Mediating Gentrification: How One Community Created Unity Out of Divisiveness with Beth Roy

Join the JP Forum in welcoming Beth Roy, a long time mediator in the San Francisco Bay Area, for a talk on her experience moderating an intense dispute in a San Francisco Neighborhood.

“I don’t mind new people coming into the neighborhood,” said one young man, the third generation in his family raised in a rapidly gentrifying community, “but I do mind their coming with a sense of entitlement.”

Sweeping dynamics of global change manifest as very local tensions. Neighbors long familiar with each other’s ways become challenged by newcomers’ expectations and demands. Played out without consideration, these tensions grow into painful conflicts.

But it is possible for communities to come together in respect for the needs of all residents, both old and new. It is possible for people to grow and for community life to benefit from honest contention that is respectfully shared.

At the JP Forum, Beth Roy will talk about an example of such an approach when she mediated an intense dispute in a San Francisco neighborhood. Drawing on her mediation there, she extracts directions for re-thinking facets of the work with a social justice perspective.

Beth Roy, PhD, is a long-time mediator in the San Francisco Bay Area. Trained as a sociologist at University of California, Berkeley, she teaches there in the Peace and Conflict Studies program. She writes books on social conflict, including 41 Shots….and Counting: What Amadou Diallo Teaches Us About Policing, Race, and Justice (Syracuse University Press, 2008). A detailed case history and training aid, The Bernal Story: Mediating Class and Race in a Multicultural Community, was published this year by Syracuse University Press. Dr. Roy is a co-founder of the Practitioners Research and Scholarship Institute (PRASI), a network of writers dedicated to supporting academic and other professional authors to regard lived experience as the basis of research and to write their knowledge for publication. She co-edited Re-Centering Culture and Knowledge in Conflict Resolution Practice (Syracuse University Press, 2008).