The earliest use of the word gentrification comes from the British sociologist Ruth Glass who wrote about several London neighborhoods in 1964:
One by one, many of the working class neighbourhoods of London have been invaded by the middle-classes—upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences … Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly, until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.
It’s a strong word, invaded, but one that never leaves the mind when chasing gentrification in real time. Invasions can be grand—an entire neighborhood—or nearly imperceptible—a single building, one apartment at a time.
“1059 Union.”
“1159 President Street.”
Money is always involved—it can’t not be. And so is land. Land that is endlessly transforming under the subjugation of capitalization. As Rob Robinson put it, “Make no mistake about it, that’s what’s at the crux of the problem in this country: land. The fight for land and property rights.” Land as property: it’s the idea we used to seize much of this continent and establish a nation, and it’s the same idea that defines our aspirations as a culture: the American Dream of homeownership. There is something to the fact that in the five decades since Ruth Glass used the word gentrification to describe what she saw in London, all the other zeitgeist terms—urban Thoreaus, brownstoneurbia, et al.—have faded, and only gentrification remains. The idea of the gentry—and more specifically, the landed gentry—controls the space where we think and talk about land. Those who see land as a product, property valued at whatever maximum can be extracted and wired to Dubai or London or Los Angeles, strong-arm the conversation. But those individuals exist on a massive spectrum that also includes but is not limited to: those who believe the vitality of land depends on the diversity of classes and cultures that share it; those agnostic to land, who are happy to flutter through the various neighborhoods they inhabit in a state of transience; the homeless, who depend on the land for any food and shelter it can provide; fifth-generation residents who do not want the land to brook any changes from the day they were born; and those who refuse the idea of land ownership all together. On the last page of a pamphlet entitled “Squatting in New York City,” given to me by Jerry the Peddler, I found the lyrics for “A Digger Song.” This is part of the third verse:
The sin of property we do disdain
No one has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain.
The sin of property.
Each of us defines gentrification in accordance with our own relationship to a piece of land, a neighborhood. And as is the case in all meaningful relationships, our feelings are conflicted; our actions, contradictory. We have hopes for what the land may bring us—profits, security, community—and we have fears about what it can do, what it might become. As Niko, the real estate lawyer, pointed out to me, even an investor who has never been to New York has fears over its future: “The fear is that a terrorist attack will get people to leave and gentrification is reversed.” Whether it is the possibility of global jihad disrupting a portfolio’s steady growth or the challenge of finding a warm place to sleep, our relationship to land can’t help but set the terms for how we talk about gentrification.
Curtis Archer, executive director at Harlem Community Development Corporation and a colleague of Tom Lunke, recently said, “You know, I get kind of sad when I hear people talking about a ‘New Harlem Renaissance’ happening. Because let’s remember: the Harlem Renaissance was built on what? Arts and culture. It was the voices that came out of this neighborhood that mattered. And this? This is economics, pure and simple.”
Gentrification is our word of choice because we have settled into the choice to let money frame our relationship to land. This abstract thing called money is, itself, in the process of abstracting land: a patch of earth where a building was constructed and used for work and shelter by one group of people has become an investment for another group of people in another neighborhood or state or country. The second group rarely enters the doors of the homes and businesses they acquire—they don’t need to. Landowners, individuals and institutions alike, operate in a global economic system that cultivates absentee landownership, obscuring them from the people who populate their buildings. As Ephraim put it, “That’s why we don’t usually buy buildings with tenants because if you do, you have to go talk to them.”
It is not unreasonable to argue that the people who spend the most time participating in a neighborhood should also be the people who bring most of the money to that neighborhood. But in this era of steroidal global capitalism, international investment plays the leading role, and the people who spend the most time in a neighborhood and the people who spend the most money there are increasingly discrete groups. And as Cea Weaver pointed out, “The larger the gap between people who know about New York City housing and the people who own the buildings, the worse it’s going to be for the communities.”
