In Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 1998, John rented a $500/month room in a subdivided brownstone of single rooms with kitchenettes where residents on each floor shared a bathroom. He had moved to New York for graduate school in the late 1990s and initially lived at Long Island University in downtown Brooklyn because a staff person in his graduate school suggested that it was the most inexpensive housing arrangement available. After one year, John’s friend Kevin – a Black Brooklyn native who sang with John in a predominantly Black church choir and was also on the fringes of hip-hop’s Wu-Tang Clan – suggested that John live in this Fort Greene “rooming house” not far from where filmmaker Spike Lee lived.
The brownstone that housed John’s apartment was owned by a West Indian family who lived on the first floor. The landlord was a wonderful public character – the family patriarch – who owned buildings all over the neighbourhood. John was the first white resident in this house, which included one room – what had been a closet – that rented for under $200. John and Kevin were jealous of the resident of the closet and regularly vied to rent the unit when she talked of leaving, which she never actually did. To John and Kevin the idea of having an extra $300 of spending money each month was intoxicating.
In Fort Greene John was completely oblivious to being a gentrifier. We could use the term “unwitting gentrifier” to express the fact that he chose to live in the neighbourhood for monetary and practical reasons alone, two considerations that play into every voluntary re-location choice made by any consumer. While John eventually would develop more pulls to the neighbourhood once he knew the lay of the land, he moved there solely because he trusted Kevin that it was a good opportunity. John recalls this time with great nostalgia and a sense of heritage: he was walking the same streets his parents had walked, living not too far from his father’s high school. He really had no sense of what “gentrification” was. In fact, not until after a conversation with Jason the next year did he first try to conceptualize the term.
Throughout this chapter we reflect together on how our personal lives have engaged the gentrifier’s dilemma in relation to the seven facets of the multi-tool discussed in chapter 1. We think through moments of our lives as gentrifiers, showing parallels, overlaps, and differences based on the city and, interestingly, the life stages in which we find ourselves. We discuss our trajectories in terms of the typical typology of different kinds of gentrifiers. We are amazed that, as we take stock to do so, our three biographies and those of our households run the gamut of these different types of gentrifiers. This exercise reinforces for us that typologies of gentrifiers are not just about people’s personalities but very much about the “social location” of the residential actor at a particular moment.
As we proceed, we should – having mentioned him three times thus far – note that filmmaker Spike Lee, a Black, Fort Greene native, will be a recurring character in our stories of gentrification.1 We did not set out to make this the case, but it gradually became so. We will revisit what was characterized as Lee’s “rant” at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which actually occurred during a question and answer session that followed an event marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of his landmark film, Do the Right Thing. Lee’s remarks were in response to a question by Brooklyn native D.K. Smith, who was in the audience.
Spike Lee’s thoughts are relevant to us here for multiple reasons. First, and most foundationally, they constitute a brilliant overview of the themes within scholarly research on gentrification. Second, they embody the contradictions within gentrification and anti-gentrification sentiments. Namely, Spike Lee is a “native” who – like many residents – is encouraging the gentrification that he dislikes. Furthermore, he is a person of great wealth whose residential decisions serve to displace people – just as the residential decisions of gentrifiers with much less income than Lee also serve to displace people. Our purpose here is not to call out insincerity. Lee’s contradictions are not the result of a personal hypocrisy – and if they are, they are no worse than our own. We highlight such fragile contradictions to question our current understanding. To reference Pogo, we have met the enemy and he is us.
“Early gentrifiers”: the common understanding is that they are artists and students, hippies and hipsters, bohemians and cosmopolites. The urban dream for many is a desire for greater stimuli, for people, noise, stores, and unexpected encounters. It is a desire to be in the midst and in the mix. The urban dream has always been filled with contradictions: wealth and poverty, old and new.
What we usually conceptualize as “early gentrifiers” is actually a type that lies at a particular intersection of two factors: their own financial resources (i.e., early in their work life) and the intensity of reinvestment (i.e., early in the process) that they enter. Gentrifiers with relatively fewer resources tend to enter a context of low-intensity gentrification. Nevertheless, it is important to point out the “relatively” here as Marc (a new professor) would enter his low-intensity context with more resources than Jason (still a graduate student) did in his.
In terms of our seven facets of gentrification introduced in chapter 1, the early gentrifier is generally most interested in the monetary facet: affordability of housing in the form of cheap rents. In some cases early gentrifiers are interested in housing as an asset, such as the publicized cases of millennials purchasing homes in Detroit for the price of a used car or, as we will see, Marc’s purchase of his Philadelphia house. But in such cases, the asset facet of their purchase is hardly guaranteed; the monetary motivations of the early gentrifier usually have much more to do with affordability. Certainly, some of what are interpreted as shallow “attractions” and “lifestyle” decisions made within a context of whimsical, “unbridled choice, influenced only by fashion,” can indeed, as Rose argued, “relate to the presence of considerable need.”2 At other times the need is more manufactured, related to the “genteel poverty” that accompanies the ramifications of choosing to be an artist, a non-profit professional, or an academic. In the moment, however, this brand of limited means – absent networks of wealth to fill in the gap – still creates pressures on the wallet.
There is also a practicality facet. Early gentrifiers typically want to be in the centre of things. They want work, school, and other geographies of their life to be accessible – perhaps in the name of saving money or being environmentally conscious – so they look for a neighbourhood that is central. Of course, many early gentrifiers are also pulled by the offering of extra space for their rental dollars.
Many early gentrifiers are attracted to the aesthetic of an entire street or neighbourhood, a building’s exterior, or a building’s interior. Sometimes it is an aesthetic of industrial grit, in which buildings are little more than huge warehouses with interiors of blank, dingy open spaces. At other times it is an aesthetic of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century homes, homes that are affordable to the early gentrifier either as whole units or because they have been subdivided. Early gentrifiers are amazed that they could rent a unit that was constructed for an elite household – with touches such as a marble fireplace, oak floors, copper door handles, and crown moulding – for hundreds of dollars. They are happy to put “sweat equity” into restoring these hidden gems, perhaps for their own enjoyment and at their own cost or for reduced rent.
One amenity that the early gentrifier is most likely attracted to is the thirdplace. The thirdplace provides the sense of community and the actual physical interactions that many gentrifiers desire. But they can also be very invested in the idea of using the neighbourhood’s public distributive amenities, such as parks and trails. The early gentrifier often wants to “do” community, and thirdplaces and public distributive places are where they can envision doing it.
The community facet is a draw for many early gentrifiers. In the middle and late parts of the twentieth century in the United States, white flight and a later, more general, middle-class departure from cities left many neighbourhoods especially poor and isolated.3 One type of early gentrifier might want to be a part of the diversity of a neighbourhood’s remaining Latino, Eastern European, Caribbean, South Asian, African-American, or other long-standing identity or identities. Another type of early gentrifier is looking to move among other newcomers like him: college students, gay men, hipsters, artists, and so on are moving to the area, and there is a sense that an “emerging” community is developing within – or on top of – the existing community. This community/newcomer gentrifier may ignore the old community, wish it away and take implicit or explicit action to diminish it, or perhaps – as a function of the next facet below – want the old community to remain merely to bolster the gentrifier’s identity as edgy, tolerant, cosmopolitan, and/or bohemian.
Early gentrifiers are perhaps most apt to be drawn to an idea of cultural authenticity. They may be attracted to a place with deep-seated meaning and interpret the area’s past with great symbolic weight. Some interpret long-time residents as possessing an authenticity they lack, although they are not necessarily consciously working to develop meaningful relationships with them. While they might not express it explicitly, for them, proximity is enough. They feel that they have “found” something unique and different (see chapter 4) and want to protect it.
Alternatively, early gentrifiers may want to be entrenched in the heritage of the place, a heritage that (even if not their own) they connect to in some meaningful way. To some degree, this entrenched gentrifier respects the neighbourhood’s institutions (e.g., churches, political organizations) and aspires to get politically, economically, and socially involved in them. Whether a symbolic or an entrenched gentrifier, the authenticity wars are most apparent among these early newcomers: they may side with long-time lower-class residents and be vitriolic towards gentrifiers who come later. Some suggest that it is early gentrifiers who deface businesses and other places that are seen as the fronts of the later gentrification wars. One characteristic example in Chicago’s Pilsen neighbourhood included plastering a new coffee shop with posters saying, “This is what Gentrification looks like” and “Wake Up & SMELLLLLL the Gentrification.”
The early gentrifiers may also express, in various ways, their extreme flexibility for inconvenience. They are flexible enough to live with (depending on the context) huge rats, less frequent trash pickup, streets with unmaintained streetlights, cab drivers who will not take them home, lack of a grocery store nearby – all related to living in a place with less infrastructure. Early gentrifiers can feel that they are culturally flexible, willing to live in a place that feels “foreign” to them. And of all types, the early gentrifier is most likely to express flexibility for danger, possibly because he does not have either dependants or significant possessions. In other cases gentrifiers are keenly aware that the bulk of the danger in the neighbourhood – perhaps gang and/or drug related – will not affect them. This is more likely to be the case, of course, if they are clearly of a different race or ethnicity than most residents. Some white early gentrifiers can feel exempt from the violence when they come to realize that they are often counted among the police, social workers, or teachers. Still, early gentrifiers such as “young white students,” stated Elijah Anderson, “live in areas that yuppies would never consider” and “their numbers help claim the streets for whites.”4 We might add that in the current context these “young white student” outsiders might become conscious of the area through observing young, non-white student outsiders (whose gentrification is less visible and may be less impactful) who are living in the area.
While one might conceive of a neighbourhood as a viable place to live based on family memories or comments from friends, the actual apartments we and some of our friends lived in provided a more concrete sense of what was possible. To Jason, in retrospect, much of this housing seems romantic, peculiar, unconventional, or horrifying. As Friedrich Engels pointed out long ago about capitalist landlords and their tenants, “no hole is so bad but that some poor creature must take it who can pay for nothing better.”5
Jason spent a series of years in New York City both while doing graduate work and when holding a visiting teaching position. His early gentrification experiences – like John’s – not only provide examples of the housing conditions that may be encountered, but also can indicate the quality of housing for many long-time residents. The “railroad” apartments with bathrooms accessible only through a bedroom, the bathtub in the kitchen, the dorm rooms for rent, the apartment built in an old auto repair garage, the paint- and chemical-encrusted factories, the rented rooms in cavernous brownstones, the abandoned nightclub: as many of Jason’s friends lived in such dwellings as lived in more traditional apartments.
