I hope I’m not the gentrifier who I met today. She is annoyed with “the men” who “get drinks” and sit and smoke at the park near her house.
“I might write a letter to the city council. Maybe I was in New York too long,” she droned, “but I think parks should be for children and families. No smoking and drinking.”
“The thing is,” I tried to start casually, like one of those guys in the park would, “sitting outside with friends and drinking and hanging out in public spaces, that’s New Orleans.” She changed the topic to her post-natal all-fruit-and-vegetable diet plan.
I've lived in gentrifying neighborhoods my entire adult life. I struggle to make sense of it. When friends recommend the yoga studio next to Company Burger on Freret, I hesitate to try it because I wonder what happened to the affordable childcare that used to be there. But I have no trouble noshing on fries from Company Burger. They're way better than Frostop and the mayo bar has so many tasty options.
People like me see the damage of gentrification, primarily the displacement of people and loss of culture, and comment in vagaries. Then we scoop up houses in neighborhoods with prices on the climb. I benefit from gentrification and take little action to mitigate or reverse it. My gentrification costs others. It may make the Google street view prettier and my life more luxurious, but it displaces people from their homes and shunts poverty down the road to a more distant neighborhood. It creates conditions in which poverty persists. Why did it take me so long to figure this out? How did I become part of this problem? I went back to the beginning to make sense of it all.
When my parents moved to Salem, Oregon in 1974, my dad was determined to live close to work. He took a map and a compass and "put the sharp point on Eaton Hall," his office located in downtown Salem, and drew a circle with a radius of two miles. He insisted we live within that circle. The two houses I grew up in where both a mile and a half from his work. My father usually rode the bus or biked to work, out of economic necessity and concern for the environment. I was ten when we finally became a two-car family. This impacted me, I value living close to work and school and restaurants and businesses--every home I have rented or purchased was selected based on this criteria. I hate commuting.
My parents raised me on stories of American injustice--my dad's college classmate birth in a Japanese Internment Camp, easy reader biographies of Malcolm X, and movies like “Stand and Deliver.” While we didn’t use the term “white privilege,” I understood that I was born into lucky circumstances. My father was a college administrator and a huge proponent for affirmative action. His hope was education and upward mobility could reverse our country’s history of racism. Still, growing up in our historic neighborhood on a hill, I was insulated and wanted to get out and do something, anything, to right wrongs.
In 1992, I moved to Manhattan for college. Worried his daughter might up in a city plagued by litter and personal anonymity, my father pointed me toward suburban and rural colleges under the guise of his college admission expertise. I added city schools on my potential college list. I loved the grittiness of New York and its mix of people. I landed at Columbia University.
During college, I gravitated to conversations about social justice, a breaking down of social structures so that equal opportunity was possible. I asked: What are the answers to the problems of urban poverty? We termed pockets of concentrated poverty "the inner city." This term brought to my mind a segregated, hidden world, a world that's future was an unsolved mystery.
The polite phrase “inner city,” more politically correct than ghetto or hood, reminded me of the scene in National Lampoon's Vacation when the Griswold family gets lost in an African American, big-city neighborhood. When the father, Clark, rolls down his window to get directions from a stoic African American man, Clark announces with a saccharine smile that they aren't "from around here." Unbothered, the guy he's speaking to just says, "No shit." That no-shit moment stood out to me as an emblem of white American chosing to ignore or feign ignorance of place and it's relationship to privilege and poverty, while people of color shook their heads, thinking: it is so obvious.
The the plight of the city became obvious to me. It pissed me off that everyone didn’t see it. I tried to educate everyone, preaching to anyone I could trap--at the end of a night out or in the ads during an episode of Seinfeld. Bootstrap ideals were a lie. Something must be done. Why didn't everyone see this American mess of inequity?
Now I wonder, am I the gentrifier, smiling, ignoring, and playing dumb while I try to be from around here? Why is it so hard to see it?
During college, things I read pointed to places like Capitol Hill in D.C. and the South End in Boston as positive examples of inner cities getting good attention from middle class, predominately white people. These folks moved into the cities, got good deals on crumbling houses, and fixed them up. These first-wave gentrifying neighborhoods looked better and were safer than before. The narrative: Rotting properties reborn through the sweat and tears of liberally-minded, brave transplants. Parks cleaned up. Individual public schools transformed by parents with agency opting in and pouring resources into them. I did not see these gentrifiers as displacers. They were preservationists, proudly revitalizing the city. An urban renaissance was fixing cities.
