Historiography of Gentrification: a Review of Five Recent Works

A REVIEW OF FIVE RECENT WORKS

Denise Gallagher HIST 6103 Modern American Dr. Mary Hoffschwelle Spring 2014

Introduction

Gentrification is a topic of intense inquiry and debate in the academic circles and public sphere. The phenomenon first appeared in cities after World War II, when small pockets of reinvestment appeared in deteriorating urban neighborhoods. Known as the “gentrification debates,” a variety of academic fields have engaged in the study of gentrification—an occurrence that varies wildly across time and space. No single definition has been accepted by those writing on gentrification which primarily includes: sociology, anthropology, political science, planning, urban studies, geography, performance studies, and African American studies.1 Although a definitive definition is elusive, one of the field’s leading scholars, sociologist, Japonica Brown- Saracino, recently pinpointed a distinct set of traits based on over forty years of discussion. The factors include “an influx of capital; social, economic, cultural, and physical transformation; and displacement.”2 Outside the academy, gentrification has been extensively documented by journalists and passionately evaluated by the general public who all seek to understand the socio-cultural and environmental changes. Unfortunately, historians have been inexplicably missing from the debate. This paper will investigate five recent publications as they relate to the overall historiography of gentrification and will contemplate how historians can contribute to the discourse. The term gentrification derives from gentry—which comes from a 14th century French word genterise meaning a person of gentle birth. In 1964, British sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification in a report to the London Committee on Housing. Glass identified a process of specialized residential rehabilitation with overt class-based outcomes. She writes,

One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle class—upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences….Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes rapidly until all or most of the original working class

1 Japonica Brown-Saracino, The Gentrification Debates (New York: Routledge, 2013), 9. 2 Ibid., 13. 2

occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed.3

Glass’s work sparked a decade of empirically-based research focused on documenting where the process was occurring and who was involved. Only a few years before, activist Jane Jacobs had published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a work that famously attacked the insensitive and destructive approach civic leaders used to improve cities. Jacobs argued that modern planning ignored the lives of human beings in favor of “rational” planning principles.4 The Death and Life of Great American Cities became a lasting framework for evaluating the health and vibrancy of urban communities devastated by large-scale government urban renewal projects. Therefore, the fact that Glass discovered a small, but significant enclave of returning middle-class residents raised many eyebrows among scholars and journalists who began searching for signs of urban revitalization. According to geographer Peter Muller, the mass media quickly declared a welcome shift in housing preferences. He notes, “Columnists pronounced the birth of a "back-to-the-cities" movement, which they believed could have only the most positive social consequences.”5 In the 1970s, scholars published the first theoretical explanations for the unexpected reversal of the decades-long decline of cities based on preliminary fieldwork. Much of the literature was focused on deciphering the ideology of the incoming gentrifiers. The notion of a new urban homebuyer was a striking departure from the familiar post-World War II suburban homebuyer who desired a single-family home in a nicely landscaped subdivision. Scholars wondered who the new urban homebuyers were and sought explanations for the change in preference.6 At the same time, scholars noted that the scope of gentrification was expanding beyond the rehabilitation of nineteenth-century housing to include new construction and large scale commercial developments designed to leverage cultural attractions and attract businesses and

3 Ruth Glass, “Introduction,” in The Gentrification Debates, ed. Japonica Brown-Saracino (Routledge, 2013), 22-23. 4 See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). 5 See Peter O. Muller, review of Back to the City: Issues in Neighborhood Renovation, by Shirley Laska and Daphne Spain. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, (1982). 6 See Timothy James Pattison, The Process of Neighborhood Upgrading and Gentrification: An Examination of Two Neighborhoods in the Boston Metropolitan Area. Thesis, 1977. 3

tourists. As the impact of gentrification on urban spaces increased, two theories of gentrification emerged that would dominated the academic discourse. One theory, led by geographer David Ley was later termed the “emancipatory city” and the other theory, by geographer Neil Smith was eventually called the “revanchist city.”7 The impact of these two theories on gentrification studies cannot be understated. It is impossible to write about the historiography of gentrification literature without including these opposing, yet overlapping viewpoints. In 1978, David Ley, argued that consumer demand for an alternative to the suburbs caused the resettlement of urban spaces. Ley’s “demand-side” theory is called “emancipatory” because the gentry actively seek spaces free from the hegemonic culture of conformity. Ley writes, “The neighbourhoods themselves include a measure of life-style, ethnic and architectural diversity, valued attributes of middle-class movers to the central city…these desiderata of the culture of consumption should not be under estimated in interpreting the revitalization of the inner city.”8 Ley was primarily concerned with the cultural politics of gentrification, prompting various theories of why individuals and families were moving back to the city. Scholars proposed the following reasons: the emergence of post-industrial white-collar jobs; rejection of suburban ideals; a growing interest in historic homes and neighborhoods; the rising cost of commuting to work; and an increased appreciation of human diversity and authentic urban living.9 According to Ley, the new “emancipated” gentrifier was less politically and religiously conservative than the “old” middle-class. Gentrification scholarship adhering to Ley’s theory typically focused on gender, sexuality and class as motivators. But according to geographer Loretta Lees, “By abstractly celebrating formal equality under the law, the rhetoric of the emancipatory city tends to conceal the brutal inequalities of fortune and economic circumstance that are produced through the process of gentrification.”10

7 Loretta Lees, “A Reappraisal of Gentrification: Towards a ‘geography of Gentrification,’” in The Gentrification Reader, ed. Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin K Wyly (London: Routledge, 2010), 384-389. 8 David Ley, “Inner City Revitalization in Canada: A Vancouver Case Study,” Canadian Geographers, 25 (1981): 128 9 Loretta Lees, et al., “Introduction to Section A,” in The Gentrification Reader, eds. Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin K Wyly (London: Routledge, 2010), 81. 10 Loretta Lees, “A Reappraisal of Gentrification,” 385. 4

