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The Changing of the Guard
oung people moving into cities look for cheap housing and are willing or even eager to live in a gritty area with substandard housing stock and high crime. They crave the ethnic diversity and stimulation of a "real" neighborhood, and soon they have started and attracted galleries, clubs, cafes and thrift shops and have formed a vibrant night life and cultural scene. Because they are largely from higher income backgrounds, are educated and mostly white, these pioneers make the area less threatening to the average higher-income yuppie.
Greenwich Village could be the case study for this phenomenon. In the ‘40s and ‘50s it was the cheap and seedy realm of the beatniks; today it costs more than $1200 a month to rent a one-bedroom apartment. Other New York neighborhoods followed in the Village’s tracks—Soho, and more recently, the lower East Side and Williamsburg.
In Chicago, the near north side neighborhood of Wicker Park has gentrified dramatically over the past five years after becoming the city’s hot "artsy" neighborhood. In the 1980s, Wicker Park was a Latino and Eastern European working-class neighborhood, whose seediness was memorialized in the work of Nelson Algren. It was filled with cheap Mexican restaurants, furniture stores and dollar stores, and prostitution and drug dealing were common.
Then a community of artists moved in to take advantage of the huge loft spaces and homey local bars and diners. Gradually, their slacker’s paradise disappeared. Urbis Orbis, a spacious cafe which was popular with the early artists and writers, was recently priced out when it could no longer afford the rent. The Flatiron building at the corner of North, Milwaukee and Damen, once a bohemian refuge where artists could slide by rent-free for months, was taken over by corporate realtors who systematically harassed their tenants and jacked their rents up with no notice, hoping to clear the building for wealthier renters. Today, the three-flats on the tree-lined side streets of Wicker Park go for $500,000. Chic restaurants with $24 meals and glitzy night clubs with $10 cover charges line the main drags.
Dana Brown mentions a North Portland area called Alberta Street which "used to be very depressed, mainly boarded up buildings and lots of prostitution and drug deals. Now it’s chez Alberta, with lofts and bistros." She notes that the area, in the early stages of the "hipness" transition, is still pleasantly diverse, with lots of gay and lesbian and African-American-owned businesses. "But still," Brown said, "The original residents aren’t part of it."
Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood is another example. Until a few years ago, it was one of the few integrated and open-minded neighborhoods in the city, but now rising property values are turning it into another yuppie haven. "Boston’s always been pretty segregated, but Jamaica Plain has always been the funky, diverse, cool place," says Kathy Brown of City Life/Vida Urbana, a local community and activist group. "But if something isn’t done soon it won’t be too funky or diverse anymore. The politicians are supposed to be progressive, but they should put their politics into their real estate practices."
She says it’s common not to have a year-long lease in Jamaica Plain, so many residents are getting "outrageous" rent increases month by month. In a way, many of them are victims of their own hard work and organization. "In the late ‘80s we did a lot of work to stabilize the neighborhood, getting banks to come in, fighting crime, promoting homeownership. Now it’s a really great area, but the people who made it that way are getting pushed out."
Eroded Public Housing
n many cities, decrepit public housing projects stand on some of the most valuable land. In other areas, project-based Section 8 (scattered site public housing) units are earmarked for low-income residents, but landlords are realizing they could be getting astronomically higher rents for these structures. Thanks to original ill-conceived plans and shameful maintenance, much public housing is now virtually unlivable.
Now federal and state agencies are removing large public housing projects in every major city. The majority of residents are given Section 8 vouchers and sent into the open market to find an affordable apartment. Yet the federal government has also passed legislation that spells the near-total dismantling of project-based Section 8 housing. Developers previously got low-interest mortgages to build apartments for Section 8 housing, with the tenants paying a third of their income toward rent and the government picking up the slack. But recently, landlords have been allowed to buy out their 40-year mortgages early, get rid of Section 8 tenants, and raise the rents to fit the market. If they don’ t do this, there are always other means they can use.
"We’re afraid that local HUD offices will start enforcing quality standards on Section 8 buildings real strictly in valuable areas," says Mike Foley of the Cleveland Tenants Union. "The buildings won’t be up to code so they’ll lose the Section 8, then they’ll be demolished or rehabbed for market rate housing."
