{"id":130265,"date":"2017-10-17T08:20:53","date_gmt":"2017-10-17T12:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=130265"},"modified":"2017-10-25T14:35:22","modified_gmt":"2017-10-25T18:35:22","slug":"op-ed-gentrification-bring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2017\/10\/op-ed-gentrification-bring\/","title":{"rendered":"Op-ed: Gentrification? Bring it"},"content":{"rendered":"

In July, a group of long-time, mostly Latino residents of Los Angeles\u2019s Boyle Heights neighborhood\u00a0staged protests<\/a>\u00a0outside a trendy new coffee shop called Weird Wave Coffee, holding signs that read \u201cAmerikkkano\u201d and \u201cWHITE COFFEE.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across the country in Brooklyn\u2019s rapidly gentrifying Crown Heights neighborhood,\u00a0locals lashed out<\/a>\u00a0over a new restaurant with decor that included fake bullet holes and a menu that offered a drink called \u201c40 ounce ros\u00e9\u201d (malt liquor and wine) served in a paper bag.<\/p>\n

Over the past few decades, gentrification debates have migrated from the\u00a0pages of academic journals<\/a>\u00a0into the streets and\u00a0the mainstream press<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The word, in many ways, is tinged with negativity. And for good reason. In tight real estate markets, it can lead to development that privileges profits over community and shuts people out of neighborhoods they have lived in for decades.<\/p>\n

But what about cities struggling to overcome the threat of bankruptcy like Hartford? How does gentrification look in New South cities like Austin and Nashville, where midcentury urban planning destroyed residential communities and left downtowns largely unoccupied?<\/p>\n

While doing research on the economic health of Hartford, one of us asked the head of a downtown Hartford nonprofit about gentrification. Her response? \u201cWe could use some of that. But we are so far away from it, it\u2019s not even an issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

If residential patterns and urban areas vary, so too must the story of gentrification. In other words: Have big cities hijacked the gentrification debate?<\/p>\n

The origins of gentrification<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cGentrification\u201d is a term coined by the British sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964 to explain the return of the middle class to\u00a0London\u2019s center city<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the U.S., academics and urban planners first started extensively talking about and debating gentrification in the 1970s. Between 1950 and 1970, urban manufacturing went overseas and white middle-class city-dwellers moved to the suburbs. Concerns over blighted urban centers grew. Sociologists, planners and geographers found new cultural and economic trends to study related to the rise of artist and middle-class\u00a0loft living<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0return of capital investment<\/a>\u00a0to urban centers.<\/p>\n

Today, the meaning of gentrification no longer refers to the \u201creturn to the center.\u201d Instead, it usually means that new and affluent residents or developers are investing in a neighborhood.<\/p>\n

This infusion of capital changes the relationships within and between communities. Demand increases and property values rise; poorer residents are displaced as wealthier people move in; new shops appear and the public image of the neighborhood changes. High demand can incentivize landlords to evict residents, at times using egregious practices \u2013\u00a0like hiring someone to harass renters<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 in order to escalate rental prices.<\/p>\n

\"Members
Members of New York City\u2019s East Harlem neighborhood protest a development company\u2019s attempts to push immigrant families from their homes. (Bebeto Mathews\/AP Photos, via The Conversation)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Extreme gentrification takes place in the highest-rent, highest-demand places like San Francisco or New York\u2019s Greenwich Village. Rents in New York\u2019s once-booming Bleecker Street have become so astronomical that vacancy is now a problem of\u00a0too much demand, rather than not enough<\/a>: Property owners now keep their storefronts empty, hoping a major chain will want to locate in the high-visibility district.<\/p>\n

Gentrification isn\u2019t all negative. In an influential and counterintuitive\u00a0study<\/a>, Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi, who study urban development, found that poorer residents were less likely to move out of gentrifying neighborhoods than nongentrifying neighborhoods. Safety improves with gentrification, and so can services and amenities.<\/p>\n

While some neighborhoods experience positive outcomes, gentrification studies are mostly concerned with access to housing, public space, and the loss of community. It seems impossible not to view New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Boston through the lens of skyrocketing real estate and displaced residents.<\/p>\n

What about other kinds of places?<\/p>\n

The urban in-between<\/strong><\/p>\n

When cities experienced population and economic decline decades ago, some, like New York and Boston, found ways to rebound. Others, like Detroit or Connecticut\u2019s largest city, Hartford, did not.<\/p>\n

