Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Gentrification: Whither (or Wither) Community?

Navigating this 3-part series
- Part One  Gentrification: Some Background
- Part Two  Gentrification: Abandonment Issues
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Most people have one of three primal reactions to the word "gentrification."

One group gets excited by it, enthusiastic about new opportunities for redevelopment, money-making, and "new urbanism" usually afforded by gentrification.  Another group immediately recoils, angry about and afraid of the potential for deep population displacement typically caused by gentrification.  And yet another group - mostly middle-aged suburbanites - don't really care one way or another.  They have no immediate interest in living in a big city, and they can't see how the things that happen there directly affect them.

Older Suburbs May Not Be Immune

So, OK; maybe gentrification doesn't directly impact suburbanites.

But if you're a suburbanite living in an older, closer-in ring of suburbs, don't get too ambivalent.  The conventionally urban phenomenon of gentrification may, as you read this, be lapping at your subdivision's doorstep anyway.  After all, gentrification is a trend, just as suburbanization was a trend.  And trends exist by turning the status-quo upside down.  Or at least cross-ways.

And at its roots, gentrification involves simple supply and demand.  For cities that have been - and are currently - experiencing a robust overhaul thanks to gentrification, there may soon come a point at which the urban core will run out of neighborhoods economically eligible for a makeover.  And then, where will all of this renovation momentum turn?

Those folks interested in moving back to the city probably won't simply shrug their shoulders and say, "you know, that farm country in Nebraska looked pretty appealing after all."

Most probably, the folks who continue arriving at the urban party will start to take a new look at older, stale suburbs.  Back in the day, these towns were the first to be built around your closest big city.  By now, however, they are probably pretty dated, with a rapidly aging housing stock and shopping centers that are largely vacant, thanks to the big-box phenomenon which swept through newer suburbs a decade ago.  These aging suburbs may not have the grim sophistication that old cities have, but they likely have the one thing developers love:  under-utilized properties at relatively low prices.

How do I know that?  Simply by applying the basic corollary that motivates most Americans:  Whatever looks dated isn't trendy, and whatever isn't trendy is ripe for a makeover.

So, just because you may be blithely ensconced in suburbia right now, don't imagine that gentrification is something that will never impact you.  Unless, of course, you live in an affluent neighborhood with homes that consistently sell at the top of the market.  Like I said earlier, most wealthy neighborhoods that are immune to most other changes are also immune to phenomena like gentrification.

And no, the McMansion craze currently sweeping most American cities doesn't necessarily count as gentrification.  It just means that some people have more money than taste.

The New Urbanism Zeitgeist Shows No Sign of Stopping

Back in the mists of time, around 1990, I was a graduate student at the urban studies program at the University of Texas at Arlington, smack-dab between Fort Worth and Dallas, when even Arlington was a booming, fast-growing city in its own right.

I had thought that a master's degree in city planning would be an ideal synthesis of my undergraduate studies, first in architecture, and then sociology.  Yet in grad school, all the professors wanted to talk about was how many lanes of freeways were necessary to accommodate all of the explosive growth suburban Texas was experiencing.

That was the seminal issue of the day:  Getting drivers from one part of suburbia to office parks in other parts of suburbia, and back home again.  All while spending as little time as possible in the big, bad cities.

Today, however, freeways are what's big and bad.  Freeways are evil when it comes to city planning.  Freeways are what destroyed America's greatest old cities, and freeways are preventing America's newer cities from becoming fully-functioning urban centers.

New York City's controversial planner, Robert Moses, is the great satan of New Urbanism.  Moses is the demigod who bulldozed residential neighborhoods throughout Gotham for the construction of freeways that have never actually alleviated traffic congestion.

On the other side of America, and completely opposite of New York's design, Los Angeles literally built itself around freeways, yet today, LA can't shake its reputation as our country's most traffic-choked city.

