Tag Archives: gentrification

Gentrification Conversation: Part Two

Posted on by under Together in Place

I didn’t notice any trouble until he called the police–I was too distracted by the sunlight. Our kitchen windows are six feet tall, and on sunny afternoons like this one, the yellow walls gleamed, the dirty dishes on the counter shone. Thump, thud.  It was still early spring, and the windows were closed, muffling the clanging, banging and thumping coming from across the street.

I looked out. Two men were loading our former neighbor’s belongings into a pickup truck. Her house had sat vacant for a year after she moved into a senior building, now her appliances were heading out the door. “I tried to talk to them,” my housemate said, “and they blew me off. The cops are on their way.”

“Oh,” I said, “oh, I see.” He walked out to the porch to see what would happen, and I sank down on the kitchen stool, staring at the floor. Calling the police was complicated. We couldn’t just sit by and watch while our neighbor’s house was emptied, but they would know who called–the white people, again–and what if the men were rude to the officers too? “No one get shot, no one get shot,” I prayed as I peeked out the window.

No one got shot. The police arrived, they talked, the next door neighbor came out, and soon everyone was laughing amiably. As the cops drove away, embarrassment settled in, hard. “I hate this,” I thought, “Why are we always the ones to overreact? It’s the middle of the day, of course they weren’t doing anything wrong.” My housemate came back in and noticed my discomfort.

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, and disappeared into the basement, returning a moment later with two bottles of beer. Clink, clank, he marched out the door. Peeking out the window again, I watched him approach the men, somewhat in awe at his nerve. He was talking, they were talking, he handed them the beer, and he walked back to our house. “Whew,” he shut the door, “Turned out they were family of a neighbor, everything’s alright. Glad I apologized.”

“They took the beer,” I said, still a little surprised. “Yeah,” he shrugged, grinning, “Sometimes a beer can turn an enemy into a friend. They’re good guys, just a little surly at first.”

And that was that. Two beers–the solution for all your cross-cultural tensions.

*****

With a big word like gentrification, it’s tempting to just talk about it at a macro-level. Government, development, public policy–all of this matters. But there is also the everyday reality of living in close quarters with people who are not ‘like me,’ and trying to get along.

This can be exhausting, and, like deciding whether to call the cops, more complicated than I ever imagined. But I suspect that mixed-income communities (or any communities) succeed or fail, ultimately, at the micro-level. In other words, can the people who live next door to one another learn to be neighbors?

On our block are middle-class working families–healthcare workers, retired city bus drivers, preschool teachers–and families who subsist on minimum wage jobs, food stamps and medicaid. The black folks (about three-quarters of our block) have generally lived in our neighborhood their whole lives and have family scattered about the community; the white folks are relative newcomers and have family scattered about the country.

And there are times when living together can be stressful and bumpy. There are misunderstandings and mistakes; there are awkward moments. Soon after I moved in, a well-meaning man said to me, “Don’t you worry, dear, my mother and I are glad that you’re here. We’re not like everyone else.”

And I thought, “It’s a good thing that ‘everyone else’ is too polite to say!”

However, there are also moments when I think that living where I live, and learning to get along with people who are not ‘like me’, is perhaps one of the richest experiences of my life.

One of my favorite neighbors is a grandmother who is working toward her GED while raising her grandkids. We go to church together, and her youngest loves to chase our chickens around the backyard. One day I gave her a ride to the bus stop, and as we were chatting about kids, weather, and leaking chimneys, I suddenly realized how much I needed this woman to be my neighbor.

There is a lot of talk, a lot of research, about how mixed-income communities benefit the poor–there can be increased employment opportunities, for example, and their kids tend to have higher social mobility–but what struck me in that moment, and has stayed with me since, is the sense of how much the rich (or at least the relatively rich) benefit from living near the poor.

I give my neighbor a ride, but she gives me insight I could get no other way. I watch her sacrifice for her grandkids while taking one GED class at a time, I watch her struggle, and I watch her pray. I watch her maintain faith and a sense of humor in the midst of situations that might just do me in.

She (and others) also give me financial perspective. When asked why they moved to our neighborhood, one family said, “We didn’t want our kids to think that it was normal to have a Rolex.” Having neighbors who work full time and yet struggle to buy fresh vegetables tempers my materialism. It also reminds me to be grateful at the farmer’s market. It’s not a guilt trip; it’s a reality adjustment.

Finally, speaking of reality, there is just something about living with people who freely admit they don’t have it all together. My neighbors have kids in jail, various addictions, and teenage pregnancies. While we’re all messed up in one way or another, the poor tend to wear their wounds on the outside. When I see this, and then see these same people embraced in spite of their (sometimes still oozing) wounds, something inside of me is also set free.

All this doesn’t happen in one trip to the bus stop, but over a decade or so, it begins to sink in: I need my neighbor because in the moments when I am her chauffeur, she is my teacher. This is a small step, but isn’t this the way that neighborhoods are built?

