Gentrification and its Contents

Indians, Pioneers, Nomads, Refugees

For many years, I have closely followed the lives of four Washington, D.C.-area residents–Jennifer, Juanica, Tim, and Mrs. Kay–as they search for the best housing opportunities they can afford. Their stories, taken individually and together, help explain three very different views of gentrification.

For some like Neil Smith, a leading authority on urban geography at the City University of New York, gentrification pits postmodern “Indians” against reprehensible “pioneers.” In this view, longtime residents have the right to fight for the continuation of their way of life against outside invaders. For others–like travel writer Robert Kaplan–the battle is between refugees and nomads. “Refugees,” Kaplan explains, “flee a place because they have no choice, but nomads are pioneers on the make. Nomads are the makers of history, refugees are its victims.” A third perspective, represented by renowned University of Chicago sociologist Saskia Sassen, might object to the very notion of gentrification as a battle and instead call it a rational exchange in which some neighborhoods are better positioned to draw investment than others. Which of these models is more accurate? Is gentrification truly no more than the forcible displacement of postmodern “Indians”? Or is it really the justified triumph of enterprising “nomads,” or a purely rational process of exchange among people who all have some degree of choice? 

These three views surface clearly in the lives of Jennifer, Juanica, Tim, and Mrs. Kay. It is the intersections between their lives that may say the most about the true meaning of gentrification and displacement, and the inevitability of neighborhood change.

Jennifer

Jennifer works for a well-known department store. She earns $90,000 a year, well above the $62,000 median income of the Washington region, one of the most costly housing markets in the United States. She is white, 31, single, and interested in buying her first home. Professional and upwardly mobile, Jennifer has chosen to live in the Courthouse/Clarendon section of Arlington, an urbane Washington suburb in Northern Virginia.

“I like living in the thick of things,” she says, “but I hate the traffic and strip malls that come with outer suburbia. I like being near the city, but am glad to not be there because of crime and parking hassles and high taxes.” Though she cannot quite bring herself to say it directly, in listening to the subtleties of Jennifer’s explanations over the years, one learns that Jennifer also lives in Courthouse/ Clarendon so she can avoid living near people like Juanica. Jennifer prefers not to have single mothers with low incomes as neighbors–especially not low-income single mothers who are black.

Juanica

Juanica is a 27-year-old African-American single mother of three. She did not complete high school, but managed to find a full-time job as a data entry specialist earning $25,000 per year. At her salary, Juanica can afford no more than $750 a month in rent, meaning she simply cannot afford housing west of 14th Street in the District of Columbia. East of 14th Street, she has options. She can rent in the city in a tough neighborhood or far outside the city–as much as an hour away. Juanica examined the housing options in the Trinidad neighborhood, the gritty span of Washington behind Union Station. She looked at options in Deanwood, Anacostia, and Marshall Heights, across the Anacostia River from downtown. She tried Prince George’s County in Maryland, to the east. In all, Juanica explored more than thirty neighborhoods, and in the end chose to live in Shaw, the safest area she could afford. She did not want to live near drug dealers, or be near homeless men. She did not want her car broken into, or feel unsafe walking to neighborhood stores. Although she is on the receiving end of Jennifer’s biases, Juanica is concerned about the worthiness of her neighbors as well.

Tim

Tim is white, with a high school education. He is a part-time construction worker and part-time truck driver. He works for hourly wages that add up to roughly $30,000 per year. He recently sold the house he has lived in for the past fifteen years in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia. The house he sold–a two-bedroom bungalow–originally belonged to his girlfriend Diane’s aunt.

At the turn of the century, Del Ray consisted mainly of residents who worked for the railroad as low-level managers. By World War II, the neighborhood had evolved into a more economically diverse place, albeit still white and solidly blue-collar. By the 1980s, many white families in Del Ray left for the blue-collar subdivisions that were being constructed south of Alexandria in Dale City and Springfield. Despite many hours of hard work on renovations and his family connection to the house, for years Tim had longed to follow his friends to Springfield. This hunger to leave Del Ray grew when low-income Hispanics arrived in some areas of the neighborhood, further hastening the exodus of blue-collar whites. Tim firmly believed that the arrival of Hispanics would undermine his children’s education. Suddenly, in Tim’s words, his neighborhood had become “the hood.”