Jason arrived in New York in the mid-1990s with a pre-existing social network of great-aunts and college friends. He can remember drinking coffee with his aunts and explaining to them that he was going to live in either Park Slope or Williamsburg. Each place had a density of his friends already living there and recommending he move in. Friends served as an indicator that the area was safe and livable. (In fact, it seemed as if graduate school consisted of the annual “paying friends with pizza and soda” to help move.) Jason’s trajectory appeared to follow Herbert Gans’s demographic typology of inner-city residents: the cosmopolites and the unmarried and childless were “detached from the neighborhood because of their life-cycle stage, which frees them from the routine family responsibilities that entail some relationship to the local area.”6
For a newcomer, both Park Slope and Williamsburg (indeed, all of Brooklyn) were “abstractions” in the sense that anyone new to the city knew only the smallest slice of the available places to live and work. Such a viewpoint creates a disconnected view of housing options. In fact, the myths we tell ourselves about places are a key part of understanding the mechanics of gentrification. If, by the 1990s, the places where a newcomer imagined living were no longer in Manhattan, that in itself was indicative that the city was changing.
Jason’s first, and unsuccessful, living arrangement was in Williamsburg. While he had friends in the neighbourhood, no one needed a roommate at the time. So he rented a room in a shared, partially converted factory floor that had been finagled into an apartment. Upon arriving with the moving van, Jason discovered that the couple he was renting from were not home, had locked themselves out when they left for the weekend, and therefore had not cleared his room of the years of art supplies (e.g., cans upon cans of paint, canvases, etc.) they had stored there. Working with a friend, he relocated the roomful of paint buckets, old mattresses, and other leftover detritus to a storage closet. Once the room was cleaned out, he painted the walls white to cover up years of stains and graffiti and painted a new coating on the floor. (During Jason’s first couple of years in New York he moved three times and each one entailed redoing floors.) Eventually, though, he would move in with two college friends looking to share a place in Fort Greene.
Instead of a factory with an indeterminate status, Jason’s Fort Greene residence consisted of a floor in a large brownstone. There was a diverse ethnic mix moving into Fort Greene at the time, but the neighbourhood had a reputation as the site for a “new Black Renaissance.” Rebecca Walker, daughter of the author Alice Walker, opened the Kokobar café. There were new boutiques and restaurants owned by hip, young, Black residents. The pizza parlour from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing was down the block. His landlords lived on the property: the retired, older father on the garden level and the daughter on the second floor. A church across the street played raucous gospel music during Sunday services as an electric guitar and drums echoed throughout the block. After months of negotiating, the landlords agreed to replace soiled carpet with redone wood floors. They paid for a crew to come in, remove the carpet, and then sand and polish the floors. With the floor to ceiling windows and renewed floor, the living room was, to Jason, a lovely space.
At the end of the year, Jason moved in with yet another college friend looking for a roommate. In this case the apartment was over a cramped clothing store on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, which today stands down the street from Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. The building was in decline, so this move marked another time when Jason invested sweat equity into a rental apartment. The roommates painted the walls, coated a brick wall, and then ripped up all the carpet and sanded the floors by themselves. The landlord spent his days sitting in his ground floor store. He reminisced about installing a rolling storefront security gate in the 1970s and laughed as he recalled closing up the gate at night only to sit in front of it with a gun.
Jason’s next move, coming full circle, involved living by himself in Williamsburg, this time in a converted basement. Periodically, the fire department would need to examine the boiler room of the building to make sure it was up to code. There was a small room within Jason’s apartment housing the boiler for the entire building. The firefighters were bemused by his space. The apartment had narrow, steep stairs that led to the door. The only window was a small foot-high pane in the back door. The kitchen consisted of a sink and a hotplate; a small bathroom had been installed in the space. Jason could easily reach the seven-foot-high ceiling by stretching out his hand and standing on his toes. Tall friends had to bend down in the space. Essentially, this was a white, underground cube. It was affordable for one person, centrally located in Williamsburg, and available.
Jason’s goal, simply stated, was to “dwell among friends.”7 Three of his four moves entailed sharing an apartment or a building address with friends. He wanted to find a place to live that allowed him to continue his pre-existing social life and to expand from there. Friends were concrete elements of a neighbourhood. They are the variable that does not appear in a rental classified advertisement or real estate broker’s listing. Too often we ask who the first is to arrive in a location. Instead, perhaps, we should ask: who follows?
Understanding Jason’s actions requires thinking not only about social class, but also about life stage. Cultural affinities for types of music, clothing, entertainment, and food inform the types of neighbourhoods one would want to live in, but those same affinities feed back into constituting that neighbourhood. Separately, a young, single male has a degree of flexibility in the types of city housing to rent: dorm, boarding house, room in a shared apartment, studio, or one-bedroom apartment. He is less likely to live in a single-family house or to buy property. Yet this is what Marc did.
Marc’s early gentrification experiences began in 2005. After completing graduate school, Marc accepted a faculty job in Philadelphia. Because of the job and his one-year-old daughter, who lived in Philadelphia with her mother, Marc decided to further establish roots in his native city. While multiple facets shaped Marc’s decision making, the most influential were practical and monetary.
After a few months of searching, Marc decided to move to Germantown, a large neighbourhood in the northwestern part of Philadelphia. As Elijah Anderson vividly details, the racial and economic make-up of Germantown shifted dramatically as one moved down Germantown Avenue, the main road and a dividing line between the east and west parts of the community.8 While northern parts of Germantown (and neighbouring Mount Airy) were racially diverse and filled primarily with middle-class restaurants, bookstores, and entertainment, the southern parts were a mixed bag.
On some blocks, abandoned homes, open-air drug markets, and “Home for Rent” signs served as informal borders between the northern and southern sections of Germantown. In other parts, the impact of early gentrification was evidenced by the fitness centres, restaurants, community gardens and other markers of middle-class residency that were recently built in the neighbourhood. Although he felt culturally and socially connected to the northern part of Germantown, prices and property taxes prompted him to choose a house in the southern part. The housing boom inflated prices to more than twice the amount paid by buyers five years earlier, but they were still manageable, due to disinvestment in the neighbourhood over the previous few decades.
This pricing context, combined with a sub-prime loan encouraged by his mortgage broker and real estate agent, allowed Marc to mortgage a newly renovated, pre-war, three-storey, five-bedroom house with a garage, off-street parking, and a backyard for a monthly mortgage payment he could afford. As his real estate agent told him, he was “getting a West Germantown house for an East Germantown price.” Within ten years, the agent promised, the neighbourhood would be “filled with people just like you,” a phrase the agent also used in referencing or introducing Marc to other potential homebuyers on the block – in each case white, middle-class professionals. The agent was speaking to Marc’s professional and presumed class, rather than racial, status.
In many ways, Marc was not a traditional early gentrifier as commonly understood. As a junior professor, Marc would be considered a young urban professional, part of the creative class that is typically assumed to have sufficient economic and social resources to live in more affluent or developed neighbourhoods. Unlike the young upstart who feels compelled to sand his own floors or paint her own walls as a short-term sacrifice, Marc made a choice to invest in this neighbourhood despite having more varied options.
Still, the costs of childcare, student loans, and other debt made his disposable income lower and other options less viable. In fact, it was only by obtaining a “no document” sub-prime mortgage – readily available during this era that precipitated the housing market crash – that Marc was able to afford the house. During this time, high-cost predatory lenders and banks offering prime mortgages to wealthy households were targeting the same neighbourhoods.9
While Marc’s overall socio-economic status, higher than many of his lower-income neighbours, his income and wealth levels were much closer to theirs – exacerbated by his lack of job history and low credit score. For Marc, psychological and cultural connections to the community, his proximity to Black institutions, and his monetary limitations – having less wealth than many of his white counterparts of equal professional and income status, made his choice feel both reasonable and intuitive. Such a dynamic is not uncommon within neighbourhoods gentrified by African Americans, which can create a distinct type of gentrified community life.
One reason Marc made this residential choice was the long-term benefit of “getting in early” – he had goals for creating household wealth by investing in this asset. While Marc valued economic stability for himself, he did not see that his goal was at odds with his political world view. To the contrary, he envisioned an influx of young, economically stable, and politically progressive Black residents as a preferable alternative to the gentrification patterns he had witnessed as a child growing up in Philadelphia. As opposed to University City and Northern Liberties, neighbourhoods in West and North Philadelphia whose racial composition had changed drastically due to university-aided gentrification, he saw Germantown as a site of possibility for a different type of housing arrangement. For Marc, this was an opportunity to simultaneously stabilize his finances and help build a community that would be more racially diverse, culturally rich, and supportive of long-time residents.
The short-term sacrifice of this deal was the convenience of comfort and safety. Marc’s block was populated by a mix of retirees, low-income subsidized-voucher renters, and gentrifiers, along with abandoned homes. There was not an active watch program or a demand for consistent police patrolling. While there was a community garden within two blocks of his house, there was also an active heroin and crack market on the adjacent block. Within a week of moving in, Marc’s car window was smashed and his stereo, compact discs, and a small amount of cash were taken.
Was Marc a gentrifier? As a native Philadelphian, he spent the first half of his childhood in Hunting Park, one of the most economically and socially vulnerable neighbourhoods located in North Philadelphia. As Marc’s family moved from working poor to solidly middle class, they moved to Wynnefield, an economically diverse Black neighbourhood in West Philadelphia. Because of these experiences Marc saw himself as authentically connected to Germantown. Also, because he grew up in neighbourhoods that would be considered worse than Germantown – in terms of both real and perceived levels of neighbourhood crime, violence, and poverty – he saw his entry into the neighbourhood as an example of “insider” social mobility rather than the “outsider” colonization that he imagined when he thought about early gentrification.
