This paper examines the place and community identity dialectic in Mount Pleasant, a multi-ethnic and multi-class U.S. neighborhood where place definitions are highly contested among residents. In a grant proposal for public toilets, grantwriters' use a discursive type of spatial purification practice via which they set up a moral and spatial order where they and other core community members use space 'appropriately', thus inhabiting positive moral positions, whilst immigrant community members' alleged 'inappropriate' use of space is used to attribute negative moral positions to them.