Republican state of mind?

He looked at me the way I looked at the guy from this weekend’s car ride. Actually, that isn’t true. He looked at me the way I look at people who said Trayvon Martin shouldn’t have been wearing a hoodie. He looked at me with fatigue and maybe a little bit of derision.

We were at the tail end of a conversation about gentrification. And it seems, where that is concerned, I am the equivalent of a right-wing republican talking about the sanctity of male female marriage and the gift of childbirth. Instead, I was just expressing an opinion urging more nuanced thinking regarding gentrification than what I often see as knee-jerk reactions.

“Us” and “them”. Good and bad. Right and wrong. Resident and interloper. And I’ve written about this before. I’ve expressed the unease I have lumping every new person that comes into a community as a gentrifier…at least when the term gentrification is synonymous with someone who doesn’t belong. 

But my colleague, an older man of color, looked at me with a kind of sadness. Like I am a traitor to the cause. And it threw me. I went inward, trying to sort out my feelings. Trying to see his side. I initiated conversations with other friends who had similar reactions. Not so much the sadness, but irritation and anger. Again, it appeared we were picking teams and I had picked wrong.

Only, even in the midst of the righteous anger about the way things change and the people who are responsible for that change, my friends didn’t disagree with me. Not wholly; hell, not mostly. 

“I know you are right about the ‘us’ vs ‘them’, but sometimes you are angry and you need a place to put your anger.” My friend shrugged. A native of San Francisco she has no love for the techies that have overtaken the Mission. At the same time, she love/hates the new restaurants they have brought with them. 

Everyone seems to want things to change for the better but only if they can stay exactly as they are. And that isn’t how it works. You don’t get new restaurants with the same folks in the same place.

That doesn’t mean I believe that the level of change, the speed of it, is a good thing. It doesn’t mean I think the eviction of families and the skyrocketing cost of living is inevitable and the price of progress. I don’t. It only means that misplaced anger isn’t the route we need to take. Policy is.

My friend argued that policy is made by the rich for the rich. And of course that is true. People don’t hear you until you make them hear you. Uphill battle though it may be, pushing for policy that protects the residents that have been here, paying taxes and making a home of Oakland, has long-term benefits. I’ve got the long stare. I want policy in writing and enforced (with recourse for folks trying to ignore it) so that on cold and rainy days when people are too busy with life to come down to city hall to protest some new development, they are still protected.

I don’t have THE answer. I have some thoughts that might get the conversation started. A tiered pricing structure in every new building, dedicated space for different income levels. Preferred status for long-term residents. All of these suggestions have their benefits and their problems, but they start a constructive conversation that has potential to end in something other than shouting. I’m tired of shouting into the housing I can no longer afford.