April 29. Gentrification and Other Forms of Neighborhood Change
Workshop: Xui Zhong
Theory
Neil Smith, 1979. “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People,” Journal of the American Planning Association 45:4, 538-548.
Jackelyn Hwang and Jeffrey Lin, 2016. “What Have We Learned About the Causes of Recent Gentrification?” Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 18(3):9-26.
Derek Hyra, 2016. “Commentary: Causes and Consequences of Gentrification and the Future of Equitable Development Policy,” Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 18(3):169-177.
Approaches to the Case Study: Commercial gentrification?
Sharon Zukin, et al. 2009. “New Retail Capital and Neighborhood Change: Boutiques and Gentrification in New York City.” City & Community 8(1):47–64.
Rachel Meltzer, 2016. “Gentrification and Small Business: Threat or Opportunity?,” Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 18(3):57-85.
P. Lipman, 2011. “Racial Politics of Mixed-Income Schools and Housing,” chapter 4 in The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City. New York: Routledge.
Workshop
We will discuss how to define, measure, and study ‘gentrification’ in Hunters Point/LIC and your study site considering both its residential and commercial dimensions.
Tom Waters, 2015. “Is Gentrification Something You Can Measure?” Unpublished paper, PhD Program in Program in Political Science, CUNY Graduate Center, 15 pp.
I appreciated two narrative threads in our readings this week: first, the intersecting causes and effects between commercial and residential gentrification, and second, the implications of gentrification beyond countable displacement. This latter observation is especially highlighted in Derek Hyra’s work, who pushes against the theory that gentrification will lead to increased collective efficacy by highlighting the political and cultural displacement that can often occur. So, just because there is inconclusive evidence that gentrification causes residential displacement, doesn’t mean there isn’t a responsibility of the state to ensure the stability of long-term residence’s quality of life. Moreover, Hyra’s point that low-income households tend to move more often than their higher-income counterparts points to the existing inequality that gentrification compounds.
Likewise, in the retail landscape, Meltzer finds that on average, “the typical gentrifying neighborhood in New York City does not experience elevated rates of business displacement compared with a comparable non-gentrifying neighborhood.” However, she qualifies that change “could be more alienating than useful for incumbent residents.” Zukin et al’s article confirms this, focusing not on displacement but on the experiential aspects of retail gentrification. The embodiment of race, class, and development strategies in new boutique gentrification have material and cultural affects on public space.
Another aspect of Zukin’s article that I appreciated was that she argues the media is as culpable in the consequences of gentrification as the state is. Her references of the New York Times’ portraiture of Harlem as “gracious living” and Williamsburg as “cutting edge” reminded me of a colloquium talk by Zaire Dinzey-Flores (from Rutgers) gave to our sociology program. Dinzey-Flores was in midst of a research project on racialization of space through real-estate advertising in Brooklyn, and it made me think about the way images of place circulate through media like the NYT, curbed, and other sources of “real estate porn.” This discursive flow is another aspect of neighborhood change, and can be used (or, in itself acts on the world) for justification for/against intervention. For instance, Crystal City was narratively referred to as a barren landscape of empty office buildings, devoid of personality or human life (1), erasing the neighborhood establishments of queer spaces that have existed just to the west of Amazon’s future site (2). On the other hand, the Annabel Basin site was constructed as an area under threat of gentrification, which gave it a potent yet ambiguous narrative for mobilization against Amazon.
(1) Tim Logan, the Boston Globe: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/11/08/amazon-new-second-home-boring-corporate-and-perfect-for/D9BgkSPROvGmdRFlcq3VxK/story.html
(2) Ali Schweitzer, WAMU: https://wamu.org/story/18/11/27/as-amazon-looms-crystal-city-business-owners-want-to-preserve-the-neighborhoods-funky-side/
The City of Atlanta – variously referred to as the home of the civil rights movement, the heart of the New South, and Black Mecca – has been, with the District of Columbia, America’s most prominent city of continuous black government. Perhaps the most astonishing feature of its political history, however, is that this black government has been implementing policies that it knows will contribute to its demise.
