chapter one

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Tools

What people don’t seem to realize is it isn’t the mere act of moving into a neighborhood that makes you a gentrifier; it’s what you do once you get there.

Dannette Lambert, political consultant in Oakland¹

I’m gentrifying too, right?

No, because you understand the culture.

Exchange between Marc and filmmaker Spike Lee about Lee’s native Fort Greene, Brooklyn²

The Mirror

“We all know gentrification is bad.”

Thus began another session at an academic conference session on the topic a few years back. This sort of statement is nothing new. Academics and activists have long railed against the process of gentrification and stories of its destruction of working-class communities.

In this book we develop our theoretical ideas on gentrification as we draw upon a series of our stories. People respond to stories. The narratives we usually hear about gentrifiers involve the kinds of cafés, boutiques, bicycle lanes, dog parks, and other new amenities that they bring, all the while undermining local character and displacing long-term residents. Residents express worry that the city is going to become a bastion of elitism or a generic suburb stripped of diversity. To some scholars and activists, gentrification is a contemporary form of urban class and racial warfare, a process that echoes in history. Case closed.

Gentrification is usually defined in a set of interdependent ways: “the in-migration of affluent households to poorer and lower value areas of the city,”³ “the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of a city into middle-class residential and/or commercial use,”⁴ and “the reinvestment of real estate capital into declining, inner-city neighborhoods to create a new residential infrastructure for middle and high-income inhabitants.”⁵ The conceptualization of gentrification is a complex mixture of migration, transformation, and reinvestment; forced migration and displacement; class, racial, and ethnic transformation; and investment for new residents to the exclusion of older residents.

As city residents and students of the city ourselves, we have increasingly noticed an elephant sitting in the methodological corner: many progressive activists and academics against gentrification are actually gentrifiers themselves. Yet the same people tend to talk about gentrification from a veiled, objective distance. Why? It seems to us that “gentrifier” has become a dirty word that indicts one’s very character, and thus many individuals assume that they cannot possibly be one.

In this book we work to place ourselves – John, Jason, and Marc – in the story of gentrification. We are gentrifiers. That is to say, we are middle-class people who moved into disinvested neighbourhoods in a period during which a critical mass of other middle-class people did the same, thereby exerting economic, political, and social pressures upon the existing community.⁶ Ten middle-class people living in a low-income neighbourhood is not typically (or at least should not be) termed gentrification. It involves a tipping point when there are enough middle-class in-movers in a lower-income neighbourhood to prompt social, cultural, political, and economic changes. Once this process begins, it seems, it is hard to shake the “gentrified” label.

We use the term “middle-class” to capture the interstices of economic position, career status, marital status, parental status, and household wealth. The authors’ specific economic positions shifted from lower-middle class to middle class or upper-middle class. Also, we shifted in our marital statuses and became parents. Though each of us faced some periods of vulnerability, we are grateful to have been rising in household income as we advanced in our careers. That gives us increasing power, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu stated, to “keep economic necessity at arm’s length.”⁷ No matter what our belief in egalitarianism, then – as geographer Loretta Lees aptly argued – after all is said and done, if “the particular desires of gentrifiers win out over others, it is because [we] are willing and able to pay more for the privilege” with “economic, cultural, and social resources.”⁸

Through our own narratives we offer an entry point into this complicated and often contentious set of debates and processes. Throughout the text we provide a series of frameworks for thinking systematically and critically about gentrification. We also synthesize a large and diverse literature into a whole that we hope will be useful to scholars, activists, journalists, city residents, and students. This book is an engagement between our own critical encounters, the literature, and you, our readers.

Our goal, then, is to undertake the messy and difficult task of combining our personal story with the scholarly story to create an account that “is not strictly scholarly because it contains the personal, and ... not strictly personal because it contains the scholarly.”⁹ This approach is – loosely – a version of auto-ethnography. Proponents suggest that auto-ethnography can offer “a more full acknowledgement of the self,” which is exactly what the muddled state of the gentrification debates demands.¹⁰ After all, we believe not only that our own “stories can and do theorize,” but they also theorize differently.¹¹

Urban planning theorist Peter Marcuse warns that “if we do not understand and do not intuitively put ourselves in the place of those whose problems we examine, we will not understand them – either the people or the problems.”¹² This is true, but we believe that the most difficult work in understanding gentrification is not putting ourselves in the place of the “victims” but honestly putting ourselves in our own place. Throughout this book we the authors, the gentrifiers, will be using our biographies to illustrate, frustrate, and promulgate particular arguments about urban change. Briefly allow us to outline who we are.

For Marc, growing up in North and West Philadelphia but going to school in the Northeast section, the idea of the city connoted density and segregation. He is the son of Black, Christian, public school teachers. His father was born in Wilkes County, Georgia, and moved to Philadelphia after leaving the US Army in the late 1940s. His mother moved to the city from Farmville, Virginia, in 1957 after the fallout from the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision increased the city’s racial tensions. After marrying, they started their family in Hunting Park, one of the most economically poor and socially dense areas of North Philadelphia.

Although they eventually finished college and attained professional careers, their roots in Jim Crow poverty and racism prompted them to remain in nearly all-Black neighbourhoods. After undergraduate and graduate school Marc began his career as a university professor, working in Education, Anthropology, and Africana Studies Departments at Temple University, Columbia University Teacher’s College, and currently Morehouse College. Since 2006, he has also been an active member of the American news media, serving as a commentator and presenter on a range of television and digital platforms. In 2004 his daughter, Anya, was born. Although single, he is an active father, commuting between New York, Atlanta, and Philadelphia on a weekly basis to share co-parenting responsibilities.

For Jason, a third-generation Texas Jew, who grew up in a suburban landscape within Houston’s boundaries, the city was always a place of “more.” Instead of the low-density, strip-shopping-centre sprawl of outer Houston with its endless highways, city life entailed more people in close proximity walking past each other, a mix of places to hang out besides playgrounds and backyards. High school consisted of driving across town to be near more people, more activities, more sounds and sights. Usually this destination was near the Montrose neighbourhood and its nightclubs, arts festivals, gay pride, vintage-clothing stores, cafés, and tattoo studios.

After a couple of false starts, he ended up living in New York City to attend graduate school and hold his first academic position. He met his wife Mariani, who immigrated from Greece for college, during a graduate-student union drive. She recruited him into the union. They now live in Providence, Rhode Island. He is a tenured professor at a small, liberal arts university; she is an arts educator at a local art museum. Their daughter is named after Raymond Queneau’s book Zazie dans le Métro, the story about a young girl trying to take a journey on the Paris Métro with her outlandish uncle. Jason bought the book from the only bookstore on the West Side of Providence. Jason, Mariani, and their daughter did eventually live in Paris and ride the Métro.

For John, growing up in a suburban context – where Chicago’s Milwaukee Avenue transitions into post-war subdivisions – “the city” was “downtown.” It was where the real events of economics, politics, and culture transpired – or at least more real, as his Irish mother from Brooklyn and his German father from the Bronx instilled in him that real life was actually happening in New York. He and his five siblings were raised in a lively 1950s mass-built, aluminum-sided community that his father says was understood as overflow housing for the nearby US Navy base. John’s parents, who did not attend university, as well as his aunt and uncle and their six children, moved to the area around the same time. They were following the American philosophy of moving in, moving up, and moving out: their families had moved into New York City as immigrants, they worked their way up in their employment and their economic well-being, and they had the increasing flexibility and – as a white household in the 1960s United States – the readily available opportunity to move out. As sociologist Herbert Gans observed in 1968, within the context of national policies that privileged suburban homeownership, ”as soon as they can afford to do so, most Americans head for the single-family house and the quasi-primary way of life of the low-density neighborhood, in the outer city or the suburbs.”¹³

John’s neighbourhood had the quasi-primary feel Gans describes, filled with people of similar economic standing, mostly white, and in similar life stages. In John’s family, eight members occupied 1,300 square feet and many other families lived in similar situations, which often drove people into the streets. His neighbours were immigrants (from Greece, Italy, Poland, Japan, India, etc.), migrants from rural settings (Puerto Rico, Wisconsin), people who grew up in Chicago and other cities – contributing to what John and his siblings recall as a warm, connected, safe neighbourhood with a mix of blue-collar and white-collar households. In writing this book, John realized how much this micro-context mattered; as Gans noted, “people do not live in cities or suburbs as a whole, but in specific neighborhoods ... defined by residents’ social contacts.”¹⁴

In 1997, John crossed paths with Jason when both entered graduate school at New York University. A few years later, at his church in Brooklyn, John met his wife Monique, a Brooklyn-born, Black Caribbean woman. First living in Brooklyn after they married in 2006, they later moved to San Diego, where their two daughters were born. After six years they moved to Chicago, where they intend to settle for the long term.

