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(en) US, Calif. Berkeley, Slingshot - Gentrification
From
Worker <a-infos-en@ainfos.ca>(http://slingshot.tao.ca/displaybi.php?74002)
Date
Wed, 20 Feb 2002 04:55:57 -0500 (EST)
________________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
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Can freak bohemians avoid becoming
pawns in the capitalist ethnic cleansing
game?
For five years most of my neighbors have been
different than myself. I am white and from a
middle class family; my neighbors have been
latino or black and often working class. I am
one small piece of the gentrification puzzle, one
of the group of people the real estate analyzers
call "risk oblivious", willing to live in an area with
little capital invested in it and high crime rates,
eventually making the area palatable for other
generally white people with higher incomes.
Gentrification happens when a neighborhood
becomes attractive to a wealthier class of
people than the group of people currently living
in the area. Current residents get displaced as
landlords jack up rents to milk the wealthier
class and developers build with only the newer,
wealthier class in mind. The newer, generally
white residents, who have more political power,
eventually grow intolerant of the old
neighborhood culture, often a code word for the
poorer, often non-white people who originally
lived in the area.
While nobody should have to live in a
neighborhood riddled with street drugs and
crime, making a neighborhood 'safe' usually
involves making it unsafe for certain classes of
people, who are forced out to other low-rent
neighborhoods, to shelters, or to prison. The
version of 'safety' used by city government often
involves cultural fascism: criminalizing 'loud
music' and certain types of street congregating
because they are supposedly associated with
street drug trade. The key is figuring out how to
protect mixed neighborhoods that are safe, fun,
and sustaining for all kinds of people including
the original residents.
Because our culture is based on race as well as
class privilege, gentrification often goes down
along race as well as class lines. It is hard to
imagine stopping gentrification and
displacement without a working analysis of race
privilege. A race-based analysis of gentrification
is not a clever way to make the racist assertion
that white people make a neighborhood 'better'
because they are white, thus implying that white
people are better than people of color. That's
bullshit. The same privilege grid that lets white
shoplifters skip past security guards and tracks
white kids into the 'smart' classes follows white
people when they move into not-white
neighborhoods. The lecherous relationship
between the (mostly) white counterculture and
the (mostly) white hipster culture means that,
when poor white counterculture people move
into a neighborhood where rent is low,
developers and landlords see hipsters with
more money looming in the background and
thus see a reason to invest in the neighborhood
and raise rents.
For white people, a race based analysis should
not be confused with a white guilt complex.
White guilt is a luxurious excuse to do nothing
because you assume that white people are "the
problem" and therefore incapable of engaging
in their own positive social action around race
issues. Although whites act in the context of a
twisted system of race privileged, they can take
initiative and responsibility for their own actions
and they way they, too, get used as pawns
within a racist system. It is irresponsible to
sidestep an analysis of race privilege because
your politics are centered on an anarchic or
democratic ideal free of race and class
divisions. Actively dealing with the complex,
sick reality of both race and class privilege is
hard but essential in revolutionary work.
Like many people in the mainly-white activist
community I'm part of, I am not entirely sure
how to deal with my implicit role in gentrification.
More than mere
thorns in the side of people inclined to
traditional lives, I do think freak bohemians can
have social and political purpose and contribute
valuably to the glittering diversity that is an
integral part of urban life. White bohemians are
placed in a sticky position between our politics
and ideals, and the reality of our unwilling but
crucial role in promoting gentrification. Because
of this role, we may face hostility from a number
of fronts, including displaced tenants, the new
yuppies, and the old property owners who
appreciate the rise in property values that
comes with gentrification.
How can gentrification be successfully fought?
What is the place of white bohemians and
activists in the struggle? Understanding the
relation of property to capital is key; in this era
of gentrification, city governments are working
more closely than ever with development
corporations. The battle can be fought both on
the bureaucratic front, exposing
developer-government connections, and by
taking direct action against corporate
developers. Tangible improvements to the
neighborhood can be made directly by people
in the neighborhood, although these
improvements usually themselves encourage
gentrification. In all these actions, it is important
for newly-transplanted activists to respect the
work of activists already in the area.
Real estate, the root of evil
When a friend of mine was in prison in the
1970's, his history teacher said that the history
of the world revolved around real estate. The
root cause of gentrification is real estate, the
relationship between property and capital. With
the exception of tenant protections like rent
control and subsidized "affordable housing",
housing costs are arbitrated by the market.
Landlords charge what they can based upon
the demand for an area. Landlords are most
excited when a lot of people with money want to
live in an area. When people with money aren't
interested in an area, landlords have little
incentive to put money into their property,
because they won't earn enough of a profit
since nobody will pay high enough rent.
Buildings deteriorate and are torched so
landlords can collect insurance money. Lots lay
fallow, buildings deteriorate, and social services
slump.
Gentrification happens because of this
relationship between property and capital,
because the land owner can make a profit off
the fact that somebody is living on their land. It
is this profit-motive that keeps poor people
moving at the whim of the wealthier folks.
Displacement of poor and working class people
is built into the very structure of capitalism.