One ride,

one conversation,

one adjustment of perspective,

one mistake and one apology,

two beers at a time.

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Photo by Wagner T. Cassimoro

Gentrification Conversation: Part One

Posted on by under Together in Place

I didn’t expect to be married to one of the bad guys, but there it is.

My husband Kendall was recently asked to lead a workshop at a seminary conference. I came along to help him keep time. While we were waiting for everyone else to arrive, I read the program. We were Track #2.

Track #2: Neighborhoods and Development. Goal: To assist churches and communities in analyzing and responding to physical, cultural, and socio-political changes within neighborhoods as a result of urban development policies and approaches.

This was a mouthful, but I knew what it meant. My husband works for a local Community Development Corporation (CDC) that has succeeded, over the past decade or two, to bring significant changes to the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Changes like a dramatic reduction in the crime rate; changes like an upturn in the housing market. Changes like opening (at that time) the only Whole Foods in Western Pennsylvania.

Changes like white people walking the streets with yoga mats tucked under their arms.

3936450656_1d6e343e2a_oAnd the word, the g-word, began to buzz in conversation, public and private. By the time of the conference, I was used to concerned friends asking questions like, “But what will happen to all of the residents who were already there?” or “What if rents rise and push people out?”

Kendall had answers to these questions: His organization had secured a large number of affordable units a decade earlier. More than a third of the housing in the neighborhood is subsidized long-term. The improved market could create generational wealth for current residents. The increased tax revenue benefited public schools. Turn-of-the-century houses were expensive to renovate, and without investment, they would rot and be torn down.

And finally, if our friends weren’t convinced (they usually weren’t), he would remind them that his organization had merely enacted the results of two extensive community plans, done in 1999 and 2010. These plans called for the creation of a mixed-income community, and that is what East Liberty was becoming.

“But isn’t it just being gentrified?” was the shorthand response, or, as one brave participant in the seminary workshop finally voiced, “Aren’t you just trying to get rid of all the black people?”

I checked the time; Kendall was just halfway done.

*****

This month’s theme at You Are Here is “Together in Place,” and as I have reflected on the gentrification conversations that go along with being married to my husband, I realize that a “Mixed Income Community”, however attractive in theory, is messy and frightening in practice.

Consider the alternative. Isn’t there something in us, as human beings, that is drawn to living near people who look like us, act like us, and make just about as much money as we do? Why else would we create gated communities? Why else, sixty years ago, did people flee to the suburbs? And why else, as the wealthy (in Pittsburgh, read ‘white people’) return to the cities in this decade, would there be a sense of invasion and take-over?

Take-over. This was the phrase my friend used as we sat together in the car after Kendall’s presentation. “I know that he’s got a convincing argument,” he conceded, staring out the window, “but there’s just this sense that people have, this sense that their world is being taken over, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. It feels like a take-over, and that’s scary.”

For awhile, we sat in silence. Neither of us had any answers. There were good reasons to build a mixed-income community; there were compelling arguments for the change. The cost of doing nothing, of stagnation, of the status-quo, of ghettos and gated communities, was also high.

But living together is hard, and there’s this open question: how long will we able to keep it up? Rich, Poor, Middle-income, Black, White, Asian, Latino–all the census categories and a thousand variations–will we learn to live as neighbors? Will we attend each other’s birthday parties, bar mitzvahs and funerals? Will our children grow up together? Can our worship spaces go from being the most segregated places in America to become communities of reconciliation?

Can we live together? Or, is it inevitable that one group will take-over, one group will flee or be pushed out, and that a mixed-income community is just a stop on the way to gentrification?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But the friend in the car was the pastor of my church, our mixed-race and mixed-income church of a hundred-or-so people who love one another, and we were determined to continue the conversation.

*****

Early this morning I was walking up the hill to my house, and I saw someone approaching, coming down the hill. The sun had not yet risen–I am on my guard in the dark–but as the figure came into focus, I relaxed. It was a middle-aged woman, vaguely familiar, dressed in hospital scrubs with an umbrella tucked under her arm. “Good morning” I chirped, perhaps a little too cheerfully, my voice loud in all that quiet morning space.

And… nothing. For a long moment, she just stared. I took in her worn brown face, cigarette in hand; she glanced at my pink cheeks and the orange yoga mat tucked under my arm.

“Good morning” she finally acknowledged, her sharp tone cutting into the air between us, her meaning clearly the opposite of her words. And just like that we passed one another, quickly, and the silence re-settled into the city streets.

What will fill this silence? This remains to be seen.

*****

Later this month, I will fill some of the silence with another post, Gentrification Conversation: Part Two. In the meantime, those of you with opinions, questions or your own experiences… please comment. I’d like to hear what you have to say.

Yoga Mat photo by Grace Commons