by Kari Lydersen
03.15.1999

his family lived in the working-class Mexican and Italian Taylor Street neighborhood in Chicago, just west of downtown. Then the University of Illinois at Chicago was built, and Aragon’s neighborhood was destroyed to make room for university buildings and more upscale restaurants and apartments serving the students and faculty. His family took refuge in Pilsen, a neighborhood slightly further west and south, which had long been a haven for working-class immigrants and became largely Mexican in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Today, Aragon is experiencing deja vu. His neighborhood is once again in mortal danger, with the university having decided the area is a perfect place for more student and faculty apartments and the city set on redeveloping the area by providing subsidies to developers marketing lofts to higher-income professionals. "They’re pushing poor people out of the city and in the process breaking up the power bases of their struggle," he says. "It’s gentrification, but you could also almost call it apartheid by both race and class."

All over the country, the cycle of gentrification is displacing lower-income residents. In most American cities, as sociologist William Julius Wilson has argued, de-industrialization and the ascendancy of the information age have inverted traditional structures of urban life. With most factory jobs shipped abroad or lost to automation, professional white-collar jobs and low-paid service jobs with few benefits are taking their place. Meanwhile, white-collar workers eager for convenience and a happening neighborhood are flocking back to the central cities.

The poor have very little political or economic defense against developers who want to buy up their crumbling apartments and rehab them into luxury condos and lofts, and city and state governments are only too pleased to ease the way for this transition. They do all they can to weaken rent-control laws, tear down public housing and subsidize higher-level developers.

Many pessimistic community activists and urban scholars see only two possible eventual outcomes to the gentrification situation: either the market will become saturated and run out of people to fill expensive housing, or all the poor and the majority of non-white people will be driven out to far-flung neighborhoods and suburbs collaring the city, out of sight and mind. But other community leaders say it is possible to redevelop and improve a neighborhood without driving existing residents away. They are determined to hold on to at least a fraction of valuable land for the less-fortunate. Through protests, lobbying, organizing, legal clinics, tenant buyouts and support from socially-conscious non-profit developers, activists have won some major victories against gentrification from New York to San Francisco.

Displacing the Poor

But they can’t totally prevent what amounts to the largest makeover of urban America in decades. For instance, San Francisco, long a refuge for all kinds of huddled masses, has lately become one of the least welcoming cities in America for neo-Bohemians and immigrant families. It has become almost completely gentrified, with only a few pockets of the city available to the poor and lower-income. A recent ranking found it to have the highest housing costs in the country.

Now even those neighborhoods are on the verge of being obliterated. In the past three years, more than 1,000 low-cost housing units and 2,000 public housing units have been demolished and 1,600 rental units went condo. Over 8,000 residents lost their homes through eviction. The majority of them were either forced to leave the city or to join its burgeoning homeless population, which is estimated at 10,000 and growing. The paper also reported that since 1995 dozens of local businesses have been driven out, replaced by national chain stores.

San Francisco’s mostly Latino Mission neighborhood has long been a mix of working-class and poor people, as well as young white bohemians. Spanish was the primary language spoken there. Now, as one activist describes it, the Mission is "the epicenter of trendy martini bars, high-priced restaurants and vintage clothing boutiques." It has suffered the city’s highest number of evictions, with Latinos and seniors on fixed incomes hit especially hard. Moreover, the neighborhood has become the center of an intense drug trade catering mostly to young whites. English has replaced Spanish as the neighborhood language, according to Ted Gullickson of the San Francisco Tenants Union. A recent newspaper article stated that less than a third of the people who lived in the Mission in 1990 could afford the rent now.

New York faces a similar situation. Gentrification has made New York look less like a melting pot and more like a pot of oil and water, where people with varying wallet thicknesses never mix. "Twenty years ago the Upper West Side was very mixed-income," said Evan Hess of the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation. "On the same block you could have found a judge and the criminal who was facing him. You wouldn’t see that today."

Low-income people fleeing New York won’t find any relief in Boston, which has traditionally been another port of entry for immigrants. As in New York, Massachusetts lawmakers have attacked rent control in pursuit of development. "Landlords know what the business is like," said Carlos Rosales of the Massachusetts Tenants Organization in Boston. "They raise the rents so the people move to another community, then they raise the rents there. In some cases, rents are increased 200 percent."

In the previously affordable Jamaica Plain neighborhood, rents have increased more than 20 percent—up to an average $812 for a one-bedroom apartment—and housing prices have increased 40 percent over the past few years. Latinos and the elderly have been forced out in droves by these increases. "There’s a huge increase in the number of white people and high-income people in the city," says Jamaica Plain activist Kathy Brown. "It’s happening because the traditional residents are being forced out of the communities. It’s wonderful to bring economic vitality to a neighborhood, but you need to keep the original residents there."