In 1990, African Americans constituted a high of 67% of Atlanta’s population. The city’s black majority appeared unassailable and elections were fought out largely between black politicians. Twenty years later, in 2010, African Americans made up only 54% of the population. Kasim Reed, the mayor, had won his incumbency against a white challenger by a margin of only 714 votes. .
Gentrification, bearing considerable responsibility for this turnover, has been especially aggressively pursued in Atlanta.
Its government, certainly, hasn’t been the only driver. Markets have operated to bring supply and demand together. In the readings Hwang and Lin, and Hyra, note the importance of demand. It has been generally argued, though imperfectly corroborated, that the location of jobs and amenities, the reduction of inner city crime, increasing hours of work, and changing preferences around such matters as marriage, entertainment, and racial integration, have colluded in bringing wealthier, whiter residents into majority black neighborhoods. Some evidence can be found for some of these propositions in Atlanta. Neil Smith argued that production of housing units precedes and plays a role in creating demand. He hypothesized that with the widespread depreciation of house value, actual ground rent, and purchasing price of units in inner city neighborhoods into the 1980s, a gap was opened up between actual ground rent and potential ground rent, attracting producers back to the inner city with the prospect of higher profits. Smith’s “rent gap” theory of gentrification appears to have struggled to achieve empirical operationalization, including apparently in Atlanta. The basic idea about the importance of producer agency remains important and, certainly, this has been a feature of the city.
If the market has played its role, it has been enabled, its parameters framed, by the actions of government, federal, state, and local. Atlanta has been an eager participant in the federal government’s Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) program. The program is characterized by Paula Lupkin as racist, neoliberal, and an enrichment scheme for developers. Under HOPE VI incentivization, from the 1990s Atlanta destroyed nearly all of its public housing, around 17,000 units and 10% of all housing stock in the city. The city’s government sought to deconcentrate and disperse its poor population, many of whom left the city boundary as it extensively subsidized the development of middle- and upper-class housing. Atlanta has, among the provision of other services that favor its richer inhabitants, pursued a severe, broken windows-style policing policy. As late as 2012, Kasim Reed supported legislation that set minimum jail time for panhandlers, 30 days for a repeat offence, 90 days for a third.
Mary Norwood, Reed’s challenger in 2009, gained considerable support from Atlanta’s black working class and poor, frustrated with the failure of the black establishment to represent their needs.
Indeed, Atlanta’s black politicians have a long history of aligning themselves with the city’s white business elite. Already in the 1970s, when Atlanta’s black urban regime began to take shape, some initial tension had given way to close accommodation with business. Suffering from severe inner city decline, and without very substantial resources of its own, such accommodation would be important to redevelopment. Denied extensive access to municipal patronage, by a civil service system policed from a still white-controlled Georgia state, business would also be a necessary source of direct distributions of jobs and contracts, campaign finance, and media support. Black politicians had often followed careers that passed through federal government and business-funded civil society, and brought them into the middle class, a trajectory that predisposed them toward establishment concerns. Atlanta’s business elite, to this day still uncommonly cohesive, retaining control of the press, with unparalleled capacity to mobilize resources around emerging issues, has been formidable and able to turn the Atlanta regime in an increasingly conservative direction.
Gentrification occurs on such a scale that the Black Mecca, within only a decade or two, will be majority white.
– Ryan Brunette
Reading about the role of retail on gentrification (Zukin et al and Meltzer) reminded me of a discussion I had a few months ago with a boutique owner and a fashion designer friend. Ironically, the early boutiques back in the 1920s Paris were opened by the Parisian designers as small shops to sell their designs ranging from less expensive to couture (not necessarily the only exclusive idea of the present case). However through the changing trends in consumption patterns and innovative design in window displays, the boutiques were rather well-established businesses by the end of 50s. By adding sense of fun, originality and creativity, the owners not only added value to their businesses but also created a social identity for the young consumers of early sixties. The concept of boutiques is now applied to pretty much everything from clothing and accessories to hotels and cafes- the value adding to a core product/ service through a brand identity. What was once an individual and privately owned stores are now owned by big groups or corporates that are being made look like a boutique or an independent store. The concept itself has now become very selective and disassociating.
