“To examine history is to examine the nature of power.”
debord boy

I’m sure you’ve heard the hype over and over again: “small businesses keep our community alive.” What is subtly omitted, however, is the question of WHO and WHAT of the community is kept alive? It is not low-income minorities WHO are being “kept alive” by these businesses (the new historicism of economic displacement). I mean, HOW is a $7 cup of coffee affordable for a large portion of most communities? Instead, WHERE small businesses choose to speak for “the community,” they are creating a vision of what community should mean. WHEN did gentrification become part of the definition of the word alive?

As people move out of neighborhoods like the one my mother, Ivonne Torres de Leon, lives in, the Lower East Side, census records show that the minority population has receded. Yes, much of the old Loisaida community is fading away, they are being replaced! And similar hostile processes of displacement and conquest (colonialism again!) have led to gentrification being described as the new segregation.

Now, what is gentrification? Why happens? What are the forces and conditions that cause it?

Gentrification is a broad word for the appearance of wealthy people in a surviving city, a correlated increase in rent payments and property prices, and alterations in the city’s culture and atmosphere. The word is frequently seen as negative, signifying the dislocation of disadvantaged people groups by wealthy newcomers. However, the impact of gentrification is multifaceted and conflicting, and its effects fluctuate.

Several features of the gentrification process are desired. What neighborhood would not want to see new investments in infrastructure and buildings and improve economic activity? Unfortunately, the benefits of these changes are often disproportionately enjoyed by newcomers, while conventional occupants are left socially and economically marginalized.

Gentrification has caused a pounding struggle in numerous cities, repeatedly along economic and racial lines. Community modification is frequently seen as a breakdown of social justice in which wealthy newcomers are applauded for “refining” a community, whose residents (poor and part of a minority) are evacuated through a rapid increase in income and economic changes.

The physical, economic, and social effects of gentrification repeatedly end up in grim political clashes, made worse by differences in race, class, and culture. Former residents feel besieged, overlooked, ignored, ostracized, unwanted…excluded from their community. Newcomers are time and again perplexed by claims that their determination to develop the local environment is seen as antagonistic or racist.

But we know that change is the only constant. And the change in the wealth, in the inhabitants, in the physical structure of the communities has been the constant story of the life of the city.

However, changes imply winners and imply losers. Low-income people are rarely among the winners. Residents, city governments, community development corporations… and ALL of us must recognize and act on the effects of gentrification so that we can together help rebuild a just outcome for all.