In this book we each share our time in multiple neighbourhoods in New York City – Williamsburg, Fort Greene, Park Slope, Harlem, Morningside Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Sunset Park – making connections with the dense amount of literature focused on this city. We also discuss three significantly different American cities: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; San Diego in southern California; and Providence, Rhode Island. Our moves to these cities parallel changes in our personal lives. We bring in single life, marriage, housing, children – the gamut of life issues. We work to take our gentrification stories into the context of urban studies and into macro-level or large-scale focus, showing how gentrification is not confined to a limited set of places, but also how it is quite different in different contexts.

Our auto-ethnographic orientation raised a series of complications. How do we deal with housing prices? In which ways do we confront homogenization and commercialization? What makes our lives contented; what unsettles our households or families? How does the current form of capitalism actually affect lives? How do the politics of race shape our navigation of these processes? How do we disentangle economic inequality from new opportunities? How do we unpack the anger, guilt, shallowness, and other emotions related to gentrification? And let us be clear: we do not resolve these complications by our final chapter.

Although this book complicates our conceptions of the gentrifier, we are not here to absolve anyone, including ourselves, for particular actions with an “oh well, it’s complicated” shrug. We do hope to illustrate how, as we work to make politically, morally, and ethically sound decisions, we are situated within a complex range of factors that inform housing choices. This is the constitution of everyday life: our actions connecting with the actions of others and the circumstances around us. Ultimately, we want this book to lay bare a complicated phenomenon and develop a firm foundation upon which to mobilize for a better city.

Gentrification as Everything and Everything as Gentrification

We argue in this book that myriad diverse urban issues have been subsumed under the gentrification umbrella. Consider the Barclays Center in Brooklyn (opened in 2012) and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan (opened in parts from 1962 to 1969), the latter built during the “urban renewal” era in the United States, which we will discuss in chapter 3. The former is a large, flowing, copper oval emblazoned with a large blue corporate logo that serves as home to the NBA (basketball) Brooklyn Nets and NHL (hockey) New York Islanders. The latter is a series of three white modern buildings evoking classical structures that features opera, ballet, jazz, classical orchestra, and other performances. Are both examples of gentrification?

We would argue that an approach suggesting that both sites, constructed fifty years apart, are gentrification illustrates how the term has overgrown its original boundaries. Consider also an article in which a New York Times art critic heralded Charles Marville’s photographs of late 1800s Paris as capturing the city before gentrification.¹⁵ Geographer Neil Smith similarly situated the restructuring of nineteenth-century Paris as gentrification.¹⁶

Was Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s massive program to redevelop Paris indeed gentrification? The urban-renewal-era urban planning schemes of Robert Moses and his ilk in the United States: were they gentrification? How about the more current, sport-oriented growth strategies – for example, World Cup stadiums, Olympic venues – of many cities around the world? Or the displacement of residents after disasters – the failure of New Orleans’s levees, for instance – and the policy-influenced inflow of higher income groups? There is perhaps some merit in considering these inclusions, but one larger problem facing the study of gentrification is that the term has displaced so many other meaningful concepts that urbanists once had in their toolkits.¹⁷

It seems as though we are living in an era of the “gentrification of everything,” an era in which we are “stretching the term so far as to make it almost meaningless.”¹⁸ For instance, an automotive journalist suggests that the brand Cadillac has become gentrified because it has tapped into a taste for “startling makeovers and unexpected twists.”¹⁹ Scholar-activist Sarah Schulman uses the idea of the gentrification of the mind to refer to a collective loss of memory. To her, gentrifiers seek a suburban privatized homogeneity because they simply “don’t understand what is to live together.”²⁰ Another scholar, Brittney Cooper, suggests that we are witnessing the gentrification of media and the accompanying gentrification of culture, one of her arguments accompanied by a photograph of Black actor Kerry Washington in the hit American television show Scandal holding a to-go cup from a coffee shop. To Cooper, gentrification and race are inextricable: “Under the logic of gentrification, both the physical kind and this new mediated kind … people of color” are constrained in their ability to “live and work and be represented on their own terms.”²¹ One Twitter user suggested that Spokane, Washington, NAACP director Rachel Dolezol, who identified as a Black woman although she was raised a white woman and her parents are of European descent, “took gentrification to a whole new level.”

As we think about all of the charges made to the term, we realize, as urban sociologist Japonica Brown-Saracino stated, that “sometimes we are not just talking about gentrification when we speak about gentrification.”²² And when we do discuss it, as geographer Damaris Rose so astutely observed, “everything that is generally subsumed within the concept is usually assumed to be a part of the same phenomenon and assumed to be produced by the same causal process.”²³

The Chaos of Viewing Gentrification as a Cause Rather Than a Concept

Ruth Glass coined the term “gentrification” in 1964 to describe something that seemed genuinely new in London. Friedrich Engels and co-authors St Clair Drake and Horace Cayton also marvelled at similar intersections of economic change, political decisions, power, and social dynamics as they observed workers cramming into urban industrialized neighbourhoods in nineteenth-century Manchester and twentieth-century Chicago, respectively. Yet social scientists did not call these households “proletariers” as housing in their communities was subdivided for more and more families and factory-centred taverns emerged.

Like gentrification, this in-moving had both positive and negative consequences for the neighbourhoods, depending on who was moving in, the conditions of their mobility, the politics on the ground, what variables were being observed, and who was doing the observing. Later, when working-class suburbs developed, they bore some of the marks of working-class urban enclaves.²⁴ And when middle-class suburbs emerged away from industrial development, they bore many of the marks of middle-class enclaves in the city.²⁵ However, such continuity between urban and suburban neighbourhoods was rarely noted.

Instead, other concepts – such as suburbanization and its accompanying way of life, suburbanism – seemed to subsume all other nuances and take on their own explanatory power. Suburbanism was perceived as an all-encompassing belief system, “complete with its articles of faith, its sacred symbols, its rituals, its promise for the future, and its resolution of ultimate questions.”²⁶ Rather than viewing suburbanization as the product of multiple large trends coinciding, as working-class neighbourhoods were often understood, conceptions of suburbanization and suburbanism grasped these confluences of various forces as independent elements with their own autonomous force.²⁷ They became shorthand for everything “we” don’t like about contemporary middle- class life. It is this sense of suburbanization that Smith must have had in mind when he stated that new-build gentrification projects that did not agree with his tastes were “accomplishing a suburbanization of the city.”²⁸

When we discuss a term like gentrification as if it has some explanatory power, that confusing act itself “arbitrarily divides the indivisible and/or lumps together the unrelated and the inessential.” Methodologist Andrew Sayer called such a term a “chaotic conception.”²⁹ Rose argued that gentrification is a chaotic conception two decades after Ruth Glass coined the term, and she further suggested that “the concepts ‘gentrification’ and ‘gentrifier’ need to be disaggregated.”³⁰

If explanatory power is wrongly assigned to the idea of gentrification, how much more confusing is it to ascribe to all middle-class residents within non-affluent urban neighbourhoods some implied identity and purported motive for being a “gentrifier”? As sociologists Bennett Berger and Herbert Gans argued in regard to suburbanism, one’s “‘way of life’ is a function of such variables as age, income, occupation, education, rural-urban background, and so forth,” not the type of housing they choose.³¹ One motivation for writing this book, in fact, is that we believe that the contradictory caricature of gentrifiers developed concomitantly with the disconnect between the personal and scholarly lives of those theorizing them.