The downside of it is that now we are, at some places like Williamsburg, at a speed where even the so-called “boutiques” cannot afford to survive. As an intersecting example to Neil Smith and Zukin et al’s article, the kitchenware shop (Whisk) on Bedford, Williamsburg recently wrote a public letter explaining their closure. The store is nicely located right falling on to the busy footpath of Bedford (prime location- tick), just across Wholefoods (“nicely” gentrified- tick), owned and conveniently located a couple of blocks away from the subway station. During the lease renewal talks, the landlords asked for $26,500 monthly which is already a 44% increase from their current rent. Bravely, the owners explained their reason to shut down their doors not because they cant sustain the high rent, but because they refused to change their business model by hiking up their prices for their customers and cutting off staff numbers. Their original rent was $8,625 per month only back in 2012. It was also the similar story with my local deli owner (border of Williamsburg/ Greenpoint) when I noticed the slight increases in everyday staples such as pint of milk or bread, he mentioned that their monthly rent has gone up by 62% and they are doing their best to resist shutting down for a “fancy bakery” or “another bagel shop”.
This is the new, second level of gentrification that even the once good business-making independent stores are facing it, not leaving the residents alone. Their battle is with the multinational brands that are occupying retail spaces in gentrified areas backed up with corporate money.
(Link about the shop “Whisk”: http://gothamist.com/2019/04/22/whisk_williamsburg_closing.php)
Throughout this week’s readings, particularly the Meltzer piece on commercial gentrification and retention, I was most curious about gentrification as it affects different segments of the population in the neighborhoods experiencing it. I left Meltzer’s discussion of Sunset Park wanting to know more. Specifically, as I briefly introduced when providing a glimpse into my research on the walk to work data’s relationship with existing garment factory presence in the neighborhood, the questions remain on what the limitations of this kind of data can teach us about who benefits from what manufacturing and commercial spaces.
Building on Tarry Hum’s work on Sunset Park in her 2014 book, “Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn’s Sunset Park,” the influx of foreign capital into Sunset Park coupled with the reinvention of garment production at Industry City shapes a unique face of gentrification and exploitation for the most vulnerable population: limited-English proficient (im)migrant adults across both the Mexican and Chinese communities in Sunset Park, some of whom may be undocumented, particularly in the working-class Fujianese subset of the Chinese population there.
Particularly as a lot of this week’s reading looks at residential displacement and commercial changes across the city, I of course always come back to the relationship of these socio-economic changes and the networks of social capital and organizational support (beyond those “services” looked at in Meltzer’s piece, though those are important, too).
Looking forward to class tomorrow.
— Ali
Gentrification has been on my mind a lot the last few weeks, not just because of this week’s topic but because I went a play in Chicago last week that dealt with many of our reading’s themes. “Lottery Day” is the seventh and final play in Ike Holter’s “Rightlynd Saga,” and concludes the tale of a fictitious predominately black neighborhood in Chicago undergoing rapid change and displacement. The play takes place in the backyard of Mallory, the commanding matriarch of Rightlynd whose space is now imposed upon by a looming newly constructed townhouse. The backyard BBQ in which the play takes place is a farewell of sorts for the neighborhood and an opportunity for a diverse set of characters to communicate their feelings about the changes that are happening.
Many aspects our readings are represented in the play. There is the young and well-meaning hipster who has converted an empty storefront into a community theater. Another young man whose bodega has been foreclosed upon as he struggles to compete with the new organic market. The social tensions that Hyra writes of, the limited “social interactions between longtime residents and newcomers,” are addressed in Holter’s “Lottery Day” when a character speaks of a “white, silent nothing” that has consumed the once vibrant, but historically violent, neighborhood. Police arrive at one point in the play after a bullet is fired into a window of the new townhouse and the older residents remark that previously only a body in the street could bring police to their block.