Cities encourage gentrification because it will
generate more tax revenues, which city
governments increasingly depend on as the
federal government moves away from
supporting local governments. Thus cities have
an incentive to encourage reinvestment in an
area through zoning concessions, tax
structures, and reducing protection for
affordable housing.
One manifestation of government-developer
incest is the insidious Tax Increment Financing
(TIF) zone. Instituted in 1977 and operating in
44 states, TIFs center around freezing the
portion of property tax dollars that go into social
services at current levels for some designated
period of time, up to 30 years. The extra money
earned from inflation and rising property values
is channeled towards reinvestment in the
neighborhood via city subsidies for developers.
For an area to be designated a TIF by the
mayor and city council, it must be officially
considered 'blighted'. The idea is that after all
this city-supported development, the area will
no longer be a haven for blight.
Neither will the area be a 'haven' for low-income
people, who get their social services and then
their homes taken away as rents and property
taxes rise in response to the reinvestment.
What's worse, the excess money can be moved
between TIF zones that border each other, so
low income residents in a newer TIF area may
be paying to further develop an area already
gentrified by an existing TIF. Because TIFs can
last for so long, developers may continue to get
subsidies long after the area resembles a
Starbucks-laced American Dream.
Government encouragement of gentrification
also takes the form of zoning concessions,
reduced protection for affordable housing, and
weaker rent control laws. For example,
developer David Walentas tried for nearly 20
years to get permission to gentrify the DUMBO
(Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass)
area of Brooklyn, NY, an industrial,
non-residentially zoned area. Throughout the
80's and 90's city and state governments
argued he lacked funding; if private market
investors were not willing to fund him, why
should they grant him the change in zoning
necessary for him to redevelop the area
residentially? But the state of New York did
move their labor department into one of the
buildings he purchased in the area, stabilizing
his investment in the area enough to encourage
several arts galleries to open. Finally in 1998,
after a yuppified arts gallery community was set
up, the city government broke down. They took
the crucial step of rezoning the area, giving him
full permission to develop luxury residential
condos and an entertainment pier.
Organizations originally intended to support
low-income housing, like the Federal Housing
Authority (FHA), are increasingly used to funnel
money towards developers. FHA support was
crucial in the development of the Queens
neighborhood Long Island City, a mixed area of
factories, warehouses, and working class
apartment buildings. Developers were unable to
gain a foothold for most of the 80's; banks were
unwilling to lend to smaller developers seeking
projects in such a 'risky' area. In order to push
the area towards more lucrative developments,
a large corporation was formed in the mid 80's
including such key government players as the
New York Port Authority and the city's
Economic Development Corporation.
As soon as neighborhood resistance to the
corporation's luxury development project was
organized, a NY state organization intended to
build affordable housing joined the behemoth
corporation; the state organization perversely
had the power to squash local opposition to
development proposals. The final straw in the
fight against luxury development was mortgage
insurance for the project issued by, surprise,
the Federal Housing Authority! The FHA
justified the development by saying they were
supposed to support development "pioneers".
By the end, these gentrification pioneers were
supported by four government organizations
including two intended to protect affordable
housing. What the fuck?
The city cheats and lies
Real, tangible neighborhood improvements
often originate not from corrupt government
organizations but from within the neighborhood.
People in a neighborhood often have specific
ideas of what could make their neighborhood a
better place to live- for example, where better
lighting is needed, where traffic could be
re-routed to make the roads safer, where
gardens could be put in. People can do these
things themselves even in the absence of city
support, with immediate results. However,
physical improvements are easily co-opted. For
example, several south Berkeley
neighborhoods, frustrated with cars speeding
through their neighborhood streets, took
initiative and created traffic-slowing detours with
concrete barriers and planters at key
intersections. Later, Berkeley cops used the
same method to corral drug dealers in areas
with lots of drug sales.
While homemade improvements can be
immensely satisfying in the short term, the
kicker is that once neighborhood improvements
are made, the real estate is more valuable and
so gentrification is likely to happen anyway.
Yuppies love those quaint community gardens.
City-funded neighborhood improvement is
usually not done with the community itself in
mind. Rather it is a vehicle for social cleansing
and social control. "Improvement" is often a
justification for criminalizing whole populations
of people. For example, Oakland has a whole
set of laws regulating the way people
congregate in the street. These laws are meant
to control cruising and what the Oakland PD
calls 'sideshows', and are only enforced in
certain, predictably minority and poor areas of
the city. You can, for instance, hang out in a
parking lot after watching a movie in the posh
College Avenue area, but not in the black/latino
areas of East Oakland. Because of these
cleansing laws, entire populations of people
end up in prison, very convenient for the
prison-industrial complex.
Blight control is another mechanism of control,
allowing the city to decide who can live in an
area through harassment by fines. Oakland is in
the process of making it illegal to park a camper
or RV on the street; RV owners must park their
vehicles in a garage. Rich people can afford
storage for campers; poor people often live in
campers within city limits.