As a group, we – residents who currently have middle-class standing – are coming “back to the city” for very clear reasons. And our reasonable or even good decisions on the micro-level can produce negative results on the meso level, owing to nothing more than our class positions. Even if we denounce gentrification (e.g., “gentrification is horrible,” as one gentrifier said at a public meeting³²) or express tolerance (e.g., “everyone has a right to be [here],” as another said³³) or encourage residential integration in all neighbourhoods (e.g., “why not make it possible for the poor to live in rich neighborhoods?” quipped a third thinker³⁴), it may not matter much. The role of gentrifier becomes enacted when a middle-class resident is located within the larger macro- and meso-level contexts of gentrification and a critical mass of other gentrifiers.

Brown-Saracino in her edited volume, a cross-section of this chaotic sub field, writes that her book is meant to inform “our relations with one another.”³⁵ One must be vulnerable in building relations, a task that wasn’t always easy for these three authors – who were not exempt from finger-pointing. Similarly, as we interrogate our residential choices, attempting to place our intimate conversations and thoughts on display, we invite the reader to interrogate how we deliberate, interpret, highlight, and frame them. Our interrogation is almost certainly flawed, and we hope such flaws will only illuminate the worn seams of our current understanding. We must do this if we are to “demarcate and ... politicize the strategically essential possibilities for more progressive, socially just, emancipatory and sustainable formations of urban life.”³⁶

As we will argue, it is very likely that the gentrifier and the displaced share common needs and interests, needs and interests that help to produce gentrification when acted upon by the middle class. In such cases it is extremely illuminating to consider that it may be nothing more than the unchecked capitalist housing market that “pits these two against one another, forcing them into competition or even actual conflict” where such conflict might not otherwise exist.³⁷

Structure, Agency, and the Self

Gentrification is profoundly structural. In sociological parlance it is the result of fixed regularities, patterns, and institutions that are bigger than individuals; structures that shape the actions those individuals take; and their perceptions of the way things are. Gentrification is the return of the middle class and wealthy to cities, cities that through much of the twentieth century were markedly abandoned socially, politically, and economically.

Yet despite being indisputably structural, somehow – and this is why we love social science – gentrification is also the result of individual agency: people’s ability to take creative social action in their own lives, to pursue their goals and their tastes. It would seem that most social scientists and many in society at large (including many gentrifiers) would agree. There is interaction between the social institutions around us and the choices we make. Such nuances can be hard to find, however, in gentrification discussions. After decades of debate about this very thing, discussions about gentrification tend to “merely lurch uncertainly between the twin poles of ‘structure’ and ‘agency.’”³⁸

In the study of gentrification, this general tension between structure and agency is known as the production versus consumption debate. In the very narrow view of adherents to this debate, there are two distinct, polar camps. There are those who emphasize that gentrification is driven by large-scale socio-structural trends in capitalism – the structure-centric production camp – who usually add that we need to organize against and fight these forces. And there are those who emphasize that gentrification is driven by consumer tastes – the agency-centric consumption camp.³⁹

For many in the structural production camp, any mention of tastes (i.e., “consumption”), agency, and choice is seen as an abdication of the power of social structure, a disloyalty to our craft. The adherents to this view seem to argue that it is the civic duty of the analyst to come up with the correct conclusions – conclusions that don’t muddy the water. Rose pointed out, after twenty years of (anti-)gentrification research, that a similar “type of insistence” on a “‘correct’... starting point in the ‘sphere of production’ is politically grounded.”⁴⁰

Yet, as Rose asked, what are we left with? The notion that gentrifiers’ actions are determined by structure? That gentrifiers’ actions have some role, but mostly as a “scratch on the surface” of a macro-level machine? Or, indeed, can gentrifiers “influence the operation” of the processes driving gentrification?⁴¹ Knee-jerk responses to nuance – the same nuance Rose was calling for more than thirty years ago – have led to a huge “reality gap” in the discussion of gentrification. For instance, the same activists that decry a lack of wealth creation due to low home values turn around and suggest that long-time residents should not sell their houses to a gentrifier at a 500 per cent profit.

We do understand the arguments on both sides: our point here is that such related conversations rarely intersect in this way. We believe that the disjointed discussion in academic and policy circles has only furthered – if not caused – the reality gap that exists both in gentrifiers’ own understanding of themselves and in mainstream discussions about gentrification that bubble into the news. Gentrification is a term born in the academy in London in the 1960s.⁴² But the academy has struggled to pin it down ever since.

To us, the problem with the current state of affairs is that, if middle-class urban residents – including activists, scholars, and policy makers – are seething about gentrification while assuming that they are not gentrifiers, then where are the honest conversations that link policy to the grass roots occurring? And if we are not talking honestly about gentrification, then how are we making ethically sound decisions about an issue that, as gentrification documentary filmmaker Andrew Padilla stated, lies at the intersection of every “socioeconomic and political problem that faces our city today.”⁴³

In an attempt to begin honest conversations, scholars often engage in what social scientists term “socially locating” themselves within their study. In other words, they look at where they are located within the social structure and consider how that location might bias or otherwise influence the study that they have undertaken and the conclusions that they have made. What this means in practice is that, when an author explores her own neighbourhood of residence, she may say something like, “in full disclosure, let me just say that I am middle class and educated, and I am located in a poor neighbourhood to conduct this study.” But rarely would such a scholar conclude, “and this makes me a gentrifier,” unpacking all of the contradictions that lie within.⁴⁴ Sometimes, then, this practice of “socially locating” the researcher is abused. When anyone with power – but especially someone who educates and develops knowledge – assumes that he is free to go on his way after he has “socially located” himself without truly unpacking that location, the results can be “benignly patronizing at best, and oppressive at worst.”⁴⁵

Recognizing a social location is not the same as employing the social location for a more fruitful inquiry. We cannot sincerely address a problem – that is, redirect behaviours in reference to it – until we systematically locate our own behaviours and identities in relation to it. Therefore, we are not calling for exposés that “out” scholars as being unprogressive or hypocritical. Rather, we believe that if we fail to reconcile the “data” of our own intimate lives with our position on gentrification, we have failed to locate the true “black box” that contains our most valuable tools for understanding gentrification. Within the conflict lie the nuance and the richness that connect theory to people’s lives.

Who Me?

In writing about cities and neighbourhoods, we have confronted the ways that, along with other people who think about gentrification, we are embedded in the trends we examine.⁴⁶ While some gentrification researchers portray gentrified neighbourhoods as ethically challenged, culturally homogenized wastelands, making quips like “the only positive to gentrification is being able to find a good cup of coffee when conducting fieldwork,” we realized that this pervasive distance between the process of gentrification and ourselves, the analysers of the process, seemed artificial and at times disingenuous.⁴⁷

We noticed that within the safety of personal conversations one way to complexify (i.e., “show the true complexity” of something) this line of thought was to ask a ranting friend, “where are you located in the process?” When we do, people are quick to acknowledge that the situation is more complicated, more nuanced than their rants suggest, but such humility does not make it to the scholarly debate. As urban planning scholar Lance Freeman suggested, the “good-guy-versus-bad-guy” approach to gentrification “makes a good morality play, but life is a lot messier than that.”⁴⁸ We hope to expose the messiness.

