In today’s New York Times the case where the cash strapped city of New London wants to steal the property from homeowners so they can build yuppie complexs has been placed on the Supreme Court’s docket. The city fathers (and mothers) have some wacked out idea of “public use.” Which is the part of the law that allows local governments to kick people out of their homes. Usually it is to build a road, make a big park, like Central Park in NYC, or even to build a factory that would employ thousands. Not a hotel, conference center and private 80 homes.
Tag: Gentrification
In Shaw field trip
Went on a little field trip to take a quick peek at gentrification elsewhere. It is the same everywhere I guess. When there is a housing crunch, where the housing stock is not enough for the population, people with some money begin moving into neighborhoods where poorer people are. But there was cool stuff too, which I’ll share in pictures.
Went through Harlem. I don’t know where the gentrification began there. It is pretty near the Park at 110th. Which I think is the bottom of Harlem. I could understand the reasoning behind paying big bucks to live near Central Park. The further north you went from the Park, the less gentrified it looked.
I wandered through the East Village. What jobs do odd looking goths have to afford these crack fueled rents? What jobs do to the people of Greenwich Village have to afford any of these NYC rents? Yeah, yeah, NYC greatest city in the world, blah, blah, blah, known for high rents, but still $4,000 a month for a 3 bedroom walk up? Crazy.
The good things I found in the city, besides decent buskers on the subway, were the thousands of little grocers thoughout the city. My roommate thinks DC needs more of these kinds of stores. Even in the less nice parts of Harlem you will find stores with fresh veggies and fruits, like this one, where people can get the ingredients to make meals from stratch. Scratch, instead of some high in sodium, fat and sugar prepackaged crap that is sold in many a DC quickie mart, next to the 40s.
Also walking around the city that never sleeps….. well it does sleep, on a Sunday morning ’cause that’s the time to find a parking spot…. I digress. I noticed some great architectural details. Not just on the buildings of note but the everyday ones. I say doors and ironwork that was just inspiring.
How gentrification can be just plain EVIL
Friday morning while trying to convince myself that getting up and going to work early is a good thing, I heard over NPR a newstory that riled up passions in my conservative heart. Property rights.
The story is about what’s going on in New London, CT where the city wants to redevelop a section of town to make way yuppie condos. Fine. Problem, they are threatening to use ’eminent domain’ as a way of taking land away from the few homeowners in that area. Eminent domain should only be used to build roads for polluting cars or waterways or big public utility projects, not privately owned condos. Yuppies and the working class are equal in the eyes of G-d, and should be equal in the eyes of the State, but alas no. Apparently because you can suck more money out of yuppies via taxes, yuppies are better people and thus the State chooses to kick out working/middle class homeowners, depriving them of their property. The State is dangerous.
Eminent Domain Watch, a blog, has a wonderful amount of information on this case along with other incidents of local and state governments encroaching on individual property rights.
The New London case is the best example of gentrification evil style. Gentrification done naturally invovles individual property owners selling to either other property owners or corporation when they so chose. They are not forced to sell (ok this can be argued on whaddya mean by ‘force’). Provided they can keep up with real estate taxes and local ordinances, individuals can choose NOT to sell. The residents in the New London area do not have that choice. And that is plain wrong. So wrong.
Should the Supreme Court decide in favor of the City of New London real property rights will be undermined for all US citizens. In DC I could only imagine the worst. My beloved Anthony Williams is already the bitch of the developers ’round here. I know the city likes sucking money from higher incomes and crack fuel housing prices, but if they were given this tool….
In Alexandria, with mo gentrification
I would link back to my friend Nora B.’s livejournal post, for the love of me, I can’t find it and the girl is a prolific poster.
Background
My friend Nora B. has a condo in an area of Alexandria and her area, particularly her condo, is experiencing the joys of gentrification. First, let me describe N. She’s a big white girl from my native Florida. We met at a confirmation class a few years ago and she was one of the several people I knew buying houses during the wild years of rising prices between 2000-now.
She bought, with he help of her parents, a condo on the western edge of the Alexandria city/county (what is Alexandria?) limits for $140Kish. The condo is this huge, not so pretty 15 floor monster on Duke St filled with brown people not born of this country…. who apparently drive cabs. So Nora was fine with being the only (with the exception of her roommate) Anglo EFL (English as a First Language) person under the age of 50 in the building.
