Gentrification

This opinion piece from Friday’s Washington Post may have been written by a resident of the nation’s capital but we suspect it might have some resonance here in Brooklyn.

Here’s what I see: long-term African American residents leaving the city, and not by choice. Their old neighborhoods are being taken over by young, white professionals who are the beneficiaries of educational and social opportunities that this African American population never had. Many of these African Americans raised families in the old brownstones in my neighborhood, but they rented from absentee landlords who now have been more than happy to sell out to developers. A historically disadvantaged people has been disadvantaged once again.

And apparently there is a memo I didn’t get. The one that says: “Whenever you see a non-white person in the neighborhood, be sure you strike an immediate hard look on your face to be sure they know you are not friendly.” What are they thinking? Do they wonder who lived in these houses before the developers ran them out? What the hell do they think racism is anyway?

Not surprisingly, the comments are where the action is. Reactions ranged from “It sounds to me like you have a serious chip on your shoulder” to “I’m white, college educated…etc. But I know what he’s talking about” to ” Mr. Carlso confuses demographic change with racism and, in turn, becomes racist.” See the entire story and all the comments here.

That’s the take of the president of the Harlem Tenants Council, quoted in a New America Media story titled “Gentrification Pushing African Americans Out of Cities:”

What that says to me is this is about much more than just gentrification…It seems it’s all but become a matter of public policy, one mandated by the big-time real estate, insurance and finance companies that now govern the economies of cities and truly pull all the strings. Among them, the consensus seems to be that black people don’t have the right to live in prime sectors and on high-valued, expensive land.

Brooklyn City Council Member Charles Barron has similar thoughts. “The development should be from the bottom up, from the people up, not from the top down, from rich white developers and the city planning commission,” he said in the same article.

How about you? Do you think the gentrification in Brooklyn and the rest of the city is such a top-down phenomenon. Aside from a couple of high-profile rezonings like the Williamsburg waterfront (which had almost no black residents but quite a high number of Latinos) and Downtown Brooklyn, where a few dozen residents (we’re guessing), many of them black, were likely displaced, we’d argue that gentrification is more of an organic process that is fairly bottom-up. Or at least, that’s where it starts. If you look at the standard lifecycle (pioneering artists and students followed by an upscale coffee shop or two followed by young families), the changes are already in motion before the politicians and developers get the memo. And while zoning changes are one way politicians can have a direct top-down impact on how a neighborhood evolves, the ramifications of other changes are more complicated. Take, for example, a politician who allocates money to clean up and beautify a long neglected public space in an area like Bed Stuy: On the one hand, this should be greeted by residents as a great thing, right? But it has the perverse consequence of making the area more attractive to new, possibly more affluent, residents. Likewise, should long-time residents bemoan the opening of a fantastic, mid-priced restaurant like Saraghina or an organic food market because these places will attract people of different races and income levels? Complicated stuff.

In a neighborhood like Bed Stuy, the main driver of gentrification has most certainly not come from developers and politicians, though a handful of new condo buildings have been built to appeal to more affluent buyers in recent years. (In some of these cases, no residents end up being displaced–instead vacant and derelict properties are invested in and new housing stock created.) The main driver of gentrification in Bed Stuy in recent years has been (1) families attracted to the housing stock and and community scaled who, compelled by higher housing prices in Fort Greene and subsequently Clinton Hill, keep looking further and further east for their dream home and (2) a wave of upwardly-mobile black twenty- and thirty-somethings who are both attracted to the sense of pride and history and appreciate being able to get a latte or some decent sushi.

If you’re interested in this topic and specifically how it relates to Brooklyn, the film makers behind a documentary-in-progress called My Brooklyn (trailer embedded above) have ten days to go in their Kickstarter fund drive.

White professionals and hipsters trickled in, slowly, visible even through the bubble of being a black college student, surrounded by 10,000 other black college students, in a largely black neighborhood, in a mostly black city. By 2004, they were regularly spotted making their way to and from the Shaw–Howard University Metrorail station. And by the time I graduated, white people were jogging up 4th Street NW through the campus, and walking their large dogs on the green lawn of Howard’s Louis Stokes Health Sciences Library—something longtime black residents never did.

Four years later, the author is walking her own dog on the green lawn.

For neighborhoods where it suddenly feels like white people are “everywhere,” the U.S. Census Bureau says the vast majority of residents in LeDroit Park and Bloomingdale (and Petworth, and Brookland) are still black—more than 80 percent of the residents in some gentrifying census tracts in a 2009 estimate. Perhaps that’s because just as “black people” is a proxy term for poor people in D.C., “white people” is a proxy term for the young professionals who have moved in—and neither term is being accurately used….Newcomers to D.C. of any race tend to arrive for the same kind of high-powered jobs, the kind of jobs you can’t get without education and social capital. The people who are already struggling to find work when newcomers get here, though, are likely to be black.

Later in the piece she writes this:

“Gentrifier” can’t be equated with “white person.” After all, most poor people in this country are white (though it’s definitely a numbers game; whites are still less likely to be poor than blacks and Latinos—there are just more of them). The gentrifier is a person of privilege, and even if she doesn’t have much money, she’s got an education and a network of friends who are striving like she is, and she has the resources to at least try to get what she wants.

Any of this resonate with gentrifiers of color out there?

Photo by Angry Eel