Wednesday, April 20th, 2022

SINCE 1891

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2022

VOLUME CLVII, ISSUE 33

BROWNDAILYHERALD.COM

METRO

UNIVERSITY NEWS

Local small businesses face rising rents

DPS announces new deputy chief

Owners discuss changes to Fox Point, Thayer Street, Hope Street

John Vinson has more than 20 years of experience within higher ed public safety

BY RHEA RASQUINHA SENIOR STAFF WRITER

BY KAITLYN TORRES UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR

This article is part of a series on gentrification and development on the East Side of Providence.

As neighborhoods in Providence have evolved over the years, businesses have felt the effects of increasing prices and changing customer demographics as a result of gentrification and displacement, The Herald previously reported.

Thayer Street is one area that “has changed immensely,” said Ann Dusseault, owner of Old Bag Vintage. Developers “have built up everything they can possibly build up.”

Dusseault previously owned Pie in the Sky on Thayer Street, which was in business for 27 years before closing during the pandemic, leading Dusseault to open Old Bag Vintage on Ives Street.

The business landscape has changed

JULIA GROSSMAN / HERALD

Rising rent prices can impact small businesses by driving out longtime residents and increasing property costs, owners told The Herald. “because there’s no more indies, it’s all the big stuff now,” she said.

According to Dusseault, the biggest cause for change has been landlords.

“All the landlords have obviously wanted to make top dollar on their properties,” she said. Franchises can afford to pay rising rents more often than independent shops, Dusseault said.

On Ives Street, in her experience, student rentals have led to rising rents across the board, Dusseault said.

Historically, University students seeking rentals in Fox Point have caused rents to rise in the neighborhood, The Herald previously reported.

Oftentimes, students can afford to pay slightly higher rents than working-class families, according to Nathaniel Pettit ’20, whose 2020 honors thesis investigated gentrification on the East Side of Providence.

SEE GENTRIFICATION PAGE 3

In an April 15 Today@Brown announcement, the Department of Public Safety announced the appointment of John Vinson as its new deputy chief. Vinson will work with Vice President for Campus Safety Rodney Chatman, according to the announcement. He will also work in community engagement, manage responses to incidents on campus and direct supervisors and line personnel within the department.

Vinson wrote in an email to The Herald that in his new position, he hopes to work with DPS to provide “innovative public safety services” to the University community. His first priority is to speak with members in the department to assess any changes

that need to be made.

“My approach will be collaborative and inclusive with both internal and external stakeholders,” he wrote, adding that any changes made within the department should meet the expectations of both DPS members and members of the Brown community.

Vinson added that his 20 years of experience in university-level public safety will provide a framework for his role as deputy chief.

Chatman believes Vinson will listen to and understand the “unique expectations” of the University community, he wrote in an email to The Herald. He added that Vinson will also develop partnerships and collaborations with the greater Providence community.

Vinson wrote that he will regularly meet with students, staff, faculty and other stakeholders in order to engage with the community on campus. These meetings and other events could also include members of the Providence community, he wrote.

SEE DPS PAGE 2

ARTS & CULTURE

UNIVERSITY NEWS

‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ directors give IFF talk

Student-run site Burnt Out @ Brown provides course information to students

Directors of recent hit film discuss their careers, sources of inspiration

BY FINN KIRKPATRICK SENIOR STAFF WRITER In the keynote talk of day two of the Ivy Film Festival, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — professionally referred to as “the Daniels” — were welcomed to campus virtually on Tuesday via Zoom. The talk, moderated by former Herald Staff Writer Justin Woo ’23, touched on the early parts of the directors’ careers, their creative processes and varying interpretations of their filmography.

The Daniels began their careers in the entertainment industry by directing music videos and commercials.

They directed the videos of notable songs such as “Simple Song” by The Shins and “Turn Down For What” by DJ Snake and Lil Jon. But eventually, they began to

pursue ambitions of making narrative works. “If you’re successful in the music video (and) commercial world, you’re constantly getting hit up by people who want to work with you and you kind of have to turn that faucet off and just say, ‘I’m going to walk away at the height of my career and focus on writing,’ ” Kwan said, adding that the directorial duo did just that for their debut feature film, “Swiss Army Man.” “It took us three years to write that movie because we kept having to pull ourselves away from this industry that wanted so much from us,” Kwan said.

Scheinert said that the Daniels always sought to include narrative elements in their work. “I think we’re also different from some music video (and) commercial directors in that we just always wanted to jam as much narrative in there as we could and we’d get bored with just aesthetics,” he said.

Both directors said their career in music video directing has greatly influenced the way they approach

SEE IFF PAGE 2

Website lists weekly time commitment, class sizes for various courses

BY SOFIA BARNETT STAFF WRITER This pre-registration, students will have access to a new student-created website, Burnt Out @ Brown, which lists the weekly time commitment for various University courses to help students evaluate which would be a good fit for them. The project, led by co-founders Leyton Ho ’24, Jared Dunn ’24, Kevin Cox ’24 and Isabelle Sharon ’23.5, was first developed in the 2022 Hack@ Brown hackathon in January and has since reached more than 1,000 users, according to the group.

According to Ho, the creation of the site served as a way to ensure that students are taking a manageable course load each semester and have adequate guidance in their registration.

“Shopping period is really hectic,” Ho said. “There are so many moving

pieces, and there always seem to be students looking for ways to construct a balanced schedule, even myself.”

Ho said that he and his co-founders considered this a shared experience among students and wanted to find a solution that would allow students to make informed decisions on course selection based on weekly time commitment.

The site obtains the majority of its data from the Critical Review and Courses@Brown. Cox said that Burnt

U. News

S&R

Arts & Culture

Commentary

Watson Institute hosts panel on race, racism in Palestine.

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UCLA professor discusses opioid abuse by white Americans.

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“Race & Performance” event highlights BIPOC experience in art.

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Editorial: The new UCS president-elect faces challenges Page 6

Out @ Brown acts as an intersection between the two sites with more comprehensible data. Using data from the sites, “we rank all of the courses by the average number of hours and display them on the website where the user can filter them by department,” he said.

