La Aduana: Gentrification Without The Gentry
Once upon a time, gentrification meant the import of yuppies into areas previously inhabited by working-class people. Yuppies (a term used so freely that many forget it was originally an abbreviation for Young Urban Professionals) were seen as the colonisers of these urban fringes. Armed with graduate degrees, late-model automobiles, and unusually high credit scores, they would buy into neighbourhoods in the TST in Kowloon, in London’s eastern postcodes, in Paris southeast of the 5th arr., and in Chicago’s near South Side (in the 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s respectively). Though marginally behind their artsy friends, the yuppies would have a more noticeable effect, making substantial changes to everything from housing stock to school curriculum to police presence.
In this blog, I argue that gentrification is neither the fault of the wealthy, nor a result of internal intraurban migration... though the media continues to perpetuate both myths. But, first, let’s look at how gentrification is usually thought of: black vs. white and rich vs. poor.
I write this blog in Seattle. I often joke to friends that I feel most African villages in Uganda (where I did my fieldwork) have more white people than most neighbourhoods in Seattle have black people. It’s always been something that has made me uneasy about this city. But it makes Seattle interesting to study because gentrification here has been, at least in its primary thrust, the displacement of white people by other white people. And, specifically, the displacement of local less-educated white people by highly-educated white people from postcodes that do not begin with the digits 98. The story of Seattle’s gentrification is not one of people moving from one part of the city to another. It’s a story of people from Vancouver, Hong Kong, Taiwan, San Francisco, and New York moving to Seattle.
In Seattle five years ago, you could almost hear the synchronised march in the distance: an approaching army of soccer moms on gluten-free diets. The soon-to-open boutique grocer sat patiently next to an exclusively-Asian (in its dancers, not its clientele) strip club cleverly, yet rather distastefully, named Yellowtail. Graffiti on the baby changing station in a newly-opened Starbucks washroom warned of the coming storm: a person I assume to have been a teenager had scrawled "fite [sic] the power," a rather impotent billboard for any message, as it’s a surface usually only seen by children too young to read or parents too busy to notice. Undoubtedly, the power to be fowt (phonetics used for effect) included people who drink Starbucks, people who have young children, and people who administer spelling bees.
It is interesting to consider gentrification in this race-neutral or nearly-race-neutral context of Seattle, as it seems so much less “harmful” or at least less controversial. It removes the most visible link between gentrification and imperialism: race. By removing race, we can forget for a moment that gentrification has become the local laboratory for imperialism. It is microimperialism. If one would like to witness imperialism in our cities, one can see local council decisions in Whitechapel and it’s like 1947 all over again. If that’s not recent enough, there are areas on the edges of Tower Hamlets that would look more familiar to Mr. Kenyatta than to Mr. Johnson, both in their demographics and their grievances.
But the question of gentrification as a “good” or “bad” thing too often focuses on the cultural and ethnographic identifiers we assign to people. These people are black. These people are artists. These people are rich. These people went to university. These people are blue-collar. But these identifiers do more to muddle the discussion than to clarify it.
The field of urban studies, which is in America rather oddly an outgrowth of anthropology and ethnography more than geography or economics (the latter two disciplines more often claiming paternity for urban studies in the European tradition), is dotted with bright points that are not focused on these easy identifier frictions of white vs. black, white collar vs. blue collar, and so on. But much writing in this area is trope-ridden and stereotype-enhancing drivel. Why?
The concept of gentrification is almost unimaginably abstract. Only when we visualise two groups, which are inherently distinct from one another, can we picture how one displaces the other. Observing this displacing, rather than understanding the nuanced process by which it occurs, is easier. It is intellectually unchallenging and simply handled descriptively – often, scholars in the area conclude that little analysis is needed, and peer reviewers cooperate (much to the detriment of students and subsequent scholars actually interested in the underlying mechanisms).
The next layer more subtle than race is the question of class. Gentrification, in its contemporary usage refers more to class than to race. But, fascinatingly, the very wealthy are rarely the source of gentrification. This is a piece of the policy puzzle often-ignored. While the “gentrifiers” are usually substantially more wealthy than the “gentrifiees,” they are by no means the wealthiest people in the area. What do I mean?
Though incomes in Hackney have risen substantially, and per-week letting costs per square meter even more so, this is not caused by multi-millionaires from W1, SW5, and SW7 suddenly relocating to EC2. Though incomes in Brooklyn’s Park Slope have risen substantially over a fifteen-year period, it is not as though the Upper East Side has been abandoned in favour of Brooklyn. Though incomes in parts of Chicago’s South Side and Oakland are now substantial, rather than negligible, it has (generally) not been the wealthiest residents of Chicago and San Francisco who have “colonised” these areas.
Census data tells a story of gentrification without the gentry. The middle class may push the lower-middle-class out of areas. The middle class, generally, may push poor people out of areas. But the very wealthy (which I’ll define here as people earning at least $1 million annually) are happy enough living in the areas they’ve always lived in – it doesn’t matter how trendy Shoreditch is, no one's leaving South Kensington or Knightsbridge to move there.
We know more about gentrification than ever before due to the public availability of council tax data in the UK, which is more useful and “grainy” in statistical terms than U.S. census data which is very infrequent (census data is generated every ten years, while the average American households aged 25 to 40 and earning more than $80,000 per year - the key gentrifiers - tend to change homes every 3.8 years on average). We also know more about gentrification in Asia than we did before, as most studies in the early 1990’s depended heavily upon Hong Kong and Tokyo municipal data, which had such high transaction values (over $1 million for what would be considered a small flat in London) that it was difficult to reconcile these studies with a global interpretation.
What we learn from a more quantitative study of gentrification is that few large gentrification shifts are even intra-urban. That’s right, people don’t move from neighbourhood A in London to neighbourhood B in London and gentrify it. Instead, people move from places that are not London (New York, Chicago, Hong Kong, etc.) into “fringe” neighbourhoods and gentrify them. One of the most fascinating studies in recent years in this area is Andrew C. Helms’s excellent study of the subject in New York and Chicago, finding that gentrification came primarily from migration into these cities, not within these cities. And most gentrification doesn’t come from the wealthy kicking out the poor. In fact, it hardly involves the wealthy at all. It more often involves the new middle class residents who make 20% to 50% more than the current residents – neither group is wealthy in national or international terms. But the new migrants are incrementally more wealthy when compared to the people who were there before.
To understand gentrification, we must understand that cities are not sealed containers – they are porous communities. And the characterisation of gentrification as a war that pits the wealthy against the poor ignores and distracts from the truer, and harder-to-tell, story of the middle class pushing out the lower-middle-class. Gentrification is less often about huge changes in class or race or income demographics and more often about the little changes, the little differences, that are less obvious.
