Reassessing The Gentrification Debate: Is It All About Race or Just Economics?
“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.’