Less than a year after he moved in, radically shifting market forces sparked yet another change in the neighbourhood. After peaking in early 2006, United States housing prices began to decline, accompanied by a record number of mortgage foreclosures around the nation. The bubble was bursting, and a full-fledged housing crisis directly undermined the development of the neighbourhood. By 2010 several mortgages on his block were foreclosed and the houses had yet to be purchased or occupied by new residents. The macro-level sub-prime lending crisis had hit the micro- level of Marc’s block.
By 2014 all of the young professionals who had moved onto the block at the same time as Marc had left for the suburbs or downtown, where the city government was incentivizing residents through tax breaks and preferred access to high-quality public schools. As a result, Marc felt like a “sole survivor,” left in a section of Germantown not much different than it was before gentrification began. Was it a victory that Marc’s neighbourhood thwarted gentrification? Or was it a loss that its reinvestment and potential wealth creation for homeowners was stunted?
They are called “yuppies” or “young urban professionals,” “DINKs” or
“dual-income no kids,” and myriad other names. They are perceived as bland and indistinguishable or, as a homeless errand runner on New York’s Bowery quipped, “yuppies ain’t been through s**t in life.”10
As we noted above when discussing “early gentrifiers,” what we conceptualize here as “late gentrifiers” are actually a type that imagines a particular intersection of two factors: residents’ own financial resources and the intensity of the process of reinvestment that they enter. Gentrifiers with relatively greater resources tend to enter a context of higher-intensity gentrification. However, the idea of “late” may not always seem appropriate in the contemporary context, when it is possible for huge inflows of capital to intensify the gentrification process so quickly that it seems an “early” phase has been skipped entirely.
Late gentrifiers, as is the case in our accounts here, can be the same people as early gentrifiers but at different life stages. Late gentrifiers likely have more buying power to get what they desire, often more social capital or connections to see the process through, and – because they are often older – more specific tastes for their increased buying power to enable. To at least some degree, these are transformations that can occur within any household of one or two wage earners that has secured a solidly middle-class or upper-middle-class status – whether their households of origin were upper-, middle-, or lower-class.
In terms of the seven facets of gentrification, late gentrifiers have a different relationship to the monetary facet. The affordability of housing in the form of cheap rents is no longer driving their housing decision, as the neighbourhood has reached a price level that makes it on par with other options. Whereas early gentrifiers are more likely to be limited to a specific budget, the late gentrifier is often looking for housing that is relatively inexpensive compared with other options. If purchasing, the later gentrifier is much more likely to look at housing as an asset, as a key component of household wealth. The early stages of gentrification have removed much of the investment risk of the neighbourhood, and the late gentrifier has reason to believe that the neighbourhood will appreciate in value.
As is true of most gentrifiers, there is a practicality facet to the late gentrifier’s locational decision. They want to be in the centre of things: centrality is important to them or they likely would not be in a gentrifying neighbourhood. They are quite often pulled as well by the offering of extra space for the price point: there is room for offspring, for family to stay over, for a home office.
A later gentrifier has more resources with which to privilege the aesthetic of a neighbourhood, a building exterior, or a building interior. In fact, the later gentrifier might be shopping with a priority on such criteria. Because the neighbourhood is advanced in the gentrification process in terms of time and intensity or both – it must be so, by definition, if there are late gentrifiers – someone has likely already uncovered some of the architectural details of the buildings, and the city has invested a bit in the neighbourhood, perhaps with new period-appropriate streetlights or thoughtfully paved sidewalks. Its aesthetic allure has been clearly defined and accentuated.
The amenities of the gentrified neighbourhood have likely entered into the canon of local lifestyle magazines, the leisure section of newspapers, and favoured status on consumer websites such as Yelp. Its thirdplaces are abuzz with outsiders, as are the neighbourhood’s public distributive amenities such as parks. The in-between places – the “places that have no attractions to public use in themselves but which now become travelled and peopled,” as Jane Jacobs stated – are active, with “eyes on the street” bringing life to almost every area of the neighbourhood.11 These eyes on the street provide a diverse set of informal and formal guardians of public space who are aware of local goings-on.
The prospective late gentrifier has shown a desire – or at least a willingness – to be in a community with a large number of other gentrifiers. This could be because the late gentrifier is actually happy that the neighbourhood has finally changed, or it may be that the late gentrifier laments the loss of its previous diversity but chooses it anyway for its other characteristics – characteristics that are perceived to be available only in a neighbourhood that has been (slipping into critical terminology here) “settled” and “sanitized” by some other actors, likely newcomers.
By the time the late gentrifier arrives, the cultural authenticity of the neighbourhood has probably been promoted by skilled marketing firms. At this point the symbolic value (authenticity without relationship) of the place could be maintained through plaques and building names more than through actual people. Absent public housing and planning for affordable housing, the cultural heritage (authenticity with relationship) in which some early gentrifiers may have hoped to be entrenched may be less evident (especially if it was tied to lower-income residents), reduced to the aforementioned symbolic artefacts of nostalgia. Certain long-time residents, visible by race, ethnicity, or other cues – perhaps the owner of an ethnic-based restaurant or a homeowner-turned-landlord – can act as important carriers of this authenticity (i.e., they are the “bodies” that represent it) for the late gentrifier. Late gentrifiers may realize that, given their other priorities, their desire for cultural authenticity – for instance, living in a “real” Puerto Rican neighbourhood – may not be satiated through their residential choice. As Richard Ocejo points out, authenticity and the sense of ownership of community is related to the point at which a resident entered the neighbourhood, a dynamic that creates competing nostalgia narratives.12 We further discuss such ideas in chapter 4.
Late gentrifiers often do not have the flexibility for inconvenience of early gentrifiers. They may enjoy having the infrastructure of a long-gentrified neighbourhood or desire to live in a place that feels culturally familiar to them. They also may want to use their extra buying power to distance themselves from the threat of violent crime, property attacks, and other danger. “To be sure,” said Jacobs, “there are people with hobgoblins in their head, and such people will never feel safe no matter what the objective circumstances are.” But there is also the “common sense” fear “that besets normally prudent, tolerant, and cheerful people” and the late gentrifier has more capital to avoid the contexts that prompt it for him.13
“If university-controlled space ... is available” to a faculty member and it is “reasonably equivalent to gentrifying space,” rationalized Peter Marcuse in thinking about the ethics of gentrification, then “they should take the university unit.”14 From 2007 through 2009, after a job-based move to San Diego, John and his wife Monique lived on his institution’s campus at no cost. Ironically, now that he had significant buying power, John also had the ability to live outside the housing market.
When it came time to move, though, he had an extremely difficult time finding a neighbourhood in San Diego where he felt comfortable.15 It was important to John and his wife to have a place that they could afford. That said, with two incomes and two years’ worth of savings, they enjoyed more options than they had ever had. John wanted to use this financial power and flexibility to impact both his family and the social fabric for the better. But what did that mean? What was an ethical housing choice?
For the first time in both Monique’s and John’s individual adult lives, there was much more to a neighbourhood than its economic pull and its practical pull. They had the financial flexibility and buying power to be conscious of other pulls. The look of the housing unit mattered more than in the past: this was a place that they would be calling home as a household. It was where they hoped, in the near future, to raise children (and where they – thankfully – would.)
The facet of a diverse community was important. John had long felt it would be most healthy for his children to understand their multiracial heritage in the context of a multiracial (including Black) neighbourhood or a predominantly Black neighbourhood. These were contexts in which both Monique and John were comfortable. This is the state of the DINK: perhaps thinking abstractly about the idea of family but not having to put their residential philosophies to the test as they might with actual flesh and blood under their charge. The realities of this fact would unfold later in their life together.
The amenities did matter to John and his wife. They wanted to be able to take walks, perhaps in a park, on a trail, or near a waterfront. As a professor, John valued nearby thirdplaces, especially a coffee shop or a library, where for free or a few dollars he would be able to put in an eight- or ten-hour day of writing or grading, “hiding” away from his students and beyond his small office.
The aesthetic of the unit and of the neighbourhood mattered: John wanted his home to be an extension of and a contribution to who his family is. He imagined it as a place where his (unborn) kids would grow up and come back to visit. Front steps that encouraged loitering, a curb appeal that spoke of “home” to Monique and John, a neighbourhood that looked inviting and warm, and an interior that was also cozy, with wood floors and high ceilings: these things were important to them. And, given their savings, they could now afford to pay for these things.
John and Monique also felt a new practical pull that John (at least) had not perceived in the past: space. As San Diego was not feeling like home to them after two years, it sweetened the deal if they could have space to put up friends and family from back East. After living in rather cramped university housing, Monique talked of wanting to be a “grownup”: to have family to stay comfortably, to accommodate people in a bind, and to entertain friends from work.
Downtown San Diego had the practical advantage of centrality, but little else. In monetary terms, it was not affordable and the community was one that was almost completely composed of newcomers. When exploring the large-scale gentrified downtown, John and his wife, in the words of urban planning scholar Kevin Lynch’s Los Angeles respondent, “discovered there was nothing there, after all.”16 In terms of the aesthetic of the neighbourhood, it was a bright, shiny, architectural hodge-podge that felt like it had no past and, to them, offered very little substance in the present.
So they visited small apartments in San Diego’s higher-end neighbourhoods, homes in the mostly Black neighbourhoods, and residences in the mostly Asian- and Mexican-American neighbourhood that housed his university. They considered subdivided homes in gentrifying neighbourhoods adjacent to the city’s Little Italy that they might be able to keep subdivided and rent to affordable housing voucher holders.17 But that was within a context – a Little Italy with a theme-park feel – within which they were not fully comfortable. They looked at other subdivided homes in poorer neighbourhoods, stepping over the twin-size beds of the six people they would be displacing as the real estate agent asked them to envision the shell of a home that existed beyond the slipshod plywood walls of a rooming house conversion from an earlier era (more on deconversion in chapter 3). To John, that suggestion was completely out of the question. Somebody would likely buy that house and directly displace those residents, but not him.
Then one day, they arrived in Golden Hill after looking at an overpriced home in a clearly gentrified part of the neighbourhood adjacent to downtown. They interpreted it as “gentrified” and “bohemian,” due to the presence of a women’s museum, tattoo parlour, coffee shop, and media arts non-profit within two blocks of each other in an area of homes that predated World War II. John remarked to Monique at the time that it seemed a good neighbourhood for Jason. The further they walked down Broadway away from the downtown, the more they found what seemed to be a more durable diversity of race, class, and tenure that they had not seen before in San Diego.