Although the Critical Review has been a helpful resource for Burnt Out @ Brown, Cox explained that there are

SEE BURNT OUT PAGE 5

COURTESY OF BURNT OUT @ BROWN VIA ASHLEY CAI

TODAY TOMORROW

DESIGNED BY ASHLEY CAI ’25 DESIGNER BRANDON WU ’24 DESIGN EDITOR

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LENA HE ’24 DESIGN EDITOR

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

IFF FROM PAGE 1 narrative filmmaking. “We are able to shoot fast and we are able to shoot cheap now because we’ve learned so much through the gauntlet of music videos,” Kwan said.

Music still plays a significant role in the way the Daniels make films, they said. When talking about the balancing act of handling so many different plot threads in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and keeping the audience engaged, Kwan said, “The secret weapon in all of this is the music, because the music kind of guides you through all of it. It feels like you’re on a roller coaster ride rather than a runaway bus.”

Kwan and Scheinert also discussed their process and influences in crafting their latest film. Scheinert said that as collaborators, the pair “do a lot of outlining together and then a lot of writing separately.” He added that his approach involves creating a “crappy rough draft” to “connect the dots of the outline,” while Kwan’s approach involves “disappear(ing) for two weeks and coming back with 20 great pages” that address a small part of the outline.

“We’re constantly mushing those

things together,” Scheinert said.

In discussing their influences, Kwan and Scheinert cited works from East Asian directors such as Wong Kar-wai, Bong Joon-ho and Akira Kurosawa. “The fun thing about each of these movies is because they don’t come from a Western perspective, they have been mutated and deformed in different ways that make them so special,” Kwan said. He added that he admires the experimentation with genre and tone in previous decades by Korean auteurs such as Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho — experimentation which he said American directors were not trying.

And Kwan and Scheinert’s inspiration didn’t just come from feature films. The Daniels also referenced early YouTube animations and mixed-media montages as influences on their filmmaking style.

“Suddenly there was this whole generation of independent animators that were releasing stuff that was so singular because it was just one person working on it in their bedroom,” Kwan said. “So a lot of that stuff was super inspiring early on in our careers and has maintained a really big spot in our brains.”

Throughout the talk, the discussion

repeatedly returned to the narrative of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

In response to a question about the nature of reality in the film, Scheinert said that he and Kwan like to “make movies that end somewhat ambiguously and work on metaphorical levels, but as filmmakers, it’s really important that … we treat it like it’s really happening and that’s what we say to the actors as well.”

When discussing how a viewer should approach “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and other films, Kwan encouraged the audience to immerse themselves in the viewing experience, rather than analyzing in real time. “I think we’re all so steeped in intellect and steeped in philosophy that we’ve labeled everything, we’ve put everything in boxes and we’ve accidentally built a wall around ourselves,” he said. “So while we’re watching movies or reading books, rather than experiencing it aesthetically, we’re actually just thinking about it in a way that is removing ourselves from it.”

Scheinert mirrored this sentiment.

“Ultimately that’s why we make movies,” he said. “To try to make something that resonates and speaks to something that we feel.”

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2022

FINN KIRKPATRICK / HERALD

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert began their careers in the entertainment industry by directing music videos and commercials.

COURTESY OF JOHN VINSON

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, Not Never More (2022)

Inheritance

DPS FROM PAGE 1

How Communities Are Responding to Controversial Artwork

APRIL 27 TO 30, 2022 | BROWN UNIVERSITY Online and In Person | Free and Open to the Public Inheritance brings together activists, curators, educators, tribal leaders, artists, historians, heritage workers, and policy makers to explore the range of strategies that institutions and communities are using to respond to problematic representations of race, Indigenous lifeways and history in public art and architecture. This 4-day symposium, organized by the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, includes a mix of online and in-person events and opportunities.

Registration required | go.brown.edu/inheritance

John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities & Cultural Heritage

John Vinson will work with Rodney Chatman, vice president for campus safety, in community engagement and public safety.

@publichumans

Vinson has experience with campus safety and previously worked at Indiana University, where he led policing and public safety reforms, according to the announcement. He also worked in campus safety leadership and was assistant vice president for campus and community safety at the University of Washington. Outside of University safety, Vinson previously served as an undersheriff for the Sheriff’s Department in Isabella County, Mich.

Chatman added that Vinson, who was “enthusiastically recommended” for the position, was chosen from a competitive pool of applicants.

DPS’s search process included consulting a group of community stakeholders including faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, the Department of Residential Life, Facilities Management, the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, Dining Services and others.

The announcement added that Vin-

son comes to the position during a time when DPS is reexamining “the delivery of safety services to meet the expectations of modern police agencies.”

Chatman wrote that Vinson “impressed” him with the way he connects with students and understands “safety, security and well-being in an authentic way.” He added that this was important since there is “positive momentum” within public safety to include input from campus organizations.

Vinson wants to have an “open and honest dialogue” on student concerns about DPS’s presence on campus to strengthen relationships with students, he wrote. He added that DPS would also like to establish new ways for students to share their concerns and express ways that DPS can enhance partnerships within the University community.

“I see the role of deputy chief … as one that is highly visible and collaborative within the Brown University and broader Providence community,” Vinson wrote.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2022

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

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UNIVERSITY NEWS

‘Race, Racism and Palestine’ panel discusses anti-Blackness in Palestine wards, ethnicity and ethnonationalism became the dominant frameworks,” she said. “The focus on ethnicity obscured race as an analytic.”

Tatour emphasized that “we don’t talk enough about racial regimes within Palestinian society,” noting that she

Scholars lead discussion on origins, implications of racial ideologies in Palestine

BY CALEB LAZAR & KATHLEEN MENINGER UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR & SCIENCE & RESEARCH EDITOR The Watson Institute hosted a panel titled “Race, Racism and Palestine” on Tuesday night where leading scholars of race, law and political economy discussed Palestinian racial ideologies as well as anti-Blackness and legacies of slavery in the Middle East.

Director of Middle East Studies Nadje Al-Ali introduced the event, organized by Noura Erakat, Mahmoud Darwish visiting fellow in Palestinian studies. The event featured four panelists: Marc Lamont Hill, professor of media, cities and solutions at Temple University; John Reynolds, associate professor at the School of Law & Criminology at Maynooth University; Sherene Seikaly, associate professor of history at University of California, Santa Barbara; and Lana Tatour, assistant professor in global development at the University of New South Wales.

