In Katz’s “From Underclass to Entrepreneur: New Technologies of Poverty Work in Urban America,” gave me another reason to think that harmony is the hardest substance to achieve in the midst of urbanization.
Gentrification, even though has been explained to me back in the days of IDC 3001, still seems relatively “alien” to me, mainly because I have lived in areas where gentrification went by unnoticed. Gentrification, the idea that new people coming into the neighborhood and changes the whole dynamic of the place, seems unrealistic to me. Idealistically, gentrification is used as a dominant force of revamping one neighborhood through the interaction between insiders and outsiders and somehow this interaction fuses the two groups together in “harmony” and brings in new culture and fresh perspective into the group. As a psychology major, I remain skeptical since “in-group, out-group” psychology generally prevents encroachment of outside perspectives into the existing environment, creating more discrimination and conflicts and promoting disruption of the community. Especially since little has been explored about the feeling of the existing neighborhood toward the wave of incoming gentrifiers, I expect, from a totally human point of view that at best, interaction will be little, since the existing residents themselves do not really interact with each other that much, let alone with the new people and even if they do, the quality of the interaction will be decreased since the same amount of interaction will happen with an increasing number of people in the neighborhood.
In short, gentrification, practically speaking, destroys the tightness of the community, if the tightness even exists to begin with. Yet the “theory” about the benefit of gentrification keeps extoling that having middle class people moving into a neighborhood will increase social ties. Maybe there has been something that I’ve been missing all along or that I am just that pessimistic. My view kept being echoed over again as I kept on reading the excerpt. The existing residents of the neighborhood are the driving force behind changes around the neighborhood rather than the new residents. Again, competition among in-group and out-group for the reign of the neighborhood will erupt and not cease to exist unless one group gains control and excludes the other faction from the throne. It’s just human nature.
The hostility, though mild in effect, becomes a driving force keeping the neighborhood from becoming gentrified. A classical example is given in the piece, about a black gentrifier named Jennifer, who, after moving into an existing resident of the neighborhood, was called “white” by another in-group resident. She is of course, not “white” in race, but “white” in the fact that she has the status of an outsider.
From a policy-maker point of view, gentrification may make the neighborhood more attractive in terms of real estate value and marketable for people who are looking to move in, but the neighborhood itself decreases in intrinsic, community value that really makes a neighborhood what it is. Depending on the outcome striven for, I really think policy makers should separate between “bettering a neighborhood” and “enriching a neighborhood.”