Like many academics, we research, write about, live in, and teach in cities because we love them. Each of us believes in ethnographic research: understanding people in place is our raison d’être. We do not want to pretend we are in some way outside the issues we discuss with our students or colleagues. We do not want to imagine that we are somehow not active agents in both a positive and a negative sense in our neighbourhoods. The reality that we have confronted, of course, is that John, Jason, and Marc are also people in place.

So we take up the challenge posed by Rose to “explore the actual processes through which those groups [read: us] we now subsume under the category ‘gentrifier’ are produced and discussed.”⁴⁹ We use an ethnographic lens to make sense of our own cities, our neighbourhoods, and ourselves. By employing a version of the auto-ethnographic method, which has become increasingly pervasive since the “crisis of representation”⁵⁰ in social science during the 1990s, we seek to maximize our personal, micro-level experiences and observations to rethink neighbourhood and city-wide transformation. Through personal journalling, field notes, stimulated recall of past events, and formal and informal conversations with each other, we generate and use our stories to interrogate the gentrification process.

In our lives we are regularly meeting our neighbours, other city residents: leaders, activists, and academics. The conversation often turns to how a place has changed – or, actually, what “they” are doing to a particular place. “Oh, you study gentrification?” the conversation begins. “Do you see what they are doing to ——?” And someone else joins in: “and now they are starting it in ——!” We discuss whether we like those changes, whether we think the changes make sense for the common good, whether we detect a conspiracy at the city level. Sometimes, there is an element of bewilderment at the rate of change. But who is “they”?

Recently, John had a conversation with a woman named Sherri about a piece that cited his work with Jason.⁵¹ She stated that she had been living in a gentrifying Latino neighbourhood for twelve years and explained that the recent gentrification had hurt diversity. However, she lamented, it did not seem that the newcomers, “moving here just ‘because everyone else is,’ really care about diversity.” This is likely because, as she states, “they’re just focusing ... on their craft beer, pretentious restaurants, and overpriced food co-op.”

Recognizing her perspective, John responded, “So I assume that you do not see yourself as a gentrifier?” Sherri replied that she did not. “I have really appreciated the diversity of people and experiences in the neighbourhood,” she explained. “While I am not Latino, I have learned to speak Spanish since moving here. I volunteer my time at a local food pantry. I always support my neighbourhood’s businesses.” Sherri continued to explain how she navigates life in the neighbourhood: “I take the time to know my neighbours well and I embrace this neighbourhood just as it is and I will continue to do so. But I grew up in an all-white, all-the-same suburb. So I really don’t want to lose what we have here.”

There are several important and common ideas embedded in Sherri’s feelings. First, her desire is to freeze the social composition of the neighbourhood “as it is.” Second, she seems to distrust other in-movers, fearing that they will not recognize the optimal balance that currently exists in the neighbourhood in the way that she does. In addition, she aligns gentrification – although, significantly, not her own – with materialism and consumer-driven behaviour. But, aside from a concern for social composition and a sense of distrust, Sherri’s words evidence a cultural crisis: even if white newcomers do not exhibit materialistic and consumer-driven behaviour, their presence is problematic because their sheer numbers will change the “social mix” to be – in her eyes – less diverse. They will bring what she perceives as a suburban homogenization. She wants to be there, but if there are too many “Sherris” there, it will spoil everything.

This brand of authenticity, as sociologist David Grazian noted, is a “zero-sum game in which too many seekers ... can spoil the fun for everyone else.”⁵² Of course, a further complication is the fact that statistically, as the neighbourhood is attracting different class and ethnic groups, it is becoming more diverse. To Sherri, “diverse” means different from her and, more specifically, non-white. She is aligning with this perceived authenticity – learning Spanish, working on behalf of poorer residents, embracing local businesspeople – and she therefore sees herself as somehow being more native than other newcomers. She is actually not a newcomer. Yet having been there for twelve years, she still feels as if others are the real residents and she needs to adjust.

We understand this seeking of real community and authentic city life. In fact, we see strands of it within ourselves. In 1887 German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies lamented the loss of the Gemeinschaft – what he called “the only real form of life.” The Gemeinschaft, the “family spirit” germane to the town, is a sentiment rooted “in the mind and heart.” The city, on the other hand, is dominated by a Gesellschaft of “restless striving” in which everything must be “exploited in a capitalistic way” and, according to Tönnies, the “real life” is lost.⁵³ But what is at the root of this desire for “real life” in the present day?

Sociologist Jon Caulfield had two ideas regarding where the desire for a “subjectively effective present” comes from. First, he suggests, the desire for real community may be in response to governments’ mass demolition of the urban fabric in earlier eras and its replacement by huge monolithic projects (more on this subject in chapter 3). The resulting sense of loss is twofold: one aspect relates to the destruction of a variety of architecture; the other the dismantling of complex, highly connected communities. Second, and relatedly, Caulfield noted that some of gentrification’s cultural roots may also be a response to domination of urban life and urban places by capitalistic exchange values – the simplistic valuation of land merely for its worth in the open market.⁵⁴ This market-driven approach has created modernist homogenized suburbs as well as urban environments “assiduously contrived” by real estate developers pursuing the highest and best use as they try to pack in everything their target consumer desires.⁵⁵ Gentrification need not involve a search for an authenticity that predates such environments. But when it does, it involves – as does all authenticity-seeking perhaps – “a fantasy that the experience of an idealized reality might render” life “more meaningful.”⁵⁶ The more meaningful alternative to exchange value is often understood as use value: the value enjoyed by the use of a place.

Sherri’s comments are in response to John’s question as to whether she is a gentrifier. No, she conveys, because the “indigenous” residents are a particular way and she has become this way as well. She is sincere, she fits, she is respectful. She has heeded the advice of Black filmmaker and native Brooklynite Spike Lee to recent in-movers: “you can’t just come in the neighborhood and start bogarting … You have to come with respect. There’s a code. There’s people.”⁵⁷

Also implicit in her comments is the feeling that, if she had her druthers – to use the language of Brown-Saracino – this neighbourhood would never change.⁵⁸ She, in some real and sincere way, desires to pause the neighbourhood in the time period just after she arrived and just before the neighbourhood got “hot.” This desire to stem the popularity of the neighbourhood reveals a [read: human? middle-class?] desire to tap into a hidden treasure – the unknown vocalist, the hole-in-the-wall business – before it becomes mainstream, overplayed, watered down, mundane, like everything else.

That a newcomer’s allegiance to a place, albeit one that does not actually arise from old ties, can exonerate a resident from being a gentrifier is a poignant theme. Imagined realities and physical realities collide in gentrification. According to blogs within the trope of “ways not to be a gentrifier” or “ways to be a good gentrifier,” including the standard-bearer by political consultant Dannette Lambert that was quoted to open this chapter, it is the depth and sincerity of this allegiance vis-à-vis other new residents that matter.⁵⁹ This perspective allows gentrifiers to distance themselves from the actual process of gentrification, which to them is a matter more of motive than of when they arrived. In our definition of gentrifier, however, each middle-class newcomer contributes to a “critical mass” of transformation. In 1950, Sherri’s presence would make her a quirky outlier; in 2015 she is a gentrifier. This assignment of the term gentrifier becomes sticky only when we assign moral weight to the term. And many do so.

Feeling that they are more legitimate than other more recent arrivals (although, in Sherri’s case, not the recent Latino arrivals), these residents have tried to “bracket” their own biographies from the discussion – despite demographic similarities to recent arrivals and differences from long-time residents – and exonerate themselves with a résumé of what they interpret as progressive actions. Yet the notion that we can bracket our presuppositions from our lived experiences, as philosopher Ilja Maso noted, “must be considered a myth.” We are not outside the trends in which we are positioned. And we are wholly us all the time. Our “perception and interpretation are inseparable”; therefore, our interpretation of others’ gentrification is inevitably and inextricably tied in some way to our understanding of our own housing choices.⁶⁰

Sherri’s reflective self-awareness suggests that she is what Brown-Saracino would call a “social preservationist,” since she enacts her “appreciation and consumption of difference through practices intended to preserve that difference.”⁶¹ She also is a gentrifier, despite the fact that she does not identify as such simply because – to push a tired caricature to its preposterous limit – she is not opening artisanal mayonnaise shops or lured to an overpriced food co-op. She is a gentrifier because of the intersection of her context (on the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels), her desires, and her actions. Those at the beginning of the critical mass and those who come later are equally gentrifiers, even if we value one (e.g., artists, non-white) more than the other (e.g., hipsters, yuppies.) Nevertheless, we would not blame a resident for not wanting to identify as a gentrifier, considering how the popular conception of the terms “gentrifier” and “gentrification” have evolved. A line of thought says that gentrification is not an aggregate of residential decisions made in a particular structural context; it is a state of the heart.