Working at the same time, Neil Smith produced a highly influential capital-driven model in 1979 that challenged Ley’s consumer–based explanation. Smith positioned incoming homebuyers as “builders, developers, landlords, mortgage lenders, government agencies, real estate agents, and tenants” predominantly driven by the need to earn profit.11 Smith’s analysis was controversial because it built on Marxist ideas of political economy and argued that gentrification was an extension of state-sponsored structural inequality. This model “privileges economics over culture and structure over agency.”12 Smith’s “production-side” explanation generated strong debate over the perceived positive and negative consequences of gentrification, the most discussed aspect being displacement.13 In the mid-1980s, the influence of post-modernism on the social sciences caused scholars to accept multiple voices and a multitude of explanations for gentrification that did not fit the— by then—tired debates between supply and demand. Scholars began acknowledging the incredible variation in the way gentrification manifests and progresses over time. Every location is different—the geography, the individuals and groups involved, the political and economic forces, and the historical social and cultural fabric. In light of the broadening thinking on gentrification, in 1984, geographer Damaris Rose influentially argued that gentrification was a “chaotic concept.” Rose suggested that scholars examine a multiplicity of sources including the broad historical context, as well as the socioeconomic conditions of the people involved.14 Scholars criticized Rose’s complete rejection of form as unnecessary, while at the same time they fully embraced the multidimensional study of gentrification that included race, class, gender, and sexuality. By the 1990s literature on gentrification had evolved intellectually, but also reflected significant changes taking place as gentrification progressed and expanded in cities world-wide.

11 Neil Smith, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People,” Journal of the American Planning Association 45, No. 4 (1979): 540. 12 Loretta Lees, et al., “Introduction to Section A,” 83. 13 See Phillip L. Clay, and Robert M. Hollister. Neighborhood Policy and Planning. Lexington Books, 1983; Michael Schill, Richard P. Nathan, and Harrichand Persaud. Revitalizing America’s Cities: Neighborhood Reinvestment and Displacement. SUNY Press, 1983; Dennis E. Gale, Neighborhood Revitalization and the Postindustrial City: A Multinational Perspective. Lexington Books,1984. Need footnote punctuation for Clay and Hollister. 14 See Damaris Rose, “Rethinking Gentrification: Beyond the Uneven Development of Marxist Urban Theory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, (1984); Robert Beauregard, “The Chaos and Complexity of Gentrification.” Gentrification of the City, (1986). 5

Major urban centers were becoming integrated into a wider process known as the “global city,” a concept that emphasized the fluidity of information and capital.15 Globalization caused a new “transnational elite” of highly educated, professionals who influenced a shift in public policy, whereby gentrification was embraced as a solution to urban decline. Yet according to Neil Smith, the literature expanded at this time because,

The contest over gentrification represented a struggle not just for new and old urban spaces but for the symbolic political power to determine the urban future. The contest was as intense in the newspapers as it was in the streets, and for every defense of gentrification such as that by the Real Estate Board of New York there was an assault against gentrification-induced displacement, rent increases, and neighborhood change.16

In 1996, Smith published The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City which expanded his theories on the connection between class, race and space. He argued that the inner-city was ripe for gentrification as a revenge or ‘revanche’ against poor and minority populations who were being blamed for the decline of urban life. Referencing Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Theory, Smith described the inner city as the wilderness of the twentieth century and the returning white middle-class as the brave pioneers fulfilling their destiny as democratic Americans.17 Throughout the 1990s and 2000s urban planners, geographers and sociologists moved beyond the binary debates, however the shift created a new set of challenges. Gentrification continued to materialize differently in different places at different times. The process moved beyond the world’s biggest cities to second and third tier cities, small towns and even rural villages. Also, some neighborhoods that experienced gentrification in the 1970s underwent regentrification or supergentrification in the late 1990s when even wealthier gentry decide to invest in areas already gentrified by the middle class, as was the case in Brooklyn Heights, New York.

15 See John Friedmann, and Goetz Wolff. “World City Formation: An Agenda for Research and Action.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (1982); Saskia Sassen, “The Global City: Introducing a Concept.” Brown Journal of World Affairs, (2005). 16 Neil Smith, “A Short History of Gentrification,” in The Gentrification Debates, ed. Japonica Brown- Saracino (Routledge, 2013), 35-36. 17 See Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (Routledge, 1996). 6

The literature took on a search for synthesis resulting in numerous publications that surveyed over twenty years of scholarship. The introspective nature of the scholarship led some to conclude that the study of gentrification was losing steam. In 2000, Loretta Lees noted that interest in gentrification had declined, which she feared would prevent the field from fully pushing past the ‘theoretical logjam’ because there were many important issues to be studied. She wrote, “now is not the time to let gentrification research disintegrate under the burden of its consensus.”18 Lees highlighted several key areas of research that related to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as, aspects of time and place.19 At this time, gentrification literature came under criticism for its lack of concern for social justice on behalf of vulnerable urban populations. In The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research published 2006, geographer Tom Slater argues that the term gentrification has “been appropriated by those intent on finding and recommending quick-fix ‘solutions’ to complex urban problems, and in extreme cases depoliticized and called something else.”20 One such work is The Rise of the Creative Class published in 2002 by urban theorist Richard Florida, which substituted the term “revitalization” for gentrification. The bestselling work was championed by city governments and lobbyists hoping to cash in on a rebranding of gentrification. The Rise of the Creative Class bolstered the image of hipsters as a sign of redemption and renewal in decaying neighborhoods previously lacking in culture and creativity. Notably, neither David Ley nor Neil Smith is listed in the book’s index, perhaps an indication of the complete abandonment of the supply versus demand debate and its critical components. This historiographical paper focuses on five works published between 2006 and 2010 by two urban planners, a cultural geographer, and two sociologists. Put very simply—urban planning deals with policy, geography deals with space, and sociology deals with people, therefore gentrification studies is certainly the intersection of these disciplines. However, one of the other fundamental characteristics of gentrification—change over time—remains underexplored. The works have been chosen because they are place-based studies that utilize historical information to contextualize the many physical and social changes brought on by gentrification. The authors explore the complex facets of gentrification, most notably, the