You may be unaware of this, but New Urbanists have created a religion now followed by city leaders around the world, and this urban faith is placed not in the automobile, but in walking, bike lanes, mass transit, light rail, buses, and telecommuting.  New urbanism is all about environmentally sustainable connectivity and, ostensibly, community.  It's about sharing.  Reducing the individual human footprint (except when it comes to walkability).  It's about living as closely together as humanly possible, a concept for which high-density city life should be ideally-suited, right?

Meanwhile, the automobile is not about our environment, sustainability, high density, sharing, or community; it's about individuality.  One person ensconced in a multi-ton transportation pod is not community, not even if people are carpooling.  Community is everyone sweating it out in bike lanes, or sharing personal space on a sidewalk, or crammed into trains and buses to commute between centralized concentrations of shared activities.

Remember, all of this community is most easily accomplished with greater densities.  Greater densities of homes, businesses, schools, and people.  And guess what?  The older a city is, chances are it was built for greater population densities than almost any suburb, before the proliferation of the automobile.  Which means that the older an urban neighborhood is, the greater its chances that New Urbanists have already targeted it for gentrification, because that's the best way to evangelize for the progressive city.

Older urban residential lot sizes are generally smaller and closer together, most neighborhoods probably have sidewalks, and zoning probably still allows for mixed-use developments that have been anathema in suburbia.  Streetscapes are probably more grid-like, another feature that suburban developers sought to avoid, with their curving subdivision "drives" and cul-de-sacs.  The benefit of a grid-based street system is that mass transit is generally easier to deploy, and it's harder for pedestrians to get lost.

All of which is good news for cities that have been struggling to keep their oldest neighborhoods relevant and vibrant.

Yet...

Company's Coming, and It's Staying Beyond Dinner

Most old urban neighborhoods never were abandoned, remember?  And "relevance" is a relative concept.  Whites left them, yes, but people of other skin colors moved in.  These newer residents may be poorer, but we can't forget that these are their neighborhoods now.  Just as they were white neighborhoods in an earlier time.

It's not racist to acknowledge the reality of a community.  But we should be respectful all the same.

So how would you feel if a group of new people started coming into your community, and driving up the cost of living simply because they can afford to pay more for things, and they don't balk at doing so?  Maybe where you now live is where you've raised your family.  Maybe you own your home, but you can't afford to pay more taxes on it if its value suddenly increases.  Maybe your rent is currently the highest you can afford, but your landlord could get a lot more for the same space from newcomers.

Newcomers.  They're the folks who didn't stick it out all those hard years in your beleaguered neighborhood, like you did, when crime was at its worst.  Newcomers who act much differently than what you're used to, dress much differently, and seem to be flaunting their wealth in front of you, even if they don't mean to.  After all, in an urban environment, where privacy is scarcer than in the 'burbs, it's harder to just blend in, or disguise one's differences.

After all, that was part of what fueled white flight back in the day.

So, how would you feel?

If you can afford to make financial adjustments to accommodate such cost increases, maybe you'd actually be happy that your property values are appreciating, and that better restaurants are locating near your home.  And granted, not everybody in neighborhoods being gentrified are upset at all of the improvements taking place around them.  Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find anybody complaining about better street maintenance, cleaner parks, better litter control, better policing, better street lighting, fewer blighted properties, lower crime, and improved public schools.  Many urban neighborhoods that, for generations, have been "food deserts" are now welcoming brand-new, clean, full-service grocery stores.  Suburbanites rarely get excited about a new grocery store, but for the urban poor, fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats practically signify a revolution.  Their diets no longer consist mostly of processed foods or produce from local dingy bodegas, sold far beyond their suburban sell-by dates.

Without gentrification, it's unlikely that most major-chain grocery store companies would be investing in these neighborhoods.  The economics just didn't work before gentrification.  Fresh food is far costlier to stock than other basic commodities such as clothing, hardware, cell phones, and the like.

For the past couple of generations, urban dwellers were mostly dependent on government food stamps, which isn't much of a profit incentive compared with suburbanites with broader purchasing power.  In addition, urban crime rates posed significant profitability challenges to supermarket companies concerned about loss prevention and theft.  With gentrification, it's simply easier for retailers to make money, because more money is flowing into old urban neighborhoods.