They were energized, and as they looked at the faces of pedestrians, motorists, and cyclists, they were stunned. They had found an ethnic and racial mix of people that they had never seen in San Diego – a New York-looking bodega on the corner almost seemed like a sign. John learned that, while the neighbourhood had changed over the previous twenty years, the gentrification here certainly wasn’t rapid and all-enveloping.
Nevertheless, after John and his wife moved in, it became clear that any urbanist would label their neighbourhood “gentrifying.” There was a rise in certain types of middle-class amenities: cafés, restaurants, and other businesses, such as a wine bar, that some business owners seemed to view as a flag marking this “frontier” as gentrified territory. John overheard residents discussing the wine bar, echoing Butler’s respondent (also discussing a wine bar) who breathed “a sigh of relief that ‘my god, you didn’t put all of your money onto a dud and something is happening[,] is changing.’”18 “Good for property values,” a resident said to John as he was walking the neighbourhood one morning.
But Golden Hill was different from other gentrifying contexts. John was conscious of the distinct sense of community, of the comfort level he had in bringing home his university colleagues for large department events. This comfort came from the fact that colleagues of various ethnic backgrounds (and similar current class standing) did not feel out of place in the neighbourhood. Nor did John’s neighbours feel that the colleagues were out of place. Racially diverse colleagues were coming to a racially diverse household in a stable, racially diverse neighbourhood. A thirty-year resident next door – from a Mexican-American household of four generations – dropped by for a “plate.” Having a mix of old and new residents felt like healthy community life. It was a special place. And John and Monique recall this as a special time.
Urban scholar Mike Davis, as John would learn, had chosen Golden Hill in a similar fashion. He grew up in San Diego and had always loved the Golden Hill area. In fact, in 1968, while he worked as a meat cutter in Spring Valley, Mike, who is white, lived on the same block as John would more than four decades later. In 2001, when Mike and his wife decided to move from Long Island back to San Diego, his wife went ahead while he tied up loose ends in Long Island. Mike asked his wife, who is Mexican-American, to look for housing in Sherman Heights or Golden Hill, where they would be near Mexican stores and churches, partly for the sake of his wife’s aunt, who lives with them and does not speak English. “She immediately found our present house – which we have weirdly altered,” Mike explained. The price in 2001 was $270,000, which was “more affordable than we had expected.” Mike and his wife sent their kids to a “wonderful school,” which was only half a block away. And with just about “90% Spanish-surname enrolment,” he continued, “we don’t have to worry about retention of Spanish or other cultural issues.”
Mike values the diversity of the community. “Our neighbors are a mix of machinists, school teachers, landscape workers, a construction contractor, a retired border patrolman, and a young Coast Guard family,” he said, doing calculations familiar to John, Jason, and Marc. “Counting ourselves,” he continued, “there are four professional or yuppie households out of sixteen homes.” While Mike notes that some “regard our neighborhood and school as possibly dangerous,” really “nothing could be further from the truth – great school, quiet streets, and friendly older neighbors.” While some, like him, valued the diversity, other “yuppie type” newcomers – seemingly of the community/newcomer variety – valued the presence of others like themselves and were “generally curt,” sending their kids to other schools.
Mirroring John’s experience, marriage altered Jason’s connection to gentrification in concrete ways. Mariani moved from living with a series of roommates in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to living with Jason in Harlem. The monetary and practical needs of two graduate students were different from those of a single, twenty-something student. Small quantitative and life-stage changes in relationships make for significant qualitative changes.
For three years, beginning in 2001, Jason lived in Hamilton Heights or West Harlem. Jason’s building had been renovated a few years previously. Some units in the building were now owner-occupied, but most were still rented. When we think of “pulls” to a place, we need to be conscious that options depend largely on social connections. The apartment Jason moved into was being vacated by a fellow graduate student who was moving into a larger apartment in the same building, but now with his new wife. In addition, in the building there were two other students – originally from France and Israel – from Jason’s graduate program. None of them was Black or Latino.
Jason’s neighbours consisted of a single, Black, gay neighbour; a white, lesbian postal worker; a Latino family (the father was the superintendant for the building); and another single, white man. Aside from the Latino building superintendant, all commuted downtown to work. On his block Jason could observe “boundary work” occurring across multiple intersections: Black, Latino, white, tourist, gay, and so on. Individuals within these different social categories often created and inhabited socially distinct, but physically overlapping, communities. The housing was the same, but places of work, study, consumption, and socializing were distinct.
Jason lived in the neighbourhood during the attacks of 11 September 2001. While he wishes he could share a tale of neighbourly bonding, as others do, Jason found that – like many social problems – acute trauma highlights long-standing social ills. The police set up roadblocks at the ends of the street for the better part of a month. Jason needed to show identification to enter the street and to access his apartment. Police militarization of urban space during the Giuliani administration allowed police stations throughout New York City, no matter how far from Ground Zero, to close off public space in a way that was mostly ignored.
The west end of the street intersected with a large boulevard of Latino restaurants, bodegas, and grocery stores. On the east end was St Nicholas Place and the local Black nightclub, St Nick’s Jazz Pub. St Nick’s was a jazz club that featured a bar, tables for dinner, and a small stage. It was on the map for various tour groups. Large tour buses would park in front, flooding the club with visitors.
When Jason’s wife moved in with him after their marriage, gender dynamics were rendered more visible.19 The unwanted catcalls on the way to the subway directed at his wife became increasingly uncomfortable. By himself, Jason walked to and from his apartment without ever being accosted, verbally or physically, by anyone. But Mariani’s days always ended with a quick walk past the “guys on the street.” For Jason, it was impossible to think that the key difference between a college-educated white man’s experience and college-educated white woman’s experience on the sidewalk was not gender related. It was through Mariani’s daily experiences that Jason began to actively listen and look for the whistles, “hey babys,” and grunts directed towards women in the neighbourhood.
Jason and Mariani needed more female eyes on the street. As urban ethnographer Mitch Duneier pointed out, thoughtfully critiquing Jane Jacobs’s idea that multiple people keep watch on public space, women need a set of protective eyes different from the male gaze.20 In addition, the constant moving, small spaces, and rotating roommates that had defined his housing demanded a flexibility around inconvenience. But inconveniences that are acceptable to one person do not make sense for a couple.
So, after a year Jason and his wife returned to Brooklyn, where most of their friends were living. They moved into a garden-level apartment in Sunset Park, which was euphemistically labelled by real estate agents and gentrifiers as the “South Slope” because of its proximity to the amenities of the symbolically charged and long-gentrified Park Slope.21 Sunset Park was (and is) a largely Latino neighbourhood with remnants of Polish immigrants and spillover gentrification from Park Slope. The rent was comparable to rents in Harlem, but more properties were owner-occupied instead of run by distant property companies. Jason was finishing his dissertation and working as a graduate teaching assistant, while Mariani taught full time in a non-tenure-track position at a local community college.
In Sunset Park it did not seem that there was anything overly distinct about paying rent, socializing, and working in regard to gentrification. Perhaps the food, the friends, the movies, and the shopping were different from those of the Polish immigrants, Puerto Rican neighbours, and Mexican restaurant workers on his block, but during the time Jason and Mariani lived there as a couple it seemed that all these different parts and persons could inhabit the same neighbourhood.
Jason and Mariani were two people living together and pooling their resources. They were new professionals at the start of careers. For over half a century the most likely outcome for a new couple would be to relocate to the outer parts of the city or the suburbs. But Jason and his wife stayed in the city, where there were employment, friendship, good food, and bookstores.
There was a precarious side to this approach. Together as a couple, Jason and Mariani were more stable in their housing and everyday needs. As a couple they made collective decisions – not necessarily better decisions, but different ones. Yet they were unable to find higher-paying, permanent work. Housing prices across the city and the country were increasing rapidly. The mismatch between the limited income associated with finishing graduate school and the increase in housing prices everywhere meant facing a reality of being permanent renters – of having a small apartment in a big city.
After a decade in New York City Jason and his wife felt socialized, both as individuals and as a couple, to living in a city. The use of subways and buses, the space constraints, the close proximity to strangers, the sounds, and the visual density all felt normal and comfortable to them. They felt a kind of belonging within the type of diverse, mixed-class, mixed-use, mixed-ethnic urban neighbourhood that Jane Jacobs called attention to. Yet this also meant a neighbourhood where men and women inhabited public space in equal numbers, where women ran their own businesses, and where women could expect not to be harassed. They envisioned a neighbourhood in which they were not isolated but enveloped by the friendly, quasi-primary relationships that Gans describes.22 Often their preferences pointed to a gentrified neighbourhood, not just a single, mixed building on the boundary between racially segregated blocks, as was the case in Harlem.
However, the academic job market would take Jason and Mariani away from New York to the state of Rhode Island. This move created a wide-open opportunity to reconsider where exactly they would live: city, suburbs, or small town. Moving to Rhode Island, where the entire state population was less than half of Brooklyn’s, they wanted the city life just described. They decided to live in Providence, the state’s largest town, as it would offer the best opportunity for Mariani to find employment and use public transportation. They wanted to consciously choose a socially diverse neighbourhood by race/ethnicity, class, age, and family type. They looked at census data, walked around neighbourhoods with an ethnographer’s eye, and talked with shop owners and residents. Jason was using the same methods he had used in his gentrification research to determine where to purchase a house.
In thinking through the variables of their lives, Jason and Mariani considered Providence’s options: life in a gentrifying neighbourhood, life as residents in a homogeneous – mostly white – upper-middle-class neighbourhood, life in a homogeneous working-class neighbourhood, or life as suburbanites. They could not afford to live in the wealthier neighbourhoods on the East Side of Providence. The suburbs and the upper-middle-class areas of Rhode Island felt segregated and un-dynamic.