Gentrification of the Heart

Pope Francis’s mention of gentrification a few years back highlights the moral and ethical contours of this perspective. The pope asked an audience at St Peter’s Square, “How much damage does the comfortable life, well-being, do?”⁶² It is quite compelling for our purposes that this pope – so familiar with the street level – immediately followed up on his own question with the unscripted words, “Imborghesimento del cuore ci paralizza”⁶³ (The gentrification of the heart paralyses us). Gentrification is a spiritual condition, according to the pope, one that touches the very heart and soul. Once it occurs, we become paralysed in the face of the realities around us. Again, the narrative goes, gentrifiers do not reside in authentic reality.

The reality beyond the paralysis, the pope would clarify months later, is that evil is “embedded in the structures of a society,” and every action located within that structure has “a constant potential” for harm. In other words, the ill is structural and systemic, which means that it can be furthered by actors who themselves do not embody that trait. Social scientists employ this notion when they discuss ideas such as “systemic” or “laissez-faire” racism. What is the evil embedded in our system according to the pope? It is a “globalization of indifference” through which “man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.”⁶⁴ This allows the “deification” and “sacralization” of the market – called “neoliberalism” by many scholars – a philosophy that espouses open markets, free trade, privatization, deregulation, and individualism.⁶⁵

Indifference and paralysis leave unquestioned the deification of the market, even as they result in the exclusion of people who are not just “society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised” but rather “no longer even a part of it.”⁶⁶ This parallels a common portrayal of gentrification. In the analysis of gentrification, the indifferent are the gentrifiers and the disenfranchised are those displaced by the process, those for whom staying in their current home has become “impossible, hazardous, or unaffordable.”⁶⁷

Confessions of … the Middle Class

Some urbanists regularly contend that it would be far more productive to spend our time determining how, in geographer Tom Slater’s words, researchers can “support and give space to urban movements who fight for a more just city with affordable housing.”⁶⁸ Can we cease, they ask, giving endless attention, as Slater noted, to “the consumer preferences of middle-class gentrifiers” and focus on the pain of those affected by gentrification?⁶⁹ To Slater, a focus on the practices and identities of the gentrifier necessarily leads to a neglect of those “being gentrified.”

Moreover, such a charge presumes that thinking about gentrifiers’ decisions is navel-gazing by “people like us,” since – as the argument goes – all of the middle class is the same. Making sense of what we do and its impact is really quite simple: our class position has determined who we are. There is no analysis necessary. We possess unyielding middle-class tastes and are less concerned about larger issues of injustice and more concerned with fretting over where the middle class is to live.

Yet middle-class urban residents who are bothered by gentrification don’t always feel this way about themselves. Often, in their own minds, they are an exception to this homogeneity– perhaps because of working-class roots, a special connection with the local culture, their ethnic or racial background, volunteering locally or working as a housing activist, and so on. Regardless, it is easy not to consider the issue further, because in their thinking they are what Loretta Lees called “inadvertent instruments of abstract economic forces” and as such are absolved “of any responsibility for their actions.”⁷⁰ (Did you see what they are doing to ——?)

In this book we echo what community organizers say to individuals in their everyday work: that a reflective individual working with other reflective individuals can bring about real change. But without this reflection, we – as John’s colleague, political scientist Larry Bennett, noted in a recent conversation – just get caught up “fighting an abstraction.” When a star student of John’s began working full time with non-profit community development corporations, the dealing and compromises with various actors that the job required made her confide: “I feel like I work with the enemy every day.” This is the messy world of actual living and breathing relationships: what one encounters beyond the “grand theories” and all-enveloping, deterministic terminology that can emerge from the academic study of an issue.

Indeed, gentrification is not an innocuous process, and that is why a more reflective and reflexive lens is necessary. To this end, we believe that understanding the motivations of gentrifiers (especially us) could be a way to affect the process of gentrification today outside the revolutionary structural changes that would bring “social ownership of housing ... the social control of land, the resident control of neighborhoods” and other just allocations.⁷¹ As Marcuse noted in a recent lecture, “gentrification is inevitable until we do something about capitalism.”⁷²

We agree. Yet some who agree with such a statement might say “Yes! Let’s redouble our efforts to overthrow capitalism!” – or at least their actions would imply this sentiment. We look at it from another vantage point: we think that perhaps in giving attention to our individual decisions within structural processes, we can illuminate and potentially nudge these structures through our actions. What we do know is that it certainly won’t happen if no one views herself as a gentrifier. So then, why not consider the choices that middle-class residents make?

Urban policy today, whether it is for or against gentrification, assumes the middle-class urban resident to be little more than a consumer. Yes, of course, all of us are consumers. We all purchase our food and clothes somewhere. Yet somehow we have arrived at a place where such purchases are understood to have extra depth and present unique contradictions for the gentrifier. Again, gentrifiers are “certain types of people ... viewed only in terms of their ‘consumption’ habits and patterns” – the “conspicuous consumption of cappuccino and quiche” (in Rose’s 1980s parlance) or patronizing cereal cafés (in the terms of contemporary London).⁷³

Farmers markets and urban farming, for instance, are seen as answers to food deserts for many progressives … until they bring in those middle-class folks also looking for good food. When the sanitation workers and construction crews stop at Starbucks in the morning, they are getting coffee, but when financial analysts stop at Starbucks in the morning, they are doing it to fulfil their very reason for being. A “leftist” in a café is seen as engaging in the grass-roots conversation that is the building block of politics; a “gentrifier” in a café is a poseur. Progressives decry “car culture,” but then view bike lanes as colonization. We protest the location of a garbage dump in an ethnic ghetto as environmental racism, but then, when pollution is removed from the neighbourhood, it is assumed to be a neoliberal conspiracy to foster gentrification.

Why such caricatures and contradictions? Part of the answer is that progressive thinkers reason that, if they understand the structural factors involved, then they can take the “demographic and ‘life-style’ aspects of gentrification ‘off the shelf,’ with the confidence that they will automatically know how to interpret and contextualize them correctly.”⁷⁴ As we analyse in our closing chapter, the middle-class and urban leaders have found themselves in a position in which they – to use a North American cliché – “can’t win for losing.” Such an atmosphere of judgment – one that, as we were once told, “sucks the air out of the room” – leads many urban residents such as Sherri to be secret gentrifiers.

Oakland resident Ellen Lynch doesn’t buy any of it. “Sometimes when people use ‘gentrifier,’ they truly don’t want to engage,” she says as she discusses being labelled with the term – flipping the conversation on its head. “Gentrifying? I’ve been here since 1978, I’m just fixing my house up.”⁷⁵

Sometimes it seems that for non-immigrant, middle-class people living in a neighbourhood that does not predominantly reflect their own ethnicity, there is no rightful claim to urban legitimacy. Such a resident, then, can only hope to dedicate his efforts to “curating” the authenticity of others, as we discuss in chapter 4. Isn’t this line of reasoning getting a bit cumbersome, at least theoretically if (again) not practically? Where, we wonder, does this idea of the never-belonging resident originate? As professors, we are educating the children and even the grandchildren of gentrifiers; have they earned this elusive “indigenous,” “incumbent,” or “native” standing in their neighbourhoods yet? If not, why? What are the criteria for native and non-native?