Erakat opened the discussion by noting how some people relate ongo-

GENTRIFICATION FROM PAGE 1 In the early 1980s, the neighborhood “was so different,” said Joan Ritchie, owner of Peaceable Kingdom, a shop on Ives Street. When her store first opened, Ritchie rented space for $168 a month — just over $500 in today’s money — and shared the space.

“It was so easy to go into business, anybody could do it,” Ritchie said.

“That’s no longer true.”

According to Ritchie, buyers from outside Rhode Island started purchasing properties in the late ‘80s, and rents began to rise at a faster rate. Eventually, she moved her business to Ives Street in 1987.

“And now it’s happening here,” Ritchie said, referencing quickly rising prices.

The nicer weather and people walking has led to more traffic recently, and “business has been good,” Ritchie said. But she fears that Ives Street “will follow the path of the rents being so expensive” that different kinds of busi-

KATHLEEN MENINGER / HERALD

Tuesday’s panel, hosted by the Watson Institute, brought together scholars in various fields to discuss racial identity in Palestine and how it influences and is influenced by broader global trends. ing violence against Palestinians and Black people to the rise of “ethical solidarity” among Palestinian activists. While Middle East scholars and pro-Palestinian advocates must commit to ethical solidarity, she said, they must also recognize that “the Arabs and the Jews are as much a part of the Black slave trade — the creation of Blackness as social death — as anyone else.”

Erakat also referenced a statement by the Middle East Studies Association that “recognizes the racism against indentured labor in the (Middle Eastern and North African) region as a core

component of anti-Blackness and the struggle against it.”Each of the speakers prepared answers prior to the event based on questions posed to them by Erakat in earlier discussions.

To address the questions, “What is the relationship between race and sovereignty? How does anti-Blackness travel across time and space? What lessons does Palestine offer on these questions?” Seikaly shared a series of family photos.

She outlined her family’s intergenerational experiences as Palestinian Christians, explaining their experiences

with colonization under British rule and their involvement in the slave trade.

“The idea here that’s so interesting is that these (Palestinian) men understand themselves as distinct from Blackness and Black Sudanese,” but also as distinct from the British in that they were “colonized in ways that parallel the people they believe they are superior to,” she said.

Tatour followed Seikaly by talking about the absence of race in Palestinian scholarship she encountered in her research.

“In the 1980s, and in the 90s on-

nesses, especially mom-and-pop establishments like hers, can’t afford to stay.

“That’s the fear: that it’ll go the way of Thayer,” she said.

“I’m sure this neighborhood is going to change a lot. It’s already changing,” Dusseault said. She said she has already seen people buying houses and fixing them up, sometimes living in part and renting out the rest.

“There will probably be more businesses coming in here as well,” she said.

“That’s where the money is,” especially when properties can be dual-purpose, with rental units above businesses on the ground floor, she added.

Louis Family Restaurant has also witnessed demographic changes in the neighborhood since the 1960s.

Louis celebrated its 75th anniversary during the pandemic and is currently co-owned by John Gianfrancesco, son of the restaurant’s founder, The Herald previously reported.

“The Portuguese families were pushed out,” Gianfrancesco said, citing the growing impact of the University on Fox Point over time. The Univer-

sity “just kept getting bigger.” While Fox Point used to be occupied by many Irish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigrants, many of these residents were priced out, Ward 1 Councilman John Goncalves ’13 MA’15, a long-time Fox Point resident, previously told The Herald.

This caused some tension between Brown students and Portuguese young people, Gianfranesco said, recalling his father once standing between students and members of the Portuguese community to prevent a physical escalation.

“Louis was a short guy,” Gianfrancesco said. “But he would intervene.”

Other business owners previously shared concerns that new developments would increase retail and living costs, The Herald previously reported.

Owners of businesses in another business enclave on Hope Street also cited concerns about rising real estate prices.

Over the past several years, Elise Mischel, owner of LuLi Boutique, has seen many more shops open and come to Hope Street where storefronts were

previously vacant. “There’s a demand,” she said. “There’s almost a waitlist for people who want to have a brick-andmortar for their small business.”

Mischel opened her business in May 2011 and felt that Hope Street was “pretty well gentrified” when she opened the store. But “there’s more and more people wanting to take a chance with a small business … and bring it forward with a brick-and-mortar,” she said.

The only large national chains in the area are a CVS and a few banks, Mischel said. The majority of storefronts are small businesses, many of which are notably female-owned, she added. Hope Street and Wayland Square are especially appealing for small businesses because of the size of available commercial rental units, according to Mischel.

These smaller commercial units make it more challenging for large franchises to move in, she said. Thayer Street once had this same appeal and was “very charming, but it’s not anymore,” she added.

has focused her work on the Bedouin community, which she said is not only racialized within Palestine but also holds its own “deep racial structure.”

Reynolds then discussed the limitations of Palestine’s history of occupation in racial analysis, and “the value of the Palestinian intellectual tradition in filling some of the gaps in that analysis.”

While human rights organizations recently began to focus on Israeli occupation in Palestine, Reynolds said, Palestinian thinkers “over the decades (have) given us a fuller historicized and contextualized understanding of Israeli apartheid.”

Hill closed out the event by discussing anti-Blackness among Black Middle Easterners and Ethiopians, drawing on his experiences doing fieldwork in an Afro-Palestinian community in Jerusalem.

“What does it mean to have a Black Lives Matter movement for Ethiopians who are both victims of anti-Blackness and white supremacy, but at the same time are part of a settler colonial project” opposed to the anti-imperialist BLM movement? Hill asked.

Thayer Street has seen major change, Mischel said, “but I’m far enough from that area that it’s not affecting me yet. I think that because all these big things are being developed over there, … if anything, it’s pushing shoppers towards my end of town.”

Mischel also expressed optimism that business on Hope Street is there to stay. “What’s really great about our street is that you’re going to find stores that are absolutely not at the mall, … that are unique, and you’re going to meet the owner when you walk in,” she said. “I don’t feel this threat of big business taking any of that away.”

Mischel also said that the landlords in the area are very conscientious, and a few she knows are business owners themselves. “We don’t have some corporate person that owns the building that only thinks of numbers and gouges you so that eventually you have to leave,” she said. “That’s a big deal.”

Additional reporting by Tevah Gevelber.

