The Look of Gentrification
darrellowens.substack.com
darrellowens.substack.com
People are looking at a broader pattern where minority communities are largely abandoned or attacked when they have troubles. However, whenever they build something popular or suddenly have something of value, then the spaces they inhabit rapidly evolve to push them out, and (whether purposefully or not) eventually the benefits of whatever infrastructure or invention or good fortune gets thrown their way end up going primarily to white people.
You might draw a comparison here to movements like "none of us without all of us" or to conversations about appropriation. My understanding is that they're driven by the same ideas.
Subcultures and minority cultures have noticed that they are widely demonized as being too niche or having bad culture, but then whenever they make something popular, that gets absorbed into majority cultures, the majority culture makes most of the profit, and in many cases it's forgotten that it even originated out of the minority/niche culture in the first place. Gentrification and white flight can't be separated from the prevalence of arguments over the "problem" of Black culture and the prevalence of bad-faith arguments (even on HN) about how Black communities need to address their own problems.
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Two examples, just off the top of my head that might make this pattern clearer:
- The Freedom House Ambulance service was the first ambulance service in the entire United States, created to serve Black community members largely by Black community members. They single-handedly revolutionized how paramedics respond to medical emergencies. Once it became clear that ambulances and immediate medical care before (and during) transportation drastically increased survival rates, nearly all of their resources were redirected to majority-white neighborhoods and the communities they were originally trying to serve were left with practically nothing.
- Black hair and pride about hair has been a contentious issue among the Black community for ages; kids that let their hair grow naturally were demonized, Black hairstyles were seen as indicative of flaws in Black culture. Black communities fought really hard to see their hair as a point of pride and as a legitimate form of expression that didn't need to be suppressed. At which point the hairstyles started getting adopted outside of Black communities. The problem isn't that the hair styles are being "stolen", it's that none of the demonizing or suppression was ever addressed. Black people were criticized for something that then became wildly popular but the benefits of that thing never work their way back to the community; the stereotypes about their communities persist even after the things they were criticized for are adopted into the wider culture.
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So conversations about gentrification, white flight, appropriation, etc... make a lot more sense when you view them through that lens. It's not about where white people are allowed to live, it's about selectively benefiting from the best of Black culture and communities while abandoning and demonizing those communities for everything else about them -- sometimes even benefiting from aspects of Black culture that were demonized only a short while ago. It creates a feeling of being "farmed" or "dissected". Black communities that become attractive to white people quickly become white communities (and the people in those communities often end up either displaced or forced to change their culture). Communities that are struggling turn back into Black communities.
You talk about feeling like it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, and my understanding is that's also exactly what it feels like in those communities. You can revolutionize American health care, but you aren't going to get the benefits from that. You can fix up a community and start generating business profits and opportunity, but those opportunities aren't going to go to you. And if that community gets messed up or runs into hardship, you're going to get stuck with the bill. There isn't a way to get out from under the rest of society. Even if you build something or create an environment that the majority culture wants -- that doesn't elevate you or your community; they take that thing and then they leave you behind.
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In contrast, I look at other forms of appropriation, and they don't really bother me that much. I'm a Christian, I heckin love it when I see Christian imagery adapted and cherry-picked out into foreign films from cultures that don't have much Christian influence, because it's fun to see people remix and pull out parts of something I'm familiar with in unfamiliar contexts. Likewise, when I see bad hacker movies that misunderstand computers, that doesn't make me angry, it makes me laugh. If a nontechnical person starts using terminology that originated in hacker spaces, that's great.
But I can have that reaction because of the context -- modern Japanese movies and culture aren't demonizing people like me or redirecting resources away from me because I'm a Christian. Likewise, I'm advantaged in my day-to-day life because of my technical competence with computers, not disadvantaged.
Not that this is at all the same as gentrification, but in contrast to the above, I do get angry when I see attempts to appropriate Free/Libre software terms to promote non-Libre ideas, even when that appropriation isn't necessarily purposefully malicious. Because I know where that process tends to end up, and I get angry about attempts to pull out the best of FOSS communities and terminology while abandoning the ideals that spurred people to create that software and to evangelize that terminology and create that goodwill in the first place.
So it's not that moving into a minority community or moving out of a minority community is inherently bad. It's the context and overall trends. Neutral and even natural actions take on a different tone when looked at as part of a broader system that has predictable effects.