Meanwhile, white professionals were moving into other parts of Del Ray. They did not seem like suitable neighbors to Tim either–they complained about Tim’s Lynyrd Skynyrd music being too loud. The yuppies, however, drove up housing prices enough to allow Tim and Diane to finally move to Springfield. And so Springfield is now Tim’s home, part consequence part choice. There, his two pickup trucks sit parked on the street alongside dozens of other trucks. He no longer has to share street space with Volvos and Jeeps like he had to do in Del Ray when it began to gentrify. In Springfield, he doesn’t have as many Hispanics in the school system to complain about, and there are no blacks–or “brothas and sistas,” as Tim likes to call them–anywhere.

Mrs. Kay

Mrs. Kay is 84. Her husband built a house in Del Ray across the street from Tim’s in the 1940s. Mrs. Kay used to enjoy tending the roses in the yard, but she’s been too old to take care of them for several years. Last year, her son made arrangements for her to move to a retirement facility.

The houses on Mrs. Kay’s street are modest. For decades, they housed plumbers and construction workers. Now, the same yuppies that made Tim want to move out covet anything that comes on the market on Mrs. Kay’s street. Not surprisingly, when Mrs. Kay’s son put her house on the market, offers poured in quickly. The local realtor told me that because the underlying value of the land–a double lot–is greater than the value of the existing house, the new owner would most likely tear it down and build a newer, larger house there. Asked whether an apartment building might make sense given the affordable housing crunch in Alexandria, the realtor explained that her quiet, behind-the-scenes work to explore building an apartment building was seized upon by neighbors. They quickly mobilized to prevent any multifamily housing from being built. Instead, the large house going up will be the largest on the street. Neighbors are already getting appraisals, hoping to learn what increase in value they might expect if they were to build up to the new, larger standard.

Intersections

Tim is happy to leave behind the Hispanics, upwardly mobile professionals, and the remaining blacks in Del Ray. He has fulfilled his dream by leaving to join his construction buddies in Springfield in a subdivision of ranch houses. Jennifer can afford a ranch house in Springfield, but she is not willing to live in the very homes that Tim finds attractive. She considers places like Springfield banal and tasteless. Moreover, she wants to avoid neighbors like Tim as much as Tim wants to avoid having Juanica live next door.

Jennifer would like to live in fast-gentrifying Del Ray, but she can’t afford it. In fact, the sole option she might have had to live there–an apartment building on Mrs.

Kay’s old lot–was squelched by residents who believed that multifamily dwellings would harm their property values. Jennifer will give some consideration to Shaw, the neighborhood with historic architecture that Juanica settled on as the best of a menu of weak options. But even great design is not enough to trump the barriers of race and class. Jennifer wants hip, but not if that means moving somewhere that is mainly black. Juanica avoids the most dangerous areas of the District to the extent possible, given her income. She does not want to live near crack houses, but cannot afford the neighborhoods where Jennifer and Tim live. Someday, after other places become more expensive, newcomers will arrive in the part of Shaw where Juanica did decide to live. The image of the area may slowly improve. When that happens, the drug dealers will leave, but so will Juanica. She might also leave well before newcomers arrive, if she gets sufficiently tired of the tenor of Shaw and can find another neighborhood that better meets her preferences. 

Gentrification

Whether a neighborhood will gentrify is decided by the cumulative choices of individuals like Tim, Jennifer, Juanica, and Mrs. Kay about where to live–what attracts them and pushes them away. These choices and preferences, when balanced with each individual’s financial ability to act on these choices, establish home prices. An increase in home prices, therefore, reflects a neighborhood that is becoming a more attractive place to live for more people. Confidence and interest in one place is always determined in relation to confidence and interest in other places. By implication, neighborhoods are never fixed entities, instead always in perpetual motion. With every “For Sale” sign placed on a house, a neighborhood competes with other places for available capital. When many people choose to move into the same neighborhood, prices rise and gentrification occurs. Gentrification, then, while not an unalloyed good, is a sign of market approval of a neighborhood’s positive attributes.

But what attributes lead people like Jennifer or Tim to choose a particular neighborhood in the first place? What signals effect the transformation of moribund places into what we might call neighborhoods of choice? These signals are the cumulative choices others have made about where to live, with a particular emphasis on the race, class, culture and religion of those who have recently moved into a neighborhood. When a household moves to a particular area after examining the costs and tradeoffs of living in other areas, it sends important signals to the marketplace.

The first signal a new resident sends is that of the investment itself, which demonstrates confidence to potential future investors. Second are the owner’s subsequent actions to preserve that investment. High standards of property maintenance communicate confidence in a neighborhood. Third is the set of “norms” that new residents bring, such as their attendance at church meetings, or the absence of drug dealing and loitering on street corners. The fourth is retention–their decision to stay in the community instead of moving once again. Each move also sends a signal in terms of the household itself–the race, class and culture of the new resident.