As I write, Bill de Blasio is approaching the one-year anniversary since his election, and The New York Times is reporting that the income gap is worse in Manhattan than anywhere else in the country. The top 5 percent of Manhattan households earned 88 times as much as the poorest 20 percent. More New Yorkers are living in poverty than last year and this trajectory shows no signs of abating with millions surviving on less than $11,170 per year.
A development company called Extell recently won approval of its plans for a thirty-three-story condominium high-rise at 40 Riverside Boulevard in Manhattan, and they did so the way all big developers win approval for their plans: with the promise to designate a small portion of the available housing units, generally 20 percent, for “low-income” earners—a term defined by the city using different measures, depending on the type of project, but it is generally either side of $30,000 annually for an individual and $50,000 annually for a family of four. In the case of 40 Riverside Boulevard, Extell has made 55 of 219 units available for low-income earners. But in the construction plans, Extell was granted permission for one very important design feature of the building: two separate entrances, one for those who live in the low-income units (at the back of the building with no views of Riverside Park or the Hudson River) and another for those who have paid market value for their apartment (with park and river views). New Yorkers and the media at large now commonly refer to the entrance at the back of the building as “the poor door.”
The de Blasio administration emphasizes that the Extell project had already won preliminary support from the Bloomberg administration, implying that the situation is beyond its control—the mayor’s appointees are simply pushing the paper along.
If the interests of those who spend massive amounts of time in the city are never weighed against the interests of those who spend massive amounts of money in that same city then New York will not only become hollowed out and demoralized, but also economically unsustainable.
The city of Detroit lost 35 percent of its population over six decades, and while the reasons were complex—and wholly different from the afflictions faced by New York—it’s not inconceivable that in the era of global gentrification, New York, too, could shrink away at such a rate. The Motor City did not project vulnerability in the 1950s, and New York does not project vulnerability now. But with a fading middle class and a swelling population living below the poverty line, if New York does shrink, it will be because the pursuit of capital steamrolled all else. It will be because the idea of property completely seized how we think about land. If the needs and desires of the people who fill the streets and workspaces and apartments do not remain a priority, then this giant tent of ideas and perspectives that is New York City will lose its central post and collapse.
New York has always been defined by human interaction—and by new iterations of it. Even though modern technologies can weaken these interactions—“Look up!” says Shatia Strother to her neighbors—we still ride the subway, we still walk the street, we still gather at the bar, we still sit or stand or kneel in the house of worship. All of these people and all of these activities continue to provide a certain propulsion. At the risk of quoting a politician, Daniel Squadron might have put it best: “The greatest thing about this city is that we have the strongest collection of energy and expertise anywhere in the world.” And the idea that New York might not be as diverse as it was when the senator’s grandfather arrived at Ellis Island is, in Daniel’s words, “Absolutely unacceptable. And it will mean we lose the city.”
Endless variations on humanity maintain the city’s notorious energy level—it’s always spiking in one direction or another: if it is not sucking out your last current of breath and hope with hurdles and malevolence, it is, instead, charging you with an electric moment, revivifying you in an instant, and you feel yourself upright again, ready to march forward. If the diversity of income and skills and perspectives that allows for those moments of revivification—of exposure and opportunity—is trampled underfoot by the hegemony of capital and its insistence on class homogeny, then the transformation of the city will end. The devaluation of land will follow the devaluation of the people who used to call it home.
“Money,” said Dylan Gauthier, “people better fucking realize it isn’t everything.”
This conversation about gentrification must end with Bea. And that’s precisely because it is impossible to write policy that does what she accomplishes. This type of reform, which prioritizes the health and accessibility of a neighborhood over any individual’s—or corporation’s—opportunity to maximize the value of property, can only be enacted from within. To imagine what might become of a neighborhood’s dark spaces, those dream spaces—to really reckon with those possibilities—is to take the city seriously. It is what it means to be a citizen.
Look up.