Because I am black I seldom get the moniker of gentrifier. I
am not a hipster and I don’t stand in line for 20 minutes waiting for an individual
slow drip coffee. And while I do question the changes to my city, the shift in
demographics, the morphing google maps street-view, I know I am part of those changes.
I know that my meager rent is still more than what could be demanded for rent
just a little while before me…maybe only a tenant ago. And like it or not I am
part of the gentrification “problem” that folks are so vocal about these days.
“Gentrification is
complicated. It isn’t all good or all bad,” I said it matter-of-factly. I said
as if it was something everyone knew and I was stating the obvious.
“Don’t let Zee hear you say that, she’ll be pissed. I heard
her at a meeting recently remonstrating someone who dared to say it was a
nuanced issue,” my friend confided with a hint of amusement in her hushed voice.
I took a deep breath and my mind wandered…Of course she is
angered by nuance. Of course raging against the machine is easier than sorting
through it and figuring out where the harm is – where the help is.
Gentrification is bandied about in conversation these days
with equal support and abhorrence celebration and derision depending on your
politics. I rarely hear balanced conversations about the benefits and the
destruction that it bestows upon a city. Seldom do people add a well-placed, “but…”
or “and…” to their thoughts on what gentrification is or is not.
Not quite tool – gentrification is as amoral as a tool- it
can be used for destruction or for benefit; or rather, the effects of it can be
destructive or beneficial. The oversimplified understanding of gentrification weight
down opposite sides of a spectrum. Methodically moving out the black brown and
poor occupants of a neighborhood or city to make way for whiter and richer
folks – and on the other side – improving a dilapidated area through much
needed development of infrastructure and business. The first implies neighborhoods
never change – no one leaves and no one new comes; the second, cities – even crumbling
ones – are devoid of people, empty vessels waiting to be rebuilt.
The truth, as it is for most things, is more complicated
than that. But we live in an age of simplicity. Sound bites and B rolls and app
oriented solutions. Sitting down to hash through the complexities of a
situation- be it dependence on fossil fuel or immigration – are seldom our aim.
Instead, absolutes rule opinions and hold sway. Facebook and twitter over long-form
journalism.
Stripped bare of the nuance with emphasis only on the
outcomes – wanted or not – and it is easy to pick a side and vilify the other. But
it isn’t that simple.
Oakland, like Detroit and other cities once glorious and now
struggling – needs help. It needs an infusion of revenue to repair, and in some
cases build, much needed infrastructure of a long neglected city. Hobbled by
crime and a dearth of industry (even while silicon valley lies just across the
bridge and down the 880 corridor) the murder rate is high, the schools struggle
and close, and in a cruel twist of irony, the rents and mortgages continue to
climb. And even with this backdrop, people live and flourish here. Families replenish
their ranks, love their neighbors and the neighborhoods they grew up in. who,
after all, needs infrastructure if there is no one there to utilize it. People are
here.
People are here. And people are moving here. And much like
immigration, folks desire for a better situation or a simply a change of
scenery or better weather, is not wrong or evil. People moving is simply people
moving.
An influx of people means change. New populations, new
ideas, new expectations. The Castro was originally Scandinavian, and after
that, working-clash Irish. In recent decades it became one of the first LGBT
communities. Things change and change isn’t always good or bad, sometimes it
just is.
A friend from Oakland is vocal in her lamentations that Oakland
is changing – that interlopers have taken over- that we have no memory or
understanding of what once was. And she is right. I only know the New Parish; I
have no idea what it was before it was the New Parish. I only know I am thankful
for it- interloper that I am, because that is where I saw W Kamau Bell, and
Hari Kondabolu. That is where I saw a Prince cover band and went to a Saturday night
party. It is part of my Oakland…the way I am learning it and have, over the
years, come to love it.
On the flipside, of course, are the problems that come with
gentrification. The negative side of trendy restaurants and coffeehouses…the
sky rocketing rents and home prices that threaten my ability to continue to live
here. A desire to cater to the richest among us can leave the rest of us –
implants or natives – struggling to survive.
There is a racial component at work as well. Oakland, a traditionally
mixed city, feels less diverse these days- even from five years ago. Walking
into the new restaurants popping up across town and I’m often part of a
smattering of brown faces. I can’t help but assume – as I contemplate my own
ability to stay here long term- that the ever increasing cost of living is partly
to blame. People priced out of San Francisco are now moving east and pricing
others out of Alameda County. Unable to afford the shift- people are forced farther
inland, away from the cities and into the more suburban towns.
And people are angry. And scared. And with anger and fear
there is the need to blame. And why not the new folks? Me and the Texas license
plates I drove in on. But it isn’t my fault…not really. Rather it is a failing
of policy. Sound policy couldn’t stop every family from being forced to less
expensive city limits but it could help. Policy, more than an individual
person, could temper the negative impacts of gentrification while harnessing
the good ones.
The thing is, it is complicated, and we have to admit that. Admit
that the villain in this is our unwillingness for introspection and middle ground.
It is impossible to manage a city successfully without funds.
Police, to tamp down crime, cost money. Encouraging business development and
investing in schools, even in areas that aren’t the biggest tax base- especially
in areas that aren’t a big tax base, is necessary too.
Demonizing those of us transplanted to a new city for whatever
reason we come isn’t helpful.
Holding onto the fiction that cities are in
stasis, like protected and unchanging snow globes, isn’t helpful. Cities, like
the people that inhabit them, change. They conform to their inhabitants, shed
their skin and replace it with new. They evolve. And gentrification, is often a
part of that equation. What part…how well or how poorly it is done…that remains
to be seen.
On either side of the gentrification line the absolutes are
problematic. New isn’t always better,
but either is old. As a hybrid though…as
an idea, that when made actionable takes the extremes on both sides into
consideration, gentrification can be less volatile word, a more benign action…like
construction or invention.
Done well, gentrification could be the saving grace of Oakland,
the thing that restores it to glory, even if the glory looks a little
different.
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