Frozen Tropics pointed it out and Richard Layman did too, the NY Mag article about a neighborhood that seemed as if it was going to get gentrified, but is now heading in the opposite direction. I enjoyed reading the article as well as the comments at the Curbed blog that shed some light on the Red Hook neighborhood.
I can’t really talk about a neighborhood I know nothing about, but the idea of de-gentrification is curious. Of course, the question is has gentrification occurred in the case of Red Hook, or was it really strong wishful thinking? And if a neighborhood is gentrifying and then the process is stalled indefinitely, is that de-gentrification, or does it only count if the neighborhood reached a gentrfied point? To me degentrification seems to hint at disinvestment, but reading the NY Magazine article, they appear to define it as something else.
Today I got an email from the folks over at Neighbors Project with their 7 Rules for Talking About Gentrification and they make some excellent points. I especially like #2. Get your history right. I’ll call Shaw an historically Black neighborhood, mainly because it a) in it’s most recent history been predominately African American, and b) the history bonus points of notables come from the Black History basket. Yet I will totally acknowledge that once you go further back than 1930, Shaw is mixed, if not white.
Flipping around on their site I found a link to some Instructable guides they produced. Some are so simple that it should be like ‘duh’, such as “How to Pick Up Trash In Front of Your Home.” But I guess if you lived somewhere where this was never an issue, then a how-to is in order. (My excuse for not cleaning up in front of my house, I’m just lazy) They have some other guides like “How to be a trick-or-treat stop for apartment-dwellers“; “How to Shop at a Downtown Farmers Market”; and “How to say hi to a stranger on the street“. These guides, though a little dorky, can help people integrate into the neighborhood and foster neighborly-ness.
Check out their 7 Rules, what do you think?