Gentrification is a process of neighborhood change in which higher-income, more highly educated residents move into historically disinvested, lower-income neighborhoods. - Small Business Anti-Displacement Network
Gentrification is not as simple as people like to explain it. It’s layered, like an onion. I will peel back each layer and identify them to get to the core of the problem. My intentions are to prove that narrative and perception are heavily involved in how we see and consider space and places.
Perception, attitude, and hierarchical nature of humans is what shapes our physical communities, I want to understand how. Does where you live say who you are or does who you are say where you live? A lot of my journey at SCAD has been about uncovering my design philosophy through self-discovery. This project is no different.
As a part of the African Diaspora, an originally displaced group of people, I naturally feel like a visitor in America though I was born here. However, I wonder, do I feel this way because of the stories I’ve been told, the history I’ve been taught, and the experiences I’ve had as a Black person in America.
On the contrary, I desire to explore the gentrifier’s intentions as we continue to hear and see accusatory narratives. Is gentrification a racial issue or a spatial issue? Is gentrification the external force that haunts my community or does it affect everyone? Are the lingering racial inequalities over time only gentrifiers responsibility to bare? Can a new understanding of where you are change how you should be?
So many questions! Let’s take this adventure together. I seek to improve the relationship between “who’s here now” and “who’s coming”. I’m not interested in either party backing down or taking a loss. There must be, for the sake of sustainable communities and quality of life, a win/win condition.
The “G” word and its consequences
Defining Gentrification
When seeking to define something, the ultimate goal is to understand it. I framed the discussion of gentrification into digestible avenues of understanding. I will take on the topic from first historical context, community impacts, and planning and policy. The term gentrification was first coined by British sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964. The definition resides in her book “London: Aspects of Change”. The words she uses to describe read:
“One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes — upper and lower... Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.”
The word gentrification is derived from the word “gentry”. “Gentry” referred to the British upper class. Glass wrote this book in the response to a study done on the empirical housing details of 1960s Islington Borough in London. This definition was offered in the context of European socioeconomic elements, classism, and housing accessibility. Glass also incorporated history and the development of urban cities.
Tom Slater, an urban geographer, and Professor of Urban Geography at University of Edinburgh, in 2011 explains Glass “powerfully captures the class inequalities and injustices created by capitalist urban land markets and policies.” In Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson’s “The New Blackwell Companion to the City”, the state of our cities and contemporary urbanism was considered from a variety of intellectual perspectives. Slater’s chapter, “Gentrification of a city” (Pages: 571-585), summarizes the history of the term gentrification, controversial views, opposing effort’s dismissal of the term, and presents consequences of such dismissal.
In the literature, gentrification is understood to commonly occur in urban areas where prior disinvestment in the urban infrastructure creates opportunities for profitable redevelopment. The question presented, which I wondered too, is it simply a quest for profit or improvement for the expansion of accessible middle-class housing? Historically developers, investors and lenders have attempted to “gentrify” the term itself (huh) by glorifying what was presented originally as a warning of social disturbance.
Prior definitions to Slater’s interpretations he considered foundational are fascinating. In 1986, Neil Smith and Peter Williams (Smith and Williams s 1986: 3) describe a familiar scene of redeveloping urban waterfronts. The decline of historical manufacturing facilities and then the rise of hotels, convention complexes, and office developments, as well as the “emergence of modern “trendy” retail and restaurant districts” are ways gentrification is demonstrated visually. They considered these “visible spatial components” as “social transformation”. A following analysis was offered by Saskia Sassen in 1991 discussing the shifts in understanding the term gentrification over time:
“Gentrification was initially understood as the rehabilitation of decaying and low-income housing by middle-class outsiders in central cities. In the late 1970s a broader conceptualization of the process began to emerge, and by the early 1980s new scholarship had developed a far broader meaning of gentrification, linking it with processes of spatial, economic, and social restructuring.” (Sassen 1991: 255)
Today, we so often hear gentrification labeled as “revitalization” or “regeneration”. To also classify this as generally residential is not only analytically flawed but also politically conservative. In 2008, Kate Shaw, a _____, called gentrification “a generalized middle-class restructuring of place, encompassing the entire transformation from low-status neighborhoods to upper-middle-class playgrounds.” The process of gentrification is both visual and theoretical, about structure and agency, and dealing with economics and culture. A solid explanation of gentrification in any context must recognize the importance neoclassical 1970’s production perspective of inevitability and the concept of choice and preferences of the middle to upper class that promote cultural and social friction. Slater suggest “they work together to result in neighborhood expressions of class inequality.”
Social class is not the only dimensions of difference on which research has been focused. With the cultural turn of the social science in the 1980’s, other class positions and social identifiers such as age, gender, sexuality, and most notable, race/ethnicity began to be considered. A study done in 2018 on the racial transition in New York City between 1970 and 2010 examines an inverse relationship between Black and Latino residents and the pace of increasing gentrification. It supported that even though middle class, Black and Latinos were increasingly unable to sustain residency in their neighborhoods.
As we know now, gentrification is the spatial manifestation of inequalities. Since its founding in 1776, America has always been a place of racial inequality. Racial inequalities in America now appear as economical inequalities (shown in figure__) as we remember historical racially motivated sociopolitical forces such as Slavery, Jim Crow, and Redlining. These same forces influenced the “disinvestment” of minority populated areas. These same areas are now amongst the more susceptible to gentrification. A study by a Stanford sociologist Stacey Sutton in 2020 determined that the negative effects of gentrification are felt disproportionately by minority communities.