policing modes and methods.

Corporate Buyouts Target the Majority of Low Income Communities in Paterson

Map created with DataWrapper. Data from Census American Community Survey 2021, 5-Year Estimates, Table B03002.

Corporate buyouts are known to target low income and historically underserved communities because of relatively cheap properties. In doing so, real estate corporations invest in buying out properties in distressed areas and turn them into new apartments to drive up real estate prices, and make profits. Meanwhile, local leaders promote narratives of development in order to promote economic growth and tax income. During this process, local long-term residents get priced out as they usually can not afford to stay in their neighborhood anymore.

It is important to note that these findings do not show causation, rather they demonstrate how poor communities could potentially be at risk for future displacement due to the increased concentration of two phenomena: policing and gentrification, both of which are now understood through a growing body of research and police reports to be major contributing factors to the process of gentrification.

These findings support the overarching conclusion that a rapidly increasing corporate ownership contributes to a cycle of profit-driven development that puts communities of color at risk of displacement through targeting cheap properties in historically disinvested communities. While these findings could have benefited from more data on policing, accessible data and transparency from both the Paterson municipality and the Paterson Police Department, this data has been hard to come by. As such, these findings provide an early insight into the impact of ongoing economic development on long-term residents, while highlighting which demographic is being targeted and put at risk. Community organizers and tenants in Paterson had been pushing the city and the police department to increase transparency and provide publicly accessible data for residents to understand the changes happening in their city and pushback against gentrification and displacement. The current struggle against investment-driven displacement and policing is the latest battlefront for many residents of Paterson. If the past is any indication, a well-informed and organized community stands the chance to confront and win this struggle for justice.

References:

Displacement

Police Violence