The area of Alexandria that she’s in is experiencing a different sort of gentrification. I don’t know how to describe it as…. different. From Nora’s living room window she sees Yuppieland (which we have a song for) otherwise known as Cameron Station. Yuppieland used to be a military. Now it is a place where people who can afford near million dollar townhomes live and breed. Outside of Yuppieland it’s pretty much bluecollar/ whitecollar, eh. Pretty much what Arlington’s Wilson Blvd area used to be like in the early 1990s. You got the dinner theater, porn theater, CVS, cruddy Magrudgers, Mango Mike’s, and other generic run of the mill businesses.
Nora remarks gentrification
Her first sign that gentrification was coming to her condo was “Republican Guy”. A white man, married, father, American, in a suit spotted. Apparently the condo was affordable, and he wasn’t scared off by the huge number of Africans and Latin Americans running around. Then another night Nora spots, in the building, the Bennetton ad hipster kids. Last weekend we spotted white people in the pool. The typical pool attendees are Islamic grandmas who’ll only show off their feet and the grandkids they are watching.
Another sign came from the condo board. Nora would like more parking, or at least parking for her friends who visit, and the building rules force visitors to park across the 4 lane street at odd times. So she has taken to going to the board meetings. From attending the meetings she has learned that the porn theater’s days are numbered, as well as the Magrudgers. They will be replaced by the yuppie grocer Harris Teeter. Also in a move to attract white people with money, the condo is considering updating the decor that hasn’t been changed since the Nixon administration.
Gentrification in Shaw- Manna Report
If you haven’t read Manna’s 2003 report you should. It covers rising rents, displacement, the personal impact gentrification is having on long term residents, good stuff. The best part is the photo on the cover (this is a PDF file) of 7th Street right after the riots, with the burned out shells. Okay, not the best part, but the jewels of the report are the personal stories of residents who have experienced the rent increases and non-renewal of leases.
The stories do help illustrate the problem that gentrification has brought. Saying rents have increased, nothing. Saying that one day a renter receives a letter that their 2 bedroom apartment that had been $634 a month was soon going up to $954 in 5 months, says a lot.
Conversions are another thing Manna writes about, that I didn’t think much about before. Not just apartments to condos conversions but from boarding house to single family residence. There are several townhomes that you can see along New Jersey Avenue that are divided into two residences next to homes with the same exterior that are just one residence. The report mentions large townhomes that were formerly boarding homes housing several people at low rents that are now for one family.
A good thing about the report is that is does get into the specifics, naming names and addresses. It mentions location, address of particular apartments and converted and rehabbed homes and also businesses that have felt the impact of gentrification hard.
Of course I disagree with Manna on some points, but that is just my opinion. I don’t disagree that there is gentification going on in Shaw. Hence the title of the blog “In Shaw (now with more gentrification)” which acknowledges the gentrification. I don’t disagree that people are being displaced and the sadness of that.
I have a problem with the concentration of bemoaning the areas west of 9th St. That area has been gentrified. Dead to any hope of making it affordable. Move on. Don’t wring your hands about the unaffordable even to mid middle class folks, lofts and condos. Another problem I have is Manna not coping to it’s role in the gentrification game. Yes, Manna sells homes and condos at rates affordable to the people it is trying to help. I gather to cover operating costs, it also has sold homes AT market rate, reflecting the crazy prices in Shaw. Manna is a non-profit, so is it any better when Manna does it and worse when a for-profit does it too, doing what it was created to do…. profit? I remember when I was first looking to buy they and other non-profit developers had some pretty expensive homes. For the ones you could afford you’d have to get in line or belong to a certain group, or wait for …. whenever.
The solutions that Manna presents, would at best preserve small islands of affordable renting in a sea of gentrification. They desire to preserve Section 8 by helping tenant associations. Good if you are in large enough building where tenants can buy the building. Land development, well maybe public land but with quasi-public organizations like Metro (WMATA), I don’t think so. Maybe they hadn’t heard but Metro doesn’t have enough to pass up maximum money making opportunities. New jobs, well, that might help some. But the kinds of jobs needed to afford the market rate rents and houses around here are a bit unaffordable to folks with “good jobs”. And as with my former neighbors, when the opportunity to pull up stakes so your kid can get a yard, with grass, and enough room to play and run around in, presents itself because you got a good job or can sell the house at $$$, there is nothing saying you’ll stay in Shaw.
How to Gentrify a neighborhood: pt 2 1/2 the gentrifier
Warning: I’m writing this after 3 glasses of wine. I could be crazy.
In a followup to Gentrify yo hood:pt 1 this part briefy looks at the gentrifier.
First, money. Do you have it or don’t you. If you have money you might have choices, you could live in the “nicer” parts of the city, or you could buy bigger digs in the hood. Then there are the people like me, who don’t have a lot of money and the hood was the only affordable thing. So you move in and make the best of it. I didn’t move in to displace the poor. I moved into Shaw, because it was along the Green and Yellow lines (metro), close to a grocery store, decent for my car-less lifestyle, and oh I could afford it as a single person.
