Yesterday I wrote about an excellent piece on gentrification, with a note that lucid analyses of the subject don’t appear all that often. Today, a counter-example, courtesy of Bushwick blog BushwickBK.
Barrett Brown (who, full disclosure, I used to edit at the A.V. Club) writes a weekly column there called Freelance Wasteland. The newest essay is titled “In Defense of ‘Hipsters’ and the Controversial Practice of Moving to a City Not of One’s Birth,” which makes its point sort of laboriously but basically asserts that native citizens of Bushwick shouldn’t criticize recent arrivals to the neighborhood, as they themselves are unable to fill the numerous creative/media jobs in the area that need filling and which “hipsters,” as it were, tend to fill. I’m not sure it’s his finest work:
There are also, contrary to popular belief, many such gigs available in this city. They are almost always awarded to those of us who came to such places as Bushwick from elsewhere, as the alternative would be to depend on the talent pool found in such as places as Bushwick. For some reason, the city’s editors, producers, and the like are disinclined to do such a thing, although this will certainly change if more outlets end up needing people to honk at parked school buses, throw old televisions out of windows, play shitty Top 40 dance music from parked cars at 600 decibels, scream at bodega clerks, avoid branch libraries, give money to Pentecostal preachers, buy t-shirts that say “Hi Hater” on one side and “Bye Hater” on the other and then wear those t-shirts in public, await the Jewish Messiah, worship the Christian Messiah, and play the lottery.
Anyone who’s ever moved to a dense urban area from somewhere more affluent and suburban has likely felt this, at least in passing. The break from one’s comfort zone leads to the indulgence of stereotypes that liberal-arts college degrees are supposed to get rid of. But stereotypes aren’t truths in disguise—they’re the opposite—and it’s lazy to present them that way. Not that the comment section is any better:
Brooklyn in another year or two will be completely overrun with pasty-faced, talentless hacks like yourself and turned completely into a faux Portland. Only natives can see how tragic that would be.
I should mention at this point that my favorite Scorcese film is Gangs Of New York.
Which is why everyone should read Benjamin Schwartz’s article in The Atlantic, “Gentrification and Its Discontents.” Schwartz stresses the temporal aspect of gentrification—of the unspoilt city as a moment in time—rather than the usual rhetoric, which frames gentrification in terms of spatial incursion by outsiders. It’s a much better way of thinking about the issue. Like this:
Zukin declares that she “resent[s] everything Starbucks represents,” which really means that her urban ideal is the cool neighborhood at the moment before the first Starbucks moves in, an ever-more-fleeting moment. Indeed, what has changed since [Jane] Jacobs’s day—and the reason, as these books attest, that gentrification has become so intense an issue—is the speed of the transition of districts from quasi dereliction to artsy to urban shopping mall. This acceleration results from the ways consumption has become the dominant means of self-expression (Zukin is perceptive on this point) and from—relatedly, ultimately—the acceleration of the global economy.
And this:
Confronted with this unstoppable process, Zukin proposes waving a magic political wand by calling for an assortment of mandates and controls to ensure that certain ethnic groups and social classes and the practitioners of certain livelihoods that contribute to the “authenticity” of the city be able to live there. Surely this is taking the fetishization of vibrant Jacobsian urbanity too far. It’s entirely reasonable—in fact, humane—to argue that the state must ensure decent living conditions for its citizens (and God knows we are terribly far from that situation). But it’s a wholly different proposition to argue that, in the name of what Sorkin calls “the protection of … the local” and to forestall “a landscape of homogeneity,” the state should create the conditions necessary for favored groups—be they designers, craftspeople, small-batch distillers, researchers, the proprietors of mom-and-pop stores—to live in expensive and fashionable neighborhoods or boroughs. That effort would ultimately be an aesthetic endeavor to ensure that the affluent, well-educated denizens of said neighborhoods be provided with the stage props and scenery necessary for what Jacobs and her heirs define as an enriching urban experience.
Mostly, though, such political solutions seem quaint: all this bellyaching about authenticity and lost soul. Sorkin and Zukin, sentimental progressives, need a bracing dose of Marx. Manhattan is the primary locus of global capitalism, the most voracious force for change in history. Best to pick a different place to try to render fixed and solid that which inexorably melts into air.
Softer housing markets are likely to dampen the magnitude and the burden of displacement, or obviate it all together. In cities like Cleveland, with much vacant land and low-priced abandoned residential and commercial shells, developers can create attractive housing for newcomers without displacing existing renters or homeowners. In fact, rather than posing a problem and inciting opposition to community revitalization, the slow influx of newcomers seems a welcome change from decades of population loss and concentrated poverty.
