Keeping the Hood, Getting Rid of the Neighbours
By Simon J Black
Published: 08/09/2008
In his latest contribution to POUND magazine, Simon Black analyzes gentrification in the age of hipsterism and what it means for the inner-city working-class neighbourhood.
"Be a true hipster, drive the poor out onto the streets” reads the makeshift poster haphazardly plastered on a lonely Bed-Stuy lamppost. Home of Biggie Smalls, Bedford-Stuyvesant is the latest traditionally black neighbourhood in New York City to be subject to the seemingly irrepressible forces of gentrification. Once one of the largest African-American communities in the U.S., Bed-Stuy’s under assault from the Nike Dunk wearing, latte sipping, Cool Kids pumping hipster brigade. Fetishizing black popular culture since the jazz era, white hipsters have always longed for the ‘grit’ and ‘authenticity’ of the black neighbourhood. And yet the new foot soldiers of gentrification – in ironic fashion – are hurting the ones they love, as the first wave gentrifiers in the urban displacement of the black working class in cities across the US. But averse to the true ‘grit’ of the ghetto (i.e. the daily grind of joblessness, police brutality, the crime and the hustle), today’s hipsters want to keep the West Indian food joint and the Black history bookshop, but not necessarily the people that go with it. They want the ‘hood, just not the neighbours.
Gentrification is the process of wealthier people arriving in an existing urban neighbourhood, leading to an increase in rents and property values, and the displacement (pushing out) of poorer residents. For its defenders, gentrification is a key part in the process of “urban renewal” i.e. turning so-called “bad” neighbourhoods into “good” ones. It involves investment into old and dilapidated housing and increased economic activity. According to this narrative, gentrification is linked to reductions in crime rates and greater tax revenue for local governments leading to improved public infrastructure such as new schools and parks. Yet as gentrification’s critics rightly question: Why can’t governments invest in low-income neighbourhoods as is? Why does the rejuvenation of poor neighbourhoods have to be left to the workings of the housing market? Gentrification doesn’t eliminate poverty; it simply shifts it to another neighbourhood.
So how’s the hipster to blame? Loving the ‘hood ain’t a bad thing, is it? Maybe not, but evidence shows that moving into it may be; at least from the perspective of said ‘hoods residents. The role of the hipster is that of “urban pioneer”: an economically marginal group of “trend-setters” who come to low-income neighbourhoods in search of cheap rent and a sense of “authenticity”. Geographer Neil Smith points to the racist undertones of the term “pioneer”, in that like the American west colonized by the violence of white “pioneers” against Native Americans, the term “urban pioneer” assumes a neighbourhood is an empty space to be settled, not a vibrant community with an established population. As the hipsters take root and their numbers grow, their culture of art galleries, trendy bars and coffeehouses takes root as well. Rents and property values escalate as second wave gentrifiers (those who follow the hipster) looking for “cool” neighbourhoods move in and push lower-income residents out.
Hipster gentrification takes place within an important historical context. During American’s urban crisis of the 1960s and 70s, whites fled riot-torn inner-cities; “you can have your chocolate city; we’ll keep our vanilla suburbs” was their mantra. But the reversal of “white flight” came with the booming economy of the 1990s and now long established black working-class neighbourhoods are targeted for gentrification by hipsters and the soon to follow white middle class: Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district, Kensington in Philadelphia, Oakland in the Bay Area are all in the process of hipster colonization and gentrification. In recent years, the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Williamsburg – self-proclaimed hipster capital of the world – rapidly gentrified pushing lower-income hipsters into Bed-Stuy. Capital of black America, Harlem, has seen gradual hipster creep and now Wall Street traders are looking to buy up its Sugar Hill brownstones. Even the South Bronx, the spiritual home of hip-hop, hasn’t escaped the hipster invasion. Devastated by the construction of the cross-Bronx expressway – an episode so forcefully recounted in Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop – the South Bronx is slowly seeing galleries and lofts occupy old real estate.
Although the overlap of race and class in America remains strong, it’s would be easy to understand gentrification solely along race/class lines, i.e. the white and wealthy causing the displacement of the black and poor. However, the rise of a black middle class means African-American landlords and property developers are often complicit in the gentrification of traditionally black working class neighbourhoods, illustrating that the logic of the market can overwhelm the logic of community preservation. And other racialized communities are being gentrified, such as the working class Chinese neighbourhood of Lower East Side Manhattan. With different historical patterns of residential segregation and race relations than south of the border, gentrification in Canadian cities can take on different dynamics. Toronto’s Parkdale is not ethnically homogenous but a multicultural low-income neighbourhood that slowly gentrified in recent years as the hipster Mecca of Queen West West inches along the Queen St. corridor bringing coffee shops, art spaces, and rising rents along with it. The continuity between the Canadian and US experience lies in the fact that low-income neighbourhoods in the inner-city are disproportionately home to people of colour and increasingly subject to gentrification.
So what can be done? The growing social movement that is hip hop activism needs to put gentrification at the top of its agenda – alongside prison abolition, youth employment, and police brutality. This means educating ourselves about gentrification and its impacts, and then fighting on the front lines of urban battles over rent control, public housing, and city planning. Low-income neighbourhoods don’t need art lofts or Starbucks or other symbols of hipsterism; they need well-paying jobs, good schools, affordable housing, public day care, and democratic control over what goes on in the ‘hood. But there’s more than community empowerment and social justice at stake in this struggle. Despite the globalization of hip-hop, the black working-class neighbourhood of urban America remains the epicentre of hip hop culture, a driving force in its creativity and advancement, and the foundation of its progressive political agenda. If hip hop is the house that the ghetto built, then dismantling the neighbourhoods that gave birth to the culture is tantamount to dismantling hip hop brick by brick, ‘hood by ‘hood.
Published in POUND Summer 2008 Issue