As people who discuss urban-rooted topics every day, the three of us live within a world of “inside jokes” in which all of these realities – the Marxist’s sharply renovated 100-year-old home in a historic district, the radical’s love for $6 dessert coffee, the education activist’s decision to put her child in a private, language-immersion school – are timorously acknowledged in passing. Time after time, we have found that, in settings in which we espouse our auto-ethnographic perspective, we are approached afterwards for what feels (uncomfortably) like one-on-one “counselling” after the larger audience has left.

Marc is routinely stopped by academics who are critical of the role of gentrification in school reform policy, but are equally committed to using their social capital to get their children into “the good school.” Jason served as a talking-head expert in the documentary Bowery Dish, a film on the gentrification of The Bowery in Manhattan. After the film’s showing at the Tribeca Film Festival, a viewer asked in the follow-up Q&A, “what can I do to be ethical as a gentrifier?” Similarly, the young East Harlem filmmaker Andrew Padilla joked with John that during the discussions that take place after his film El Barrio Tours about Harlem gentrification, “people look at me like a priest” who can absolve them. After one such event, he was walking a woman home when she turned to him and said, “You know I’m a gentrifier, right?” “She thought I wouldn’t want to walk with her anymore!” he laughed. It seemed to us that this obviously rich intersection of the theoretical and the personal was worthy of systematic exploration.

Our Multi-tool

In our daily lives, the micro-level manifestation of gentrification seems the most tangible. As sociologist Alan Warde noted, the tension in gentrification research lies between those explanations focusing on the “activities of large-scale property developers” and those who focus on “individual households.”⁷⁶ The cookie-cutter model of theorizing forces data into preset moulds. And it creates false, dichotomous debates.

We endeavour to connect these two polar approaches by explaining our analytical “multi-tool.”⁷⁷ Our multi-tool is intended to be just that: a tool that pivots in multiple ways, an analytical device that enables researchers and readers to take apart, rework, and adjust their views on a complex, ever-changing process. As analysts, our concepts are our tools; we attempt in this section to articulate them clearly.

“The things that low-income people think are nice,” says Nancy Biberman, who runs the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDco) in the Bronx, “are the same as what wealthy people want.”⁷⁸ Of course, the reality is a bit more complex, but there is a valuable nugget of truth here. Our multi-tool flexes to work at making sense of housing decisions in various possible contexts. And that feature is important. As we will see, particular facets take on a unique significance in a gentrifying context.

The gentrifier is a social, political, and economic actor whose “needs and desires … in conjunction with other contingent factors, may become important in producing gentrification.”⁷⁹ While economics has traditionally overprivileged choice, critical sociology must not respond to this error by failing to interrogate individual choice.⁸⁰ Indeed, gentrification does not occur because middle-class people decide to be gentrifiers. But deeming all things structural allows middle-class residents to ignore their own agency. We believe that we simply cannot get the whole story until our critical eye follows us home. Ultimately, just as there are no gentrifiers without gentrification, there is no gentrification without gentrifiers.

We hope that our multi-tool can be useful in a variety of projects including the project of examining our household’s own residential decisions. We think that this exercise will illuminate the inextricability of agency and structure.⁸¹ Instead of a standard-issue hammer that assumes each case to be an indistinguishable nail, we need a tool that has utility for a variety of experiences. A structural approach provides us with a very sharp understanding of the macro and meso levels, but it gets a bit fuzzier as the analyst “zooms in.” Micro-level consumption patterns, on the other hand, are very sharp on the street level and get a bit fuzzier as one “zooms out.”

Any argument that one side has all the answers in the debate – which pits “consumption” or “demand” or “agency” versus “production” or “supply” or “structure” – should be relegated to its proper place within the graduate student theory seminar. The answer on the street level, of course, is both: all of these phenomena are concomitant. People make up structures and the structures make up the trajectories of people – all at the same time. Yet this implicit gulf remains readily discernible in academic journals, popular media, and community meetings.

The challenge in urban studies is to identify a place’s character in a way that captures the multi-faceted social, cultural, political, and economic life in the built environment – that is, to ask: what makes up a place? It is not enough to focus on one aspect or one scale. With this in mind, our multi-tool follows in the footsteps of sociologist Harvey Molotch and his colleagues, who brought sociologist Bruno Latour’s idea of “lash-up” into urban studies. Molotch et al. work to show how “rather than resulting from one force overpowering another (e.g., the material versus the symbolic), things exist in the world through the ‘success’ of connections among various forces and across ... realms” as diverse as architecture, social clubs, non-profits, businesses, street design, demographics, natural amenities, and political agendas.⁸²

The “lash” imagery, while abstract, is useful: it suggests a bundle of sticks being combined into a single unit with a rope. As each city’s context is different, the specific manner in which a city’s parts “lash up” or cohere is different, and therefore the outcome is altogether different. The debates about gentrification tend to pit one slice of urban life and urban analysis against another, rather than work to place the pieces together into a messy but more complete whole. Our multi-tool is intended to allow for both specific inquiries and analytical triangulations. So what are the behaviours and the motives of the people within the structure, the gentrifiers? How do individuals make up the structure around them? Our multi-tool encompasses seven facets of a housing choice: monetary, practical, aesthetic, amenity, community, cultural authenticity, and flexibility.

Monetary: Affordability and Asset

Let us begin with the basics: money. The gentrifier’s locational decision is characterized by a monetary facet. This facet includes, first, the affordability of housing as well as, second, the potential for it to serve as a primary asset in a household’s wealth.

Figure 1: Multi-tool

Early gentrifiers, often economically marginal, value the affordability of housing. “Much of what are alternatively referred to as ‘alternative lifestyles’ – reduced to exogenous ‘fashions’ by neoclassical theorists and viewed pejoratively by some Marxists,” states Damaris Rose, “in fact symptomize attempts by educated young people, who may be unemployed, underemployed, temporarily employed (or all three simultaneously), to find creative ways of responding to new conditions.”⁸³ If the gentrifier is a buyer, she may be pulled by the potential for stability or increases in housing values so as to hold the housing as an asset. Housing, historically, can be a key household investment – especially in the United States. There is a common (although perhaps changing) wisdom in places where the homeownership rate is high that paying rent is akin to giving money away when the same payments could in fact be building household wealth. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, such wisdom proved useful. Gentrification has kept this hope alive, even in a post-recession world. This household focus on a property’s exchange value should not surprise us within a capitalist economy.

Practical: Centrality and Space

The gentrifier’s decision is characterized by a practical facet. This might apply to the practicality of a particular neighbourhood’s geographic centrality or perhaps to the practicality of having extra space.

Gentrifiers often privilege neighbourhood centrality. They are conscious of “the advantages of living close to the center of the city.”⁸⁴ Some appreciate this centrality because they reject the “suburban space-time rhythms of separate spheres of work and daily life.”⁸⁵ The connections between space, time, and money lead to practical considerations. For instance, commuting time affects family life: “if we had to pay a £1000 more on the mortgage was that better than paying £1000 on travel expenses?” asked one gentrifier.⁸⁶ The logic behind the “spatial mismatch” – the geographic (and transportation) disconnect between place of residency and place of employment for the urban poor – like many terms related to housing choice, can be extended more broadly to the middle class.⁸⁷ The spatial mismatch idea implies that the poor do not have the means to overcome this disconnect and the middle class do, but this concept likely operates more as a continuum than a dichotomy. Both, Rose recognized decades ago, can “have good reasons for wanting an inner-city location.”⁸⁸

Moreover, some gentrifiers appreciate the size of home they can afford in a gentrifying neighbourhood: the extra space. They may appreciate it because of the ease with which they could entertain or perhaps even house friends and family, as a function of a desire to have a live-work space, or because of anticipating a growing family. As gentrifiers are middle class, they often have the income to consider the value of such luxuries.