18 Loretta Lees, “A Reappraisal of Gentrification,” 383. 19 Ibid., 385-388. 20 Slater, Tom. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives,” 585. 7

importance of image and identity in shaping the discourse on gentrification. Japonica Brown- Saracino advocates for more in-depth and comprehensive gentrification research in order to understand the “role and characteristics of a set of actors involved in gentrification” and “the relationship between traits such as race, income, and gender, and ideology and behavior.”21 In this paper, I argue that the field of gentrification studies would be positively enhanced by the perspective of historians. Conversely, historians would benefit from analyzing how other disciplines have approached the study of gentrification. Two of the works are written by leading gentrification scholars, Lance Freeman and Japonica Brown-Saracino. The other authors, Gabriella Modan, Michael Crutcher, and Carolyn Whitzman, are more obscure. All of the works are case studies that contain a section detailing the history of the neighborhood’s built environment and successions of residents. In each case, the identities of the inhabitants—the gentry or longtime residents—are formed or constructed as part of a complex set of negotiations often referred to as “politics of place.”

Case Study 1: New York City

In 2006, urban planner Lance Freeman published There Goes the ’Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground up, a book that expanded on ideas first published as an article co-written with Frank Braconi in 2004 titled, “Gentrification and Displacement: New York City in the 1990s.” The article analyzed the mobility rates of residents in gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City. There Goes the ‘Hood is an expansion of a claim originally made in the co- authored article that “gentrification in these studies does not appear to cause the widespread dislocation of the disadvantaged that some observers have claimed and it may also help to promote important fiscal and social goals, municipal governments may become more inclined to pursue policies explicitly geared to promoting it.”22 In There Goes the ‘Hood, Freeman attempts to support his controversial claim of low levels of displacement with sociological evidence rather than empirical data. He also argues

21 Japonica Brown-Saracino, The Gentrification Debates, 6. 22 Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi, “Gentrification and Displacement: New York City in the 1990s,” in The Gentrification Reader, eds. Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin K Wyly (London: Routledge, 2010), 373. 8

against the widely held belief that gentrification is 100 percent detrimental for longtime residents. Drawing on sixty-five interviews of longtime working and middle-class residents of Harlem and Clinton Hill, two predominantly African American neighborhoods, Freeman suggests that many longtime residents manage to avoid or postpone displacement. Furthermore, Freeman reports that many longtime residents considered some aspects of gentrification to be positive, such as the increase of public services and commercial amenities like grocery stores, pharmacies, and retail stores. The work’s strongest contribution to the literature is its focus on the lived experience of individuals and families who struggled through decades of disinvestment, poverty, and escalating crime. Harlem’s notoriety as America’s most prestigious African American neighborhood and Clinton Hill’s status as a predominantly black neighborhood strongly influence the identities of their inhabitants. The interviews frequently reported a lack of social interaction between new and old residents and conflicts over public space. Residents clearly understood that their historical claims to the community were under threat because the changes and improvements due to gentrification, because the residents perceived that the changes were not intended for them and did not ultimately serve their interests. Freeman highlighted the presence of middle-class black gentrifiers as a complicating element, because they are part of the gentry, yet are not considered to be a threat by the longtime residents. He concludes that a neighborhood’s black identity means it “belongs” to blacks and that there is an absence of whites—a sentiment that trumps class distinctions.23 Freeman references the work of sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton who argued in American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass that America’s residential “hypersegregation” has forced black communities to develop unique attitudes and behaviors in order to survive in exceedingly harsh conditions.24 Freeman considered race rather than class the “central organizing theme” that emerged from the interviews. He writes, “Through the course of my research, the topic of race repeatedly reared its head in a manner more compelling that my original focus on residential mobility and displacement.”25

23 Lance Freeman, There Goes the ’Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 80. 24 See Douglas S., Massey and Nancy A Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Harvard University Press, 1993. 25 Lance Freeman, There Goes the ’Hood, 8. 9

Initially, scholars were skeptical of Freeman’s claim of low displacement levels because tracking the movements of the ‘displaced” was notoriously difficult. Issues related to scale, timing, unit of measure, and ascertaining residents’ reasoning for moving rendered many displacement surveys inconclusive. Sociologist Rowland Atkinson famously described tracking displacement as “measuring the invisible.”26 Furthermore, Freeman’s conclusion ran counter to decades of gentrification research that recorded observable, even if not traceable, changes to the physical and sociocultural landscape of urban neighborhoods. Freeman’s claims also earned criticism because he only interviewed residents still living in the neighborhood. Lastly, Freeman was broadly criticized for aligning with “policy elites and journalists seeking neat soundbytes and tidy statistics.”27 In 2006, urban planners Kathe Newman and Elvin Wyly evaluated the same set of data as Freeman and Braconi and concluded that gentrification is not necessarily a boost for longtime residents. The same individuals and community groups that Freeman viewed as “both more receptive and optimistic, yet at the same time more pessimistic and distrustful than the literature on gentrification might lead us to believe,” were found by Newman and Wyly to be actively fighting to resist gentrification.28 As a city planner, Freeman is especially driven to analyze his findings as they relate to policy, specifically the neoliberal urban policy that appeared in the late 1990s that encouraged private institutions to invest or lend in inner-city neighborhoods. There Goes the ‘Hood is centered on the lived reality of America’s black ghettos and argues that no other public or private effort has been as successful in attracting capital to these economically depressed areas. Rather than let the free market reign, Freeman believes government intervention is required to achieve long term mixed-income neighborhoods.