The option of living in a segregated working-class neighbourhood did not feel as viable to Jason as it did to Marc and John. In Jason’s understanding these areas included mostly white and Catholic working- and middle-class north Providence; poor, working-class, and mostly Black south Providence; or poor, working-class, and mostly Latino Olneyville. Although these places have inexpensive housing, Jason and Mariani felt out of place culturally, economically, and religiously when they visited them. These were ethnic communities with their own richness, but were not a good fit for them. They had also made the practical choice to live in a neighbourhood that was easily accessible to Mariani’s job via public transportation, and these neighbourhoods did not meet that condition.
Through the online classifieds site Craigslist, Jason and Mariani found a rental apartment in a large, pink, Victorian-era house in a neighbourhood historically considered the Little Italy of the city, a community with increasing numbers of Latino and Asian residents. It was speckled with other food amenities, such as Guatemalan and Vietnamese PhÒ restaurants. When a tattooed young woman in a rockabilly/punk outfit came out to greet them at a restaurant, it confirmed that they had found their fit: a mix of people and places.
A year later Jason and Mariani found themselves with two stable incomes and new monetary flexibility that enabled them to purchase their first home. Aesthetically, socially, amenity-wise, and practically, they wanted to live in the city. They knew they were not alone in this preference, and they knew the aggregate challenges it could pose for the city. Jason and Mariani purchased their own house in a historic district of Providence, a place with an increasing symbolic value. And here, as it was for John, is where the diagnostic moment intensifies. Buying a house entailed making a different type of commitment.
Their home was originally built in the 1870s, but by the 1970s it was boarded up, covered with graffiti, and filled with outdated wiring and plumbing. After it was restored in the late 1980s, the owner lived in the upstairs unit by himself for about fifteen years. Then a family bought and lived in it for the next five years before moving to another state with their young daughter. During this entire twenty-year time span, the same family rented out the first floor unit, and their sons grew up in the house. Within the very house Jason and his family moved to, one can see an outline of neighbourhood changes that structure gentrification.
Gentrifiers attract gentrifiers, investment attracts investment. A few years after they moved in, a handwritten note was left in the mail slot enquiring if the neighbouring empty lot was available. A trio of recent college graduates wanted to use the space for an urban farm. The three women ended up ploughing the plot and removing the remaining chunks of a house that had burned down in the 1970s. They dug out planting beds, lined them, and brought in new soil so as to remediate the lead-containing soil that covers much of the neighbourhood. Years later they continue to run a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm. Members stop by on Tuesday afternoons to pick up their share of fruits and vegetables.
Such a system requires a set of members who can afford to pay a few hundred dollars up front. Around the block are food vendors that sell low-priced fruits and vegetables out of their trucks. A neighbourhood without a grocery store depends on and can support these different types of food delivery systems. But it is more than just the food. During the growing season the farmers provide a daily presence. Children from local home daycares come over to visit the chickens. Jason and his family meet more and more people via the farmers, making connections across blocks.
As Jason, John, and Marc had a final Skype work meeting for this book, Jason interrupted the meeting and left the screen. “Hold on a minute. There’s something going on outside.” John was actually very worried, given the puzzled look on Jason’s face. He relaxed when Jason returned, gut-laughing at the irony of what was occurring. “You’re not going to believe this; there is a tour bus in front of my house.” As an indication of how far gentrification has proceeded, the farm is now a stopping point for large tour buses showing urban farms.
The combination of relatively dense housing located within walking distance of public distributive amenities such as a sizable, heavily used public park and various thirdplaces to eat and drink (not to mention the tour buses) held a passing resemblance to Jason and Mariani’s previous life in Brooklyn. They saw young children and their parents on the playground. Although they did not have a pet, they appreciated having a dog park nearby. Despite the city’s small population, they regularly saw the traffic of parents and children, dogs and their owners walking past their house, along the sidewalks, and towards the park. It is not about living on a “frontier” but rather within what Jason sees as normal city life, a place to create a home. This looked and felt like a community.
In the spring of 2013, Marc too felt it was time to move to another home. Having considerably more financial resources and a desire to establish a life in New York City, Marc decided to continue his housing journey where John and Jason began theirs: Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Now that Marc’s income and credit score had risen, questions of affordability were less significant. Unlike his previous housing searches, certain building amenities were now non-negotiable because of the demands on his time. Given these conveniences, Marc paid more than twice the mortgage payment on his five-bedroom, three-storey house in Philadelphia for his 700- square-foot, one-bedroom Fort Greene apartment.
Marc was now participating in what some would call Brooklyn’s hyper-gentrification. This raises an interesting point, though, one that perhaps requires more discussion: when does a neighbourhood lose its gentri-label? Considering Lincoln Park, Chicago, or Fort Greene, Brooklyn, to be “gentrified” or “gentrifying” remains the norm, yet it is confusing to consider an upper-middle-class person living in an upper-middle-class housing market as having any relation to the process. Is dropping that label resisted because it connotes an end to the struggle against gentrification?
For Marc, gentrified Fort Greene represented the perfect location. In terms of centrality, he was now a fifteen-minute cab or train ride away from his East Village office. In addition, he lived within walking distance of a range of potential thirdplaces such as restaurants, bars, and gyms. The new amenities that Marc used, such as twenty-four-hour security and on-site parking, he deemed necessary, given his increasingly hectic travel schedule and a growing public profile.
In contrast to the Fort Greene that John and Jason had inhabited, where issues of danger were still present, Marc’s neighbourhood now was an established New York hot spot. No longer were people afraid to stroll through Fort Greene Park, walk down Flatbush Avenue at three in the morning, or leave their cars parked on dark side streets. As opposed to the situation of ten years earlier when he had visited the neighbourhood, Manhattan cab drivers now never refused to drive Marc to Fort Greene because they deemed it too dangerous. But for Marc the fit of Fort Greene wasn’t primarily about location. Rather he felt – for the first time, perhaps – that he was surrounded by “his kind of people.”23
Fort Greene offered Marc the kind of community that he had looked for in Harlem and East Germantown but had never really located. Unlike Harlem, which he regarded as too professionalized – due to the many lawyers, investment bankers, and other corporate professionals who lived there – Marc was now living within a few blocks of his favourite creatives: artists, actors, singers, rappers, journalists, and academics. Like those of many Americans, Marc’s ideas of Brooklyn were shaped largely by Black popular culture narratives of the borough, from Spike Lee’s movies to 1990s television shows like Living Single to the influx of Black bohemians such as Erykah Badu and Common. Marc saw contemporary Fort Greene as an ideal mix of Black natives and newcomers who desired to sustain, honour, and protect the heritage, diversity, and cultural authenticity of the borough. Yet this narrative also helped to produce a kind of “colonial nostalgia,” obscuring the fact that these changes were directly linked to or reflective of gentrification processes.
More than any place he had lived before, this context captured Marc’s conception of life as a Black, upper-middle-class, urban resident. He was enjoying the best parts of a developed neighbourhood while feeling connected to what to him were the realities – difficult, enjoyable – of Black urban life. For Marc, Fort Greene’s authenticity was actualized through its built environment and the diverse community that inhabited it.
Behind Marc’s apartment was the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a cultural institution known for progressive and avant-garde exhibitions that is a strong centre for Black creative work. A few blocks further was Habana Outpost restaurant, where a racially diverse mix of Brooklynites could sit outside eating Mexican-Cuban food or enjoy a free viewing of Spike Lee movies projected on the building’s large concrete wall. Adjacent to Marc’s building were chain restaurants McDonald’s and Applebee’s, as well as a “dollar pizza” shop, all of which attracted working-class adults and youth from the nearby high school. Across the street was Fulton Mall, a pedestrian street and transit mall that has a mix of major retail shops, African and South Asian street vendors, and local businesses historically targeted at working-class Brooklyn residents.
Like most residents, Marc had not researched the housing and commercial development patterns in the neighbourhood before moving in. As a result, he thought that the continued presence of locally owned, iconic stores like Dr Jay’s sneaker store in Fulton Mall, even though it stands next door to the corporate chain Banana Republic, were proof that parts of the “old neighbourhood” were still intact. The story was more nuanced, of course; it always is.
Although it still felt like a local shopping area, Fulton Mall is the third-most profitable shopping district in New York, preceded only by Madison and Fifth Avenues. Seeing an opportunity, in the early 2000s Mayor Bloomberg initiated a plan to “revitalize” downtown Brooklyn and rezoned the area to allow for the construction of high-rises, condos, and other luxury buildings. This policy shift caused a spike in product prices and leasing rates, which forced many local residents and business owners out of the neighbourhood. It also contributed to the closing of Albee Square Mall, a staple of local commerce and popular culture – rapper Jay-Z speaks nostalgically about 1990s Albee Square Mall in his song “Hello Brooklyn.”
Marc wanted to live in a neighbourhood that still had the people, culture, and resources that were indigenous to the community, along with the new amenities that made it an even more desirable location for him. But, like Sherri from our first chapter, he also wanted to feel like he was entrenched and to know that he was not disrupting the fabric of the place. Yet the very thing that Marc viewed as a remnant of authentic Brooklyn was by some measures, beneath the veneer of diversity, another signpost of gentrification. This realization was disappointing.
His desire to live in Fort Greene can be read as a predictable outgrowth of Black upper-middle-class authenticity politics. Marc wanted not to live in “the ‘hood,” but rather to live “‘hood adjacent” so that he could enjoy the amenities of gentrified life without looking or feeling as if he had sold out. While such a claim is not without merit – Marc continues to struggle to reconcile his Black leftist politics with his enjoyment of upper-middle-class life and the footprint it leaves – it understates his intentionality and ethical vision. His decision to live in Fort Greene was also born out of a set of pragmatic decisions about housing. While Marc opposed gentrification as an idea, he wanted to contribute to a neighbourhood with a strong and economically diverse Black community. He viewed Fort Greene as the embodiment of that possibility.
Marc desired not merely to live near this mix of long-time residents and newcomers as a symbolic gentrifier but in meaningful ways to become entrenched in the heritage of the place. He believed that the ethical and functional value of his housing choice would ultimately be determined by the ways in which he engaged the community. This took place most often through casual interactions on the nearby basketball court or neighbourhood barber shops. Within these spaces Marc felt like a member of the community who honoured its past but also was committed to being a part of its idealized future. He also felt as though he was honouring Spike Lee’s implicit vision of ethical gentrified citizenship: enjoying the neighbourhood while understanding, respecting, and engaging the pre-existing culture.