Aesthetic: Neighbourhood, Exterior, Interior

The gentrifier’s decision may be characterized by an aesthetic facet. This facet may privilege anything from the sleek and new to what cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard called a “taste for the bygone.”⁸⁹ There are three relevant scales for one’s aesthetic concerns. An aesthetic sense could relate to that of an entire neighbourhood, the exterior architecture of a house, or a particular interior layout.⁹⁰

In regard to a neighbourhood-level aesthetic, there is almost certainly a good deal of nostalgia at play here. M. Christine Boyer charges the residential area of Battery Park City with “so concentrat[ing] New York City’s landmarks that here one can find the look of pre-war apartment houses combined with the views and atmosphere of Brooklyn Heights, reproductions of Central Park lampposts, and 1939 World’s Fair benches, the inspiration drawn from the private enclave of Gramercy Park as well as the great landscape inheritance of Olmsted’s parks.”⁹¹ Certainly, though, the attraction to design need not be so problematic. In London, Butler notes the pull to the “architectural significance” of De Beauvoir Town and particularly the “architectural integrity of the whole area.”⁹² In terms of the exterior of one’s own property, sociologist Elijah Anderson discusses “the big old Victorian townhouses” of Philadelphia and their “abundant yard space with century-old wrought-iron fences” as being a draw to gentrifiers.⁹³

Interior design is also a consideration. Urban sociologist Sharon Zukin noted “that people began to find the notion of living in a loft attractive” for its industrial aesthetic.⁹⁴ Sociologist Mary Pattillo, one of a few scholars to intentionally position herself within the complexities of everyday life in her ethnographic work, notes that she was “drawn to [her] house” in gentrifying North Kenwood-Oakland for its “rich vintage character – pocket doors, transoms above each entryway, a butler’s staircase off of the kitchen, a water closet in the master bedroom, and the original skeleton keys for each bedroom door.”⁹⁵ Similarly, in Philadelphia, sociologist Elijah Anderson points to “spacious rooms” with “leaded-glass windows.”⁹⁶

Amenity: Thirdplaces, Public Distributive

The gentrifier’s locational decision is characterized by an amenity facet. When we talk about amenities here, we refer only to their use value: the value enjoyed from using the park, using the cafe, using the school, and so on. Amenities, besides having practical uses (e.g., the cafe is a useful, low-“rent” work space for workers in the service economy and for students), also have an often inseparable social aspect: they help “people to make new social contacts and thus extend the local community.”⁹⁷ In noting the visuals of such use of amenities, urban planning thinker Jane Jacobs explained that “if a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull.”⁹⁸ Amenities help to drive street life. For our purposes, we will divide them into two types: thirdplaces and public distributive. Indeed, amenities such as retail districts, parks, and schools feed back into monetary considerations, but their use value here is distinct from how they impact property value.

Scholars like Richard Lloyd believe that thirdplaces – a term sociologist Ray Oldenburg used to describe hangouts away from home and work such as restaurants, bars, and coffee shops where people can “do” community – can be “crucial.”⁹⁹ These are the businesses so central to all stages of gentrification, from the barely profitable café in a neighbourhood with few potential patrons, such as Urbis Orbis in Lloyd’s Wicker Park, to the Starbucks that opened in the same neighbourhood twenty years later and sociologist Richard Ocejo’s new bars of the Lower East Side.¹⁰⁰ Even when regulars are mostly alone during a particular visit, their experience is, as Grazian noted, “enhanced by the familiarity of their surroundings.”¹⁰¹

Public distributive amenities, paid for by tax dollars, are spaces that should in theory be evenly distributed among all areas of a city. This idea of distributive amenities, employed by political scientist Paul Peterson, is in contrast to the idea of redistributive amenities, which would describe amenities in a lower-tax-revenue area that are largely funded by tax dollars from a higher-tax-revenue area.¹⁰² While redistributive policies can be tangled in inter-class tensions, distributive policies should be class neutral: all areas are in some way due them. One such distributive amenity is a park. Another might be a tree-lined sidewalk. Another key distributive amenity – and one that structures the locational decisions of families – is a public school.

Community: Diversity, Newcomers

Gentrifiers may simultaneously emphasize both narrow and broad ideas of community, maintaining what sociologist David Ley called a “roving agenda” that is conscious of their neighbourhood’s place within the larger city.¹⁰³ This perception may be true for either one of our pair of community orientations: one that celebrates the gentrifier’s place within the perceived diversity of a neighbourhood and a second that seeks to cultivate a community of newcomers.

In regard to the first type, some gentrifiers appreciate being immersed in a community characterized by diversity. “The biggest reason that I like living in this area is the ethnic diversity and the range of incomes and social classes,” wrote one gentrifier.¹⁰⁴ This is part of a slow and variable but nonetheless identifiable trend towards a desire to live in a diverse environment – compared with earlier periods when segregation by class and/or race was a systemic norm. Rose discusses a case in Montreal’s inner-city neighbourhoods where new housing construction is balanced by social housing in the vicinity of middle-income developments. As one representative community/diversity professional states, “[we] shouldn’t live in a closed circle where everybody has the same [middle-class] social standing, where everything is rose-coloured. That’s not the way it is … The attraction of a city in general is that it’s where things happen. And, everyone has the right to be there and to express themselves.”¹⁰⁵

Some suggest that gentrifiers desire – either in addition to the aforementioned desire or perhaps to the exclusion of it, depending on whom you ask – to be part of a community of newcomers. Familiar examples would include an emerging bohemian community, a community of young urban professionals, an emerging gay community, or a community of middle-class residents of a particular racial or ethnic identity (e.g., Black, Latino). Counter to Jane Jacobs’s account of new apartment dwellers, these gentrifiers create primary relationships with a large number of other new residents.¹⁰⁶

The community facet, either of the “newcomer” or “diversity” variation, can be important to gay and lesbian gentrifiers. Considerations about safety in numbers and inclusion or, alternatively, being ignored and anonymous, can matter. Manuel Castells’s seminal work on identifying gay neighbourhoods ran parallel to identifying early gentrification.¹⁰⁷ Urban planning researcher Mickey Lauria and geographer Lawrence Knopp noted that gay men, as men with fewer dependants, tend to have more capital; they are thus able to create strong communities of gay newcomers.¹⁰⁸ They can employ their capital to invest in both residential properties and entrepreneurial efforts, opening gay-focused businesses. Urban planning theorist Sy Adler and sociologist Johanna Brenner show that gays and lesbians often inhabit different urban sites.¹⁰⁹ Lesbians, as women, often lack the same financial resources and tend to live in mixed-race, middle-income neighbourhoods or in counter-cultural neighbourhoods. Their marginal economic and cultural status leaves them non-gay neighbourhoods. Nonetheless, geographer Tamar Rothenberg shows that even though lesbians do not create lesbian neighbourhoods, they create dense social networks and key institutions within neighbourhoods.¹¹⁰

To paint with a broad brush, the community/diversity gentrifier is pulled to the longer-term residents, the community/newcomer one to other gentrifiers. While these types of community are altogether different in their motivations and ramifications, they do have one thing in common. In a social-media-driven world, many gentrifiers want to be a “user” of their neighbourhood rather than merely commuting to other parts of the city for different needs or wants. Appropriating the words of Jane Jacobs, gentrifiers want to be among a community of “people who go outdoors on different schedules and are all in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.”¹¹¹ This is true of the three of us.