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2022

SCIENCE & RESEARCH

UCLA psychiatrist-anthropologist explains ‘whiteness’ of opioid crisis Marketing, regulations have led to opioid abuse by white Americans in recent decades

BY WILL KUBZANSKY UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR Since the 1990s, opioid deaths have skyrocketed, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From April 2020 to April 2021, 75,673 Americans died of opioid overdoses.

The opioid crisis has long been associated with white Americans in parts of the country undergoing deindustrialization, said MD-PhD psychiatrist-anthropologist Helena Hansen, who is also a professor at UCLA School of Medicine and UCLA Center for Social Medicine, according to the event description.

“But why opioids, and why white people?” Hansen asked in a virtual talk at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice on Tuesday. The answer, she said, is that “the current generation of opioids were designed to have white identities.”

“Social technologies,” Hansen noted, “reinforced racial inequalities while at the same time harming white Americans.”

Opioids, from treatments like buprenorphine to highly addictive drugs such as OxyContin, have consistently taken on a white racial identity, she explained — both in terms of whom they are prescribed to and how society perceives them.

Hansen, who said she has studied the intersection of race and addiction

for two decades, noted that only in 2020 did the racial opioid overdose rates reverse, with Black and Native American individuals beginning to die at higher rates.

“What makes the overdose crisis of the past 20 years different in people’s minds is the way the white identity of sufferers has been highlighted,” she said.

Drugs, she said, have always held racial associations: Historically, narcotics have been associated with “opium dens” run by Chinese individuals, cocaine has been associated with Black Americans and marijuana has been associated with Mexican communities. White middle class identity, too, has tied into drug use, she said — but those drugs, such as valium and barbiturates, were advertised in the open and are legal.

For opioids in the late 20th century and early 21st century, a distinct marketing and regulatory paradigm targeted white, middle-class Americans, Hansen explained.

Much of Hansen’s previous work surrounded buprenorphine — an opioid that both treats pain and also works to treat opioid use disorder.

The drug, she said, took on a racial identity compared to its treatment predecessor, methadone. The federal government initially saw methadone as a “weapon in the war on drugs,” only making it available in regulated, observed clinics primarily located in “marginalized neighborhoods.”

While buprenorphine is “pharmacologically similar” to methadone, the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug in 2002 in the form of suboxone and subutex, allowing for

doctors to prescribe it for home use, Hansen said. This marked the first time that private doctors could use opioids to treat people dependent on opioids.

But the high cost of suboxone and its limitation to medical practices that completed an extensive certification course dictated its target audience, she said.

“Patented, expensive technologies for expensive deliveries encode white race and middle class,” she added, noting that race stratifies access to medicine. In contrast, public clinics with little profit incentive to prescribe suboxone rarely had the time or saw the incentive to undergo certification, she said.

Another key example, she added, comes from the development and marketing of OxyContin, a drug produced

by Purdue Pharmaceuticals that has been repeatedly cited with helping create the opioid crisis.

After the FDA allowed acute pain sufferers to access opioids in 1996, a “new generation of patented opioids” followed shortly after, Hansen said.

Purdue hired 700 representatives to encourage 100,000 physicians — “located primarily in white suburban and rural areas” considered low risk for addiction, such as Maine, Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia — to prescribe OxyContin, she said. Ads for OxyContin featured white, middle-class patients and grandmothers, while doctors primarily directed OxyContin to supposedly “trustworthy” patients who were often white.

“For the most part, the white middle class consumer is the one that pharmaceutical companies first target,” Hansen said.

CA L E N DA R

WILL KUBZANSKY / HERALD

In a virtual talk at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice on Tuesday, Helena Hansen discussed opioid abuse by white Americans.

Opioid marketing in the late 1990s and early 2000s also aimed to legitimize the use and addiction of “white middle-class” patients, she added, detailing a phenomenon called “pseudo-addiction” in which users of prescription opioids exhibit all the same signs of opioid use disorder.

“The treatment for pseudo-addiction (was) not to get them off of opioids,” she said, “but to increase the dose.”

Opioid manufacturers also used coded language in marketing materials to declare opioids a “white drug” with images and descriptions of white, middle-class patients, she said.

And when Purdue began introducing tamper-resistant formulations of OxyContin in response to its abuse, more white Americans addicted to opioids began turning to heroin, she explained.

While drug users had previously been considered “criminals,” white opioid users were painted as “victims,”

she added.

Hansen urged the audience to consider systemic intervention — not isolated, “magic bullet” technologies — as the key to improving public health conditions. Any solution introduced to the health care system, she noted, automatically becomes “stratified.”

In the meantime, Hansen urged health officials to consider the impact of social systems on the brain and the social determinants of health.

“The more we focus on a magic bullet, the less we focus on deep social inequalities and how they’re driving overdoses,” she said.

The argument as a whole, she added, will feature in her coming book written with Jules Netherland, a policy analyst for the Drug Policy Alliance, and David Herzberg, a University of Buffalo history professor, titled “Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Heroin in America.”

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WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2022

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

5

ARTS & CULTURE

Artists, scholars discuss structural racism in performing arts Panel caps off ‘Race & in America’ series with virtual discussion on race in arts

BY KAITLYN TORRES UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR On Tuesday, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America hosted “Race & Performance in America,” its final event in the 2021-22 “Race & in America” series. This event followed five other virtual events this semester and in the fall, including “Race & Inequality” and “Race & Poetry.”

The speakers at the event discussed structural racism in the performing arts and explored how they have navigated performances as women of color.

Provost Richard Locke P’18 gave opening remarks highlighting the importance of addressing systemic racism in the United States and specifically at Brown. “We can and we must be agents of change,” he said.

Locke also introduced the speakers at the event: Assistant Professor of Visual Art Helina Metaferia, Associate Professor of Art at Wellesley College Nikki Greene and Professor of Theater Arts and Performance Studies Patricia Ybarra. The event was moderated

by Inaugural Artistic Director of the Brown Arts Initiative and Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics Avery Willis Hoffman.

Hoffman echoed Locke, highlighting the importance of discussing performance and race. She said that it is an important time for “wrestling and reckoning with race and the structural racism that we see in performing arts and other art entities,” adding that these structural factors can affect how society perceives art.

Ybarra spoke first and discussed her work as part of an editorial collective that examines the history of theater.

KAITLYN TORRES / HERALD

“Race & Performance in America” was the final event in the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America’s “Race & in America” series, which examined the relationship between racial identity and various facets of American society throughout the academic year.