Now that they have children, Jason and John could move to a suburb or small town. They choose to live in a city, in existing housing. Referring to decisions like John’s to live in the global city of Chicago with kids, urban and globalization theorist Saskia Sassen suggests that “urban residence is far more desirable than living in the suburbs, especially for single professionals or two professional career households. As a result, high-income residential areas in global cities have expanded, creating a reurbanization of family life, insofar as these professionals want it all, including dogs and children, even if they may not have time for either.”24 We have a great deal of respect for Saskia Sassen, but ... ouch!
In the twentieth century feminist-urbanists like Daphne Spain brought attention to the gender and spatial division of labour.25 The suburbs segregated men and women. Men tended to commute to work while women remained at home to work. Perhaps it is not obvious, but women have always been a part of the public sphere in cities.26 However, the growth of suburbs did exert a series of pressures on the social roles men and women enacted.
Feminist planners looked explicitly to densely populated cities and processes such as gentrification as viable alternatives to patriarchal, suburban spatial forms.27 Their plans entailed locating housing, work, childcare, and places to socialize in close proximity. “Having it all,” then, must be more than backhanded code for conditions such as women – including highly educated professionals – having opportunities equal to those of men. Instead, we must reimagine urban layouts to accommodate new social forms and expectations.
In the end, though, as Herbert Gans pointed out a half-century ago, places in cities and outside cities can create homologous outcomes.28 It makes little sense in the twenty-first century to juxtapose urban and suburban living: most cities are now sprawling metropolitan areas encapsulating a multiplicity of housing arrangements, transportation types, and employment locations. (We discuss this topic further in chapter 5.) We now turn to the facets related to being a gentrifier with kids.
If the gentrifier with kids is older and further on in his work life, he may have the same relationship to the monetary facets of his locational decision as his late gentrifier counterpart. Affordability may still be an issue, especially now that the household income is feeding and clothing more people. And like the late gentrifier, the gentrifier with kids is more likely to look at his home as an asset, given the extra weight of financial responsibility. A lower-middle-class gentrifier with kids may depend upon home equity as an emergency fund, a life insurance plan, and a college fund. Even so, the gentrifier with kids is more likely to sacrifice the desire for affordable housing (which can serve as an appreciating asset) for what seem like more pressing facets.
Concerns for aesthetic – of the entire neighbourhood, the home’s exterior, or the home’s interior – too would seem a most expendable facet if something had to give, as it is the only one of the seven facets that has absolutely no direct bearing on the child’s well-being. There may be a desire to have a “home” that will come to represent a particular family. John feels, for instance, that Jason and Mariani’s home fits or represents their family. John and Monique were looking for what they dubbed the “Thanksgiving home,” one that would be perfect for having extended family and friends over for Thanksgiving dinner. But these desires often don’t hold a candle to the perceived need to privilege those facets that affect the child.
There is a changed meaning to the practicality facet of the locational decision for the gentrifier with kids. The centrality dimension to practicality is still present, but the need to have access to “the centre of things” now pertains more to a school or a playground than to a bar or a restaurant. The allure of extra space for a home in a gentrifying neighbourhood versus a long-established middle-class neighbourhood may not be for a live/work space so much as it is for a degree of extra sanity and the luxury to carry on household activities unhindered while kids are napping.
The amenities of the gentrifier with kids still include thirdplaces like cafés. But the allure of a smoky, seedy dive – if it was ever there – may have faded when one is looking for a venue for a hot chocolate date with a toddler.29 And the thirdplace list has been expanded to amenities such as “play places,” an institution utterly foreign to generations past. Such different business can serve as “faces on the street,” creating a set of new and perhaps exclusive social networks.30 But the thirdplace dimension of a neighbourhood becomes inverted in importance with the neighbourhood’s public distributive amenities – parks to be sure, but it is public schools that likely exceed every other facet in importance for families without the desire or the funds for a private school. There is a growing body of research by education policy scholars such as Linn Posey-Maddox, Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara, and others that examines the ways in which parents have leveraged their power to shape curriculum, increase available resources, and force school administrators to be more responsive to their needs. At the same time, these studies have shown how such efforts have also led to heightened racial and class tensions, further denial of access and resources, and diminished social capital, for lower-income families.31
Philosophical beliefs regarding the cultivation of community among long-time residents in the name of diversity (of class, length of tenure, ethnicity, and race) is more likely to be balanced – however uncomfortably – with a realization that a neighbourhood with more middle-class residents may be more stable. In a gentrifying neighbourhood – which by definition had to be disinvested at some point in recent history – the vast majority of these middle-class residents are relative newcomers.
The goal for cultural authenticity that the early gentrifier held dear might lose its standing in relation to other facets, just as it does with the late gentrifier. One’s appreciation for the symbolicfacet of such authenticity (authenticity without relationship) or its related entrenched facet (authenticity with relationship) may take a back seat. That said, parents may still value their child’s exposure to a particular cultural fabric in their neighbourhood – with or without an accompanying deeper relationship.
Gentrifiers with kids may no longer be as flexible as they were before children. Culturally, these gentrifiers may or may not want their children to be exposed to the same wide array of languages, practices, and traditions that they themselves wanted exposure to. The neighbourhood might be becoming more diverse by race, as Chicago-based urban planner Marisa Novara noted to John, but the gentrifier’s child might face the prospect of being the only person of his or her race in her classroom at the neighbourhood school. And, as she adds, “white people don’t have a lot of practice being the ‘only one.’”
Parents may also prefer that their kids are in a neighbourhood with sufficient infrastructure. A mile walk to the subway in the winter, a strained police/community relationship, and lack of parking may no longer feel doable. To cite another example, that of real (rather than perceived) danger, no parents would choose that their child was closer to the threat of violent crime than need be. As Jane Jacobs would say, this is “common sense fear.” The moral problem arises not when gentrifiers take action to keep their children away from stray bullets, to cite one highly charged example, but when the mere containment of the problem is sufficient; that is, they are not concerned enough to take actions to keep everyone’s child away from stray bullets. This is the distinction between common sense and NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard.”)
School decisions are the crux for many families. A block over from Jason’s home in Providence, four families with children have since moved from the neighbourhood. Three moved to suburban houses in the region. The last moved away to a larger city. Despite demographic characteristics similar to those of Jason’s family, the neighbourhood is not the place they feel they need. Many make the choice to live in the suburbs based largely on the educational needs of their children. But other families have stayed.
Jason and Mariani quickly felt the ways in which their trajectory in Providence was linked with their young daughter. To their shock many daycare centres had waiting lists. As one daycare worker remarked, “You should have signed up when you were pregnant.” They had made a point of thinking in advance about preschool and elementary school. While Mariani grew up attending private schools in Athens and London, Jason had always attended public schools in Houston and both his mother and his sister taught at public schools.
In contrast to most of their friends, Jason and Mariani had a privileged mental outline of almost every elementary school that they could possibly send their daughter to. Mariani’s job as an arts educator for the local art museum provided an entrée into most of the city’s public and private schools. She coordinated with teachers in incorporating the museum’s holdings into class plans. She possessed a fair amount of knowledge about the culture of schools, the quality of teachers, and the commitment of administrators in Providence.
Knowledge is power, but knowledge is also often depressing. Before Jason and Mariani moved to Providence, they had attended a local panel on school buildings where Bryan Principe, now a city council member, discussed the closing of his beloved local elementary. They, too, had an idea of a beloved “local” school. But what is a local school? An elementary school where their daughter could walk to school with her friends is a wonderful image.
The closest elementary schools were in poor physical shape, classrooms were crowded, and administrative turnover created inconsistent support for teachers. Eventually, three West Side elementary schools were consolidated (in a move that presaged a similar, but larger, consolidation in Chicago). Jason and Mariani understood themselves to be navigating a segregated city with its resulting education system. Generally, middle- and upper-middle-class residents live on the East Side and lower-middle and lower-income residents on the West Side. This pattern overlaps with an overwhelmingly white East Side and a mostly Latino, Black, and Asian West Side. The result is a public school system stratified by race and class. And this result does not include even the significant numbers of private schools also on the East Side.
Because of the taxation downturn associated with the recession, accompanying housing bust, and childhood population decline in Rhode Island, public schools were being shut down. In contrast to earlier periods in their relationship, Jason and Mariani were flexible enough monetarily to have choices: buy a house in a better-off suburb, opt out of the public school system, pay a premium to live near a good public school, or send their daughter to an underperforming, underfunded school. They felt that this skewed set of options in Providence could be remedied only at a level higher than the household: parents are forced to choose – if they can.
In all likelihood their daughter will learn to read, write, and do arithmetic at any of the schools mentioned above. But Jason and Mariani knew which schools were built like prisons with heavy metal screens on all the windows and locked doors during security shutdowns; sending their daughter to one of them was not going to change that situation for her. At the other extreme were schools with private campuses surrounded by fields and old trees.
Together they visited half a dozen schools in addition to the schools Mariani regularly visited for work. Where were the “typical” schools? In thinking about their daughter, they wanted a place that they knew was safe, was academically exciting, and matched the city’s demographics. They wanted a high-quality public school that they could walk their daughter to every morning, but that school did not exist. They tried to make it happen with their city council member and other local families. For a brief moment it seemed that the Providence Public School District was going to open just such a school. But was this the “typical” school? Or was it a school built with gentrifiers like Jason and Mariani in mind?
In the end, it didn’t matter. The school was never built and multiple neighbourhood elementary schools were closed and consolidated in response to the recession. All of the teachers in the school district were temporarily laid off as an accounting scheme to control labour costs. Reinvestment did not extend to the neighbourhood schools.
Frustrated by the process, Jason and Mariani ended up making an educational choice they did not anticipate. They sent their daughter to a private French school. Preschool starts at age three and grades continue through eighth grade. The school is located on the East Side, walking distance from Mariani’s workplace. Many of their other gentrifier neighbours have since decided to send their children to private schools or charter schools in other parts of the city but not within the neighbourhood.