As Thomas Schelling and others have repeatedly noted, most people avoid the minority position and seek environments in which they are near others like them. Liberals in Berkeley shun the more conservative suburbs. Rednecks in the Research Triangle avoid liberal Chapel Hill. And whites eschew mainly black neighborhoods. As each individual chooses to enter or shun an area, norms and demographics are either confirmed or modified, and a neighborhood is transformed.

These transformations occur in every neighborhood, in every city, and in every region all the time. It is this process that reshaped Courthouse/Clarendon. While Jennifer would not have even wanted to live in Courthouse/Clarendon two decades ago, today she can no longer afford to buy there. Unless she is willing to continue renting, she will eventually leave. This view encompasses a more complete picture of gentrification than the oftheld contention–that gentrification signifies nothing more than the displacement of households of lesser means by those with greater means. That displacement is real, but it is scarcely the whole picture.

The Irony of Displacement

Juanica moved to Shaw as the best of a number of imperfect options, and at some time in the next decade she is likely to leave. Will we be as concerned about Juanica’s displacement, should it happen in the near future, while Shaw is dilapidated, as we will be if it happens after Shaw becomes more desirable? For example, if Juanica were replaced by an absentee landlord who makes no investment in the area, no one would notice. But if Juanica sells to a young professional for a fair market price, it is viewed negatively. The reality is that Juanica is not choosing whom to sell to; she is simply deciding to move out. The decisions of the next owner of the property will lead to improvement, stagnation, or decline.

Similarly, if Tim had been replaced in Del Ray by another white construction worker who did not invest in the neighborhood, no one would comment, even if property values decline and schools weaken. But when Tim sells to a young couple named Rick and Dana for a fair market price, critics of gentrification view it negatively. The reality is that Tim is not choosing whom to sell to; he is simply deciding to move out. I am consistently astonished by how many big-city housing commissioners worry about gentrification even as their cities hemorrhage. Regardless of how prosperous or poverty-stricken a city is, housing policy often becomes little more than an expression of concern about gentrification.

Yet gentrification, often viewed as an unmitigated negative, is barely understood. Rich cities seem to prefer to maintain a few neighborhoods as relatively shabby havens for the poor than to admit more affordable housing into better-off communities. They frequently stall efforts to expand housing choices by rejecting multifamily housing, such as the apartment building that could have replaced Mrs. Kay’s house. Impoverished cities, on the other hand, are so dominated by the interests and legitimate needs of the many poor in their cities that they often disregard abysmal neighborhood conditions so long as repositories of affordable housing are maintained. In city after city, when it comes to local policy-making, concern about housing affordability masks the more central issue of neighborhood quality. Given the dynamics of neighborhood change outlined above, keeping a neighborhood unattractive often presents itself as the easiest way to keep a neighborhood affordable. But preventing gentrification and keeping neighborhoods affordable are not victories if those neighborhoods remain unsafe and unattractive places to live.

The Inevitability of Change

Our dilemma, then, is to choose between a more livable world of higher prices and a less livable world that is more affordable. A shortage of demand in an area generally signifies the existence of some type of problem. But ironically, in hot markets like the Washington region, a demand shortage (and, hence, lower prices) in a particular neighborhood can in itself become a magnet for people looking for affordable housing alternatives. The weak demand that allows for housing affordability is also, in hot markets, precisely what positions a neighborhood to become ripe for gentrification.

When Jennifer is priced out of Courthouse/Clarendon, her neighborhood of first choice, she will likely help “gentrify” yet another neighborhood. And as she and others are priced out of subsequent neighborhoods, a self-fulfilling cycle of investment and gentrification takes hold that forces other long-time residents to move. Some, like Tim, wanted to get out anyway, and can suddenly use their growing home equity to do so. But some want to remain, and are prevented from doing so by higher rents or property taxes. Although gentrification invariably forces some people to leave their old neighborhoods, it can also create opportunities for them to find new places that better fit their needs. The critical question is how to secure the most attractive and viable opportunities for the most people.

To begin securing the best of such opportunities, policymakers must acknowledge that neighborhoods are always changing, and that idealizing a static notion of communities is counter-productive. Community bonds and organizations maintain their central role in the life of a community, even as individuals come and go. In successful neighborhoods, marketability, a sense of community, and the choices of individuals do not conflict, but rather reinforce each other.