Her presentation entitled “Canonizing the History of Race as/and Performance” shared how she reworked a new edition of the textbook “Theater Histories.”

According to Ybarra, the new edition of the textbook will discuss how violence and racial impersonation, or when actors pretend to be a person of a different race, are at the heart of the history of performance, a fact which she said has previously been ignored.

Additionally, she said she wants to embrace demands she’s heard from students for more inclusion in performance.

Ybarra inserted various sections within the textbook meant to correct the lack of recognition of racism in performing arts, including sections on the place of BIPOC-led rebellions in the Americas and racial impersonation as white supremacy. She added that these additions will make readers reconsider what they know about artists of color, whose historical importance is often overlooked, she said.

After Ybarra, Metaferia shared a presentation on her exhibition “By Way of Revolution,” in which she sought to

construct a project that “creates space for powerful dialogue and communion amongst BIPOC women identifying (cis, trans, gender non-conforming) people, who have historically served as overlooked yet vital assets within care politics and activist labor,” according to her website.

Metaferia explained that her process began with the compilation of materials and stories that show “what activism looks like across generations.”

As part of the exhibition, students working with Metaferia had the opportunity to be photographed. These photographs were presented alongside photos of activists that the students felt represented them, she said. The exhibition also contained a collection of signs and buttons formatted to appear like a protest, she said.

The pieces in the exhibition “can actually be used in the world as instruments for change,” Metaferia said.

After the project was showcased at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, striking union members printed copies of the signs shown in the exhibition, she added.

Metaferia also shared videos from

her project “The Call,” which was composed of performances by the descendants of prominent civil rights activists. She said that the film was made to “report oral history” of these activists.

The last speaker was Greene, whose presentation “When We Gather: María Magdalena Campos-Pons and the Collective Creativity of Women” discussed the film “When We Gather,” a collaboration of seven women of color artists organized by Campos-Pons.

Greene followed Cuban-born artist Campos-Pons to her art exhibitions in Cuba, New York and Germany and witnessed the making of “When We Gather.” For the film, which was inspired by the election of Vice President Kamala Harris in 2020, Campos-Pons asked the artists of color to create a performance of “movement, prose and a sonic landscape,” Greene said.

Greene said that it was transformative to see Campos-Pons work virtually alongside the other female artists after having covered Campos-Pons’s previous works.

The purpose of “When We Gather” was to create a project for healing, unity and creation, Greene said. “ ‘When We

Gather’ … continues to be an invitation … for collective renewal” to care for one another, she added.

The end of the event featured a question and answer session with the speakers. One question that Hoffman asked was about experiences with post-pandemic performance.

Greene said that the pandemic affected the way that people can access performances due to restrictions such as gathering limits and mask requirements.

She also brought up the idea that the pandemic has forced us to rethink who we want to share our space with.

Ybarra said that symbolic acts such as “sharing breath,” which are present in many performances, have become difficult with the pandemic. As a result, she said that many performances feel like risk management.

In response to another question regarding the history of performance, Ybarra said that during her career she has seen an expansion of inclusivity in theater.

In reference to performers of color, she said that theatrical “spaces weren’t built for us, but we are always here.”

Follow us on Instagram! @browndailyherald BURNT OUT FROM PAGE 1 limitations on the information that it provides due to the inconsistent amount of feedback it receives for each course.

“The main limitation of our website is that we only obtain data involving hours and time commitment from The Critical Review, and many departments use (The Critical Review) a lot less than others,” Cox said. “It would be nice to add the feature of self-reporting courses so that courses not on The Critical Review could be featured, but that data would be a lot less reliable and consistent than what we obtain now.”

Despite this challenge, Burnt Out @ Brown has managed to more directly compile course data, Cox said. Cox added that he was particularly excited by the site’s ability to order courses by time commitment so that students could compare them to one another

more easily.

“There is a gap between having access to the data in The Critical Review and actually being able to easily interpret it as a student during course selection,” Cox said. “There was no way to see a ranking of difficulty, so the only way to find a class on the harder or easier side was to do a linear search over every course, which we’ve done and reformatted on Burnt Out @ Brown.”

Dunn said that Burnt Out @ Brown has plans to expand its data to include specifics regarding individual professors as the site continues developing to condense as much information as possible for users.

“I’m hoping that we can get more data on professors so that you could look up professors by average amount of work rather than just courses,” Dunn said. “It would be cool to release helpful information for students on professors even when The Critical Review does not

have that data.”

Additionally, the founders plan to implement a search filter to provide information on courses in specific concentrations and classes that satisfy the University’s WRIT requirement.

To maximize the number of students Burnt Out @ Brown can reach, the team has utilized various social media platforms and word of mouth to increase its levels of engagement, Sharon wrote in an email to The Herald.

“The more information we include, the more helpful it’ll be for students,” Sharon added. “We’re really just hoping that students find it useful and tell their friends.”

According to Dunn, since its launch in January, Burnt Out @ Brown has reached over a thousand students and has seen increased usage among students as course pre-registration for the fall semester begins.

“The initial response has been great,” Dunn said. “I think we’ve had a surprising amount of traffic, which means that it’s not just our friends who are looking at it.”

The team has also received positive feedback directly from the site’s users, Ho said. “We even heard from some students who ended up registering for classes that they found through the site.”

“I also heard of people unaffiliated with the project discussing Burnt Out @ Brown, which was amazing,” he added. “ I also have a couple of friends who were able to explore courses that they wouldn’t have taken otherwise, like MUSC 0640: ‘Ghanaian Drumming’ and BIOL 0150D: ‘Techniques in Regenerative Medicine.’”

Mason Mead ’25, who is currently preparing for fall preregistration on April 21, said that Burnt Out @ Brown has been the simplest yet most helpful resource detailing course demands that

he has used since arriving on campus.

“The site is so user friendly but still full of information,” Mead said.

“It genuinely has acted as the deciding factor for a few of the courses I’m planning on registering for in just a couple of days.”

As the site continues growing, its founders said they will continue working toward their vision for the site’s use.

“Students are welcome to use the website however they’d like, but we don’t envision students visiting our website and taking the four classes we’ve determined have the lowest average workload,” Ho said.

“I want students to use the site not because of any potential for profit, but because I know it is a tool which can save a lot of time and facilitate the process of being the architect of your own education,” Cox added.