After John took a new job in Chicago, he and Monique were once again looking for a home in the city. With gentrification on his mind, John asked various urban scholars for their opinion on what neighbourhoods he might move to in Chicago that would be responsible, ethical choices. This query is almost humorous, of course, as a middle-class housing choice is always fraught with complexity. Ethical to one thinker is naïve or even despicable to another.
For this move, John and Monique had a much more complicated housing choice. They came to Chicago with a two-year-old, a four-month-old, and a desire to adopt more children. Unfortunately for Monique, who ascended from lower-working-class neighbourhoods to a stable middle-class position, she has not only her parenting responsibilities to deal with, but also the overly self-conscious urban community concerns that her academic husband carries.
Monique is very aware of social structure, to be sure, but she does not carry around with her this ever-present consciousness of her place within them. She wants her daughters to be safe from gun violence and educated in schools that are not failing. John wants both of these things as well, of course. But he carries a sense that his family could, in the din of everyday life, turn their backs – residentially speaking – on Chicago’s greatest challenges, namely, its deteriorating public schools and the escalating violence among its youth that touches people all around them. He imagined making a residential choice that was more a part of the solution than the problem.
Their criteria – notably, the practical pull of being on transportation lines, the community pull of being in a diverse or mostly Black neighbourhood, and the monetary constraints of living on his salary alone while Monique interviewed for work – would once again likely lead them to a gentrifying, near gentrifying, or already gentrified neighbourhood. Such neighbourhoods as North Kenwood-Oakland or neighbouring Bronzeville also had an aesthetic “architectural integrity” and a sense of authenticity as Black cultural centres that energized them.32
There are blocks on the South Side on which John had friends who have since moved away. Had those friends still been enmeshed in their neighbourhoods, John’s family would likely have looked for a home in one of them. Kinship, a basis for community, would trump other facets. This had been Monique and John’s living situation in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Social capital provided them not only with the joy of dwelling amid relationships, but also with a shared neighbourhood knowledge.
“Did you end up moving to Bronzeville?” urban sociologist Mary Pattillo asked John upon finding out that he had arrived in Chicago. “‘Did you end up moving to Bronzeville’ is one of the most loaded questions you could ask me right now,” John replied. “At times I wish I did, but no.”
After the family left San Diego, Monique and the kids went to Brooklyn to stay with her family while John looked for housing (on the ground, that is; Monique was leading the search online) and started his new job. Months earlier, Monique and John had spent four long days in Chicago with a middle-aged Black real estate broker, Clarence Thompson, who had grown up in the area he was showing them. So, from this and other visits, Monique was familiar enough with the neighbourhoods from the downtown Loop south to the “70s” blocks to locate listings on her mental map of the city.
Monique and John liked North Kenwood-Oakland, but for monetary reasons their home search would be relegated to blocks undergoing considerable upheaval, among abandoned houses and foreclosures. While they did not mind the inconvenience of living in such a context, the idea of living in a community of newcomers who were maximizing their profit potential – while acceptable to Monique in particular contexts – was less comfortable to John.
On one hand, John was looking for a twenty-first-century version of Gemeinschaft discussed in chapter 1 – Tönnies’s conception of a community built upon close ties versus one held together by the calculated, selfish instrumentality of Gesellschaft. On the other hand, there was a much more straightforward dynamic. As a middle-class Black woman, Monique understood herself to be a part of the status quo or even the solution – a line of thought very similar to Marc’s. As a middle-class white male newcomer, John felt a part of the problem. In segregated Chicago, this would be an enduring theme within their household during all of their housing deliberations.
They began looking further north at Bronzeville, a loosely defined area located south of the McCormick Place convention centre and up to (some say including) North Kenwood-Oakland. Using a real estate listing site, Monique found a home for sale near the heart of Bronzeville and asked John to visit it. As infill construction that was completed in the early 1990s, the home lacked aesthetic appeal inside and out. It had neither the look nor the material quality of its early twentieth-century neighbours. However, the block, despite being a hodgepodge of old and new, had a general architectural warmth. The home was affordable, its centrality to the “L” train made it practical, and it was in a predominantly Black community within which they felt their family could comfortably integrate. John and Monique decided to put an offer in on the house.
The days passed and the offer was being processed. At first, they felt excited. But over time John began to think further about it. Like Jason, he began what amounted to an ethnography of the community. Indeed, the neighbourhood had few amenities, with poor public distributive goods such as parks and few thirdplaces. John ordered from a soul food restaurant, Mama Lou’s, eating standing up in the blustery January weather because of the lack of seating. There were a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop and a Starbucks, but they were housed in what had certainly been a controversial development – a fact visually obvious before he even knew the details. It gave off a “moated” feel. The edge of a middle-class, mixed-use project, the area clearly had been developed with only the centrality of the immediately adjacent Interstate, suburban Metra line, “L” line, and Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in mind.
As he walked, John felt like a white body signalling gentrification. The border with IIT was palpable to him. The transition from a mostly white street life to a mostly Black street life seemed to happen in a span of two blocks. Was this a tense border area, as John was perceiving? Or had his sociological framework and his knowledge of the history driven him to madness?
At times, John perceived IIT students interpreting him as a symbol of safety. At other times he interpreted them as the characters of architectural renderings with all of the attendant obliviousness. Were these perceptions tainted by his school of thought? After all, oblivious to what? “Well, yes,” pushed Novara, “they may be oblivious that the area once marked the start of the ‘ominous’ ‘State Street corridor,’” a negatively charged term for what was a four-mile-long stretch of public housing demolished in the city’s much praised and much maligned “Plan for Transformation.”
Of course they are oblivious: in what context do we require residents to study up on their neighbourhood before moving in? Novara noted to John that these students would likely not be familiar with 35th and State if the Starbucks / Jimmy Johns development was not there. Is that a good thing, if the problem previously was that non-residents feared the neighbourhood and the group of young people John observed were uninhibited by that baggage?
When is obliviousness the product of privilege? When is it the sign of progress? When is it the result of a well-executed plan by the powers that be?
John, too, did all of his housing research from the one thirdplace that allowed loitering for five-hour stretches: Starbucks. Indeed, the ethnic, racial, and apparent class mix of the Starbucks customers was rather shocking; the relationships and rich conversation there – from medical colleagues to student groups to church groups to non-profit staffs to sanitation workers – seemed very healthy. Yet the irony of a gentrifier using a Starbucks as a home base to strategize his “invasion” was not lost on John. But this is where he could mix his course preparation for his new academic job with his writing and house researching. At times – anxious about the decision – he would just pack up and walk the neighbourhood. Somehow, now that John had kids, a mere intuitive feel of a neighbourhood – sufficient in San Diego – provided insufficient grounds upon which to make a decision.
Furthermore, John’s belief was that his daughters’ light skin and mixed status would not be a defining issue in a stable, non-gentrifying, Black neighbourhood like Monique’s Bedford-Stuyvesant block of ten years earlier. Indeed, it was John who had initially wanted the housing search limited to historically Black Bronzeville and North Kenwood-Oakland, believing that this was the most comfortable context for the family. But he had his doubts about Bronzeville’s current context of flux: he believed nuances of race to matter more amid such flux, to be more charged.
During those long days and late nights at that Starbucks (since he was without an office or a home, it served various functions of both), John ventured onto websites that profiled the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Police Department’s geo-coded crime data. It was the first time he had ever done such research pertaining to his own life – and it was a Pandora’s Box indeed. Never before had public distributive amenities – most especially schools but also parks – and the potential of danger played into John’s locational decision. And never before had quantitative measures mattered much to him.
Here were the numbers. On the Chicago Public School website he searched school graduation rates, the rate at which a school’s students pass the state exam, a school’s race and class distribution. John wanted his older daughter in a local public school. He wanted that school to be class diverse and to have a high proportion of Black students. And he wanted that school not to be a low performer. But he also did not want to jockey to employ networks, money, or status against other parents.
To John, the crime statistics were jarring because they were disjointed: he did not know the fabric of the block. Being near the location of a homicide or assault is much different when one knows this fabric. But he just had numbers: the number of homicides, robberies, aggravated assaults, and aggravated batteries on his prospective block, on his path to the train station, and in the surrounding area.
One day, when new data were uploaded, the symbol for aggravated assault – a blue handgun – showed up on the property. John’s initial response was to knock on a few doors to talk to potential neighbours, but nobody answered. The block was desolate. A police van sat on the block for hours with two officers inside; eventually, John stopped and talked to them. But the conversation yielded little. They looked at him the way John had known white Chicago Police Department officers to look at a white man on a mostly Black block at night: “Are you lost or naïve?”
John decided that the family should withdraw their offer on the home at the risk of losing their deposit. He felt that his family would likely move to a block like this one once he and his wife knew enough people in a particular neighbourhood. Monique began talking to Clarence about properties elsewhere. John was still living quite precariously, moving from couch to guest room in various places; he and Monique decided to spend one week trying to find a place to buy before they ultimately gave in and rented.
It was during this time that Monique sent John the details on what was for them an affordably priced listing for a condominium building in the West Loop neighbourhood. As the Wall Street Journal stated, the West Loop was “long known for its meatpacking warehouses and industrial feel” but had become “a hot spot” where “top tech firms, restaurants and some retailers are moving in, bringing a spate of luxury condo developments.”33 Due to the fact that the building’s developer had abandoned the building years earlier when the housing bubble burst, the home sale was being administered by a federal government program intended to sell properties quickly in order to minimize negative impacts on the community.34 As a result, their home was affordable, actually in a similar price range to the one in Bronzeville. Clearly, John’s household – squeezing in through a government-program-cracked door – was not going to influence much displacement here. The ethics of entering into such a context were refreshing in relation to the other locations where Monique and John had been looking.
Examining the listing’s photograph of the living room, John was shocked to see the sign for the restaurant Wishbone, where a dear mentor had met with him in the early 1990s. Near Oprah’s Harpo studios, Wishbone was a place filled with much warmth for him, representing a considerable amount of race and class vibrancy – a place that had served and still does serve as a site of Black social and political life. When he walked the area around the condo, this was still evident to some degree. The neighbourhood was not the type of place John had ever thought of living, but the goings-on of this block made it an intriguing place. Walking the area as they were making their buying decision, he often saw people he knew from various aspects of his life and from all around the city – the same type of people he ran into around Wishbone in the 1990s.