Safe, sustaining neighborhoods are an aspect
of society everyone should enjoy. The way to
prevent gentrification is definitely not to keep
affordable neighborhoods crime-ridden and
scary to both outsiders and the people that live
there. And the way to prevent crime and drug
abuse is not to criminalize the culture of youth
of color and homeless people. A sensible
strategy towards neighborhood improvement is
to employ people who actually live in the area to
do neighborhood cleanup and improvement. A
number of these programs exist but are often in
tenuous positions. For example Oakland has a
youth program training and employing young
people in street cleanup and environmental
education. Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown is
fixated on clean bus stops; the youth program
offered to step in and clean up the stops, but
Jerry Brown would rather cut the entire youth
program in favor of a 24-hr city-wide bus stop
clean up crew, a more expensive option without
the benefits of youth employment. Where are
Jerry Brown's priorities??
The future of property
White activists and freaks should take
responsibility for their role in gentrification and
should actively work against it. Gentrification,
housing, displacement issues are not new;
groups all over the political spectrum are
already waging campaigns and newer activists
should see what the scene is. Obviously it is
good to get in touch with existing groups to
make sure you don't step on their toes. The
Autonomous Zone, an anarchist community
center in Chicago, worked closely with the
Brown Berets, a Latino activist group already
active in the same area. When issues came up
the two groups would contact each other,
sometimes reserving different days for actions
associated with a specific group.
Artists in the San Francisco Mission District
were not quite so willing to work with housing
and displacement activists. As live/work spaces
first gained popularity among what was still the
artist fringe, some artists thought city
regulations were hindering their progress
converting old warehouses into loft spaces. In
their excitement they petitioned city hall for
relaxed building code standards, less obligation
to affordable housing, and zoning breaks.
Against the recommendation of other artists
working with housing groups, the artists refused
to define "artist" in the code relaxation;
essentially they wrote a blank check for
corporate developers to build armies of loft
space. The result is the San Francisco we see
now, covered in boring bullshit post modern loft
space. The politically unsavvy artists wrote their
own eviction note.
Now is an excellent time for more militant
activists to get involved in anti-gentrification
campaigns. In the late 1980's, community direct
action against developers helped temporarily
dry up enthusiasm for gentrification. For
example, numerous riots supporting the
squatter community in New York City's
Tompkins Square park brought international
attention to the gentrification of the Lower East
Side. However, as more militant organizations
morphed into housing and tenant service
organizations, developers encountered less
opposition and charged full speed ahead. The
time is particularly ripe for direct action in the
San Francisco Bay Area, where the fall of the
virtual E-conomy left many developers with
unfinished projects. Once an area is cleared or
tamed, it is ready for the newcomers whenever
they will arrive; but it is also true that the exact
course of history is now unclear. Diverse,
community based organization and activism
may affect the future of all the property for sale
now in the Bay area.
One successful example of gentrification
resistance is Boston's Dudley Street
neighborhood. One of Boston's poorest
neighborhoods, the community got fed up with
neighborhood decline in and in the early 80's
organized to improve their neighborhood. They
managed to improve their neighborhood into an
extremely pleasant place to live without
gentrification, through community cohesion and
involvement at every step of the process, and a
vision that included social as well as economic
improvements. The neighborhood organization,
the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, got
funding from a local foundation but retained
control of the spending. In an unprecedented
victory they gained eminent domain over the
many empty lots in the neighborhood. They
launched an impressive affordable housing
project where families earning as little as
15,000 a year can buy into co-ops or new
homes. The neighborhood set up a shopping
area but allowed only local business to move in,
with no chain stores or check-cashing outlets
allowed. Local business started a campaign to
keep local money in the neighborhood.
Specifically, what can white punks, bohemians,
and activists do to fight the gentrification of their
neighborhoods? There is not one formula; here
are some ideas.
*Look around and talk to people about
neighborhood change and anti-displacement
work already being done. Do oral history
projects of the neighborhood.
*Expose development plans on the part of
corporations and various branches of
government. Snake your way into the 'public'
meetings held by the inner workings of the
government bureaucracy. Oppose corporate
development scams with a range of tactics.
*Support the foundation of neighborhood
associations like the Dudley Street
Neighborhood Initiative.
*Help fight individual evictions.
*Help with direct neighborhood improvement
projects like kids projects, gardens, traffic
slow-down devices (and do other things to fight
the yuppies who want to leach off this good
work).
Gentrification is essentially apartheid by race
and class. There are always multiple cultures
coexisting in one area; the question is which
cultures are officially recognized, and what
political power these recognized cultures have.
As an area gentrifies, the range of activities and
people considered acceptable in the area
shrinks. Formerly vibrant urban areas become
suburban monocultures were human creativity
is replaced by packaged experiences OK'd by
the market. Neighborhood gentrification mirrors
global homogenization where culture and life
are governed by an increasingly small number
of rich, powerful organizations with no
relevance to the immediate local. Imperialism
stifles life; a Boston anti-gentrification activist
shouts, "one longs for more bad taste, for more
surprise, dirt and looseness, more anarchic,
unself-conscious play."
slingshot@tao.ca
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