How Customers of an Independent Coffee Shop Justify Neighborhood Change
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE HIPSTER GENTRIFIERS: HOW CUSTOMERS OF AN INDEPENDENT COFFEE SHOP JUSTIFY NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE Erin Davenport A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Sociology. Chapel Hill 2020 Approved by: Andrew Perrin Kenneth Andrews Paul Mihas Karolyn Tyson ©2020 Erin Davenport ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Erin Davenport: The Hipster Gentrifiers: How Customers of an Independent Coffee Shop Justify Neighborhood Change (Under the direction of Andrew Perrin) In this paper I move the focus of sociological gentrification discussion away from private housing and into public “third-spaces”, such as a coffee shop, that provide insight into the collective, every day experience of life in a neighborhood. It asks interview respondents to consider how the neighborhood is changing, and through their responses, shows the cultural tools they use to understand and rationalize the negative effects of gentrification. I build on literature to show how ethical concerns over gentrification do not result in decisions to forego gentrification among gentrifiers, who in this study tend to minimize the role their residence has in changing the neighborhood. Also, through the case of homeless residents who frequent both the focal coffee shop and another nearby business, I show how treatment by employees related to brand identity and customer comfort help reinforce social boundaries. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee: Andrew Perrin (chair), Kenneth Andrews, Paul Mihas, and Karolyn Tyson. Andrew Perrin challenged me to be rigorous in my application of social scientific logic. Kenneth Andrews connected me to important literatures on neighborhood and place and guided elements of the project design. Paul Mihas helped me from my project’s inception, and was an invaluable sounding board. Karolyn Tyson taught me qualitative methods and pushed me to be precise in all observations. I am also appreciative of my friend Faizan Khan, who first took me to Combustion because he thought I would like the vibe, and then stuck with me and encouraged me when I realized I wanted to write a paper about its contradictions. He brought me food on long fieldwork days, and was my earliest audience, looking over drafts and pushing my ideas forward. Thanks to my parents Steve and Sue, who have always supported my education and empowered me to be my best self. I also appreciate my siblings Meghan and Jack who cheer me on and keep me grounded. And lastly thank you to my participants, who gave their time to a stranger when they probably would rather just be enjoying their latte. You will never know how much you saying “yes” meant to me. Thank you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………………….vii LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………...…………..….viii LIST OF GRAPHS…………………………………………………………………………….....ix LIST OF IMAGES…………………………………………………………………………..…….x INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 Research Questions……………………………………………………………………......1 LITERATURE REVIEW…………………………………………………………………………3 Coffee shops and Gentrification…………………………………………………………..3 Customer/Employee Experiences…………………………………………………………4 Urban Dwelling Hipsters, Latte Liberals, and Performative Progressiveness…………….5 DATA AND METHODS…………………………………………………………………………8 Setting……………………………………………………………………………………..8 The coffee shop…………………………………………………………………………..14 Fieldnotes………………………………………………………………………………...18 Recruiting Strategy………………………………………………………………………18 Interview Sample………………………………………………………………………...18 Interview Strategy………………………………………………………………………..20 Interviews………………………………………………………………………………...21 Researcher Identity……………………………………………………………...……….22 Analytical Strategy……………………………………………………………………….24 FINDINGS AND EMBEDDED DISCUSSION………………………………………………...26 v How do they know? Race, symbols, and hipster coffee shops as indicators of gentrification……………………………………………………………….26 Racial Avoidance as a Symptom of Gentrification………………………………………26 Placelessness as a Justification for Neighborhood Change……………………………...31 Process with No Actors- Framing Absence of Responsibility around Gentrification…...34 Managing the Space on Behalf of Customers: Employees and Homelessness………….39 Homeless as Validating Brand Identity? Investigating a Nearby Fast-food Restaurant as a Comparison Case………………………………………………………..45 CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………………………………………...51 APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW GUIDE……………………………………………………..