Case Study 2: Chicago and New England

26 Loretta Lees, et al., “Introduction to Part Four”, in The Gentrification Reader, eds. Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin K Wyly (London: Routledge, 2010), 318. 27 Loretta Lees, et al., “Introduction to Part Seven”, in The Gentrification Reader, eds. Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin K Wyly (London: Routledge, 2010), 527. 28 Lance Freeman, There Goes the ’Hood, 1.

Published in 2009 by sociologist Japonica Brown-Saracino, A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity is an influential work that focuses on perspective of the “power holders” or gentry.29 Brown-Saracino presents an in-depth look at two neighborhoods in Chicago and two small towns in New England as a comparative study of places with different histories, different trajectories, and different controversies caused by gentrification. She aims to explain “how political economy and culture conspire to shape gentrifiers’ residential choices and daily practices and how these, in turn, alter the lives of…[longtime residents].30 Brown-Saracino works to fill a gap in the literature detailing the lived experiences of gentrifiers, who are more diverse in their desires and beliefs than the literature depicts. She claims that scholars have been focused on only one type of gentrifier—the urban pioneer— characterized by self-interest either in economic gain or cultural consumption and that the overuse of the pioneer type has obscured variation among the middle and upper-class gentry. Brown-Saracino identifies three different types of gentrifiers: social preservationists, homesteaders, and pioneers. The categories, she writes, “describe the ways in which gentrifiers oriented themselves ideologically and practically to gentrification…The typologies capture, not types of people, but rather how individuals position themselves, ideologically and behaviorally, in relation to a political, economic, and cultural process in which they are engaged.”31 Like Freeman’s argument that not all outcomes of gentrification are bad, Brown-Saracino argues that not all gentrifiers are bad. Both authors agree that gentrification is more complicated than the literature suggests and advocate for an expanded and more detailed study of the cultural and ideological variation among the actors involved. While race was a significant theme in There Goes the ‘Hood, race is only one of several other topics of study in A Neighborhood That Never Changes—one of the more prominent being sexuality. Brown-Saracino interviews 160 individuals in four locations—two neighborhoods in Chicago, a small town in rural Maine, and a coastal village in Massachusetts. Half of the interviews are conducted with old timers and half are considered to be members of the gentry.

29 Lance Freeman, There Goes the ’Hood, 20. 30 Japonica Brown-Saracino, A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 4. 31 Ibid,. 12

Her balanced, comparative approach illustrates the widely varying manifestations of gentrification and serves to highlight the significant number of gentry who did not fit the ruthless pioneer stereotype. Brown-Saracino seeks to understand the motivations of a particular set of gentrifiers who show “concern for a sense of place, community, and authenticity and a related self-consciousness about gentrification.”32 In other words, some gentry are aware of their privileged position and actively work to prevent the loss of existing cultural elements. Brown-Saracino argues that a group of gentry she calls “social preservationists” do not aim to achieve financial gain, do not intentionally support the commodification of authentic urban culture, and do not want to disrupt the old-timers’ community life.33 They tend to appreciate ungentrified space in a similar fashion as environmentalists appreciate the natural environment. Social preservationists work to protect authentic aspects of the community and to prevent old-timers’ displacement. A Neighborhood That Never Changes is essentially a study of resistance to gentrification by those who gentrify. The author focuses on social preservationists because they “provide remarkably uniform accounts of their resistance to gentrification and relocation and their taste for old-timers and other markers of authenticity.”34 Brown-Saracino argues that their cohesion is the result of similar access to mass media, higher education levels, and an awareness of historical precedents such as urban renewal and imperialism.35 Brown-Saracino also identifies a third group called “social homesteaders” whose ideology fell between the social preservationists and the pioneers. She felt it was important to identify this group because they appreciate authenticity, but are less concerned with the negative human aspects of gentrification. She argues that social homesteaders are more likely to prioritize the built or natural environment over longtime residents. Notably homesteaders often engage in the historic preservation of homes and buildings or advocate for the preservation of farmland or wilderness. Geographer Tom Slater critiques Brown-Saracino’s categories as part of the “‘gentrification of gentrification literature’ itself, via the sidelining of displacement as a primary research concern.”36 Slater considers the term “social preservationist” to be a literary device used

32 Japonica Brown-Saracino, A Neighborhood That Never Changes, 19. 33 Ibid., 254-255. 34 Ibid., 256. 35 Ibid., 257. 36 Tom Slater, “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives,” 528. 12

to water down the negative aspects of gentrification, much like Richard Florida’s use of “creative class.” Brown-Saracino is well aware of Slater’s criticism and argues that limiting our understanding of the gentry’s ideology is a mistake. She acknowledges that the actions of social preservationists and homesteaders may only delay (not stop) displacement and other negative aspects of gentrification. Brown-Saracino details several problems that plague social preservation. First, social preservationists often desire to “shut the door behind them” or preserve the neighborhood as it is when they move in, which privileges one time period over another and creates an artificial construct of what is deemed authentic. Second, the selected markers of authenticity inadvertently encourage commodification and tourism. Third, social preservationists tend to support only one minority group and overlook most of the other old-timers, which Brown-Saracino explains as misplaced admiration or a “taste for the endangered.”37 Finally, the mere presence of preservationists in the neighborhood “signals to others that it is safe and desirable and thus invites further investment by homeowners, businesses, and local government.”38 Despite the flaws, Brown-Saracino finds value in studying the “variations, contradictions, ideologies, and daily practices that are part and parcel of gentrification.”39 Rather than simply repackaging gentrification as social preservation, she seeks a more nuanced understanding of those who gentrify. The diversity of people and places studied in A Neighborhood That Never Changes reveals the importance of local history to the analysis of gentrification. Each case study, featured vigorous debates about history and identity. Gentrification involves the mixing of new and old ideas about place at exactly the same time the place is undergoing change. Brown-Saracino documents many interpretations and utilizations of history by both the longtime residents and incoming gentry as part of ideological struggle triggered by gentrification. One research site, Provincetown, Massachusetts is a small seaside village once populated by descendants of Portuguese fishermen and artists. During World War II, the town served as a naval base, creating a steady in-migration of outsiders and the formation of a gay enclave in the 1950s. Some locals initially resisted the “town’s reputation for its “boys,”’ but the increased