Second, tolerance level. The white bread population that loves the suburbs don’t cotton the city. Scared white people need not apply either. Scared [any other ethnic group] should keep to the ‘burbs as well. To be and urban pioneer and gentrify the city you need to put up with the crime, the trash, the bamas, the crackheads, the vacant houses, the whatever, until the day the neighborhood turns “nice”.
third, and last (cause I really need to go to bed), the gentrifier needs to be an object of change. This can range from the small and the really local aspect of investing in your home and inspiring others to do the same. Or harassing neighbors to be in compliance with the DC laws by calling the authorities constantly. Or it can range on the larger scale as to being involved in neighborhood wide revilization programs.
Bed.Now.
More than just black and white
The Intowner just briefly touched on it in this month’s article about gentrification in Shaw. One little thing is that it is not just a phenomenon of white people moving in and kicking out black people. There is an element of class and general self interest within the African American community that adds to the mix.
Who do you think owns the land
There are a lot of renters in Shaw. These not only include apartment buildings but also houses converted into apartments or whole townhomes rented out to families or made into boarding/group homes. Who owns those houses? Who owns the houses where people are getting pushed out by gentrification? It may be wrong to assume it is always “THE MAN”, the unknown white WASPY figure in the shadowy background ever exploiting minorities. It isn’t always so. If my own block is a good example, two Section 8 houses are owned by a man of African decent (can’t remember if he’s from the islands or from Africa), and the other is owned by the Jamaican lawyer. There are plenty of houses rented out to poorer Afro-Americans owned by middle class African Americans, who live elsewhere. So when the economic revival comes, do you think Black solidarity will keep black landlords from kicking out their tenants?
Two good examples are the building that once housed Sisterspace and the Kesley Garden apartments. The Sisterspace building is owned by an elderly African American man. Sisterspace, was a bookstore catering to the Black community. After many years of disagreement about the lease and a legal battle, Sisterspace was kicked to the curb. Gentrification was to blame. Yes, the economic revival was to blame, but the person removing this black business was another black business. The apartment building Kesley Gardens is owned by an African American church in SE DC. The church is working toward removing the tenants so the building can be converted into luxury condos.
The Good Thing About Gentrification Is….
When Whole Foods first moved in my Aunt was doubtful that blacks would take to it. The conversation didn’t get past, “Black folk, um, I don’t know…” Go into the Whole Foods/Fresh Fields on the weekend when it is packed, you will see a diversity of black faces, and I’m not talking about the ones behind the counters. There are African cabbies, who have discovered the joys of a central location with parking, eating in the booths near the cashiers. There are the all-natural brothers and sistahs, in search of the veggie/vegan organic food you cannot get at the corner quickie mart deep in Shaw. Products of Jack & Jill wander the aisles, possibly in search of something for a dinner party? Oh, yeah and me blowing no less than $12 on wine, fish, fruit, or chocolate. Occasionally, there may be a woman in FF with kids, whose class background could be middle class to working class, but hard to tell.
For those of us who survive the wave of gentrification or are waving it in, the fruits of it are enjoyed. The equity in the house is much appreciated. The new eatery that serves good food, and maybe a place to sit, is nice too. The shops catering to the middle and upper classes that come into Shaw do not have “Whites Only” signs in front. The only signs are for VISA, MasterCard, and American Express, because the only color that counts is green.
In Closing
The point I have tried to make is that gentrification is not necessarily anti-African American. Gentrification isn’t necessarily pushed and helped by Anglos only either. It is economic. But in Shaw the victims of gentrification have a black face and the new residents tend to be white, so it is easy to simply it and say that blacks are being pushed out by whites. It’s economic. People who do not have the means to stay are leaving, people who do have the means come and stay, and because the middle class in dominated by one racial group it is easy to lose site of the incoming minorities.
Gentrification too close for comfort
I could cover the Bates Area Civic Association: I get bored so you don’t have to- but really who cares (as seemed to be a phrase bandied about)? And besides who really wants to read me b!tching about an obnoxious Jamaican who dominates these meets week after week?
Instead I cover an article in the Washington Post Church’s Plan to Raze Housing Protested Tenants Trying to Buy SE Complex Voice Opposition During Worship Service written by Dakarai I. Aarons which covers the Kesley Gardens on 7th and P and Q St. The residents protested at the church that owns the property, but the church owns it with private investors. There are other problems that make things difficult.
When my neighbor read the article he seemed resigned to the eventual destruction of this community. Apparently several residents signed away their right to buy the property from the owner for a $1000. I mentioned efforts in Columbia Heights that allowed residents to turn their slummy apartments into condos. But still. Ms. Bettye lives there and I hope she will find a home in Shaw.
Gentrification DC
Yes, I must have a bug in my bonnet. That and work has slowed down here.
Last year, well October 2003 I attended the very crowded American Cities discussion on gentrification at the City Museum. I have notes I don’t remember if I entered them into this blog. If I didn’t (too lazy to search) well here it is.
Jim Abdo, president of Abdo Development began with his side of the story. He talked about historical buildings and that he, unlike some of the other developers, only rehabbed abandoned buildings. No one got kicked out.
His take points out something that I haven’t touch upon in my gentrification rants, historical or historically interesting buildings. The neighborhoods in question, Columbia Heights, Shaw, LeDroit Park and Capitol Hill have some pretty neat buildings. Sadly it is only the middle & upper classes that can keep the buildings with the historical details up. It is good if you score a house that still has the pocket doors, the original stained glass, the long windows, the original crown molding, the wood floors, the carved newel posts, the detailed iron fences and stair railings, oh I could go on. When the middle classes fled the city and these houses with so much detail were rented out or sold to those with less some of those details got lost to the practical. Long tall windows are expensive to replace so they got replaced by cheaper squat ones. Pocket doors removed or walled up. As the neighborhood got rougher it just probably didn’t make sense to invest that much into the property. So gentrification is saving some housing provided the rehabbers have an appreciation for history.
Next on the panel was Maria Maldonado from CASA Maryland. She talked about what gentrification was, the replacement and displacement of one neighborhood with another. She talked about immigrant families that have been there for over 18 years and are being forced out due to market conditions. She also mentioned a horrible incident where 20 lawyers descended on one building scaring the tenants. The odd thing, she mentioned was that people come for the diversity but it is the economic power of the incoming group that forces out the diversity.
The last fellow I have notes for (I left before it all ended) was from Arlington and talking about affordable housing.
Uncomfy aspect of gentrification
There was another post but I think it is lost to the ether that is the Internet. Anyway, despite my odd posts about gentrification, I haven’t been able to define it in a way that is simple and oh, politics-free and maybe even free of racial context. I don’t think gender or orientation have a lot to do with it, but plays a minor but maybe pivotal role. I’m more than happy to define gentrification as an economic thing. Face it when the real estate taxes go up 200%, believe me it is very much related to money.
My own problem relates to where I fit in all this. I was raised in a working class family in a poor black neighborhood in the South. Currently, I guess you can call me middle class, definately a professional (if I’m not can I stop paying the student loans?), and still black. I laud the arrival of folks who are “middle class like me” regardless of color or orientation. But I do admit it is troublesome to those who have been here longer, who now have to keep up with the newcomers who have raised the value of the properties and rents. None of us who are middle class come in with the intention of pushing out the oldtimers or the poor. (We won’t cry a tear, however, should the loud section 8 house, or the drug dealers get moved out.)
The visuals of this gentrification are seen in the homes and in the people. Abandoned homes are restored to their former glory, or torn down to make way for something better. Other homes are bought, rehabbed, and made to look nicer. These homes sit near, or are right next to homes that are still abandoned, falling down, or just ghetto looking. The front yards are different, some with dirt patches made from years of hanging out in front, others with many dollars worth of plants, or new walkways and fencing. Oldtimers might keep up, or join in, if they had given up the effort before. The face of gentrification, is white. Despite a fair number of blacks such as myself moving into these ‘up and coming’ neighborhoods, we blend in with the old population. The ones who stick out a bit more are my white neighbors.
Please keep note that whites are a minority in the District of Columbia, making up 30% of the population. Blacks are 60%, Latinos about 8% and the rest being everybody else. In my little area of Truxton Circle (still Shaw dammit) in 2000 the Afr-American population was 90%. So when whites move in, it is very noticable. So far that group has been very middle class.
With Spring the visuals are all there. Well the “For Sale” signs are. The building and rehabbing continue. Yards in the winter that have much in common with the ghetto looking yards, bound forward with color and other greenery. And I see joggers. Joggers? Where the heck are these people jogging to? I see more dog walkers. In Winter they seem to be the most miserable sort, now, all happy with their pooches, meeting up with others pooches for doggie smootches. Then there is what I don’t see. There are places where crowds of black teens would congregate in large numbers. I see fewer of them, of course, it is still early. I hope that I will see fewer kids hanging out on street corners.
I guess I have been running around the topic of race and gentrification. As far as I see, so far I’ll probably keep circling.