In Los Angeles, low-income housing advocates fear that the demise of project-based Section 8 housing will be catastrophic. Already, L.A. has had 30 landlords buy out of Section 8 mortgages since the law went into effect. "Venice is one of the last places in the country where low-income people can live by the beach," said Larry Gross of the Coalition for Economic Survival in L.A. "We’re just barely holding on to HUD-assisted housing there. But soon it will all be over and become condo conversions. In general it’s a bleak picture. The policies that have been enacted and the direction we’re heading seem to spell disaster for low-income people."
People displaced from public housing and Section 8 will add even more strain to the already tight affordable-housing markets. And their displacement from gentrifiable areas will doubly help the gentrifiers. Not only have Section 8 and public-housing units been cleared for market rate units, but the removal of the undesirable poor residents will instantly make the neighborhood "better" and more attractive to wealthy residents.
The racial element of the dismantling of public housing is impossible to ignore. Public housing activists charge that, with the vast majority of public housing residents being black and Latino, their high concentration in valuable areas is too much for city officials and developers to bear. As public housing disappears, these minority residents are scattered.
Attacks on Rent Control
here it's existed, rent control has long been one of the best friends of a low-income tenant. Preventing the landlord from increasing rent past a small cost-of-living increase each year, rent control allows low-income people, especially the elderly and disabled and others on fixed incomes, to stay in the same apartment for years no matter how ritzy the surrounding neighborhood becomes.
Landlords and developers hate rent control for obvious reasons, as it forces them to keep renting apartments for literally as little as one-fifth what they could get for it. Rent control (and "rent stabilization laws") have suffered some vicious setbacks in the past few years. In Boston, rent control was ended in a state referendum four years ago. Even though rent control only existed in three Massachusetts cities; Boston, Cambridge and Brookline, real estate interests pushed lawmakers to put the anti-rent control on a state bill and lobbied heavily for it after it failed to pass on the city level.
"The real estate industry spent over a million dollars to get it passed," says Kathy Brown. "Now there's no protection on rents. Landlords are doing whatever they want to do."
She notes that a lot of elderly people, formerly protected by rent control, have been forced out of the Fenway Park neighborhood as more students and young people move into the trendy area surrounding the famous ballpark. Boston's rent control was phased out by income level over the past years, with the final phases basically complete now. "The last two years have been terrible," says Rosales. "We've seen a lot of people forced out, especially seniors who'd been living in the same building for years. People can't afford rents and don't have anywhere to go but the shelters. There are a lot more homeless people."
New York has also substantially weakened rent control by releasing vacated apartments from the agreement. This perversely gives landlords extreme personal motivation to evict people, because once an eviction causes a vacancy they can raise the rent at will. Several legal aid and community groups in Boston and New York said they have seen massive increases in evictions already. Hess notes that the changes in rent control also take away the judge's discretion in postponing an eviction to give the tenant an opportunity to get emergency aid. And he says that welfare emergency aid for rent has been made much harder to get with welfare reform.
"All these laws are dovetailing," says Hess, referring to the attacks on rent control and welfare reform. "What it will mean is more people on the street." Kathleen Crowe of the Tenants Union of the West Side in New York says she thinks rent control and other tenant-rights issues are basically doomed, since tenants don't have the lobbying power to compete with developers and rich landlords. "The governor and his gang want to end all rent control," she says. "The landlords fill their pockets with a lot of nice money. And housing court keeps getting less and less tenant-oriented. They're definitely on the landlord's side." In L.A., which Gross calls "a city built on rent control," state laws passed in the past few years have prevented city governments from having strong tenant-friendly rent control laws. Rent control in LA is undergoing a three-year phase-out.
San Francisco also has no protection on vacant apartments, so once a unit is vacated the rent can be raised 300% or more before the new rent control kicks in. Landlords have found plenty of creative ways to remove tenants so they can raise the rent or go condo. One popular tactic is fake "owner-move-ins," where a landlord is allowed to evict a tenant so that he can move into the unit, only to stage a move in and move right out, soon to raise the rent or convert the unit into a condo. Gullickson said "owner-move-ins" have mysteriously increased by 300 percent since 1996.
"The landlords are trying to get rid of the low and moderate income tenants so they can be replaced by tenants who are able to pay outrageously high rents," says Gullickson, noting that a two-bedroom apartment going for $800 a month ten years ago would easily go for $2,000 now.
Eshelman says the purportedly progressive Mayor Willie Brown has been no help to tenants in the face of these shenanigans—"he has done nothing [to help them] and has been the major force steamrolling the poor in San Francisco."
