The Final Frontier: Charter Schools as New Community Institutions of Gentrification

Abstract

Recent scholarship on gentrification suggests the need to pay attention the role of the state in fostering new geographies of gentrification. This paper highlights the different agents and enablers of gentrification and the increasing importance of place-based community activism in inner city neighborhoods that is a response to a retrenching state. These agents include new types of gentrifiers: family-oriented, middle-class groups who have different interests and motivations from "traditional" (childless) gentrifiers. The neoliberalization of social service provision has enabled private groups, such as middle-class gentrifiers, to transform critical social institutions in gentrifying neighborhoods. One such institution is a charter school, which enables private management of public dollars to provide public education. Through interviews and archival analysis, these new dynamics in the gentrification process are explored by examining the importance of place-based community that is produced and consumed by gentrifiers in an intown neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia.