Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Gentrification: Abandoment Issues

Navigating this 3-part series
- Part One  Gentrification: Some Background
- Part Three  Gentrification: Whither (or Wither) Community?
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Cities Were Never Abandoned

Generally speaking, gentrification is mostly about white people.  Yes, gentrification is social, political, and economic, but there's no getting around it:  If there hadn't been white flight, gentrification probably wouldn't be occurring today.

The extent to which white flight was not based on racism is the extent to which white families really did want to live in the new invention of suburbia, and to create new lives for themselves in some sort of mix of rural and urban, which the suburbs started off as being.  And it's not like the suburbs have never been populated by anybody but whites.  Blacks, too, who could afford to leave cities did so, and they were usually welcomed in suburbia with as much enthusiasm as they'd been welcomed in cities, when cities were still mostly white.

Racism was and is bad, but in terms of white flight, let's not give it more sway than it held.  In 1966, for example, my parents moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York.  My father's employer transferred him there to work with one of their important customers.  Dad had not asked for that transfer, but since, as a Brooklyn boy, he dreamed of owning his own home with its own yard and lawn, and since Mom was originally from rural Maine, they eagerly took the opportunity to leave the city behind.  And they'd been living in a desirable, almost-all-white neighborhood - Bay Ridge - which remains desirable and mostly white to this day.

Yet racism still haunts our discussion of urban America after white flight.  And of gentrification itself, since most of the people participating in the phenomenon of gentrification are white.  We whites tend to presume that once most whites left the inner cities, those neighborhoods became hollow shells of their former, bustling selves.  And, to be sure, for most cities, significant population declines did indeed began to be recorded, as early as the 1950's, for most of America's largest cities.  Declining population numbers persisted well into the 1990's, and even the 2000's, before stabilizing, and then beginning to turn around, and increase.

Thanks mostly to gentrification.

With population declines, property values suffered, which meant cities collected fewer taxes, which meant reductions in city services.  A housing stock that had been constructed for a bigger population now had excess inventory, some of which ended up staying vacant for long periods of time, which rendered them vulnerable to undesirable ends.  Some of the housing stock being vacated by whites fell into disrepair, and became either uninhabitable, or inhabitable only by squatters, the homeless, or drug dealers and users.

However, the common white misperception of America's old cities being abandoned is a false narrative.  It persists mostly because it was mostly whites who abandoned central cities in the first place.  In reality, though, for many neighborhoods, a new, browner and blacker population settled in to replace the exiting whites.  This new population was primarily African-American, or immigrants from other countries, here both legally and illegally.  In some cities, such as New York, and some West Coast cities, the replacements for whites included Asians.  In Texas and California, they included Hispanics.

The numbers of non-white "replacements" often failed to make up the net population losses being experienced by white flight, particularly in older, northern, rust-belt cities.  One of the reasons was that northern cities were rapidly losing good-paying manufacturing jobs, forcing both white and black workers with marketable skills to move generally south, and generally to the suburbs.  Another reason was that when census counts were taken, immigrants illegally in our country made themselves invisible, to avoid being counted, afraid of being found out and arrested.

Indeed, illegal immigration has been an unexplored enemy of urban areas.  Unscrupulous landlords would rent sub-standard housing to illegals, knowing that the official status of their tenants made them unlikely to complain about unkempt or dangerous living conditions.  Such landlords routinely violated city codes for protection against faulty wiring, plumbing, and gas lines.

Of course, such practices weren't limited to buildings housing illegal immigrants.  If you were poor, and desperate for housing, no matter your skin color or ethnicity, you didn't complain about what your landlord did - or didn't - do.  You just paid your rent as best you could, and hoped your home wouldn't blow up for lack of proper maintenance.

These are the types of buildings that are prime candidates for gentrification today, if they haven't been rendered so deteriorated that they aren't better suited for the wrecking ball.

Same Neighborhood, Different Community 

Much has been made of the puzzling social disparities that became evident as non-whites replaced whites in the same houses, apartment buildings, stores, and schools that remained in place during white flight.  While most neighborhoods - when they were white - tended to display a certain amount of cohesion, and a robust sense of community, the same couldn't always be said of the browner and blacker populations that struggled to thrive after whites left the same neighborhood.

It has been speculated that white communities may have enjoyed some shared heritage, such as a national culture salvaged from the "Old Country." This shared heritage helped to identify particular neighborhoods, such as "Little Italy," "Germantown," and the like.  And obviously, when these ethnic whites eventually dispersed into the suburbs, they took their culture with them. 

We now realize that most American blacks and other minorities who replaced whites probably didn't have the same familiar touchstones to help make living in close proximity - an inherent characteristic of urban life - especially easy.  American blacks, for example, generally couldn't gather around their ancestral culture, since most did not know their family's history beyond our country's regrettable slavery era.  And there is no culture of "Africa," since Africa is a continent, comprised of dozens of countries with hundreds of distinct indigenous people groups.

Economically, the whites who left also took their jobs with them, and minorities who moved in generally were poorer from working lower-paying jobs.  The housing stock was also aging, meaning that as repairs became more frequent, and more expensive, new homeowners couldn't keep them maintained as easily.

For a variety of reasons that are still debated today, marriage rates among non-white urbanites never managed to match those of the whites, when they had lived in the same cities.  Poverty was stronger among non-whites, education levels lowered, crime rates rose, and decay of all sorts - social, economic, physical infrastructure, etc. - set in.  Urban American may never have been Eden, but for a long while, it had been tolerable.

Until now.

Eventually, even among new minority residents of the inner city, the objective became getting out while a person could.  Impoverished minority parents struggled to put their kids through college and encouraged them to follow whites out to the 'burbs, where the good jobs and good housing were.  Cities were no longer seen as havens of opportunity, not even by the blacks, Hispanics, and other non-whites whose parents had come to the city in search of a better life.

Ironically, this type of turnstile effect ended up working against urban minorities.  You see, as older generations of replacement urbanites died, or moved out themselves, their more prosperous children weren't taking their place in the neighborhood either.  Many times, whenever any urbanite of any skin color, race, or ethnicity achieved the economic wherewithal to leave the city, they usually did.  The cumulative effect of this resulted in the deepening of poverty's downward cycle.  Cities became even less prosperous, more dangerous, and more undesirable.

Urban Blacks Find Their Populist Voice

From this dismal tableau, eventually, a new confection of cultural identity emerged.  Initially, it was primarily for urban blacks, but it spoke broadly to American urbanites who were generally minority, generally poor, and almost universally frustrated with the disparities they saw between their city lives and the lives of suburban whites.

Rap is reputed to have been invented early in the 1970's in New York City's teeming public housing projects (which, as public entities, are only part of the gentrification movement if these projects are sold on the open market for redevelopment).  And it quickly became an iconic cultural touchstone.  For the urban poor, rap represented a new type of community - that of the black ghetto.  The 'hood.  The street.  The thug culture, with its mechanical grit, darkness, raw survival instinct, the smell of death, the visceral sense of victimization.  While some people dispute the lumping-together of these terms, they do end up referring to the same disaffection, distress, dysfunction, and disenfranchisement that has come to characterize much of the urban minority experience in the United States.

So, in a way, black urban America eventually managed to craft a sort of community for itself, and a culture.  However, it was not a commemoration of glorious ancestry, or a fond perpetuation of venerated nostalgia, such as the white identities that preceded it among America's urban neighborhoods.  Instead, rap was a grim reflection of what inner city existence meant for one of our country's most marginalized people groups.

Before slavery, African Americans could see only ambiguity.  After slavery, there was little to be nostalgic over.  Left to their own devices in the 'hood, many black Americans, for various reasons, failed to become participants in the broader national narrative, which, for better or worse, centered mostly on suburban ideals.

For them, rap became that narrative.

Unfortunately, and I'll be blunt here, even though rap and its various corollaries have become popular across racial and socioeconomic lines, it has not proven to be a particularly ennobling ethos.  Rap's tendency to fixate on darkness, violence, guns, and misogyny is a frustrated and angst-ridden substitute to the more provincial and celebratory cultural touchstones of more conventional cultural expression, whether it be among Italians, Greeks, or even the Chinese and Vietnamese.  To the extent that rap is a language that reflects anger at what urban minorities have had to endure during America's long slog through suburbanization, despite its cultural solace to some of its fans, rap's broader narrative of discord can also be seen as a prelude to how today's poor minorities are being affected by gentrification.

You see, we cannot avoid the reality that gentrification is overwhelmingly being perpetuated by whites.  Yes, there are many blacks and other non-whites who are rediscovering the inner city from suburbia.  And yes, while this is an encouraging and welcome change, since it means that non-whites are steadily climbing America's socioeconomic ladder, the face of gentrification is still mostly white.

It's all the new white faces on the streets that mark the most immediate change urban America's long-time residents see.

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Up Next:  What All This Means For Gentrification

"White fight"?  "White bite"?  How can we best navigate urbanity's new zeitgeist without repeating past mistakes?  Or can we...?



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