Of course, as a reader of The Little House, this appealed to me. In the urban revitalization narrative, the neglected city gets attention. People like me could comfortably live in the city, soak in it's buzz, and be a part of the solution.
Where I lived at that time, New York's Washington Heights, there was a dive called Cosmos where my roommate and I could get 2 eggs, hash browns, toast, weak coffee, and a shot of OJ for $2.10. During my senior year of college it was replaced with a coffee bar. The coffee was better, way better than the lukewarm stuff Cosmos served, but a cup started at about $2.10. Being from the Northwest, I liked being able to get an Americano, and there were still other dingy diners in the neighborhood. I was pleased to see the neighborhood getting a little fancier. I didn't really see a connection between my better coffee and the puzzle of poverty. Besides, the Popeye's on 125th Street, just a mile away, still had bulletproof partition separating the customers and the cashiers. My chicken was passed to me through a lazy susan build out of 3-inch plexiglass. There seemed to be no danger in a strong cup of coffee. Giuliani had just been elected; I was living the first ripples of New York's gentrification tsunami.
The same year of the coffee bar invasion, Phil and I took Kenneth Jackson's The History of the City of New York, one of the most popular classes at Columbia. Jackson was an authority on New York City and made his name writing about suburbanization in the Crabgrass Frontier. This was the only class Phil and I took together in college. Before nearly every class, we got lunch to go at Taco Bell and arrived at the lecture hall early to secure one of the few left-handed foldout desks in the front rows for Phil. The lectures were memorable and the class featured many walking tours and an overnight bike ride from Washington Heights to Brooklyn where Jackson stopped and lectured every few miles. It was a captivating class.
This week, I reviewed the reading list. I wondered if I'd missed some readings or forgot what he highlighted. I hadn't. While Jackson’s class took me through Brooklyn’s housing projects and on a visit to a hasidic community, gentrification went unexamined in this course.
We read Jane Jacobs's classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs was the foil to the class's villains, Robert Moses, the subject of Robert Caro's The Power Broker. Never elected to office, Moses changed the face of New York City by master-minding the construction of major interstates and bridges, moving the city's poor to mammoth housing projects, and neglecting the public transit. Moses's so-called urban renewal programs increased the concentration of poverty, created neighborhoods with little commercial space, and few community spaces. People suffered as a result; poverty was further isolated, and therefore persisted and flourished.
Jane Jacobs' classic rejects modern urban planning of the 1950s. Planners like Moses valued order and separation of uses--homes, businesses, and industry in tidy, distinct spaces. Jacobs' book embraces the disorder of the city and its complexity. Recently, I pulled her book off my shelf. The cornerstones of her theory are that the best neighborhoods are dense, mix homes and businesses, have short blocks to encourage foot traffic, and include a variety of buildings in all stages of repair. Before I picked up the book, I could not have recalled these ideas, yet I internalized them somewhere in the winter and spring of 1996 over hard tacos and bean burritos.
While in my courses I learned history and theory, outside the classroom I spent much of my time on spiritual development. One summer I lived in New York in an intentionally multi-racial, Christian community. During the day, we worked as service volunteers throughout the city. In our free time we studied, discussed, and tried to practice racial reconciliation and social justice through the lens of our faith. This stirred something in me. I was a cliche: I wanted to be a changemaker, move America toward social justice. This was my calling.
Leaving college, I knew public high-rises created more problems than they solved. I knew I didn't want to live in a manicured suburban neighborhood where everyone looked like me and a car was required to get to work. I liked the idea of living in a city with a diversity of people and businesses. This felt like pioneering, a new frontier.