37 Japonica Brown-Saracino, A Neighborhood That Never Changes, 261. 38 Ibid., 260 39 Ibid., 262. 13

tourism benefited working-class families and local businesses. At the time of the author’s research in 2001, Provincetown was considered to be in an advance stage of gentrification led by affluent gays and lesbians who had become permanent residents. The debate over gentrification was infused with class tension and anger from old-timers who felt that gays “took” Provincetown. In response, some gay gentrifiers were defensive of their sexuality, while others—social preservationists—defended old-timers’ claim to the community. Brown-Saracino acknowledges that “no group is solely responsible for local heritage,” alluding to the fluidity of concepts like identity and authenticity. Brown-Saracino’s focus on social preservationists relates to a subset of gentrification studies with broad concern for social justice. In 2001, sociologist Christopher Mele chronicled a century of changes in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in order to analyze antigentrification movements in the 1980s that fought to preserve an authentic urban bohemian image. However, in spite of this preservation-minded effort, developers, reporters, and other groups co-opted the neighborhood’s marginal identity resulting in rapid gentrification.40 This case study and many others suggest that resistance to gentrification is futile because the political and economic engine supporting the process is inescapable. The inescapability of gentrification is a critical issue in the literature and has profound implications for the future of cities. Unfortunately, gentrification has not been fully explored in a historical context. Many scholars involved in the study of gentrification gloss over the fact that most inner-city neighborhoods have undergone a century or more of socio-economic and demographic changes. A “long history” of gentrification would link the process to other historical events such as mass migrations and other broad shifts in housing. The fact that neighborhood battles over culture, heritage, identity, and authenticity are frequently featured as front page headlines indicates that gentrification is a topic laced with historical precedent and emotive power. The remaining three works in this review more effectively utilize historical context in their telling of neighborhood gentrification in three cities, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and Toronto.

Case Study 3: Washington, D.C.

40 See Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City (University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 14

In 2007, socio-linguist Gabriella Modan published Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place, a multi-disciplinary study of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood located in Washington, D.C.. Modan’s research focuses on the actual words spoken along with general spatial analysis of the neighborhood’s people and places to decipher the politics of gentrification. She seeks to understand the neighborhood’s “various theories of what it means to be an authentic urbanite, who gets to define that in what kind of settings, and what’s at stake in whose definitions win out.”41 Turf Wars’ contributes to the literature by exploring the “spatialized divergent moral system” that develops between residents of different ethnicities, races, classes, and socioeconomic backgrounds.42 The neighborhood is called Mount Pleasant because it was initially settled by affluent Washingtonians wishing to escape the overcrowded central city. Working in the 1990s, Modan analyzed many sources to explore residents’ impression of themselves, of other residents, and of other neighborhoods. Following sociolinguist Deborah Schiffrin’s model of discourse analysis, described as “any given utterance both gains its meaning from other utterances and from the social context,” Modan analyzes a range of texts: interview transcripts, emails, articles, flyers, grant proposals, dialogue from public meetings, and various casual exchanges.43 At the time of Modan’s research Mount Pleasant was known as one of the most multicultural neighborhoods in Washington D.C. and was attracting the interest of investors based on the commodification of its “ethnic diversity.”44 Turf Wars utilizes a combination of history, cultural geography, ethnography, and linguistic analysis to dig deeply into the tension between various groups living in a diverse, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Modan argues that the identities and ideologies voiced by individuals and groups living in contested urban spaces are not created in a vacuum, but rather are the result of countless interactions. Modan’s goal is to study the dealings between individuals and groups as they negotiate Mount Pleasant, a neighborhood so diverse that it is an imagined community. The term is defined as a community in which members are not necessarily connected socially, but are connected

41 Gabriella Modan, Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 289. 42 Ibid., 97. 43 Ibid., 276. 44 Ibid., 9. 15

through geography and indirect communication. The theory was developed in 1983 by political scientist Benedict Anderson to explore nationalism and the process of community formation through newspapers, coded language, and other written and verbal content.45 To understand Mount Pleasant in the 1990s, it is necessary to provide a historical narrative of the neighborhood’s development. It began as a cluster of grand homes built by affluent, white upper-class families in the late nineteenth century.46 Within a few decades, streetcar service to the neighborhood ushered in commercial development and an influx of middle-class workers seeking to buy or rent the newly constructed rowhouses. In the 1920s and 1930s, an influx of rural citizens migrated to Washington D.C. in search of government jobs creating a housing shortage. The wave of newcomers influenced many of the original families to leave the neighborhood for the suburbs. Many of the large homes and rowhouses were split into apartments to accommodate the expanding African American population. Racial prejudice caused Mount Pleasant’s remaining white residents to develop restrictive covenants against their neighbors, however the white exodus continued through the 1940s. After World War II, many Latino immigrants (mostly war refugees from Cuba and El Salvador) found homes in Mount Pleasant—in what was by this time a majority African American neighborhood showing signs of absentee landlords and neglect. In the 1970s and 1980s, other immigrant groups including Vietnamese, Palestinians, Kurds, Trinidadians, Somalis, Bosnians, and Indians settled in Mount Pleasant.47 At this time, various international political and human rights organizations formed in Mount Pleasant because many of the immigrants were war refugees. Modan points out that during the seventies a small number of white and, to a lesser degree, black “middle-class and educated post-WWII baby boomers who had cut their teeth on civil rights and anti-war activism” were attracted to the neighborhood due to the appeal of the multicultural community and the low cost of the historic row houses.48 According to Modan, the boomers felt “working-class solidarity” with the neighborhood residents, but because they were