“Our ultimate goal is to increase the accessibility of information available to students.”

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | COMMENTARY

6

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2022

EDITORIAL

The UCS president-elect has his work cut out for him At 7 p.m. on Monday, leaders of the University’s three branches of student government stood on the Main Green and announced the results of this year’s student government elections. Many of the races were uncontested, but the final race announced, for the president of the Undergraduate Council of Students, was neck and neck between its three candidates: Emma Amselem Bensadon ’24, the current UCS health and wellness chair; Ricky Zhong ’23, the current UCS student activities chair; and Chas Steinbrugge ’24, the founder of the popular @brownumemes Instagram account and an outsider to student government at the University.

The point isn’t that UCS shouldn’t address these issues, but that its influence on them may be limited. Bright-eyed optimism must be tempered by an awareness of UCS’s limitations.

Back in September 2021 in an interview with The Herald’s Bruno Brief podcast, Steinbrugge conceded that his meme account could often be critical of the University without providing productive solutions. Now, as UCS president, it will be his job to work toward those solutions. But success will require knowledge of how student government works and the knowhow to negotiate with the University more than lofty goals.

Steinbrugge won 34.5% of the vote, prevailing over Zhong, the runner-up, by only 24 votes, or 1.5%. He will be next year’s UCS president. The elephant in the room: Is the administrator of a meme account with no experience in UCS qualified to lead the organization?

In this light, Steinbrugge shouldn’t discount the advice of those more familiar with the mechanics of student government at the University. It’s probably good that incoming Vice President Mina Sarmas ’24 is this year’s chair of campus life and was a first-year representative last year. Will Steinbrugge be able to navigate the structure of student government? Take one example: His platform’s focus on “creating more school spirit by hosting large UCS events in addition to promoting athletic events” is puzzling given that school spirit and event planning are the Class Coordinating Board’s main responsibility.

Perhaps, in some ways. Steinbrugge’s experience connecting with students through @brownumemes could help UCS tackle its student engagement problems,w an issue we’ve raised time and time again. Steinbrugge’s platform promises a student government “better at listening to student concerns” and “better at keeping the community informed about what the council is up to.” Steinbrugge’s meme account clearly pays attention to campus discontent — the account is often quick to criticize unpopular policies or administrative blunders that anger the undergraduate student body. Still, running UCS, unlike making memes, will require more than comic relief.

Converting campaign promises into real action will be a challenge for Steinbrugge.

Both his platform and his forum speech focused on dining — a subject at the center of campus discussion last semester — and housing — a topic on many students’ minds after a chaotic selection process. We admire his desire to be a forceful advocate for undergraduates on these issues. But at the end of the day, Steinbrugge is looking to tackle lofty problems that are not easily solved. UCS cannot veto administrative decisions or set budgets. It has little say in major University policies — with dining and housing being no exception.

Steinbrugge won the UCS election as an outsider, not to mention with a narrow margin and only a plurality of the vote. If UCS had staged a runoff election, as it has in the past when no candidate reached 50%, would Steinbrugge have won? Students saw the appeal of a candidate with an outsider background and fresh perspectives on student government may help revitalize UCS. But fresh perspectives do not equate to real change, and Steinbrugge’s win was far from decisive.

Next year, Steinbrugge will have to prove that he is more than just a meme account administrator.

Editorials are written by The Herald’s Editorial Page Board. This editorial was written by its editor Johnny Ren ’23 and members Catherine Healy ’22, Caroline Nash ’22.5, Augustus Bayard ’24, Devan Paul ’24 and Kate Waisel ’24.

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WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2022

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS

7

PODCAST

The Bruno Brief: Gentrification and housing on College Hill, explained

BY THE BRUNO BRIEF TEAM

The landscape of College Hill has undergone tremendous change in the last century. Between urban renewal, the impact and expansion of the University, off-campus student housing and the burgeoning field of historic preservation, complex factors contributed to a dramatic transformation, The Herald reported.

This episode of The Bruno Brief is part of a three-part special series on housing and gentrification. This week, we do a deep dive into property and housing on Providence’s East Side. We hear from experts, academics and more to explore this multifaceted topic.

The following is a transcript of The Bruno Brief podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and The Herald’s website. Send tips and feedback for the next episode to herald@browndailyherald.com. The Bruno Brief is produced in partnership with WBRU. Livi Burdette Brown is building brand new dorms to house its growing population of undergrads. When finished, they’ll be situated between two existing dorms, Vartan Gregorian Quad — the not-sonew-anymore New Dorm — and Barbour Hall. In preparing to break ground on the project two beloved institutions, Bagel Gourmet and Eastside Mini Mart, had to close their doors, and several houses were razed. But this isn’t the only project of its kind going on at Brown in recent years.

You’re listening to the Bruno brief.

I’m Livi Burdette.

I’m a senior here. And over the course of my four years, Brown’s campus has expanded more than a little bit. The brand new Wellness Center, certainly one of Brown’s swankiest dorms and home to University Health Services, opened its doors this academic year. I don’t even remember what was on Angel Street before construction of the new Performing Arts Center began in 2017. All this makes me wonder: If so much can change about the landscape of Brown’s campus and its surrounding areas in just my four years here, what did College Hill look like 40 years ago? How about 70? How and why has this area changed? And how have those changes affected the communities living here? Those are the kinds of questions we hope to start to answer in this special series of The Bruno Brief.

We want to know: What did College Hill used to look like? Who used to live here before college students flocked to off-campus apartments in Fox Point and historic preservation projects drove up rent prices?

For this series, we interviewed community organizers, student activists, professors, urban planners and historic preservationists to get an idea of what this history looks like. Over the following three episodes, you’ll hear an overview of the process of gentrification

on College Hill and the forces that have led to higher and higher rent prices and the displacement of existing communities. Then, we’ll do a close up on one particular neighborhood, Lippitt Hill — now known as University Heights —

Livi Burdette That was Nathaniel Pettit ’20, a recent Brown alum who wrote an honors thesis about the gentrification of College Hill and Brown’s impact. Some call this process “studentification,” a

where Providence knocked down dozens of family homes to remove what they called “blight” in order to build a newer and more expensive neighborhood.

Finally, in our last episode, we’ll hear from community members who are organizing for housing justice, and look forward to the future of gentrification and efforts to stop it on College Hill.