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> A recent Vox article discussed the phenomenon of people seeing new buildings and calling them gentrification—despite the buildings being low income housing. I used to work in building low income housing and on two occasions I found people taking photos of my nonprofit’s complexes and calling them gentrification. This conflation of modern architecture as a “gentrification style” was so common that low income builders began erecting signs explaining they were affordable housing.
> I’ve seen real people state that improvements to traffic safety is gentrification, as though disproportionately Black and brown people getting mowed down by cars keeps the rents down. An actual supervisor in San Francisco is insisting that removing cars from parks is racist against Black people right now. In Oakland, people argued about whether a bike lane was causing gentrification and whether a $1 rent-a-scooter was hostile to people of color. The scooter narrative died down because it became obvious that the scooter users were largely Black and brown school kids. But the bike lane narrative persisted for quite some time among merchants and nonprofits.
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In a way, the article is kind of touching on the confusion that OP has. People think about gentrification as being an architectural style, when it's not. Gentrification isn't about what style of house exists, it's about driving Black community members out of communities.
There's real danger in making this mistake because it leads (hopefully well-intentioned) allies to get mad about silly things -- as if they're helping Black communities by demonizing efforts to improve those communities, to build better public transportation for those communities, to help improve their infrastructure.
It isn't being an ally to advocate for worse infrastructure in Black communities. The way to fight gentrification is to ask who the infrastructure is benefiting, and whether or not that infrastructure is actually accessible to marginalized groups within that community, and whether or not other changes in that community are driving out those marginalized groups.
The article addresses some of of the ways this can manifest. Note that the problem talked about here is not that white people moved into the neighborhood. It's the creation of a housing market that is only accessible to certain people, often spurred on by regulations and NIMBYism from the very people that decry bike lanes or accessible public services as being tools of gentrification:
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> Caricatures like skinny white bike bros or some scooter make convenient distractions away from the longstanding unaffordability that the original gentrifiers often created. Many of the first wave gentrifiers had consumed existing housing back when it was cheap, then made it impossible to add more housing to mitigate additional residents like themselves, thus increasing displacement onto incumbents.
Gentrification is about real estate scarcity and high prices being a factor in community displacement. It's not just Black folks that are affected by it, e.g. plenty of people complain about highly-paid "techbros" and "Facebuqueros" displacing pre-existing communities in the Bay Area, and that's essentially the same dynamic.
"Nothing about us without us" is another good example. It impacts Black communities, but also gets brought up a lot in LGBTQ+ spaces and in other minority communities. This stuff is really intersectional.
Fair warning, we disagree severely on this topic, but I’ll leave that for another day. That said, this is actually one of the most competent summaries of the problem I’ve yet seen from its perspective.
But, yea, how do you operationalize “nothing about us without us”? I’m not sure I understand. If it means what I think it means, how do we solve this issue without looking at it purely through skin tone and fomenting division?
Assuming I understand the question correctly: increased representation within industries lowers social pressure and means people from the dominant culture need to spend less time self-policing, because the less of a monopoly that the dominant culture has over representation, the less that it needs to worry about that representation being perfect.
There's a subtle phenomenon that I don't always communicate well, but I try to get across to people often: the tone and nature of conversations around representation varies so much when you're inside of a community vs outside of it. When people are fighting for their equality, the stakes of everything just shoots up. And for communities where there isn't a lot of representation, I often see conflicts even within those communities become a lot more tense and a lot more fraught than I think they otherwise would be.
So for example, the way that I see LGBTQ+ people talk about LGBTQ+ issues inside of LGBTQ+ communities is often much more open ended and much more experimental than the way that I see LGBTQ+ people talk about issues outside of LGBTQ+ communities. My feeling is that one of the big reasons for that is that inside of the community those people aren't as worried about being shouted down or having discussions used against them in the future to deny their rights.
What does this mean for "nothing about us without us"? Well, I'm not an expert on this stuff and I don't want to oversimplify it, but in my opinion, a big part of that movement (regardless of which minority group we're talking about) is that people want agency to describe themselves and agency to present themselves in popular media, and they want a degree of agency over how people learn about issues affecting their community. How racial minorities are represented in media is a lot more complicated and a lot more fraught when it's mostly just white people writing that representation -- not because it's a problem for white people to write about minorities, but because it means that the primary form of representation is by people outside of those communities.
