Gentrification, Displacement and Environmental Justice: Co-producing a Just Transition in North Philadelphia

This paper describes a coalition between community leaders in North Philadelphia and faculty and students at Swarthmore College. The coalition, “Sustainable Serenity,” grew out of conversations with leaders of the outreach center, Serenity House, and believes that building reciprocal, productive, and enduring trans-community relationships is central to social and environmental change. Drawing on the intersections of our diverse gender, race and class backgrounds and knowledges, the coalition is creating a vision of a “just transition” away from fossil fuels and toward healthy, thriving, and sustainable communities in North Philadelphia. Focusing the core problem of gentrification and displacement in historically Black neighborhoods as a violation of people’s rights to the city and as an illustration of the “slow violence” of environmental injustice, Sustainable Serenity connects the issues of homelessness, unemployment, economic disparity, environmental racism, and climate change. I focus on the project’s “Serenity Soular” initiative including: leading teach-ins about solar power, energy efficiency and solar installation; police violence; organizing anti-gentrification campaigns through financing energy efficiency retrofits for long-standing homeowners; partnering with “National Community Solar Partnership” companies to solarize local community centers; and creating a worker-owned solar energy co-op. I discuss our collaborative’s intersectional analysis connecting race, gender, class and environmental justice in the context of anti-gentrification organizing (making homes more durable, efficient, healthy, and affordable through energy efficiency and solarization), and how local residents from what has been termed “the city’s most abandoned ghetto” are fighting for their environmental and economic “rights to remain” and thrive.