For Latino and Hasidic families who have lived for decades in the Brooklyn waterfront community of Williamsburg, the September 19, 2005 headline in New York magazine wasn’t exactly news: “The Southside of Williamsburg has become a place to put down roots,” it declared. Williamsburg has long been a place where people put down roots-see Betty Smith’s 1943 novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, or Arthur A. Cohen and Philip Garvin’s 1970 study, A People Apart: Hasidism in America. But more recently, Williamsburg’s impoverished Southside has been “discovered” by the same breed of “pioneers”-as many insist on putting it-who turned Williamsburg’s neighboring Northside into a hip artsy enclave à la Manhattan’s Soho district. The new arrivals were seeking “frontiers” to the south and east that might provide lower rents and cheaper loft space. Many are paying rents that are unimaginably high for Bushwick, east of Williamsburg and for decades one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods.
Frontier terminology may have been apt in the early days of urban revival in neighborhoods being reclaimed from abandoned fields of debris. But in many urban communities today, the trend toward gentrification no longer involves “homesteading” amid rubble or in vacant factories. It has become a process that pits the interests of poor, often minority, working-class residents against those of real-estate developers, local governments seeking higher property-tax revenue, and wealthier newcomers who invariably drive up rents. So the romanticized “frontier” metaphors must be retired. They hide the marginalization of low-income residents, and they mask the social dislocation of long-established working-class communities.
Some sociological studies have minimized the displacement that gentrification causes, finding that low-income residents have tended to stay longer in gentrifying neighborhoods because they like the new surroundings. But a different picture of the results of gentrification emerges from a March study by Harvard’s Center for Joint Housing Studies. It reports that the nation is losing two hundred thousand rental housing units a year to demolition-about double the number of units being created under the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program. “We are taking one step forward and two steps back as gentrification in some neighborhoods and continued deterioration in others leads to the removal of vitally needed lower-cost rental housing,” said Nicolas Retsinas, the center’s director.
Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Urban Research and Learning published a study in January on the gentrification of the Latino community in Chicago’s West Town/Humboldt Park. It quoted one resident as saying, “The Latino character in this area is being eroded,” that “there are huge, huge, huge areas of Humboldt Park that are gone, that are lost to us through gentrification.” Another resident reported: “There are a lot of neighborhoods that have no Puerto Ricans-period, have no people of color-period. It’s a huge impact, you know, and I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.” The Loyola study also found that displacement has taken on an antichild character. “Community leaders only half-jokingly comment on the loss of children and the increase in the dog population,” it noted. And it found a disproportionate loss of elderly residents.
Newspaper reports from around the country have recently chronicled the boom: in luxury condominiums in places that were once home to a more modest clientele; the trailer park closed in West Sacramento, California; the drop in the proportion of Atlanta’s residents who are black; the controversy over new developments in San Francisco’s traditionally Chicano Mission District. Governing magazine noted in its March issue that “gentrification, a phenomenon normally associated with coastal cities such as New York and San Francisco, is now heading inland, transforming inner-city neighborhoods from Milwaukee to Raleigh-Durham to Albuquerque. It’s even come to Houston, the three-beltway city that loves to sprawl.”
While many low-income residents welcome the revitalization of their neighborhoods, they also recognize the danger that apartments will be priced beyond their reach; that the local companies where they work will be forced out by higher rents and the subsequent conversion of commercial property to residences; and that the stores where they now shop will be closed in favor of much more expensive ones. One person’s “pioneer” can be another’s “invader.”
The importance of the terminology hadn’t occurred to me until I interviewed Fr. Jim O’Shea, a Passionist priest and social worker. O’Shea has organized churches in Williamsburg and neighboring Greenpoint to fight for the inclusion of affordable housing in a new City Hall zoning plan destined to turn the Brooklyn waterfront industrial zone into a Miami-like strip of forty-story glass towers. The language of colonial expansionism neglects the question of what happens to the natives, he told me. “It removes any social consequence to the process.” But Williamsburg “is not the empty West,” O’Shea said. “And even the West wasn’t empty.”
As much as anyone, I’ve enjoyed the new Brooklyn that is being reshaped by rocketing real-estate prices, art galleries, trendy restaurants, and a steady influx of writers, artists, professionals, hipsters, and capital. As a Brooklyn native and resident, I like walking through leafy neighborhoods of restored brownstones. I, too, marvel at seeing new restaurants and high-end shops in places once marred by graffiti and crack houses. And I like to read the authors who’ve moved from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Brooklyn’s Park Slope, turning the neighborhood into a writers’ colony.
But, as is the case in cities across the country, this gentrification comes at the price of displacing poorer people who have stuck it out through the high-crime years, only to be faced with doubled and tripled rents. The expansion of this “frontier” has reached a critical point. There’s hardly anyplace left in Brooklyn for the poor to go. Families are either doubling up-creating conditions for increased domestic violence-or moving out, often to other states. O’Shea notes that when the frontier metaphor is employed, it usually describes white people moving into a neighborhood that is largely black or Hispanic. I mentioned the New York magazine headline about the Southside becoming a place to set down roots. “Now isn’t that incredible?” he said. “What an insult to the people who have had their roots here for generations.”
The social scientist Neil J. Smith noted in Gentrification of the City (Allen & Unwin, 1986), how Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian, defined “frontier” in his famed 1893 essay on the subject. It was “the meeting place between savagery and civilization.” Smith added that “although today’s frontier vocabulary of gentrification is rarely as explicit, it treats the inner-city population in much the same way” as earlier generations described Native Americans. Smith even foresaw what’s occurring in Brooklyn today: “the social Manhattanization of the urban core to match the architectural Manhattanization....The corollary of this is likely to be a substantial displacement of the working class to the older suburbs and the urban periphery.”
Brooklyn, which had been emblematic of the American working class, is Exhibit A for such Manhattanization. I do like having “pioneer” (as newspaper reviewers have called them) French restaurants in Brooklyn-but at what cost to others? “It’s the social Manhattanization you want to really worry about, the massive exodus of working-class people,” wrote Smith.
This is where organizers like O’Shea enter the picture. Their challenge has been to make the poor visible in the public-policy debate over how to renew America’s cities. You might say that they’re the true pioneers these days.