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Another subtle idea that's kind of complicated to explain but that I think is important: in my opinion, minority groups often don't want to be protected by majority groups, they want agency and power to protect themselves, and more than that, they don't want to need to be protected. And there's a really big difference between advocacy that primarily takes the form of majority groups promising to use their power responsibly, and advocacy that take the form of dismantling a power structure entirely. There's a difference between advocacy that says that minority groups are always going to be at a disadvantage but we'll accommodate them or protect them from threats, and advocacy that removes the threats.
So going back to the question of representation, even the most well intentioned white person can't really be responsible for handling all representation of a minority group they're not a part of, not because they're necessarily evil or bad, but because that's just really heckin hard to do, and nobody has the expertise to do that. It's asking too much. And it's putting that white person in a position where they are attempting to use their power responsibly to represent the minority community rather than getting rid of the need to have a majority-group writer advocate for them in the first place.
An understated consequence of these power structures is that they make it hard even for white people to navigate these conversations; the monopolization of media and the under-representation from people who are intimately familiar with those communities makes everything higher stakes. It means that the limited representation that does exist has to be really good and apply to everyone, because there aren't as many alternatives. It means that representation from people who aren't in those communities becomes more problematic, because that's now the primary way that people outside of the community are going to see it.
I really do honestly believe that as communities feel less threatened about how representation might be used against them, and as communities feel like they have more legitimate power over their own representation, and as they feel that they're not only able to rely on a few sources to communicate about themselves, and that they start to feel like there's not a limited quota of representation where someone outside the community tackling a subject means there's suddenly less funding or availability for them give their own perspective -- I think that has an effect of lowering the stakes of conversations and of increasing the ability of people to extend grace to imperfect representation or to representation that comes outside of those minority communities.
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So I guess the TLDR there is that redistributing power over representation and getting more community members involved industry-wide in representation of their communities has a positive side effect for majority communities of decreasing the pressure on them to be perfect. You can think of it as redistributing power, but you can also kind of think of it as redistributing responsibility.
Again with a programming analogy -- this is super-forced and not really the same, and there are lots of problems, but there are also sort of similar principles at play if you squint: when I distribute FOSS software, one of the advantages to me of allowing forking is that I don't have the same level of pressure to force my software to perfectly align with everyone's goals. If there's only one piece of software for an entire field, that piece of software is the only choice people have, and the stakes are much higher in the debate over what that software has to be able to do. In a field where there is a large diversity of software to solve a problem, and (even better) if the people who have that problem feel like there are software solutions even being built directly by them -- in that world, nobody is going to care if my specific piece of software isn't perfect.
But getting to that point where there is a lot of diversity and freedom within the software field and people have other options that they can go to instead of me -- that means me giving up a level of monopolization and control over that field, and sometimes even requires special effort to make building software within that field more accessible to members of that community (ie, making a program scriptable, releasing libraries, maybe even helping foster alternative efforts, etc...). But if a company is a gatekeeper over an entire field, more pressure is put on them to perfectly serve that field.
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There are other aspects of "nothing about us without us" that I'm not touching on, and I don't speak for everyone, but in my personal opinion based on what I know and what I've seen, I think the above is a big part of that phrase, and I think that increasing resources for and stories specifically by members of minority communities has a way of defusing high-risk conversations about representation and allows for a lot more grace.
The original businesses serving the poorer income inhabitants can't keep up with the rents as they rise which forces them elsewhere. The minority inhabitants that were lucky enough to own their houses now have to go across town to their barber and perhaps over the years they are more likely to sell. As they slowly sell they're replaced with the more affluent population and aren't replaced in kind.
The thing I can't understand (maybe you could explain) - it seems to me these original inhabitants don't have to lose their homes and if anything they are the winners of this change. If they (or their kids) ever decide to sell, the land has more value now. I don't think neighborhood desirability is a zero-sum game. As mentioned in the article typically this desirability has a lot to do with proximity (nowadays) which is efficient for everyone. Many local businesses do own and they wouldn't be forced out. The lower class isn't the only demographic that has to decide between where they live and future financial opportunity.