45 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 46 Gabriella Modan, Turf Wars, 48. 47 Ibid., 8. 48 Gabriella Modan, Turf Wars, 60. 16

socially and economically privileged, “they themselves contributed to making Mount Pleasant less hospitable to people in working-class circumstances.”49 Modan builds on the work of David Ley, whose 1996 book The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City examined the aesthetic consumption of urban spaces. That work is considered one of the first multi-city studies of gentrification to incorporate the broader historical context of consumer culture applied to housing patterns. Modan agrees with Ley’s argument that privileged, counter-culture youth are often the first gentry to move into urban neighborhoods and that their presence is then co-opted and sold to subsequent waves of professionals. She writes that Ley ”described exactly the history of Mount Pleasant since the 1970s, and propelled me to think about the economic consequences of the discursive images that people constructed of Mount Pleasant as a bohemian, activist, or hip neighborhood.”50 Turf Wars relates to several studies by scholars that analyzed texts produced by real estate professionals, journalists, and other “taste makers.”51 Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, published by sociologist Sharon Zukin in 1982, focused on artists living in renovated industrial buildings in New York City in the 1960s and the impact their presence had on neighborhood real estate development. Drawing on the aesthetics of “authentic” urban spaces, the artists produced their own cultural material in the form of art and gallery spaces which led to rapid economic revitalization. Over twenty years later, Zukin published Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places as a follow up to her earlier research. In Naked City, she argues that the enormous demand for distinctive urban neighborhoods threatens the immigrants, working-class, and artists that create them. Mount Pleasant’s history features a similar relationship between culture and economy. In the late 1980s, artists, musicians, and other creative individuals seeking affordable housing settled in Mount Pleasant and a mostly white,

49 Ibid., 61. 50 Ibid., 318. 51 See Caroline Mills, “Myths and Meaning of Gentrification,” in Place/Culture/Representation. edited by James S. Duncan and David Ley, 1993; David Ley, “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification.” Urban Studies 40, no. 12 (2003): 2527–44; Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City. U of Minnesota Press, 2000; Neil Smith, “New City, New Frontier: The Lower East Side as Wild, Wild West” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, by Michael Sorkin, Macmillan, 1992. 17

hardcore rock music scene emerged, simultaneously drawing the attention of local journalists and national music magazines and real estate investors. Modan’s attention to language, images, and ideology is in keeping with gentrification scholars, however her methodology is much more hands on. As a resident of Mount Pleasant, Modan ventures beyond reporting on the lived experience of individuals and families and inserts her own opinions and judgments into her analysis. Unlike the previous two authors, Modan is intimately engaged in neighborhood politics and provides a street-level rather than top-down interpretation of gentrification. Modan explains that issues related to race, class and ethnicity were frequent topics of conversation among residents. Residents living in different parts of the neighborhood expressed different ideas of acceptable behavior and moral conduct. The dynamic between resident and place created a “moral geography” defined as “an interweaving of a moral framework with a geographical territory.”52 For example, the Modan explains that the western section of the neighborhood was known as an enclave of white homeowners, while the central commercial strip, Mt. Pleasant Street, was heavily settled by Latinos who were likely to rent. Residents living near the markets, bars, and restaurants—often noisy with Mariachi bands and loud patrons—tolerated different behavior than residents living on the side streets. Many debates focused on what Mt. Pleasant Street should look like and what activities should take place there. Modan also analyzed a grant proposal written with the goal of installing public toilets on Mt. Pleasant Street in order to prevent public urination, a problem discussed at length in community meetings. Modan argues that many newcomers settle in Mount Pleasant as homeowners and attempt to improve the community by importing their own standards of respectability. Because the funding institution required the grant-writers to describe Mount Pleasant and how the toilets would benefit the community, the proposal is an example of how one group may position themselves as the core community at the expense of other members. The grant writers created a moral geography that placed them as the power holders by dividing the “community into native-born and immigrant residents” and championed diversity while at the same time created a “hierarchal relationship between different groups of people.”53 The grant writers’ position as neighborhood organizers certainly explains some of the assumed authority in the proposal; however Modan interprets the specific language as part of the

52 Gabriella Modan, Turf Wars, 90. 53 Gabriella Modan, Turf Wars, 140. 18

“perils of diversity” where morality is contested at the same time diversity is celebrated. Battles over appropriate uses of public spaces are common in gentrifying neighborhoods. In There Goes the ‘Hood, Freeman noted that longtime African American residents in Clinton Hill resented a ban on barbeques in Fort Greene Park initiated when white residents living in brownstones adjacent to the park complained about the smell and smoke.54 The process of neighborhood gentrification causes new and old residents, civic leaders, and government officials to negotiate constructed ideas of community, identity, and history that result in tangible changes that impact people’s lives.

Case Study 4: New Orleans

In Tremé: Race and Place in a New Orleans Neighborhood, cultural geographer, Michael Crutcher, analyzes the evolution of one of New Orleans’ oldest and most culturally significant African American neighborhoods. Published in 2010, the work focuses on “how the neighborhood evolved through an array of spatially selective processes, including exclusion and segregation and targeted destruction and displacement.” Similar to Modan, Crutcher is not immersed in the gentrification debates, thereby freeing his work from the binary discussions of supply and demand and old-timer and newcomer. Instead, the work is stems from African American studies and the “geographic turn” which focuses on the relationship between space and people. According to Crutcher, the “turn” influenced geographers to start interpreting the cultural landscape, putting “geography more than on par with history.”55 Tremé contributes to the literature by analyzing the power structures that influence the process of gentrification in a specific urban context. Crutcher’s focus on the ‘geography of gentrification’ is precisely what prominent thinkers have called for to push the scholarship forward.56 By exploring the relationship between race, ethnicity, and economic and political power over time, Crutcher reveals a much more complex narrative than black—displacee versus

