Gentrification: Bring It On
The Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn has almost always been in the throes of gentrification. People commuted to Manhattan by ferry in the mid-19th century after farms were sold off for development. Brooklyn’s first city park, Fort Greene Park, was set aside in 1847, redesigned by Calvert and Vaux in 1864, and championed by local Walt Whitman as a place for the area’s poor to enjoy themselves. More recently, after the despairing 70’s—after the nearby Navy Yard closed and the local elevated train was dismantled – writers and designers such as my husband and I moved there in the 90’s, for low rents in brownstone Brooklyn. Rents and property prices soared over the past ten years. French restaurants moved in, filling the shells of old Chinese takeout places; a Pathmark and a little overpriced gourmet grocery with good cheese started competing with C-Town.
Pushing out C-Town, a terrible market that offers rancid food to people with few other options, can’t be all bad. Last month, Adam Sternbergh made the case in New York magazine that the evils of gentrification—that it pushes up property values, mainly, and thus pushes out low-income renters and owners who have taxes raised on them based on new assessments—are largely a myth. Sternbergh looked at the research of Lance Freeman, a professor of urban planning at Columbia, and found that in gentrifying Harlem and Clinton Hill, bordering Fort Greene, poor residents were not actually moving out.
“Often lost amid our caricatures of benighted hipsters invading a blighted neighborhood is the fact that without gentrification, you’ve simply got a blighted neighborhood,” wrote Sternbergh. In fact, anti-gentrification may amount to no more than (potentially self-loathing) revulsion to the trappings of hipsterdom. Without the influx of new residents, all you have is an emptying neighborhood with poor services.
Hipster-hate and anti-gentrification bohemian liberal snobbery, in this case, can also be little better than veiled racism, argued Ta-Nehisi Coates in a passionate post on his Atlantic blog. Please don’t bemoan the effects on the poor, agentless black and brown people, says Coates, many of whom decide on their own to move to places with lawns.
His commentators, though, point out that there can still be problems with city codes colluding with developer interests. What about Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a few miles north of Fort Greene, where developers have been able to take ample advantage of a relatively recent rezoning for residential? Then again, who has really been pushed out? As industrial use changes to “luxury” housing, the main losers are artists, who no longer could freely work out of cheap, unheated lofts, once city enforcement agencies started to pay attention to the area. What about rural gentrification, via McMansions? Is this still gentrification, or does it not fit our image of yoga-mat-toting, legging-and-boots-wearing, twenty-somethings taking to the streets en masse, languidly strolling between their classes on film theory and their internships at V magazine?
And yet: Bring it on, I say. Gentrifiers all, please join us up the hill in Jersey City, where my husband and I moved when, yes, Fort Greene became too expensive, at least for our visions of ourselves in an elegant Victorian-era home, with pocket doors, brass knobs, and the whir of ceiling fans high above. Our neighborhood, too, deserves the opportunity to experience overpriced organic vegetables, neurotic historic-district organizers, and the hum of a dozen espresso machines. Maybe even old-timers and itinerant renters want to walk to yoga studios.
Bike Lane Bickering
“Glocalization,” Neighborhoods as Brands
Nikil Saval in San Francisco on Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 4:43pm
It is unfortunate that the author would choose to repeat the incomplete picture of Lance Freeman’s interesting work that Adam Sternbergh’s article initiated. The author, like Sternbergh, is mistaken in assuming that a single social science study “proves” one thing or another. Freeman’s book, “There Goes the ‘Hood,” to which Sternbergh refers (attempting in his original piece to argue against the claims of two articles originally published by the journal n+1 [www.nplusonemag.com], where I am an assistant editor), is actually an attempt by Freeman to speak with members of gentrifying neighborhoods to get qualitative data to accompany the conclusions he drew from his quantitative data study (published in a 2002 paper co-authored by Frank Braconi, in which levels of displacement do indeed seem to be lower than otherwise expected)—his test cases are Harlem and Clinton Hill, in New York City. What he discovers is that people in gentrifying neighborhoods both *appreciate* the amenities more than the literature previously reported, but that they also *dislike* the economic pressures of gentrification more than the literature previously reported.
Freeman’s earlier data report is hard to reconcile with the qualitative evidence he gathered. As it happens, in 2006, two authors, Elvin Wyly and Kathe Newman, using the same data set as Freeman and Braconi, published a paper coming to an opposite conclusion: displacement due to gentrification was in fact occurring, and in very high numbers. Such data is easier to reconcile with Freeman’s qualitative conclusions in “There Goes the ‘Hood,” even if it does not—as Freeman and Braconi’s paper does not—prove once and for all a particular argument about displacement. Newman and Wyly also pointed to the limitations of Freeman and Braconi’s data-based arguments—for example, the data set Freeman and Braconi used does not include people who actually left New York City for good; in other words, people who were displaced entirely from New York City (somewhat like the author of the post) do not figure in the data. Researchers like Freeman are doing important work, but like all research, it should be subject to careful scrutiny and tests for falsifiability. A closer look at Freeman’s actual rhetoric suggests that he is more critical about gentrification than this post and Sternbergh’s original article would suggest.
As the author indicates, gentrification is not the oft-purveyed cartoon of hipsters cleaning up lofts, nor even wealthy whites refurbishing brownstones and Victorians. Gentrification is (as the author does not note) the expression of class inequality in a neighborhood, and it occurs in the absence of social movements and public policy that would seek to eliminate inequality in the urban context. At least in the era prior to the urban crisis, policymakers were attempting to produce programs that addressed poverty and inequality. With the meager but not insignificant results of many of those programs, coupled with the decline of industrial working-class jobs within cities and the nationwide loss of political will to remedy urban problems, gentrification has functionally replaced the desire to combat inequality. In most cities, it has become official policy. It is the task of intellectuals like the author of the post to find and advocate new, socially responsible ways to return working- and middle-class people to cities. Gentrification is not one of those ways.
Please note the articles to which Sternbergh referred:
http://www.nplusonemag.com/gentrify-gentrify-full
http://www.nplusonemag.com/gentrified-fiction
Michael Isla in 3104839258 on Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 4:57pm
Gentrification Is just a means to have your own local powerful Goverment. Developers Becoming senators, weathlty property owners the house of representatives, The banks the irs, The private city consule the cabinet. Ect. they do what they want cause they own the land and pay the bills to the city,police, ect. Every brown person is classified, and watched. the very poor black people the same. It beccomes a modern inslavism. the control of the people. They see you around the city and if they feel they do not like you, your credit, your job, your life is control by local spies. color becomes a means to survive. and even money. This is not democracy, this is communism at first hand in modern american history. Welcome the beginning of communism people.believe it, is at worked at this time. and it just goin to get worse.
Carly Berwick in Jersey City on Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 8:46pm
Thanks Nikil for the good points. I agree—most people want good services and at low cost. Perhaps a serious policy challenge is to enable cities to present middle-class luxuries like decent grocery stores or clean air without having to rely on an influx of ‘luxury condos’ first.
Nathan on Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 9:24pm
I like the Communism guy. He seems like he’d be more fun to pop Xanax and torpedo a few beers with than mr. assistant editor.
How many “working- and middle-class people,” I wonder, has n+1 returned to the City?