I did a phone interview today with someone doing research on gentrification. I think I overwhelmed them with too much historical information or background. The devil is in the detail.
Anyway one of the popular aspects of gentrification to focus on families and individuals being displaced. The problem with that view is that Americans (and maybe other people) are very mobile, so it is hard to say if ‘genrtrification’ could bear the blame, or is the chief reason a person or a family moves. considering people move all the time. I tried to illustrate the mobility of city residents to the interviewer, but didn’t do such a great job.
Here’s one example. in cleaning up some data from the 1900 census I was looking for a Chinese’s fellow’s address. The Census taker must have been drunk because towards the end of the page he was listed a bunch of people with different street addresses (usually there is a block of addresses) and it was barely legible. So I figured I’d fine Mr. Woon(?) in the city directory. In the directory, there were 2 male Woons of the same name in DC neither of them living in the Enumeration District I was researching. He wasn’t the only one. When I couldn’t read the sheet I would refer to the directory which was 2 or so years off from the Census, and it wasn’t helpful because the people tended to live at a completely different address on a different street.
I’ve lived in Shaw going on 10 years, and compared to others that’s not much time, but I’ve seen neighbors come and go for all different reasons. Renters may leave because they graduated college, because it was a health danger, because their landlord was an ass, or because their landlord decided or sell or the bank decided to foreclose. Owners leave because of job re-locations, marriage, divorce, separation, illness, family changes, desire for something different, taxes, frustrations with neighbors, or because the good Lord decided to call them to eternity. In that gentrification plays a part in the owners’ motivation in selling to cash out and maybe taxes. All the other reasons I’ve observed, family breakup, professional moving on and death have very little to do with the neighborhood and more to do with the individuals.
This page contains a single entry by Mari published on June 8, 2010 11:09 PM.