First, in this episode, let’s try and get a picture of what the area surrounding Brown University looked like in the mid-20th century. I’m here with Katy Pickens, Bruno Brief producer and Metro Editor for The Herald, who has led this project.

Hi Katy.

specific kind of gentrification that has happened on College Hill.

While studentification is ongoing, another factor is urban renewal — a process that mostly happened in the 1950s and 60s. It’s when governments identify specific neighborhoods that are labeled as a blight to the city and target them for demolition and rebuilding. This process often involuntarily removes its residents from their homes to make room for wealthier new ones.

Katy Pickens Hi, great to be here.

Livi Burdette So first, what has your research told you about what College Hill used to look like?

Katy Pickens There were far more historic homes on the hill. And additionally, Fox Point, just south of Brown’s campus and College Hill, was a vibrant community of immigrants, predominantly Irish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean. Since then, the communities around Brown have seen dramatic change.

Brenda Clement Like many cities, Providence is very much a tale of two cities, where (on) the East Side, where Brown and RISD are located, neighborhoods and communities often look very, very different than the west side of the city.

Livi Burdette That was Brenda Clement, director of HousingWorks RI. There are three main ways experts say that gentrification and displacement have occurred on College Hill. First is the impact of the University itself and its students.

Marijoan Bull Brown’s role on the East Side changed a lot. You know, they really were a catalyst for a lot of larger forces. You had increases in enrollment that were not matched to increases in on-campus student housing. And so then students were looking farther and farther afield from directly around campus for housing.

Livi Burdette That was Marijoan Bull, a professor at Westfield State University. She formerly taught at Brown.

Nathaniel Pettit Many – not all, but many – students at a place like Brown can pay a little bit more, but also landlords are incentivized to take in students because our standards are a lot lower. We don’t know how bad a place is. We’re willing to put up with a lot and you can pack in three or four students into an apartment that was originally designed for, you know, a working-class Cape Verdean family in Fox Point. But now, you know, myself and my friends can move in and a landlord can certainly make a lot more.

Antoinette Downing Archival audio via the Rhode Island Historical Society, RHiX_Ref_1994.66.2_ DVDRip The Benefit Street area, most of the little buildings were covered with artificial sidings and were real, real slums; as slum clearance program wasn’t an unfair thing to say that the city had planned for it because five or six families would be living in these little houses, and one bathroom would be located in the cellar, the whole family would use it. We walked into a very battered city.

Livi Burdette That was prominent preservationist Antoinette Downing in a 1987 interview courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society.

With studentification and urban renewal, the final main factor in changing the landscape of College Hill is historic preservation. This is the work that often well-meaning community members do to try to restore and preserve the architectural history of old and storied neighborhoods, which often has the harmful side effects of displacing the people who are living in those areas before preservation.

Nathaniel Pettit With organizations like the Providence Preservation Society, PPS, that were ostensibly about kind-of maintaining culture and maintaining, you know, buildings of architectural significance that were linked to Providence’s colonial history, they nonetheless had a really strong political agenda that was really interwoven with urban renewal.

Restoring Benefit Street, for instance, resulted in gentrification and resulted in the displacement of longtime residents, many of them being residents of color.

Livi Burdette In this episode, we’ll tell you the stories of these three processes, and how they each unfolded to create the College Hill of today. First, Brown’s impact. Here’s Katy Pickens.

Katy Pickens So, for the first 170 years, basically, of the University’s existence, there were very few on-campus buildings and Brown’s campus was very self contained. However, this changed after World War II, roughly, with the Wriston administration. Dorm building began en masse and blocks of neighborhoods were leveled in order to make way for these enormous dorms to house more Brown University students.

RHEA RASQUINHA / HERALD

Livi Burdette One person who knows a lot about this is Nathaniel Pettit. You’ve heard his voice in this episode a couple times already.

Nathaniel Pettit In my research it would turn up that Brown would throughout the years say, “Oh, we want to reduce our negative impact on housing costs. So we’re going to build more dorms.” And then in the next couple of years, the class has gotten bigger. And we were right back to where we were, you know, as far as students going off campus in bigger numbers and helping to drive prices up.

Katy Pickens In terms of off-campus student housing and its effects, students began living off campus in huge numbers, particularly in the 60s and 70s. This was due to a combination of factors — both increasing class sizes, making it harder to fit everyone on campus, as well as a real social dimension that people kind of wanted to have their own house so they could study or throw parties or socialize outside of the on-campus setting.

Nathaniel Pettit In my experience, it really felt like there was a big draw to move off campus socially. In all of my friend groups, or most of my friend groups, it was like, how fast can you get off? Can you get off, you know, junior year, can you somehow work magic and get off even before?

Katy Pickens From 1961 to 1969, there was a 287% increase in undergraduates living off campus, which was just astronomical for the time and definitely had a huge impact on specifically the Fox Point community, which had often been more affordable and more for working-class families.

Livi Burdette And that was according to a 1969 Ad Hoc Committee on Housing and Expansion report.

So Katy, was the University aware at all of the possible consequences that would happen if so many students kept moving off campus?

Katy Pickens In my archival research, I was surprised actually, by how aware the University was at the time. In 1970, the Acting President Merton Stoltz sent a letter to the whole student body essentially saying, don’t live in Fox Point, it’s extremely detrimental to the community.

And students were actively encouraged not to look for off-campus housing in Fox Point because of the impact on the local community. Being aware of the impact students were having on housing and Fox Point, the University actually made a plan to build affordable housing for Fox Point residents. So they had acquired a parcel of land at Bond Bread Company on the corner of Brook and John streets in 1965.

Initially, they had wanted to make a parking garage but received a lot of pushback. So that didn’t happen.

Then, as all these changes were happening with housing in the late 60s, the University actually decided to build affordable apartments on that lot, specifically for Fox Point residents who had been displaced. And the University actually kept extensive records on the whole process of the Bond Bread site, and deciding what to do with it, as well as the large amount of pushback that they received from the community, who largely didn’t trust Brown University or Edward Salzburger, the developer that the University had put in charge of the project.

In my research, I actually found a flier from a community meeting that Fox Point residents had about the project that said, “Brown has already expanded too far into Fox Point. We must make sure it doesn’t expand any further,” and demanding that the site be turned into affordable homes rather than apartments.

Nathaniel Pettit Of course, ultimately, it fell through.