You see, it's not that gentrification is a bad thing.  Gentrification actually pumps new resources into old neighborhoods and helps to iron-out some of the economic disparities that previous existed in urban centers.  Politics may have given the urban poor a feeling of power, but economic vitality is really the only thing that makes genuine, productive change happen.  Obviously, there are severe economic and social problems that gentrification itself cannot fix, but in the sense that a rising tide can lift all boats, gentrification represents just such an opportunity for both long-time residents and new ones.

At its best, gentrification is an expression of property rights, and the ability of people to get the fullest fair market value they can for properties into which they've dutifully invested.  Granted, the concept of "fair market value" is entirely subjective, depending more on what a person is willing to pay, rather than on what a property's materials and location are actually worth in raw figures.

How Can We Make Gentrification More People-Friendly?

Where things get bitter - and sometimes nasty - during gentrification is the speed with which it happens, or the degree of change it introduces, along with a corresponding lack of opportunity for input from long-time residents.

Oftentimes, developers assemble parcels of land subversively so that property owners don't realize that a new, game-changing project is being planned.  The reason for this is simple enough - if a developer announces their plans before purchasing the necessary property, land values would soar in anticipation of new development, cutting into the project's profitability.

Other times, individual newcomers with an adventurous spirit "discover" an older urban neighborhood at attractively low price points, at least compared with far more desirable and expensive neighborhoods.  If demand for in-town moderately-priced real estate is strong enough, other urban pioneers soon follow, combining to change the look and feel of an entire block, and eventually, even a neighborhood.

There's no set point at which newcomers switch from being urban pioneers to gentrifiers, but it usually happens around the time when long-time residents begin to notice that their neighborhood is fundamentally changing right in front of their eyes.  And that is when tempers begin to rise, anxiety begins to percolate, and even resentment begins to set in.

Then again, maybe all this sounds mostly esoteric to you.  Maybe even anti-capitalistic?  Maybe you've read this far and now you're angry, thinking that anything less than full-blown market-rate redevelopment is just socialism in disguise - not allowing free markets to work out for the most profit at the exploitation of opportunity?

If people can't afford to keep up with whatever changes are taking place in their neighborhood, they simply have to move out, right?  We can't guarantee a person the right to stay in their home if values rise to a point where they can't afford to.  If you want to live in a better neighborhood - even if it's your own - you need to work even harder and earn more money to do so.  That's the American way...

And, yeah... if you want to make this all about money, then the urban poor don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to gentrification.  And the raw capitalists have nothing standing in their way when it comes to redeveloping aging inner-city neighborhoods for wealthier newcomers.

So we just shrug our shoulders and, instead of "white flight," we call gentrification "white fight"?  Or "white bite"?

Or is there a way to better navigate urbanity's new zeitgeist without simply tolerating its pain?

For one thing, let's remember again that this isn't all about race.  New Urbanists aren't exclusively white, just as all the people who "abandoned" the inner city weren't exclusively white, either.  For another thing, plenty of non-white property owners of inner-city properties will make out quite handsomely by selling out to developers at prices that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

We need to look past skin color and focus on motives, and ways that change can respect both the people fearing it, and those pursuing it.

We can't forget that just because urban decay has happened, residents in these neighborhoods have no claim on their spirit of community.  Whites and the affluent don't have a corner on "community."  Remember that whole thing I discussed concerning rap music, and about how it's come to represent the poor, non-white culture of urban America?  I personally don't like rap, but neither do I like the non-gentrified "hoods" rap describes.  Few people do.  Indeed, there's no denying that rap effectively represents much of the ghetto culture experienced by America's minorities.  Which means that even though our ghettos are unpleasant places, they are still considered "home" by many people.

It's not that gentrification is something that must be stopped (even if it could be).  Instead, it's how we treat people during the process that affords the best chances for improving gentrification's results, after all of the upheaval, change, displacement, integration, newness, and learning curves have worn off.  It's how we handle the disparity between greed and need, not just the gaps between different levels of purchasing power.

Not because cities are worth the investment of our concern, patience, and congeniality.  But because our neighbors are.


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