Finally, I have compassion for people caught in the above tradeoff, it's part of life but having to leave your home due to changing circumstances around you isn't ideal. The thing I can't stand is when this is turned into a racial issue. This is a socioeconomic issue not a racial one and trying to make it racial helps absolutely nothing. If a problem is a problem, the first rule is to figure out what the problem actually is. The worst thing you can possibly do is take a problem and attribute it to the wrong cause. This alienates people and doesn't help anything.
This is starting to move a little bit past my pay grade, I am not an economic expert on stuff like house valuation. But there are a couple of factors I would bring up:
- We want to keep renters in mind in this situation; a lot of the people impacted by gentrification don't own their own homes. Rent control can be a mitigating factor here, but if you basically get stuck in the same apartment because you can't afford to move anywhere else... it's still not a great situation. Gentrification is something that affects owners to a degree (more on that below), but most of the time I see it talked about, renters are a big part of it.
- Access to local services can be a big deal, so original inhabitants might be able to sell for more but they are still going to be pressured into selling. I think SF is a really good example of this honestly. Yes, your house is worth more, and that's great, but if your income isn't enough to handle normal living, eventually you'll sell and move move, and even if you're individually better off, the community migration will still happen and you'll still end up moving to a poorer neighborhood and leaving behind the opportunity that attracted people to your original neighborhood.
- The article brings up, a lot of gentrification happens before houses spike up in value or early on in the spike. So yes, a low-income inhabitant might recognize that gentrification is happening and try to stick it out to get the best deal, but particularly if they're losing access to local services or getting priced out of normal cost-of-living, they'll be tempted to sell early.
- All of that put together, gentrification also isn't only about the small number of people who live in a community, it's about the transformation of the community overall. Maybe some members of that community do manage to get ahead, but the people renting, the smaller families that are looking to move into larger housing as they grow, the people trying to come back to a hometown, they get left behind. I think that focusing on the small number of homeowners or longtime residents that manage to wait out the process and see benefit from it somewhat misses those stories.
- Also, always kind of important to bring up, we haven't necessarily abandoned racism in home valuation, there are stories that often pop up about home valuations changing depending on the race of the person applying. This kind of stuff is naturally illegal, but it still happens, and we all know it doesn't immediately fix a problem just to make it illegal :)
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> This is a socioeconomic issue not a racial one and trying to make it racial helps absolutely nothing.
This could also be a really large conversation, and again it isn't necessarily one I'm qualified to have, but I think it's really hard to disentangle socioeconomics from race, both because race impacts socioeconomic status and also because discrimination around socioeconomic status has historically often been used as a proxy for race.
I think it's important to distinguish between them in the sense that socioeconomic issues do not only affect people based on race -- there are communities that are predominantly white that get hit with issues surrounding gentrification. But (again, potentially much larger conversation) part of the insidious nature of racism is that it can put processes into motion that become entirely self-sustaining, and it can kind of tangle separate issues together and complicate them and correlate them in ways that are hard to then separate after the fact.
It's hard to have a conversation about socioeconomic issues without both acknowledging that:
- economics affects everyone regardless of race, gender, religion, or orientation, and that these systems are not dependent on any kind of racist intention and are not only restricted to affecting minority groups. But also,
- that America still has attitudes about what a "good" neighborhood is that play into racist stereotypes and that occasionally break out even into mainstream political discussions about housing policies, and that part of the history of racial oppression was the deliberate movement through mechanisms like redlining and housing laws of minority groups into a lower socioeconomic status.
I think back to some of the conversations that were being had around me about urbanization during the last few election cycles; it's just really hard for me to think of them as purely economic in nature. But even if that wasn't happening, it's still hard for me to forget that there are a large number of socioeconomic trends and differences between communities that aren't accidental -- they were historically very deliberate and purposeful. So for me to now say that they're purely economic issues and that the history is irrelevant would require me to treat the issues as if they were equally or randomly distributed among the population, when I don't personally think that they are.
Like if I find someone who's been mugged, and they're bleeding out, it's not wrong to say that the bleeding is the real problem and that specifically the bleeding should be addressed, but it's also very hard to ignore that (in this specific case) the mugging was the primary cause of that bleeding and talking about the mugging is somewhat relevant to the overall conversation.
And strong, small communities exist outside rural areas in the form urban ethnic enclaves and suburban HOAs.