Last week there was an excellent article in the NY Times that focused on gentrification in Raleigh, NY (link below). It evidenced a discrepancy between white home-buyers and home-buyers of color. Increasingly, in diverse neighborhoods, white home buyers were shown to be at higher income levels than the median in the neighborhoods they are buying into, while home-buyers of color are typically in line with the neighborhood. There’s a freedom of movement that seems to be readily available for some but not all. I read the article the day after I went to the play and the photo they included, of new construction in Raleigh, is eerily similar to the house in “Lottery Day” (links below). The play concludes with a sense of resignation and acceptance that change has come and that what is lost is lost. Considering how long people have been trying to address the issue of gentrification, with little to show for it, it seems like maybe the only thing to do.
-Adam Sachs
https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/reviews/ct-ent-lottery-day-goodman-review-0410-story.html
https://www.theroot.com/playing-the-gentrification-game-in-ike-holters-lottery-1834022283
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/27/upshot/diversity-housing-maps-raleigh-gentrification.html
This is more of an anecdotal observation than a proven, researched one, but it seems like the popular concept of gentrification – how people use the word to describe what they see on the ground – has expanded and broadened considerably. It’s an increasingly fuzzy and abstract term, encompassing everything from rising rents to espresso counters to urban farms to new parks. Do you just know it when you see it?
Well, it turns out that it’s not just popular definitions that can’t reach consensus. Our readings this week introduced several different methodologies to measure gentrification, from storefront turnover rates to rent increases to zoning policy. Some, like Hwang and Lin, urge researchers to seek out the full breadth of causal factors, which includes (but may not be limited to), distance from the CBD, socioeconomic conditions of residents, the changing geography of work, crime rates, public policies and state institutions (like BIDs, historic district designations, TIF), global investment, and housing prices. Other authors, like Lipman, were less focused on quantitative metrics of gentrification and more concerned with the ideological and political impetus behind the effects of gentrification. In this critique of the HOPE VI program, class integration acts as “cover” for gentrification, a thin and superficial attempt at racial and class integration that allows white, middle class access to and control over space.
Hyra describes a series of consequences of gentrification – residential and commercial displacement, political changes, cultural displacement – and the consequent affective dimensions of these symptoms. But what are the causes? Hyra admits it’s challenging to sort them out. Is it demand- or supply-side? He also incorporates perceptions of race into the proposal for further study, a definitively qualitative metric. Studies of the positive effects of gentrification for incumbent and/or low-income residents have ambiguous results, but enough positive results to warrant a reconsideration of the process.
How do we measure it? Should gentrification in a neighborhood be assessed with the geographic and historical contingencies that are specific to it? Or is there a universal and standardized metric that would allow for comparison? Can the two be joined? Lastly, how do the perceptions (the standpoint) of the researcher color interpretations of gentrification?
Smith, Hwang and Lin, and Hyra not only have different definitions of what causes gentrification, but also have fundamentally different understandings of the unique type of problem gentrification presents. Hyra, with his imperative to “ensure a more equitable (re)distribution of political power” certainly views gentrification as a problematic process that causes significant social disenfranchisement for the existing low-income residents. This view contrasts starkly with Smith’s more impassive and Marxist take, in which capital is agential and determinative, and personal preference or social interactions of the inhabitants is sidelined.
These readings reminded me of the Maura McGee article we read earlier in the semester—Starbucks on Franklin Street, where the author has lengthy chats with residents of a gentrifying neighborhood about what, exactly, that means to them. In contrast, all three of the theoretical articles for today make fundamental assumptions about where gentrification falls on a spectrum of “phenomenon” to “problem” in urban America, with little self-awareness about how they land on this definition. In the absence of a discussion about this spectrum, each article makes convincing use of very similar data to very different ends. McGee’s article definitely poses gentrification as a problem in a similar way to Hyra, where the local population becomes disenfranchised and disconnected in an increasingly expensive and exclusive world of micro-breweries and “authentic” neighborhood coffee shops. But her conclusion, that Starbucks—a capitalist franchise if ever there were one—becomes a new community hub in absence of the old, casts complex shadows on the interaction between capital-determined and socially driven theories of gentrification.