As in San Francisco, the natural beauty and cultural cache of Portland, Oregon make it a highly desirable place to live. It’s also a place where non-affluent people are finding it less and less possible to live. Portland is second behind San Francisco in cost of housing this year. Rents in the previously affordable Northeast and Southeast neighborhoods are increasing 100 percent or more per year, according to Dana Brown of the Portland-based Community Alliance of Tenants, the only tenants’ organization in the state. The large African-American population of Portland’s eastern neighborhoods is quickly shrinking. They’re being driven out to far-flung suburbs where Brown says the population of minorities has recently risen up to 200 percent. Rent control is outlawed by the state of Oregon, and evictions are snowballing in Portland, aided by a "no cause" eviction law where even the perfect tenant can be evicted if the landlord wants someone who can pay more.

Seattle was used by the media as a national case study in gentrification in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. John Fox of the Seattle Anti-Displacement Coalition says that the face of the city has been changed by the loss of affordable apartments and SROs (Single Room Occupancies), huge subsidies for "big-ticket" development projects and the destruction of public housing. Housing prices are so high that 35,000 of the city’s 220,000 households are paying more than half their income toward rent; a ratio at which a family is statistically considered "at risk for homelessness."

"In Seattle, almost every neighborhood has been gentrified and the (former residents) forced into the suburbs or crowded into pockets of poverty," Fox says. "We’re following in the steps of San Francisco."

The Anatomy of Gentrification

entrification has a long history. In the mid and late 1800s, powerbrokers in many European cities tried their hands at urban planning. In Paris, Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann, a court crony of Napoleon III's, gutted the residential areas where poor people lived throughout central Paris and installed the city’s famous grand boulevards. Thousands of poor Parisians were displaced to make room for the sweeping tree-lined boulevards which show-cased the city’s famous monuments. Strict guidelines applied to new building along the boulevards, and the residences there became the most exclusive in the city.

The process became part of the American public consciousness in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s in the U.S., when artists and bohemians started moving into inner city buildings which had previously been warehouses and factories. But, says Larry Bennett, a political science professor at DePaul University, it was still a stretch and it took a concerted marketing effort to sell these areas to yuppies.

"Lofts are great for artists because they have all this room to put up canvases and paint ‘til they’re black and blue," he said. "But back then the average person didn’t want to live next to a factory or in a factory. To sell a loft to someone who wanted to put in vases and a quality kitchen was a bigger job." This early gentrification didn’t actually displace people, but it opened the way for the inner city to be viewed as a desirable place to live. It wouldn’t be long before the residential neighborhoods right outside the center of the city were feeling the pressure. But even now, Bennett thinks displacement is not the most immediate effect of gentrification. Equally harmful, he says, is the diversion of resources from poor areas to neighboring wealthy areas. Especially with "urban renewal" programs such as tax increment financing zones—TIFs—which allow tax dollars to be pooled from one neighborhood to another, he says infrastructure, parks and schools in poor areas are ignored in order to free up resources for rich neighborhoods.

There are several essential elements necessary to create a gentrification situation, according to Nacho Gonzalez, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor who is working on a study on gentrification in West Town, a Chicago neighborhood. One element is a "gentrification industry,"—realtors, developers, mortgage lenders, and construction companies eager to capitalize in the area. The second is a neighborhood with an attractive location and housing stock, preferably a disinvested area with run-down but attractive architecture ripe for rehabbing. The third necessity is a population of low-income people inhabiting the area with little political or economic power to fight for their territory. Closing the ring are people with disposable income looking to move into the area, usually young, childless professionals seeking location and action.

Low-income artists often unintentionally form the bridge from the original low-income community to the yuppies. "Artists like certain kinds of buildings, big spaces and lofts with stimulating architecture," says Gonzalez. "They bring in galleries, cafes, rock clubs and a certain night life, which attracts the gentrifiers." Gonzalez says that at a certain point he thinks the loft and studio market will become saturated—"How many yuppies can there be?" He also thinks the displacement that occurs with gentrification isn’t a wholly unnatural process. With the deindustrialization of inner cities, many working-class people actually have jobs farther out in the suburbs and for that reason would leave their central neighborhoods anyway. The elderly are the true victims of gentrification, he notes. They are quickly displaced when property values go up. Even if they own homes, their meager fixed incomes may prevent them from affording increased property taxes. Suddenly they find themselves thrown into unfamiliar neighborhoods, cut off from their social support systems, and often far from medical facilities and shopping.

Larry Bennett notes that mayors and city officials eager for gentrification often seize on huge areas of inner-city property owned by railroads or manufacturing companies and buy it to let developers build fancy, often gated, planned developments. "[Unused inner-city land masses] are like manna from heaven for Daley or [New York Mayor Rudy] Giuliani," he said. "They can bring in that critical mass of upper-class people who will wear nice clothes and subscribe to the symphony and go to theaters and art museums. They want to Parisianize the downtowns."

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