I Am A Sign of Gentrification

I have been avoiding writing this post for longer than this blog has existed.

I’ve touched on ideas surrounding gentrification. I’ve written about where I live and I’ve written about changes in the neighborhood. I read little light’s piece, “I, colonist,” months ago and the thought  “I’m avoiding this. I’m avoiding this topic” stuck in my brain. And in the spirit of gentrification, I kept avoiding it.

I talk about how the police presence has grown in my neighborhood, how it pisses me off that every time I go outside I see another giant hideous condo being built or another lot that’s been cleared for co-ops but may sit open for a good long while because of the economy right now. I talk about how rents continue to skyrocket in the area, and how people like to think it’s only become a “good” place to live or visit in the past few years because that’s when lots of folks who look like me have shown up. My damn “How Do You Preserve Your History?” section is about gentrification. But I don’t talk about the fact that, as much as so many of the signs and results of gentrification in my area infuriate me, I am a middle class white woman in my early twenties who just renewed my lease for the next two years on a bi-level two bedroom apartment in a historically Black neighborhood.

I live in Brooklyn, by Pratt, on a street that everyone you talk to will tell you is part of a different neighborhood. My landlord said “Fort Greene.” An ex-coworker said “Clinton Hill.” When a man was shot on my corner in August, the news said “Bedford Stuyvesant.” On November 26th, I will have been here a year – the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I was 18 and left my parents’ house for college. I decided I wanted to move here in April 2007. I was living in Philly at the time and came to visit Sydette. We went out to dinner in Fort Greene and then went on a Wifey Wander, which meant we marched our asses across creation. She showed me parts of the area she’d always loved. I pretended that if we kept walking around the neighborhood, somehow I would just magically live here. I’d walk up to the door of a building, the keys to my place in West Philly would miraculously fit the lock, and my cat would be inside waiting for me.

That night, I didn’t think about how anyone already living in the area would feel if my keys made that magical switch.

Six months later, I was offered a job in New York. The woman who eventually became my boss got excited when, during my second interview, she asked where I would want to live if I moved and I said “Somewhere near Fort Greene.” She owns a huge house in Clinton Hill, rents out parts of it to pay the mortgage and views the neighborhood at least as much as a real estate venture as she views it as her home (she probably wouldn’t ever use those words, but she would say that real estate, or “flipping properties,” is a hobby of hers).

Right now, I don’t view anywhere as home. My parents’ town is where I grew up, Philly is comfortable, and Brooklyn is where I am, a place I’m growing to love and where I’m hoping to root down.

Right now, I have been writing this post for almost three hours. Writing and re-reading and deleting and writing more and deleting and banging my head against the wall. Because it is my instinct to start talking about gentrification and go from “I will admit that I’m a part of gentrification without outright saying it”, to spinning a tale of why I moved here, to verbally eviscerating a past coworker.

It is easier for me to identify a problem than it is to admit I’m a part of it. It is easier for me to talk about what others are doing wrong or should reconsider without looking at myself. It’s hard as hell for me to go “I moved here because I loved how the neighborhood felt to me, I’m staying here because I love it more everyday, and I can afford to stay while people whose families have lived here for generations cannot.”

Last night, Sydette and I went to see Danny Hoch’s new play, Taking Over, at the Grand Street Campus Auditorium. It was a free show, presented as part of the Hip Hop Theater Festival. While we waited in a line that wrapped around the corner of Grand Street and Bushwick Avenue to go in, she listened to the conversation the people behind us were having and got irked. I was doing my own eavesdropping on the conversation the white Williamsburg residents in front of us were having about “reviving local culture and flavor” and wasn’t sure my jaw would ever unlock. We noticed that a whole bunch of the people who were getting called out from the line to move ahead (because of the types of reservations they had or their press credentials) were all middle aged, “artsy” looking white folks. She eventually said “you know, this is getting us, but we’re not talking about the role we play,” and then the line started to move, we realized we were going to get in after all, and we started talking about the hoards of beautiful men who were in attendance.

But Danny Hoch’s not the kind of artist who you see perform, get a little engaged by and then return to your own world exactly as it was before you entered the theater.

There was a talk back after the show, and Sydette shared the point with the audience that she had been making before we got into the auditorium. She said we don’t talk about responsibility, and we don’t talk about the individual roles everyone plays in gentrification and what that means. She said more than that, and she said it better than that, but those were the points I took to heart. Because as often as all of this is on my mind, I don’t talk about my responsibility. Sometimes I think that’s because I don’t entirely know what it is, but it’s probably closer to the truth that I don’t want to know what that is. As I write this it occurs to me that my responsibility isn’t a singular matter – I moved here, I’m staying here, and what I do and don’t do in my neighborhood are all things happening now. I try to shop as much as I can in and around the neighborhood. I pay attention to interaction between the police and residents, especially when I see the police watching or interacting with local youth. I’ve done volunteer childcare for events at local churches. I also agree to pay really high rent, patronize expensive new restaurants, and have an apartment with way more room than one person needs. I try to make myself feel better by saying “This is where I will stay for a long time, I could raise a family with this much space.” I could raise a family with as much space as I have. I could also raise one with less, and at the moment, that’s a pretty ridiculous excuse for me to ignore that it is point blank a privilege for my highly single, non-family raising self to occupy this much space.

As I re-read the previous paragraph for the sixth time, I know that privilege is exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid all along, and also how I’ve been able to avoid it. I can be one of the loudest voices yelling “well, this is class privilege, white privilege, gender privilege, etc etc” at the top of my lungs but saying privilege exists and even pretending to acknowledge my own means nothing if I can’t sit down and be honest with myself about the role it plays in where I live. It’s not just a privilege for me to have the large apartment I have, it’s a privilege for me to have one here in general, and to be able to move where I want, when I want. Because I am here. And if I can’t be honest about what all of that means, then I can’t even pretend to be remotely responsible to the neighborhood I claim to love.