By Brittany Hutson
Chris and Trey are brothers who grew up in mid-city New Orleans. Trey left home and became an attorney in New York City while Chris stayed behind and has long been dedicated to his neighborhood. But an impending building project is slated to transform their area, causing Chris anxiety about current residents being displaced because the new developments will be too expensive for people to live in. But Trey believes the impending change will be beneficial to the neighborhood.
The brothers are fictional characters yet their story resonates with an issue that is very real and is continuously stirring up controversial debates in cities across the nation, including Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and Los Angeles’ Echo Park.
“Brothers from the Bottom” is a production currently being shown at the Billie Holiday Theater in Brooklyn that brings to light the issue of gentrification as it occurs in predominately African-American communities. The play parallels an ongoing partnership between Louisiana State University and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and their efforts to build a joint medical campus in downtown New Orleans, scheduled for completion in 2013. The campus will span across 70 acres within a national historic district that will force the demolition of at least a hundred houses and small businesses. Preservationists have voiced concerns about displacing residents and losing historic assets.
Playwright Jackie Alexander attempts to show through his production how the debate around gentrification can cause a rift between neighbors and family members, as evidenced through the characters of Chris and Trey, brothers who are on opposing sides.
Gentrification is defined as the process of neighborhood change that results in the replacement of lower income residents with higher incomes ones. It is a housing, economic and health issue that affects a community’s history and culture and reduces social capital, according to the Center for Disease Control. The process shifts a neighborhood’s characteristics (i.e. racial/ethnic composition and household income) by adding new stores and creating desirable housing stock in neighborhoods previously run-down, due to crime, crumbling infrastructure, or otherwise.
It has long been associated with a strong racial component. Typically, lower income African Americans and/or Hispanics are the dominate residents in the neighborhoods that are slated for an upgrade. The outsiders (as they are commonly known) that begin to move into the neighborhood are believed to usually be higher income Caucasians. Nevertheless, studies over the last several years have reiterated that the causes of gentrification are not so black and white.
“It’s never the intent to get a certain group of people moved out of their homes,” says Barbara Becker, a dean at the University of Texas Arlington School of Urban and Public Affairs. “What happens is the housing stock that we find charming and wonderful and that everybody wants to live in is closer to the city. We’re also becoming more in tuned to being closer to our jobs so location becomes important, as well as the housing stock.”
She goes on to explain that when an influx of people moved to the suburbs during the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the housing stock in metropolitan areas went down and over time, lower economic groups began to inhabit those areas.
“It’s not that anybody says, ‘oh this is a Native American neighborhood, or a Hispanic neighborhood, or a Black neighborhood and we’re going to take it over,” she says. Typically, artists, graduate students and other bohemians see an essentially attractive neighborhood with solid housing stock, well laid-out streets, accessible public transportation and proximity to the city center and “pour a bunch of money into it to have something that’s really special in a good location.”
But it’s not that simple for people who are seeing their neighborhood’s character and integrity transform into one that is unrecognizable. Take Harlem, a region known as the epicenter of Black culture in the country.
According to New York City’s Department of City Planning website, Harlem is currently undergoing a massive rezoning project—in East Harlem, there are plans to rezone between East 99th and 122nd Streets for residential development and ground floor retail, including the introduction of new small businesses. In West Harlem, the Department of City Planning is proposing to rezone 90 blocks to facilitate affordable housing options and expand opportunities for new mixed-use development. Most popular is the rezoning of the famous 125th Street for new retail, office, hotel; arts and entertainment activities, and 2,500 new residential units, of which, more than 500 units would be income-targeted affordable housing.
“It’s causing a major exodus of people because low income families who live in these communities just can’t afford them and they are going to leave,” says Donald Cogsville, president of the former Harlem Urban Development Corporation and long-time resident of Harlem. “When government uses its power to rezone how can we be assured that people will not be displaced and affordable housing will come about?”
Essentially, gentrification brings to light the lack of communication and consideration between residents, developers, officials and interest groups. Developers assume that residents can pick up and live somewhere else, but to residents, the area that is subject for transformation is home, for better or for worse. It’s a feeling of comfort that they don’t want to lose.
And Cogsville is uncomfortable. Not only because there is a shift in the racial and ethnic makeup of Harlem, but because its cultural history seems to be getting stripped away as well. He says that the walls in the lobby of his building used to feature artwork by renaissance artists; now, they’re being replaced with more recent, contemporary artwork.
“It’s displacement of culture and is nothing that represents Harlem,” he says.
Gentrification is always going to have an underlying racial issue, believes Cogsville. “In most cases, gentrification is about increased land values but when they go up, that eliminates a certain group of people, which then makes the issue racial.”
He adds, “If someone was trying to sell an apartment for $600,000 they wouldn’t care who bought it. The problem is that because of the lack of unemployment opportunities we have, we’re not in that league. We can’t afford it.”
But according to various studies, minorities in these metropolitan areas may not be getting the short end of the totem pole. Lance Freeman, an associate professor of urban planning at Columbia University, who could not be reached for comment, published a book, There Goes the ‘Hood, in which he found that ‘poor residents and those without a college education were actually less likely to move if they resided in gentrifying neighborhoods.’
A study completed in 2008 by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Pittsburgh and Duke University found that while gentrification did not necessarily push out original residents, it did create neighborhoods that middle-class minorities moved to.
It’s about having healthy neighborhoods, says Patricia Gay, CEO of the Preservation Resource Center in New Orleans. “Let’s say you don’t want anyone to fix up any building in your neighborhood. I’ve seen the house eventually have to be torn down and people have to move out of their house because it is uninhabitable.”
Many see gentrification as the big bad developer coming to aggressively implement change upon a predominately minority community; it was for this reason that Alexander inserted a twist, among others, into his play: the developers in this case are black.
“I find a lot of times in these situations, money is the driving factor,” says Alexander. “If black people can make money off of it, they’re all for it. If white people can make money off of it, they’re all for it.”
Alexander explains a scene in the production where one of the residents is condemning one of the developers for stealing their property and trying to get rich off of it. “The developer looks at him and asks, ‘what do you own around here that I’m supposedly stealing?'” says Alexander. “I think that scene flips it and says, if we truly love these communities it’s our responsibility to buy into them.”
Of course, there is no one size fits all answer to this on-going debate. Experts and researchers believe that more collaboration should occur between the parties involved–residents and whomever else they may be–to minimize the seemingly negative consequences of gentrification. Ideas that have been proposed includecreating affordable housing for all incomes, developing policies that will ensure continued affordability of housing units and provide help for residents remain in their homes, as well as providing community participation—such as recruiting members to assist with the redevelopment of the neighborhood itself, and educating them on how the impending changes can benefit them.