Inputting the home’s address into various school-related websites, John and Monique discovered that it was zoned for an academically excellent race/class diverse public school. And searching the address in the city’s crime database revealed more property crimes than assaults. John’s “facets” – and the way they meshed with post-housing-bubble Chicago – had been overhauled in a week’s time. Time was short and this condominium seemed to have many factors aligned in its favour. It felt right.
“I can’t blame you for separating your political philosophy from your practice,” said one progressive academic friend with no children – as John absorbed the intended or unintended jab. And when John shared all of this with Mary Pattillo, she replied, “This is why I often say ‘I’m so glad I don’t have kids!’ It allows me not to have to ‘put my parenting where my mouth is.’”
“I’ve become one of ‘them,’” John would say to his wife, amazed that it seemed he would be moving to what some see as the most intensively gentrifying neighbourhood in Chicago. “What? A father?” she replied, highlighting the fact that he seemed to be viewing responsibility as an expletive.
While the area did not have the community diversity or the aesthetic John desired, it was highly practical due to its centrality and had plenty of amenities, including a park – a new park created just for people like him: middle class with kids. John felt like a lab mouse whose path had been manipulated by Chicago’s “neoliberal” mad scientists; but did conspiracy really capture what was going on? John’s politics were confronted by very messy realities. Or – as Mary responded to John’s ultimate housing choice – “the structures of inequality are both reproduced and sometimes dismantled given these real decisions that sincere people have to make every day.”
After John moved in, he discovered that while the neighbourhood around it had become a bit more homogeneous over the years, Wishbone continued to bring a diversity of street-level activity – sights, sounds, unexpected encounters with friends and associates – that John viewed as especially warm. It still remains a community centre of sorts, but for everyone from gentrifiers to the Sunday Black church crowd to homegrown celebrities. Monique’s Brooklyn friends, talking on the balcony during a weekend visit, exchanged hellos with the Chicago-native rapper Common as he walked into Wishbone’s Saturday cacophony of dishes clanking, laughter, and car stereos playing as friends chatted outside their cars. While perhaps not all of the West Loop felt like a fit, their block worked for the moment.
“Do Black people live in the neighbourhood?” Monique’s friend asked. Monique knew more than a handful of Black West Loop residents, but this was not a part of her response. “It really doesn’t matter,” she said, “because I interact with Black people of all kinds everywhere: the grocery store, Wishbone, the street, Target. That’s completely different from a similar neighbourhood in other places.” Moreover, in regard to the facet of flexibility, Monique expressed how her exchanges with the police (read: pleasant) in the West Loop, a white-majority, low-crime neighbourhood, where the sight of Black men and women – including professionals – was quite common, were much different than they would be in a majority-Black, higher-crime neighbourhood like Bronzeville.
As opposed to when he was single, John now values staying and investing in one place, and he could feel his residential roots in the West Loop growing merely by creating memories there with his family. But he also began to feel that the community was becoming increasingly commercial – and, more important, markedly younger and hipper. “They don’t speak,” said Monique’s mom when John asked her and his father-in-law over the recent Christmas holiday what they thought about the gentrification of Bed-Stuy. While her father quickly defended the newcomers, saying that he speaks with them regularly, these three words would echo through John’s mind as he considered the West Loop. More and more, John felt that the younger residents in the West Loop didn’t make eye contact, they didn’t engage. John would engage them anyway – saying “good morning” and teaching his kids to do the same – and many would ignore them.
He and Monique – who was interested in having an outdoor space for the kids – began considering another move, again looking at the South Side neighbourhoods they had considered years earlier, but with an eye to schools. Over the past few years they had learned of several well-performing primary and secondary schools that had almost all Black (95 per cent) students and a high number of low-income students. John and Monique believed that their daughters could be comfortable and thrive in these Black environments.
Their West Loop school, which they once had viewed as having “got things right” was a site of much political and social scrutiny because of the race, class, and tenure-diverse cross-section of the city that attends it – an elusive diversity that without curation might merely be a snapshot in a larger story of flux. There were particular elementary schools on the South Side, on the other hand, that seemed decidedly more local and personal, environments that would afford their family opportunities for parental involvement that would not be as politically charged.
“I just want a culture of learning rather than a culture of complacency,” Monique said. “But we don’t need the bells and whistles.” Our neighbourhood school, she added as a caveat, “has the diversity thing down.” “I don’t know how I feel about a school with no diversity,” she said, thinking about an almost completely Black school on the South Side.
Monique and John planned to visit the West Loop school and a small school on the South Side (this one in Kenwood) together, but she visited their neighbourhood school the next day on her own. “I can’t pass it up,” she said. “I walked in and it was like the United Nations: 40 per cent Black, 30 per cent Asian, 10 per cent Latino ... a quarter low income – which matters more to you than to me. But I want that rainbow for the girls.” So the issue was tabled until the month before their oldest daughter was to begin at the school, when some of its issues became more apparent.
“What, exactly, are the values we are clinging to by insisting that we live in the city?” a frustrated Monique asked John in their kitchen after the overcrowding made the news, echoing a theme that will arise in chapter 5. “We live in an apartment without a yard, our school is overcrowded, our daughter may start first grade in an overflow annex, and yet our property tax has doubled.” Nor had moving to a neighbourhood zoned for a good school cushioned their family from inter-class power struggles – the big concession John was banking on when they ruled out the Bronzeville home years earlier.
In fact, in the clamour to solve the overcrowding that irked parents like Monique, alderman Walter Burnett reminded gentrifiers that he was “closing schools on the [further] West Side” and that he must balance pouring resources into an overcrowded school that was by most measures quite successful with the fact that he had to “get something for the West Side schools first.” This belief, of course, was true. Burnett was right. “No matter where we are in this city, the connected are going to be pitted against the unconnected,” Monique said. The tangled web of ethical housing choices was getting even more complicated.
John and Monique continue to wrestle with these options. But their current reality is that there are options and, further, that there is little pressing urgency to this issue in regard to their household. In fact, the monetary truth is that their housing choice – an appreciating asset – seems as if it will increasingly afford John and Monique options that they have not had as a couple. Meanwhile, the Bronzeville real estate market has suffered, as has the property they pulled out of. Had his family purchased the Bronzeville home, John’s family would be in an entirely different place financially, as their primary asset is their housing.
In her recent memoir South Side, Natalie Moore notes that “failed political leadership, back-burner city status, racial perceptions and the capricious ways of capitalism have left Bronzeville as empty as some of the greystones along King Drive.”35 As we were completing this book, a Black forty-nine-year-old city 311 operator grabbing an afternoon coffee at the aforementioned Bronzeville Starbucks was shot in the chest and killed – the target believed to have been an employee at the neighbouring Jimmy John’s sandwich shop. Like so many other issues in this book, this horrific loss of life and the resulting images of police tape and news vans draping a Starbucks are also an artefact of the present moment.
Each of the neighbourhoods we moved into represents a moment in gentrification. Jason, John, and Marc all lived within blocks of one another in Fort Greene, but at different points in the ongoing change in the neighbourhood. Even a move into already well-established, higher-income neighbourhoods with decades of gentrification may change it further still. Gentrification is not an event with a singular start and finish. Gentrification is produced, reproduced, expanded, and sometimes stalled.
We took up Damaris Rose’s challenge to examine the degree to which “‘gentrifiers’ are produced,” and it has provided us with “more subtle and sensitive methods for exploring particular empirical situations where these tendencies may or may not become a reality.”36 “Home” matters. It is “where sentiment and space converge to afford attachment, stability, and a secure sense of personal control” and “an anchor of identity and social life, the seat of intimacy and trust from which we pursue our emotional and material needs.”37
To borrow a term from Molotch and his colleagues, there is a powerful “rolling inertia” to gentrification – and our residential decisions largely reproduced it.38 At times, we found that we became gentrifiers as we sought an “environmental solution to a set of problems that are inherently social problems.”39 For instance, a resident can, of course, live among racial, ethnic, and class homogeneity and not risk gentrification. However, all three of us, like growing numbers of people, desire to live (and raise our children) within a fabric of diversity, be it – depending on the person – racial, ethnic, or class. That the idea of “social mix” has been corrupted in gentrification policy applications does not mean that the desire to live among a mix of different social groups must always be dismissed; whatever contradictions exist therein are important to interrogate.
Our locational decisions had practical pulls as well; we desired to be central to at least some of the “identity and social life” of our biographies: workplaces, friends, and so on. We felt an amenity pull: we mentioned parks, cafés, restaurants, and schools in our accounts. It is clear in looking at them that we all felt a strong community pull to our home neighbourhoods. Living in places with a robust street life strikes us as socially and physically healthy behaviour – although sometimes such street life can be little more than the wallpaper, the backdrop of our mundane daily life.
When John was home alone for days in San Diego with his newly arrived daughter, veteran dad Jason shared his advice: get out of the house. This presupposes a neighbourhood beyond the home. As fathers, we experienced what Rose argued for mothers in the 1980s, that urban neighbourhoods “provide an efficient and non-isolating environment for reproductive work, and enhance opportunities ... to develop locally based friendship networks and a supportive environment.”40 A “day with the kids” is very different in a neighbourhood with a strong social fabric, no matter where it is. Many gentrifying neighbourhoods have such a fabric.
Our cases are not meant to be representative of all gentrifiers. We walked through our lives as gentrifiers from single, to married, to parents making decisions about our children’s lives, attempting to expose the messiness of our choices. At a micro-level many of the demographic characteristics that categorize people become muddied. We see that the seven facets in our multi-tool can combine to produce very similar residential choices, but compelled by very different motives and leading to very different contexts on the ground.
What should be clear is that even in a gentrifier’s individual life there are multiple waves, some barely noticeable and others almost overwhelming. As gentrifiers, we found ourselves in similar types of locations and decision points across cities and at different places in our lives. Our various moves speak to a more general type of mobility within the “creative industries” and educated service sector more generally, a mobility that is affecting the fabric of urban life around the world. That is part of a change that is bigger than us, a transformation with causes and effects that we explore in chapter 3.