This past Tuesday’s class raised a lot of questions about gentrification for me. As I looked further online, I found the controversy is often boiled down to this one question: “Does gentrification hurt or help the neighborhoods being gentrified?” While my own instinct, only shored up by Spike Lee’s viral speech against gentrification last year, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/spike-lee-amazing-rant-against-gentrification.html, is to be doubtful of the good brought about by the current “hyper-gentrification”, I would love to hear what people think.
2 thoughts on “A Discussion about Gentrification”
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What has been presented to us in class and through readings has been most anti-gentrification, so I think those of us (including me) who know nothing else might be skewed against gentrification. It would be nice to have some information in class about the pros of gentrification apart from the reduction in crime.
I, as you might have guessed, believe gentrification has more negatives than positives. There really seem to be two main things (from my narrow perspective) that might justify gentrification. First is an improvement of the neighborhood’s “stature” (probably the wrong word). When there’s mostly wealthy residents in an area, crime tends to be low. A safer neighborhood promotes tourism and commence (e.g. Williamburg and Hell’s Kitchen). Second, gentrification can be seen as a natural extension of a free-market, capitalistic society and so any action against it would be considered anti-capitalist.
In contrast, gentrification can turn neighborhoods into ruins of their former selves. Gentrified neighborhoods seem to lose the “community feel” that once stood there. Neighbors don’t ask each other for help or get involved with each other. An ethnic enclave might see its once lively neighborhood replaced by educated, wealthy young adults who might not bring a lively culture to replace that which they displaced. Most shockingly, long-time residents of a neighborhood might find themselves displaced in no fault of their own. In the same way people the world over have longed for their homeland after displacement, people in cities who may have spent their whole lives may suddenly be removed from the one place they could call home.
In the Arts of New York City last semester, one thing Professor Dara Kiese discussed was the duty of residents to care about and get involved with the changes that affect their community, whether it be the whole city of New York or just a neighborhood. Community members who feel gentrification threatens their neighborhood should band together and find ways to oppose it in whatever ways they can if they feel strongly enough against it. The difficulty is actually solving the “problem”.
Thanks for these smart comments. I’d love to have the class take a little time to discuss this issue, maybe after next week’s speaker.
Just FYI, when I was at the NY Times, I wrote an article for the Real Estate section about the pros and cons of landmarking sections of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Personally, I’m in favor of protecting beautiful brownstones, especially when they’re largely home to a population that has lived in the neighborhood for decades, as was the case here. But Spike Lee issued a screed attacking my article and some similar articles, saying that landmarking was a key element in gentrification that in turn made housing increasingly unaffordable for New Yorkers. And of course I’m also in favor of affordable housing.
So it’s a complicated issue, but definitely one worth discussing.
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