Throughout all of the readings for this week lies an inherent tension between supply side versus demand side explanations for the causes of gentrification. In response to this tension, Neil Smith makes the claim that gentrification is not caused by people moving from the suburbs into the city, but rather it is capital that is moving back to the city. His theory posits that, since capital flows to where the rate of return is highest, the effects of simultaneously having fewer options available to make a return on an investment on housing in the suburbs paired with the continued depreciation of housing in inner-cities, creates what Smith calls a rent gap. When this gap grows to be large enough, the capital will begin to flow back to the city for rehabilitation and renewal.
In his conclusion, Smith mentions that, as productive capital in the city grows, middle and upper -class people move back to the city “while the working class and the poor would inherit the old declining suburbs in a cruelly ironic continuation of the filtering process. They would then be trapped in the suburbs, not the inner city” (547). In my blog posts, I keep coming back to Kim Johnson’s bleak article about African-Americans being pushed out to the suburbs as a result of gentrification and John’s research about immigrant populations settling in suburban areas as well. It appears that the key difference between being “trapped in the suburbs” versus the city is a complete loss of political and social capital that once enabled minority populations to organize as well as for community-based organizations to reach these groups. If Smith is right that capital follows return on investment, we can expect the cycle of city to suburbs to perpetuate. But what does this cycle mean for minority populations?
The weakening of political and social capital for minority groups as a result of gentrification is not solely happening to those being pushed out to the suburbs. As Lipman explains, even those who remain in their neighborhoods find their power and community ties diminished. This is because, as communities become more mixed, white middle to upper class individuals tend to have greater influence over the political, social, and economic decisions for the neighborhood, and these decisions are not always in line with the values of minority communities. As Lipman points out, this is parallel to a colonial model based on the assumption that minority communities should want the same values as white middle-class groups (96). This argument is also echoed by Derek Hyra who argues that the political displacement can also be linked to cultural displacement where there is a visible change in the norms, preferences, and amenities (171).
I appreciate that all of the readings emphasize forces that are beyond the preferences of young professionals to move from the suburbs to the city. I am a young professional who grew up in Paris and moved to Manhattan with my family when I was 16. As soon as I graduated from college in 2010, I moved from one gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn to the next, nonstop for 10 years, constantly seeking an affordable rent. Even as a white affluent educated woman I had to contend with the exhaustingly volatile housing market in New York. This is an issue of impotent housing policies on the part of the city and the state. This is a failure to upload the human right to housing above capitalist greed. The state has the power over the market – as such, there are no excuses for the laissez-faire neoliberal practices that plague our housing policies.
– Rebecca Krisel
This week’s readings focused on the seemingly economic process of gentrification. As Smith (1979) describes, the value of a location related to a combination of the sales price of the house, the ground rent and ground rent and how much of it is capitalized, and the potential ground rent, with potential ground rent carrying the most weight for the potential of an area to be gentrified. Hyra (2016) describes and argues against a variety of forces that impact why gentrification occurs. For example, a reduction in crime is given as an example with the note that crime rates fell in the 1990s but gentrification did not follow. Other factors explored include commuting distance to the core business district, federal and local policies, and a new generational racial tolerance.
Zukin (2009) presents local case studies comparing the gentrification of Harlem and Williamsburg. While Harlem’s gentrification and redevelopment resulted from a large degree of state intervention, as well as the creation of a BID and heavy involvement by community development corporations, Williamsburg’s gentrification was largely the result of private market forces following artists/bohemians populating the neighborhood (though it still led to a rezoning of the waterfront eventually showing political powers now shaping the area).
Gentrification often includes a racial component with minority populations and their communities being displaced through the process. Lipman (2011) argues against the idea that mixed-income schools and neighborhoods are inherently better for people from a lower socioeconomic class, which is an argument often made in the context of gentrification. Lipman also describes the “root shock” of being displaced from a community and the trauma that comes from this displacement. In other words, although the neighborhood may experience a sort of revitalization, the gentrification process would not generally serve to improve the lives of the original residents of the neighborhood, but instead cause disruption to their lives.
-Christopher Ryan
I am glad that several classmates noted that the 3 main gentrification theory readings seem to proliferate explanations on the (“same”) underlying residential phenomenon (the case studies on commercial and educational aspects are less so). I came away confused, after going in with a certain idea of what gentrification is about.