2. Communities have the right to a say about material changes that affect them, and to block changes whose effects they see as not in their interests. (I disagree with this part).
3. Therefore, it is unfortunate that people with money are able to enter and leave communities as a unilateral, personal spending decision.
4. It is especially bad when government policy tends to amplify, rather than blunt, the ill effects of these decisions on the poorer people who are affected by them. As policy amplified white flight through the interstate highway system and redlining, or gentrification through slum clearance and urban renewal.
Point #3 undermines Point #2. Buying a home anywhere is a personal and unilateral spending decision. And when a sufficient number of people buy homes in a particular area, that becomes the "community".
With Point #4, I agree government exacerbates the issue. However it does so through regulations. Redlining aside, what you've listed are the consequences of those regulations.
> Most neighborhoods in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York City have been highly gentrified without any major changes to their built environment.
It's interesting how the language has gotten reversed on this over the years. As originally defined by Ruth Glass in "London: Aspects of Change" (1964) the word "gentrification" referred to property owners making changes to the built environment to attract middle-class renters, but the new renters themselves weren't the "gentrifiers": https://hakka3.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/glass-aspects-of-...
I think this is an interesting historical point, though the distinction is somewhat without a difference. Compare gentrifiers to carpetbaggers; carpetbaggers were a specific subset of Northern gentrifiers of the South during post Civil War Reconstruction. We don’t really have carpetbaggers per se anymore, but gentrification is still with us, unfortunately. It just morphed into redlining and urban renewal. As a value neutral process, we can examine its effects, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it doesn’t occur naturally; those gentrifying do themselves have values, and their actions or lack thereof reflect those values. Gentrification is a consequence of housing being treated as an investment vehicle, instead of being acknowledged as a basic human right.
Southpark City People
Sorry to ask this sort of question, it’s frankly a pet peeve of mine in internet discourse. In this case though I truly am looking for whatever answer(s) you have handy, cheers
Just recently there was a lawsuit against Wells Fargo alleging unfair lending practices and given how many examples there have been over the years of different credit scores or loan terms for people who appear quite similar financially, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a fair amount of truth to it:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-19/wells-far...
The interesting question is whether this is intentional human discrimination or more subtle things like algorithms laundering old historical data. For example, if someone was training a model on borrowers' applications and credit histories versus loan default rates it would not surprise me at all to learn that it picked up on details like traditionally Black neighborhoods, colleges, societies, etc. and used that to “objectively” give a higher risk score because the algorithm doesn't have a way to recognize that many old outcomes were due to things like discrimination at work (“last hired, first fired”), being offered less money for the same job, higher likelihood of bad judicial outcomes (e.g. disparate prosecution rates & sentencing for things people of all races do like use marijuana), etc.
This was a side effect of untaxing land (e.g. prop 13).
Nobody is going to fight a new development that threatens their home equity more than a newcomer who is up to their eyeballs in mortgage debt. The "aesthetics" of a neighborhood suddenly take on new meaning when you're staring down the barrel of negative equity.
This is also why rent control's effect on inhibiting new building is grossly exaggerated (& may even be negative). Getting rid of it pushes up rents which pushes up house prices which ramps up NIMBYism that inhibits housing development.
The greatest level of home building in New York coincided with the greatest level of rent control.
There is a very clear and identifiable villain in California here for deliberately engineering this situation: Howard Jarvis.
He is now dead but his lobbying lives on under the equally villainous Jon Coupal.
> They don’t have to think about the ramifications of searching for homes in a housing market where they’re outbidding lower income people of color.
I've thought about this but in a different context, when I was looking for a job. I was a bit troubled by the fact that getting a job meant that someone else wouldn't have it. In the context of a "regular" software engineering job, my reasoning was that it was "okay"/"low impact" because there is a big demand for that job right now, and it's a job where you don't have a big impact on decisions.
When buying stuff like a can of tuna or a car, it's usually easier to make the ethical choice because usually there are enough for everyone. But for things like homes and jobs, that may not be the case. This makes me wonder how people handle those kinds of decisions. Maybe giving part of what you earn can help "offset" that? Can the ramifications of one person searching for homes in a housing market where they're outbidding other people be calculated? I hear a lot about "carbon neutral" these days, I wonder if we'll have a "socially neutral" one day.