54 Lance Freeman, There Goes the ’Hood,” 137. 55 Michael Crutcher, Tremé : Race and Place in a New Orleans Neighborhood (Athens : University of Georgia Press, 2010), xi. 56 Loretta Lees, “A Reappraisal of Gentrification,” 384. 19

white—gentrifier. African Americans living in Tremé not only actively resisted displacement and other forms of outside interference but they could also be ‘agents’ of gentrification themselves. Therefore, gentrification is only the latest structural pressure the neighborhood has fought over the course of the neighborhood’s two hundred year history. For example, city-led efforts to improve the downtown area resulted in the razing of homes for the construction of a municipal auditorium and public housing complex, and the destruction of Treme’s business district to make way for Interstate-10. The state-driven projects only served to exclude the largely African American neighborhood from economic growth and prosperity. Today, Rampart Street, so named for the French-built city fortifications that were torn down after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, is the only undisputed border of Tremé. The author writes that despite the loosely interpreted borders, the neighborhood “contains a concentration of structures, places, and social relations that are distinct and identifiable over time and place.” Historians consider Tremé to be New Orleans’ first suburb formed after an influx of Haitian- Creoles flooded the city in the early nineteenth century. The city’s racial system and codes of conduct reflected the large population of Creoles of color or “free people of color” who demanded, but were denied equal citizenship. Many black and white Creoles and other French- speaking immigrants purchased land in Tremé and slowly developed an autonomous, prosperous community with close ties to African slaves and Native Americans living outside the city. Treme also produced the rich street performance traditions of second-line parades, jazz funerals, and Mardi Gras Indians. Two centuries later, the neighborhood is championed by New Orleans’ official tourism office as “America’s oldest black neighborhood…the site of significant economic, cultural, political, social and legal events that have literally shaped the course of events in Black America.”57 Tremé is now being marketed as part of a state-driven multibillion dollar tourism economy designed to exploit the historic character and unique culture of the French Quarter and surrounding neighborhoods. Sociologist Kevin Fox Gotham argues that “tourism gentrification” is a term to describe a commercial and residential transformation of a “middle-class neighborhood into a relatively affluent and exclusive enclave marked by a proliferation of

57 Michael Crutcher, Tremé, 15. 20

corporate entertainment and tourism venues.”58 While Treme’s status as working or lower-class neighborhood, its proximity to the interstate, and its nearness to housing projects have delayed tourism gentrification, longtime residents have actively worked to resist gentrification. For example, in the 1990s, historic preservation overlays in Treme failed due to resident hostility. Furthermore, African American newcomers and developers are considered “race traitors” if they engage in activities that threaten longtime residents or Treme’s cultural traditions.59 However, despite these protests, many residents are acutely aware of rising land prices and express the defeatist sentiment that, “Treme is becoming more like the French Quarter.”60 Another defeat in Treme’s struggle against displacement was the colossal impact of Hurricane Katrina in further “deterritorializing low-income African American residents.”61 Crutcher also cites changes in neighborhood character, “alienation,” and “loss of identity” as factors that threaten the very cultural fabric upon which the city-at-large has leveraged its future. He writes, “Two legacies have the potential to shape Treme: one is architectural and material; the other is social and cultural. This contrived separation fails under critical scrutiny but exists in the everyday.”62 Crutcher argues that government policies may be working to preserve New Orleans’ unique heritage, however the policies should actually be working to nurture it. To be effective long term, the policies driving historic preservation and tourism gentrification should include low-income housing and city-sponsored efforts to “improve residents’ quality of life, create economic opportunities, and protect and foster local cultural traditions.”63 As a neighborhood case study, Treme exposes the fragility of centuries-old cultural traditions and the intimate connection between people and place. All of the authors reviewed have shown that the process of gentrification inherently reflects a historical relationship between people and place, which can be dramatically different in depending on the location. Also, temporality is important. The dynamics of gentrification in the 1970s and 1980s is different than in the 1990s. Finally, various stage models of gentrification

58 See Kevin Fox Gotham, “Tourism Gentrification: The Case of New Orleans’ Vieux Carre (French Quarter).” Urban Studies 42, no. 7 (2005). 59 Michael Crutcher, Tremé,, 108. 60 Ibid., 98. 61 Ibid., 101. 62 Ibid., 126. 63 Ibid., 126. 21

can create subsequent waves of gentrification and in some cases super-gentrification where members of the gentry are priced out. In Treme, Crutcher focused on displacement, injustice, and the impact of short-sighted public policy. Geographer Loretta Lee describes most public policy as ‘one size fits all’ meaning it ignores the intricate social, economic, political, and racial relationships that are involved.64 Furthermore, Tom Slater finds fault in policy makers who appropriate the term gentrification as a solution to urban poverty and blight. Slater suggests that “the very nature of policy research, usually funded by policy institutions, may be a significant factor” in explaining why more comprehensive and inclusive solutions are not being promoted.65

Case Study 5: Toronto

In the final work under review, urban planner Carolyn Whitzman analyzes over 125 years of neighborhood change in Toronto. In Suburb, Slum, Urban Village: Transformations in Toronto’s Parkdale Neighbourhood, 1875-2002, published in 2009, Whitzman utilizes traditional historical documents to explore how city planners, media outlets, community groups, and individuals wield their influence in contested urban spaces. She seeks to understand the way images of a particular place are created and disseminated and how the discourse resulting from these images relates to the actual social conditions. To accomplish this, the author utilizes newspapers, magazines, government reports, academic studies, and marketing materials to compare how the neighborhood was perceived at different points in time. Whitzman suggests that there is a growing interest in “longitudinal studies of neighbourhood transition” among scholars because gentrification muddles “earlier theories of inevitable decline” and because the postmodern turn within the social sciences involved an increased concern with rhetoric, images, symbols, and representations.66 The work is a case study of Parkdale, a centrally located neighborhood founded on Victorian ideals of “sylvan purity” and domestic harmony in 1875. While American cities are