……53 APPENDIX B: CODEBOOK…………………………………………………………………....55 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………..60 vi LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Demographic Info about Interviewees…………………………………………………19 Table 2. Times of Interviews…………………………………………………………………….20 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Theory-Building from Findings……………………………………………………….49 viii LIST OF GRAPHS Graph 1. Age Distribution of Interviewees……………………………………………………..20 ix LIST OF IMAGES Image 1. June 2019 Looking out the window of Combustion…………………………..………12 Image 2. October 2019 Looking out the window of Combustion……………………….….…...13 Image 3. Billboard near Combustion……………………………………….…………………...13 Image 4. Keypad lock on bathroom door…………………………………………….………….15 Image 5. Photography on the wall of Combustion………………………………………………16 x INTRODUCTION In the context of gentrification, how do the (likely politically liberal) customers of a “hipster” independent coffee shop make sense of the changing neighborhood context and their own role in those changes? In this paper I address this question by focusing on a coffee shop in a gentrifying neighborhood. I root my study in a specific location to illuminate the local neighborhood dynamic, and to see how different customers respond to the same neighborhood conditions. I ask the research questions: (How) do the likely liberal customers of a “hipster” independent coffee shop make sense of the gentrifying neighborhood context, express regret about neighborhood conditions while justifying their own actions to move into the neighborhood, and serve as the impetus for employees to recreate broader dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that exist in the surrounding neighborhood? I conducted over sixty interviews with customers and staff. I find that employees perform boundary work on customers’ behalf, making sure homeless neighborhood residents do not linger in the coffee shop. This enables the avoidance of responsibility for gentrification that many customers enacted in interviews. The “out of sight, out of mind” approach softens some of the harshest realities of gentrification and economic inequality in the neighborhood, which are marked by the homeless people impacted by the lack of affordable housing, and allows the coffee shop to maintain its cozy atmosphere for its paying customers, who work hard to disclaim their agency in neighborhood changes taking place around them. This is important because it 1 helps explain inaction in the face of concerns, which customers justify through consistent narratives. Gentrification occurs not only in housing, but in every part of the neighborhood. The gentrification literature shows how spaces change based on the actions of the gentrifiers, but rarely focuses on how gentrifiers themselves make sense of their position in the neighborhood and how they justify individual decisions that may displace others. Interviews work well for the research questions I pursued because ethnographic interviews offer opportunities for researchers to determine how participants make sense of the meso-level interactions and public cultures they are a part of (Rinaldo and Guhin 2019:14). Additionally, the well-documented emotional labor obligations of working in the service industry are a key factor in helping gentrifiers rationalize their decisions. I show the unique form of emotional labor that is required of employees to maintain an atmosphere that invokes urban aesthetics of gritty exposed brick while maintaining distance from homeless neighborhood residents. I will also show how customers at this coffee shop explain gentrification, opening the door for future research into how gentrifiers make, and subsequently justify, their decisions in changing neighborhoods. 2 LITERATURE REVIEW Coffee shops and Gentrification The question of how gentrification impacts communities has been well documented in the quantitative literature, especially within the realm of housing, showing how displacement is an effect of gentrification, and that an effect of displacement is typically a neighborhood with whiter and wealthier demographics than the one existing previously in that area (Hetzler, Medina, and Overfelt 2006) yet there is a need for ethnographic work to expand the understanding of this phenomenon on an everyday level. We do not yet understand how individuals process and respond to the displacement when they are the ones doing the displacement. As shown in a study of neighborhood change in New York City, brands of cafes and restaurants became symbols of the gentrification in the surrounding neighborhood (Zukin et al. 2009:47). In particular, coffee shops have been identified in several studies as one of the types of business likely to pop up within a gentrifying neighborhood. This association is so strong that Papachristos et. al. used the density of coffee shops in a neighborhood as their operationalization of its gentrification level, in a study looking at neighborhood change in Chicago (2011). Indeed, other scholars make this connection more explicit, noting that: “changes in the local business