While reading the readings for this week, I couldn’t help but think about how gentrification seems to be a problem without solution. In both readings, the historical trajectory of neighborhoods is the focus—the process of gentrification, what starts it, and where it ends up. But if, for instance, we’re talking about Crown Heights, where gentrification is currently in the process of kicking people out of the neighborhood as prices climb, what is the solution to the problem? Is gentrification’s end as a displacement of previous tenants and the investment of newer wealthier ones inevitable once the process starts? And me, as a middle-class white kid renting an apartment in Flatbush, what part do I have in the whole process?

So, upfront: I’ve experienced homelessness; I was homeless for about three (four?) months over the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. Homelessness, for that reason and more, is an issue that hits fairly close to home for me. These readings, in that respect, I found to be really good for understanding homelessness: in the Klienewski, we get the harsh, governmental angle on the problem; in the Picture the Homeless article we get possible solutions; and in Hidden City we get a human portrait. Especially as shown by Hidden City and the video we watched on Tuesday, I think the humanizing aspect of talking about homelessness is incredibly important—most homeless people obviously aren’t such by choice, it’s because of forces (sometimes Kafkaesque ones, like those happening to Christina in Hidden City) outside of their control. Most of the reason homelessness is such a problem, from my point of view, is because of failures of empathy—homeless are people, in need of help, that’s all. So maybe me question is, how do you teach empathy?

As food for thought, here’s this cool awareness campaign run by Canada’s Homeless Youth organization:

What is the place of subjectivity in sociological study? More or less, I found myself newly informed by the Gregory reading (especially in regards to the statement made on the stereotypical views of impoverished groups as being disorganized and helpless), however I also found myself intensely distrustful of some of the historical accounts—not because I don’t think any of these issues didn’t happen, far from it, but because of the admittance of the author on the tilt he was putting on it. Objectivity is impossible, I get that—the golden objective standard for journalism is fast becoming a funny thing people used to strive for, and the “impartial observer” is little more than a myth—but the acknowledgement of recolored history made me more skeptical than I feel I should have been for any point of the author’s to get through. “While doing my fieldwork,” Gregory writes, “it quickly became apparent that activists continually recollected and reworded Corona’s history to provide meaning and context, as well as narrative authority, to interpretations of contemporary social conditions.” (14) Then, later, “If my writing of this history has been skewed by the ways in which activists selectively reuse the past, it has also been shaped by my own, equally particular, theoretical and political commitments.” (15) The problem I find with these quotes is more or less the problem that’s apparent in Govan’s action of “[dismissing] decades of people and events with an impatient wave of his hand,” and the further problem of the proliferation of the stereotype of the welfare queen (which seems to be more or less the same action but with the blinders covering up different angles)—the complexity goes unrealized and, as such, the account becomes biased in a way that’s too blatant for the role of the study of how people work. As in the Kleniewski readings, there’s an attempt to simplify trends which leads to an impossibility to find what’s seemingly true: “Thus, the ecologists’ search for a model to describe ‘The City’ was frustrated by the complexity of actual cities.” (27) The problem here doesn’t seem so much to be one of some baseless redirection but of an exchange of sympathy—away from accounts that might might complicate the sympathy and a redrawing of lines to make sympathy easier. This seems to me to be a failure of empathy. But the problem then becomes: if objectivity is impossible, and the acknowledgement of directed subjectivity seems untrustworthy, how can empathy be projected more boldly into every account, and how can complexity be more truly realized? How do you balance the need for truth to systems with the need for your point about the systems to get across?

—Kyle