Hartford continues to experience unusual and difficult financial circumstances. The city has low home-ownership rates and high poverty rates. But maybe more significant is that the city is the state\u2019s capital. Half of the city\u2019s real estate is made up of government buildings, educational facilities, or hospitals \u2013 all of which are\u00a0nontaxable<\/a>. With a U.S. $65 million deficit,\u00a0Hartford is now on the verge of bankruptcy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Where is Hartford\u2019s gentrification? Or, more precisely, is there a kind of gentrification that would be welcomed in a place like Hartford? A place like Hartford could learn from smaller cities, which are less afflicted by the bloated real estate and speculation that plague places like New York and San Francisco.<\/p>\n

In a deindustrialized small city like North Adams, Massachusetts, for example, gentrification is welcomed. The old mill city near the Berkshire Mountains had its sprawling electrical manufacturing plant, Sprague Electric, transformed into a contemporary fine art museum, MASS MoCA. The museum, in turn, helped transformed the city from a shrinking post-industrial community into an arts and cultural destination. The museum\u00a0injected $34.4 million into the local economy in 2015<\/a>, drawing tourists, lowering unemployment levels, and creating opportunities for new businesses.<\/p>\n

Tourism jobs are not the skilled union jobs Sprague Electric once offered. But without other opportunities, the community welcomes this kind of gentrification. The town was\u00a0built for 20,000, but only has 13,000 residents<\/a>. The community wants \u2013 indeed, it needs \u2013 more people.<\/p>\n

There is also what we could call \u201cempty lot\u201d gentrification. Gentrification doesn\u2019t always displace existing populations. Consider cities like Nashville, Tennessee and Austin, Texas, where suburbs bloomed in the postwar era. The center cities never housed the heavy manufacturing of northeastern and Rust Belt cities; until recently, they remained sites of light manufacturing, parking garages, and empty lots.<\/p>\n

In the early 2000s, former Austin mayor (and real estate entrepreneur) Will Wynn sought to build more residential properties in downtown Austin, and Austin has since seen dramatic residential growth. Empty lot gentrification has its own issues: It can create downtowns for elites. Concerns over\u00a0gentrification beyond Austin\u2019s city center<\/a>\u00a0have grown, and Austin\u2019s famed music venues are getting\u00a0priced out<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A tale of two kinds of cities<\/strong><\/p>\n

In bloated real estate markets like New York or San Francisco, critics of gentrification see even the smallest changes \u2013 a new park or a new coffee shop \u2013 as harbingers for inevitable neighborhood ruin.<\/p>\n

For cities needing gentrification, the issues are different. The conversation about popular cities has made academics and policy analysts timid about gentrification. Ailing small cities need to increase visibility to attract more people and develop a stable tax-base.<\/p>\n

Hardly a call for free market-driven housing policy, there is no reason policies that minimize the negative effects of gentrification \u2013\u00a0rent control<\/a>,\u00a0mixed income housing<\/a>, and\u00a0limited equity cooperatives<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 cannot be combined with efforts to attract the middle class.<\/p>\n

The gentrification debates should also not blind us to what made New York and San Francisco attractive cities in the first place. The principles of urban activist\u00a0Jane Jacobs<\/a>\u00a0for healthy city life still hold: diverse uses of streets and public places, mixed-use buildings, a variety of economic and commercial opportunities, and local excitement about community building.<\/p>\n

But simply getting people into the city cannot be overlooked. In North Adams, new opportunities come from investing in the\u00a0arts<\/a>. In\u00a0Pittsburgh<\/a>, an openness to technical innovation, museums, universities, and a dynamic restaurant culture are creating national buzz about a city that continues to lose population. Detroit just hired the nation\u2019s first\u00a0chief story-teller<\/a>\u00a0to help move the narrative away from stale stereotypes. Throughout European cities,\u00a0night mayors<\/a>\u00a0are charged with inspiring excitement around urban nightlife.<\/p>\n

Hartford will never become New York. But why not look to North Adams, Pittsburgh, or\u00a0Columbus<\/a>\u00a0for examples of a different kind of gentrification?<\/p>\n

Weird Wave Coffee, in other words, might be welcomed in Connecticut.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hartford will never become New York. But why not look to North Adams, Pittsburgh, or\u00a0Columbus\u00a0for examples of a different kind of gentrification?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":130267,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,1715,1862,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[175],"class_list":["post-130265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-community-impact","category-busn","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-10 16:14:54","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130265"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130490,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130265\/revisions\/130490"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/130267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130265"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=130265"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=130265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}