Right after college I moved to one of America's great sprawl cities: Phoenix. It was the un-New York; a car was required. An optimistic Teach for America Corps Member, I lived as close as I could to my job and drove straight down Central Avenue to Cesar E. Chavez School in poorer South Phoenix. In between my apartment and my school was a newish coffee shop, just like in New York, a sign of good things to come in the largely quiet downtown Phoenix. For those two years I spent 90% of my energy on teaching, but when I had a minute on the weekends I would try to act like I was still in New York. I joined an African Methodist Episcopal church and sang in their choir. I walked across 6-lanes of traffic a mile or so to a bar that fashioned itself as a London Pub. I tried rollerblading in downtown Phoenix, just like I had in Central Park. When I was on foot (or wheels), it felt strange to wait for the automatic gate on my apartment complex to open and let me out. I reasoned that I was there to teach, not walk around a gritty or hip neighborhood. I believed all of TFA’s hype. I hoped my efforts might make it so "one day, all children in this nation will have an opportunity to attain an excellent education."
In 1998, Phil I got hitched and moved to Oakland. I taught at a small Episcopal school where Maya Angelou and Alice Walker’s grandsons attended. My school sent me to a workshop on institutionalized racism and privilege. The faculty was tuned-in to how a diverse community could be a vehicle for social justice. Yet in this savvy community, never once do I remember discussing displacement. Gentrification entered my vocabulary in these years, but I saw it as a good thing, a tidying up of the city which would benefit everyone.
A Starbucks and the Gap arrived in our Lake Merritt neighborhood just before us. An Ikea in Emeryville arrived during our tenure in the East Bay. I thought: life on Lake Merritt is so livable. Brunch, groceries, a video store, playground, farmers market, and my school within walking distance. So what if I have to drive far 25 minutes to a Target? We lived there for three years and would have stayed if medical school hadn't taken us elsewhere.
When we bought a condo in Boston’s Jamaica Plain in 2002, a friend who had gone to law school in Boston warned me that it might not be a good neighborhood for kids, "It's kind of rough." Her impressions were outdated. Our real estate agent and many others marveled at how the property values had skyrocketed. We even worried that we were buying high, vulnerable to losing our small savings. But rents were impossibly high and so as we entered graduate school and were living off loans, we bought a condo. We somehow benefited from subprime loans.
I think it is important to note that our maternal grandfathers were builders. Part of our inheritances were made through the construction of low income housing in the 1950s and 1960s in Salem and New Orleans. My great-grandparents were Scandinavian immigrants who were given land in North Dakota through the Homestead Act. At about age forty, my grandfather moved out West to start a construction business, returning each summer to bring in the harvest. In my lifetime, oil was discovered on his land. Philip's grandparents were German Jewish immigrants who arrived in New Orleans in 1938. His grandfather also went into construction. Some of the profits from these businesses trickled down to us, enough to help with our educations and make a down payment on our first home.
Our first week in Boston, Philip took the kids to the JP Tot Lot. When he got home he said they'd had a good time, but that I might not like the parents there. He tried to explain, "Your reverse-snobbery thing will kick in. They're all pretty well-off. It wasn't as diverse as I expected."
When I lived in JP, I wrote several graduate school papers about how the gentrification of the neighborhood was changing the schools, drawing more middle-class, mainly white parents, back into the public schools. Boston's segregated school system and its complicated history of attempting to integrate the schools were part of almost every class I took. I firmly believe that integrated schools improve the quality of education for all students. Wholesale, forced integration has its limits. I wondered: could voluntary integration be the answer?
As part of my research, I approached an acquaintance about throwing an anecdotal quotation my way. Our sons went to a Boston public school where about a dozen of mainly white middle-class families opted to send our children as a group. Historically the school's population was almost entirely students of color.
My friend had lived in our neighborhood about a decade longer than me and sold real estate at one time. I was fishing for a comment that "got at" how the changing demographics lead to a voluntary reintegration of schools. She looked at me blankly, stunned by my assumptions. "I'm not sure it is a good thing. I'm not comfortable with what is going on."
She went on to explain to me her worries about people displaced by gentrification and the fact that her friends, many of whom were gay women with children, could no longer afford to rent or buy on her street. Cost of living increases far outpaced salary increases. We became friends and spent many afternoons mulling over these issues while sipping hot tea as our kids played in the other room.
I was beginning to see the ugly side of gentrification: displacement. Still, I loved seeing new coats of paint in funky purples on the triple-decker houses I walked by on the way to the food co-op. The invisible market forces seemed beyond my area of expertise. Social justice through education was my gig. I was hoping we'd make a killing on our condo when we left.
Who was I to stand up against gentrification? And what could really be done about it anyway?
NEXT UP: 10 Years in New Orleans: the good, the bad, and the ugly