My preexisting notions were that (1) gentrification is a (real estate) economics-driven phenomenon (people wanting to “buy low” an asset that has the potential to go up a lot in market price, so that means previously central but cheap(ened) areas of the city that were priced low due to various reasons, a lot of them being associated with the racial profile of the area, and the assumptions and/or reality that go along with that, eg higher crime, inferior local schools, etc.). (2) The strong and problematic racial dimension is reflected in who’s buying in versus who’s being displaced — the buyers being mostly white, additionally characterized the other indicia of privilege (higher education, higher income/wealth, more of a professional identity) associated with that skin color (the articles do not really mention them, perhaps because of the relatively small numbers, but the articles on immigration a couple of weeks ago makes it clear that the buyers also include the better educated and higher income-earning Asian Americans tagging along on the white coattails, plus the not inconsiderable number of Hispanics who self-identify as white rather than as black). (3) The crucial importance of crime rate reduction starting in the 1990s (now we know much better that it has a lot to do with demographics but at the time people overly credited conservative policing using racial profiling/broken windows approaches) that made the areas much safer in reality and in perception – safe enough for richer, educated, professional folks to feel like it’s an neighborhood that they can move into and raise their kids – it’s no bargain if the kids are getting mugged on the walk to school.
Notwithstanding the confusion I felt, some of the readings added important qualifiers to my preexisting notions. (1) The role of the state – policies, funding. That came across in the Zukin article comparing/contrasting Harlem and Williamsburg. (2) The multiple dimensions – residential, commercial, education/schools, other “amenities” (including the very important amenity of safe streets, eg low(er) crime) – although I suspect that economics is a powerful thread through all of them. The fact that there are multiple dimensions may explain why there is a “lag” – the price may have been low for a long time, but for many a gentrifier with kids, they need to want until the area is safe and the local schools are half-way decent before buying in. Thus the crucial importance for gentrifiers of the proliferation of charter schools? (since it may take a long while before the local public schools are upgraded)
Thanks to Ruya for bringing up the example of the cookery shop Whisk in Williamsburg and Caroline for reminding us of the Crown Heights Starbucks piece. I read the linked writeup on Whisk. The basic storyline is that the rent increase was too much to bear – unless the Whisk owner changes the business model into something more mercenary (higher prices for customers, squeezed wages for their staff). Yet, and maybe I am reading too much between the lines and excuse me for piling on Whisk’s owner (who sounds like a very literate person), the rent had previously been raised AND the store then expanded – so that suggest the previous rent increase was so bearable the owner found it profitable to expand the business! Also, this is a mini-chain: the owner has two other cookery shops in up-and-coming neighborhoods; being in gentrifying neighborhoods is perhaps even their own “DNA”?! The Whisk owner’s answer is … to close shop and leave the current employees with no jobs?
Similar to some classmates, I was struck in this week’s reading by the lack of a clear definition of gentrification. There’s a sense of repeating patterns, but in terms of distilling the specific phenomenon across different within the trends and forces of urban development, scholars still face challenges. It was particularly interesting, however, to read Smith’s piece from 1979, as it pre-dates the current discourse. The rhetorical and causal line he tries to draw between individual consumer choice and mechanisms of urban land valuation, is still a communications challenge today. To the extent some of the other authors and popular discourse discuss the consumer choices involved in gentrification as particularly millenial behavior, Smith’s description of gentrification as the urban upper middle class geographic concentration shows how the economic and racial patters that construct the visible, daily symptoms of gentrification are not conditional on the specific behaviors of this generation.
In considering how one might ideally want urban space to evolve over time, gentrification becomes a stand-in for underlying problems of inequality that includes access to consumer choice in both retail and housing markets. The Rachel Meltzer piece on the interiority of culture, and thus the experience of loss as a domestic, communal loss as opposed to a public, market-based loss, provided insight into why gentrification is such a compelling political discourse. It is a process that is felt by people in all elements of their life, even before or without being displaced. While in some ways it makes it harder to raise some of the core economic structures that make the displacement possible and dismissible collateral damage for developers, to remove the felt nature of gentrification from analyses that could lead to solutions does a disservice to understanding what is lost and what people are trying to save.
Toby