And it was a really disastrous event, and I think it really left deep wounds between Brown and Fox Point.

Livi Burdette University Spokesperson Brian Clark told The Herald that understanding campus property growth in the past requires looking at original materials which documented what University leaders were thinking at the time. As a result, the University couldn’t comment directly on those decisions.

To this day, the University continues to have major impacts on housing access in the areas surrounding it.

But we’ll hear more about that in a future episode. Now, let’s move on to the second major factor in gentrification on College Hill, urban renewal.

Katy, can you explain what urban renewal means exactly, and what that process has looked like?

Katy Pickens So urban renewal is essentially state-sanctioned programs to rebuild

SEE BRUNO BRIEF PAGE 8

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2022

BRUNO BRIEF FROM PAGE 7 or refine a specific neighborhood that has been considered inadequate or of low quality. Oftentimes, in the 50s and 60s, when these projects were predominantly taking place in Providence, it was extremely racist in what it would deem as a low quality neighborhood.

News broadcaster Lippitt Hill Revisited, via RIHS. RHiX_ Ref_1994.66.2_DVDRip When 70% of the houses in the neighborhood are substandard, and when one in five of those houses is uninhabitable, and all the signs of blight are to be seen in the area, there’s only one recourse for the city and that is to demolish the houses by condemning.

Katy Pickens Oftentimes in city planning documents, predominantly Black, brown or immigrant communities would be called a “blight” on the city. So essentially, the state poured money in to demolish many homes and raze neighborhoods.

People were forced to leave whether they wanted to or not, because of eminent domain. A predominantly Black community just north of campus, called Lippitt Hill, was a catastrophic example

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD | NEWS of how urban renewal can destroy a community. And we’ll get to that in the next episode.

Livi Burdette So the final main factor in all this that you’ve identified is historic preservation. What exactly does that phrase mean? And who are the actors behind the process of trying to preserve the history of College Hill?

Katy Pickens So in the early 1950s, when Brown was just starting its massive dorm building campaign, they essentially demolished five blocks of historic homes, which created uproar, especially in the community, many of which had direct ties to Brown University.

Archival footage RIHS - RHiX_Ref_1994.66.2_DVDRip In the 1950s, when an institutional neighbor on College Hill, Brown University, began tearing down and moving houses for new dormitories, Antoinette’s scholarship turned into activism. With the support of John Nicholas Brown, one of Rhode Island’s foremost citizens, the Providence Preservation Society was formed. Over the next decade, they convinced Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design to

preserve and adapt, rather than demolish. Today, for example, the home of the 19th century inventor George Corliss is Brown University’s admissions office.

Livi Burdette That was another clip from a TV special you heard a bit of earlier. It’s a profile celebrating the life of Antoinette Downing, a prominent Providence resident who published a reference manual on historical homes in Rhode Island. She and John Nicholas Brown, a direct descendant of Brown University’s founding family, created the Providence Preservation Society in 1956.

PPS played a central role not only in preserving historic homes from being torn down by Brown, but also in how urban renewal was implemented more broadly on College Hill. Here’s Downing talking about the urban renewal project targeting Benefit Street.

Antoinette Downing RHiX_Ref_1994.66.2_DVDRip It was a real first in the preservation thing. In the normal preservation plan, you went through the area and you marked houses that looked beat up, and you slated them for demolition, you picked out your area for urban renewal, and then those were demolished and you started over. We weren’t doing that

here, we were going to save the houses.

So what we did, that had never been done so far as I know, even in earlier preservation plans, was to date the houses. We looked up the records in the town hall and spent hours doing that.

Livi Burdette According to Downing, this process of dating historic homes made the zoning committee realize that every period of historic homes should be treated with respect. However, in reality …

Katy Pickens This did not apply evenly to all communities near Brown University.

The group was predominantly white, wealthy and connected to the University. And as a result, they did not always view non-white neighborhoods as worth saving at all. They contributed to the designation of Lippitt Hill as a blight on the city, and also did not do very much work to preserve the Black-owned homes or churches or businesses that were destroyed throughout the time period.

And an additional thing to consider is that in the work of preservation, especially in the 50s and 60s, certain histories have been deemed more important than others. So oftentimes, they were working to preserve aesthetics in homes that were very representative of colonial or even times in the U.S. where there was slavery. So when I talked to Brent Runyon, who is the executive director of the Providence Preservation Society, he was open about trying to preserve and prioritize histories that were often overlooked by the organization in the past.

Brent Runyon For now, we’re working with a project in South Providence to try to understand from their point of view, where does preservation affect them both positively, negatively and potentially.

And for us, part of that is just learning how to listen and engage.

Katy Pickens And oftentimes, because so much of their attention was focused just on College Hill, non-white or poorer neighborhoods were overlooked.

Another dimension of historic preservation is that it does create economic value. And it is something that today is still considered a very hot commodity in

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8 terms of real estate, and as a result can often make neighborhoods unaffordable to lower income people.

Brent Runyon You know, it’s all tied up in the real estate market. If you put money into a place to improve it, which is often what you’re doing if you’re trying to preserve something or restore something, then it’s very likely that you might need to increase the rent, right? Or you’re banking on that place being more valuable, so you can sell it at a higher price. And so, without subsidies from policies that say preservation of places is a value to our community. Without those kinds of subsidies, then improvements will often mean displacement.

Livi Burdette So, considering all three of these factors, how would you characterize sort-of the scale of gentrification and displacement around College Hill in the last half century or more?

Katy Pickens While it’s been a slow and complex process, looking today at the housing prices and rental prices on the East Side compared to the rest of the city, it is clear that we are in a neighborhood that has been made unaffordable.

So in my research I referenced the HousingWorksRI Factbook, which lists housing prices in different communities in Rhode Island. And Providence is interesting because they list it once with the East Side, and then again without the East Side, because it makes such a significant difference in the averages that they calculate. The annual income needed to purchase a median priced home in the community of Providence without the East Side is $69,000, approximately, versus on the East Side, it jumps to $188,000. So clearly, over time, all of these factors have had significant impacts.

Livi Burdette That’s it for this week’s episode of The Bruno Brief. Stay tuned for the next episode in this special series. This show was produced by Katy Pickens, Jacob Smollen, Finn Kirkpatrick and me, Livi Burdette. If you like what you hear, subscribe to The Bruno Brief wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.