64 Loretta Lees, “A Reappraisal of Gentrification,” 392. 65 Tom Slater, “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives,” 584-5. 66 Carolyn Whitzman, Suburb, Slum, Urban Village Transformations in Toronto’s Parkdale Neighbourhood, 1875-2002 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009), 192. 22

generally segregated by race, Toronto’s segregation pattern was along ethnic and religious lines limited to a small percentage of poor European immigrants. Therefore, Parkdale’s earliest residents were a mix of professional and working-class white, Protestant families living in detached homes. Whitzman explores how Parkdale’s idyllic image of suburban civility gave way to being described as a slum after World War I and eventually as an urban village in the 1970s. Unlike the other authors in this review, Whitzman utilizes historical research methods to study gentrification in the broad context of urban planning history, suburban studies, and industrial decline. In doing so, the author presents gentrification as the latest in succession of neighborhood transitions, rather than a trend reversal or “return to the city.” Suburb, Slum, Urban Village contributes to the literature on gentrification by evaluating the “long history” of neighborhood transition from “development through decline and into gentrification while paying equal attention to changing images and social conditions.”67 This treatment emphasizes history’s mantra that past informs the present and that gentrification is part of a continuum of human behavior that simultaneously reflects and informs social practices and economic trends. The primary images or labels under discussion are suburb, slum and urban village. Whitzman writes, “This study of how, when, and why labels were attached to this place demonstrates how successive descriptors papered over diversity and conflict.”68 For example, Parkdale was first described as a “flowery suburb” by marketers and journalists hoping to appeal to virtuous, middle-class wives and daughters. Yet the neighborhood was also home to many working-class families who all found work in the factories nearby. Then, when many large homes were converted to boarding houses and apartment buildings were built, Parkdale suffered the distorted label of “becoming a serious slum.” The label reflected social anxieties related to gender and class and ignored the increasing rate of homeownership and prospering ethnic communities that had developed. Additionally, the label influenced the government to launch several urban renewal projects that reshaped the landscape with high-rise complexes and a lakeside expressway resulting in true economic decline. Lastly, in the late 1960s, investment returned to Parkdale in the form of single-family home renovation and studio apartment development for low-income and mentally ill residents. After several decades of political conflict over the future of the neighborhood, the image of “the

67 Carolyn Whitzman, Suburb, Slum, Urban Village, 12. 68 Ibid., 192. 23

resurgent urban village” emerged, elevating the interests of higher-income homeowners over lower-income renters. Whitzman concludes that “both economic and social factors, both transnational structural trends and local agents, led to Parkdale’s changing image over time.”69 In Parkdale, the image of “a good place to live” shifted over time due to changing morals and social norms; however, the author notes that the same decades are identified as “turning points” in many North American cities. Suburb, Slum, Urban Village also analyzes the impact of images on public policy over time. According to Whitzman, a “disturbing continuity” emerged in the city regulations that disadvantaged low-income residents and was consistently at odds with diversity.70 The role of public policy is a central topic in the literature on gentrification. Scholars are particularly focused on the neoliberal urban policy that emerged in the 1990s after years of poor economic conditions and conservative lending practices. Loretta Lees describes “the “perfect storm” that created a new relationship between policy and gentrification”:

the general trend was unmistakable: in country after country, and city after city, more and more public policies began to encourage the kind of investment, subsidy, and planning processes that have long been understood to reinforce gentrification pressures. In general, efforts to use policy to cushion the worst inequalities caused by gentrification were scaled back or abandoned, while policies that unleashed gentrification became more and more popular.71

Because Parkdale began gentrifying in the 1970s, the neoliberal urban policies generated a second wave of gentrification in the 1990s that displaced many of the artists and other gentry who had contributed to the neighborhood’s hip urban village status. Because planning policy favored revitalization, Whitzman described Parkdale as a “landscape of despair for low-income residents” with “occasional oases of hope.”72 Pressure from homeowner and business groups advocated for limited housing for the poor and lobbied the planning office to “restore Parkdale’s “stability.”’73 The author suggests that the image of Parkdale as a family-friendly place to live

69 Carolyn Whitzman, Suburb, Slum, Urban Village, 195. 70 Ibid., 199. 71 Loretta Lees, et al., “Introduction to Part Six,” in The Gentrification Reader, eds. Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin K Wyly (London: Routledge, 2010), 448 72 Carolyn Whitzman, Suburb, Slum, Urban Village, 189 73 Ibid., 190. 24

was being recreated and that city planners “continued to listen.”74 One of the greatest values of Whitzman’s longitudinal study is the historical context given to public policy, which can be applied to current debates on gentrification. She writes, “If one of the great challenges that face cities today is the accommodation of difference, then it might help to look back at the past, not only to understand why we have the exclusionary planning policies that we do, but also to uncover alternatives, sites of resistance, places that did not fit the dominant models.”75

Conclusion

The five works reviewed reflect the current trends in gentrification literature that focus on race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Gentrification is a shifting, evolving social, cultural, and economic process similar to other topics have been written about extensively by historians, such as urban renewal, white flight, and urban decline; however, historians have not turned their attention to it. The oversight is troubling because gentrification ought to be interpreted as an important aspect of the post-World War II historical narrative. The surprising silence could be attributed to the dominance of suburbia as the quintessential postwar transformative historical event, thereby obscuring the small pockets of gentrification that would eventually spread over time. Another explanation could be that the process of gentrification is indeed too chaotic and lacks sufficient archival records to support historical inquiry. This argument is weakened by the attention historians have paid to population migrations, housing patterns, and architectural styles along with the material culture associated with these topics. Finally, historians may tend to avoid topics that have contemporary implications, which gentrification certainly does. Yet, it is impossible to believe that popular historical topics, such as urban renewal and suburbanization, do not have contemporary implications.

74 Carolyn Whitzman, Suburb, Slum, Urban Village, 190. 75 Ibid., 190. 25

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