Hemphill-Nichols “blasted” the city planning office, first by email and then at a meeting at Centennial Missionary Baptist Church, asking them to explain what happened. She then took the maps to Medical Campus officials, who said they had nothing to do with it.

As she stressed to officials at the time, the existence of the Fruit Belt wasn’t open for debate. The neighborhood appeared on city maps dating back to the 1950s, bordered by Michigan Avenue, Jefferson Avenue, Cherry and North streets. In 2005, when the University at Buffalo commissioned a neighborhood map based on more than a century of historical records and city plans, it clearly placed the Fruit Belt on a neat scalene wedge between the Kensington Expressway and the Medical Campus.

“Maps don’t just show the world — they change the world,” says the geographer Mark Graham. “They affect how we interact with the world and understand the world. In doing so, they shape the world itself.”

Residents couldn’t prove it, exactly, but they believed the Google Maps error was both a symptom and cause of their displacement. “They took our name from us and no one knew about it,” Hemphill-Nichols says. “Once you take our identity, you plan to take everything else.”

Matt Enstice, the Medical Campus’ chief executive officer, says the facility never requested any sort of name change or geographic designation. Mehaffy, the head of the Office of Strategic Planning, says the city had also made no attempts to “rebrand” the Fruit Belt either, at least since 2010 when he started his tenure.

Nevertheless, residents say references to “Medical Park” started cropping up all over the place. There was the Zillow listing for a vacant lot in “Medical Park” asking for far more money than entire house typically fetches in the neighborhood. There was a “Medical Park” rental aimed at med students and doctors on Airbnb. Then, there was the flood of new students and workers parking and smoking in the Fruit Belt. Residents wondered if the newcomers saw “Medical Park” when they mapped their commute and just made assumptions.

With so little public understanding of how these systems work, it’s tempting to assign intent to these myriad decisions. The process is too opaque to scrutinize in public. And that ambiguity foments a sense of powerlessness.

Worst of all, in May 2018, a young realtor named Kim Santana posted a glamorous Instagram post of herself standing on the corner of High and Lemon Streets, holding a large coffee cup. “Whether you call it the fruit belt or the medical park neighbourhood, this is a great opportunity to be part of the buffalo renaissance!” her caption read. (“I really believe that the Medical Campus is going to bring some attention to the formerly known Fruit Belt neighborhood,” Santana told me by email.)

Residents who saw the image seethed. India Walton, the co-founder of the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust, ticks off the many ways the Instagram post offended her: the tone, the use of the reviled Medical Park name, the presence of a “chai latte or whatever.” Walton includes the image in a presentation she gives to other activists around the country about the dangers of gentrification. The post proves, Walton says, that developers and realtors seized on Google’s mistake to market the Fruit Belt to rich white kids.