Gentrification Blues

I just got nauseous reading an article in "Business Week" on "Up and Coming Neighborhoods." What made me sick about it was the carefree tone the author used when advising home-buyers to look for artist neighborhoods to exploit.

It's my nature to take things personally and look for where I'm implicated. It got me thinking: I sometimes notice that I'm a yuppie. I'm a young, upwardly mobile, urban professional. I eat organic food. I am a white face in the neighborhood, and the kind of person who will shop in the health food store and coffee house that officially signal the out-pricing of the neighborhood's residents. I feel guilty about this. Still, I live in these places.

When looking for a neighborhood, it seems like most people like me are looking for three things (In no particular order): Price, community, and authenticity.

Price

I will never make as much money as my parents make. Even if I change my occupation from internet startup writer to say, best-selling writer, I will never be able to buy a house in their neighborhood. My generation of middle class kids will not make as much money as our parents did. The middle class is shrinking. I live on the lower end of it. I spend most of my discretionary income on organic food, and therefore do not have a single decoration in my apartment. What can I do? Eat ramen and buy wall paper? I need to live in "cheap" neighborhoods. The joke is, the "cheap" neighborhoods I've lived in are really not so cheap. For example, a room in an apartment in Cambridge, MA's Central Square (a gentrified neighborhood that retains a very small fraction of its ghetto roots) costs an average of about $700 a month. That's what it costs to rent a room - not a whole apartment. It's not as bad as Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where a room in a shared apartment will cost you on average $1000 a month. So why do we live in these places?

Community

 If you're not married and shopping for your first house, or at least somewhere stable to live, you need to live in a place with an active social life. The unfortunate harbinger of high prices for substandard housing, and even higher prices for renovated housing, is a proliferation of hip bars, coffee houses, art galleries, and social activities. That very development is called, in animal terms, a lek. It's where people meet. Humans crave interaction with other humans. Even yuppies who work in internet startups crave interaction with other humans. We need other people to share organic carrot juice with. So we congregate in neighborhoods like Cleveland's Tremont, East Austin, LA's Silver Lake, and the Mission in San Francisco.

Authenticity

 The problem with hipness is that it causes neighborhoods to reach carrying capacity - that's the sociological term for when a tourist destination becomes so exploited by the tourism industry that what the tourists originally came for ceases to exist. Beautiful beaches are sand mined to build ports for cruise boats, and what's left is a pile of bacteria-infested rocks on the edge of an ocean full of garbage thrown off of cruise boats. So too for neighborhoods. We want the corner bodega, cheap rent, and the cache of being able to say that we saw a crack deal being made outside our building that morning. When we start populating these places, suddenly the neighborhood flavor takes on the flavor of Starbucks coffee, and we need to start shopping for a new place to ruin, uh, I mean live. What kind of artist can actually afford to live in an "artist loft"?

So where am I suggesting that the nation's internet startup workers and graphic designers live? Is the problem us, or is the problem real estate developers who exploit our presence in "up and coming neighborhoods"?

Posted by: Chaya Goodman