Cultural Authenticity: Entrenched/Symbolic

The gentrifier’s motives in the community facet can be characterized by a cultural authenticity facet. While the social facet related to diversity mentioned above involves wanting to be around different types of people and institutions, the privileging of cultural authenticity seeks to preserve a perceived culture of a place. This authenticity is likely attached to a brand of community that – to borrow from cultural thinker Raymond Williams – the dominant culture “undervalues, opposes, represses, or even cannot recognize.”¹¹²

We suggest two types of this cultural authenticity perspective. In the entrenched facet, newer residents want to lock arms with long-term residents in living out this culture. The symbolic facet, on the other hand, privileges proximity over relationship. Both types reflect a connection to culture that cannot be separated from histories of power and particular formations of gender, class, and race. For this reason, as we will see throughout the book, certain deliberations about what constitutes “authentic” culture – for example, Marc’s admittedly complicated and problematic desire to live in a “real Black community” – often hinges on particular socially constructed understandings of what constitutes a legitimate performance or representation of racial identity.

Entrenched gentrifiers feel an attachment to local meaning, heritage, history, and people. Entrenched gentrifiers want to actively participate in the heritage of the place, a heritage that (even if not wholly or even partly their own) they connect to in some meaningful way. The entrenched gentrifier perceives some type of authenticity in the long-time resident, but not in a “museum piece” sense. Entrenched gentrifiers have a desire for meaningful relationships with long-time residents. They want to get politically, economically, and socially involved (e.g., “assisting”) in the neighbourhood’s institutions. For instance, journalist Natalie Moore described moving to Chicago’s Bronzeville as a “starry-eyed Black romantic” along with friends who “were going to help this historic neighborhood.”¹¹³ This is cultural-authenticity-seeking with relationship, and it may very well overlap with the community/diversity gentrifier described in the previous section.

Symbolic gentrifiers desire to live alongside long-time, culturally different (from them) residents with whom they associate authentic community. But this is an authenticity without relationship: a desire for authenticity that can be satiated by mere proximity. It may result in a concern for long-time residents as merely bodies, as carriers of culture – critics might say as props – that we separate from the entrenched facet above. Symbolic gentrifiers overlap with a category that Brown-Saracino termed “historic preservationists” and we (in chapter 4) refer to as “curators.” The symbolic gentrifier, to use the words of sociologist Tim Butler, “values the presence of others ... but chooses not to interact with them.”¹¹⁴ Such residents serve “as a kind of social wallpaper,” what amounts to “an ideologically charged and desirable backdrop for lives conducted at a remove from [the long-time residents’] multicultural institutions.”¹¹⁵ While it may be valid to see an entrenched orientation as superior to a symbolic one at the extremes, we should note that one can have entrenched intentions but in the rhythms of everyday life be symbolic in practice.

Flexibility: Infrastructure, Cultural Unfamiliarity, Danger

A housing choice in a gentrifying neighbourhood can require a certain amount of flexibility, a willingness to accept the inconveniences of a disinvested neighbourhood. This flexibility can be related to three suboptimal aspects of the neighbourhood: infrastructure, cultural unfamiliarity, and danger.

First, some gentrifiers are willing to – or perhaps desire to – live in a neighbourhood with less infrastructure, including imperfect housing and limited transportation options. They are willing to accept the personal financial risk that comes with living in a less stable neighbourhood. They are flexible enough to reside in places where local amenities and services are not the best available. They are willing to invest time, labour, and money in a place with hidden costs. Pattillo remarked on having not visited her gentrifying North Kenwood-Oakland neighbourhood before looking for a home there “because there was little reason to do so. There were no restaurants, stores, or services,” and “the street was uneven and cracked as if there had been a rare earthquake in Chicago.”¹¹⁶

Second, some express a cultural flexibility. They may see themselves as “flexible” enough to live among people with whom they are unfamiliar (at least for the moment) and from whom they are culturally and linguistically separate. There is a willingness (if not a desire for diversity, as outlined above) to live beyond the familiarity of a homogeneous enclave that matches their own class, ethnic, or linguistic backgrounds. Such compliance does not mean, of course, that all gentrifiers are from homogeneous contexts – in fact, some may be very familiar with being unfamiliar. As is true of any aspect, this flexibility may be healthy or unhealthy, which relates to the third flexibility, which is more negatively charged.

Some gentrifiers appear to be “flexible” enough to live among people and neighbourhoods that they actually fear. Social flexibility may be expressed as a willingness to live amid danger – crime and “grit” – perhaps with a desire to develop a “streetwise” attitude.¹¹⁷ Urban sociologist Christopher Mele suggests, for instance, that “because of their limited economic resources and/or preferences for residing in alternative neighborhoods, [some] groups endure above average levels of crime, noise, and drug problems.”¹¹⁸ Writing to gentrifiers, Dannette Lambert suggests that they should “smile and say hi” to neighbours, even those who “seem scary.”¹¹⁹ Which leads to the question: what is it that a gentrifier fears? One blog guide for Washington, DC, gentrifiers suggests, for example, that the “good gentrifier” should not “automatically cross the street to avoid young, black kids.”

The interpretation of Black residents as “danger” and a resulting increased police presence in marginally gentrifying neighbourhoods can be uncomfortable and even dangerous for both long-time residents and Black and Latino gentrifiers who face an increased risk of being profiled (e.g., “stopped and frisked” by police) in such an environment.¹²⁰ To further complicate this facet, a neighbourhood’s association with danger may actually mask the fact that for certain gentrifiers – especially gay and lesbian ones – it is a space for subcultural association of newcomers and thus of perceived safety.¹²¹

Outline of the Book

In our second chapter, “Dispatches,” we interrogate our own housing decisions within the framework of our multi-tool. We also use the multi-tool to consider the “type” of gentrifier that each of us has embodied at different points in our residential biographies. We consider the ramifications of our decisions and what the alternative paths might have been. Through this exercise we essentially outline the contours of a social structure that shapes middle-class urban residential decisions.

In “Invasions,” our third chapter, we examine the cocktail of larger trends that are both facilitating and facilitated by gentrification and the policies (with a view towards our United States context) that helped to determine where it would occur. While this chapter will be a familiar review to some gentrification scholars, it is often absent in conversations among even rather informed people who are baffled as to why residents of disinvested neighbourhoods would ever have an aversion to reinvestment. The chapter then considers the key criticism that gentrification causes the displacement of long-time residents, that people with less capital – economic, social, and political – are losing their ability to maintain residency in their neighbourhood. We examine different types of displacement and explore important attempts to measure displacement.

In our fourth chapter, “Columbus,” with our multi-tool facets in mind we develop six very different types of gentrifiers: conqueror, connector/colonizer, consumer, competitor, capitalist, and curator. In so doing, we use our personal narratives to interrogate the dichotomy of authenticity versus imitation or simulacra. In particular, we are uncomfortable with the essentialism of critiques of gentrification. All residents living in cities are “real”; how can it be otherwise? To suggest any less in the name of progressivism is ironic at best. Again, Ellen Lynch has been in her home in Oakland since before Marc was eating solid food and while John and Jason were playing Atari; when can she move from “gentrifier” to legitimate resident?

In our conclusion, “Collisions,” we consider the various ways that the middle class has been “problematized,” including for not wanting to live among diversity, for being fearful of the city, for enjoying the cultural distance and homogeneity of the suburb, for loving their cars, and for wanting to segregate themselves. We consider how, although many of the factors that drive gentrification are diametrically opposed to these “problems,” gentrification too has been problematized with equal fervour. The incomplete solutions to the original problems are treated as more important subjects of critique than the systemic problems themselves. We ask, then, where do we go from here? What is the way forward for cities experiencing residential flux? We outline where we believe that path must start.

Gentrification, we believe, is driven by more than the shallow, base tastes of some consumerist “other” and the city leaders that pull their strings (with lofts, bike lanes, cafés, and wine bars) to make them dance – although, to be sure, there are politicians and investors trying to pull our strings. We hope that this volume will help to bridge the distance between rhetoric and reality, between scholarship and city life. We wholeheartedly agree with Peter Marcuse that the urban marks “the point at which the rubber of the personal hits the ground of the societal, the intersection of everyday life with the socially created systemic world about us.”¹²³ We will work to remain at such an intersection for the entire book.