First, read this fairly tone deaf article on gentrification in Harlem and Bed Stuy from the New York Times on the August 4, 2011.
Then read this elegant evisceration of the idea that gentrification “just happens” or is somehow the fault of the minorities who get forced out of their neighborhoods.
To really understand the harm perpetrated by gentrification you have to know your history. Gentrification is “merely” the latest incarnation of restricting the free movement and self determination of poor and middle class minorities. It does to minority neighborhoods economically what could not be accomplished legally through policies like redlining, and pushes minorities farther and farther away from locations that white people have decided are desirable places to live.
When the suburbs were the place-to-be neighborhoods, sometimes entire cities, enacted racial covenants, often enforced by violence. Banks colluded to redline blacks and other minorities back into the forgotten urban areas by denying them home loans. When urban areas became attractive to white people, cities started fixing up the infrastructure (after leaving it to waste away for 20-30 years) and wealthy developers started building expensive condos and town homes to attract white people to those areas, who would then economically force the long-time minority population, who could no longer afford the rent or property taxes, out.
Gentrification doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not a-historical. It’s deeply grounded in the United States’ history of racial oppression. Gentrification is just the latest extra-legal strategy in a long history of racially biased policies and laws designed to keep poor and middle class minorities off-balance and cut off at the knees. Though now race is cleverly left out of the wording to pass the Arlington Heights equal protection test that makes it almost impossible to have racist policies or laws overturned in the courts unless there is specific language you can point to that signals the law or policy’s discriminatory intent. Mere disparate impact, no matter how severe, is not enough.
Photo credit: Title from a poster by the Phoenix Anarchist Coalition, archived at zinelibrary.info.
