On Gentrification
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I live in a black neighborhood. I suppose I should say I live in a predominantly black neighborhood, as current estimates put the black population at seventy-five percent. But I’m not just talking about demographics. I shop at The African Peoples Farmer’s Market. I live two blocks from The Concord Baptist Church, one of the largest black congregations in the
You have probably encountered my neighborhood at some point. If you have ever seen a Spike Lee joint, you’ve probably seen my street. If you think Chris Rock is funny, you’ve probably heard a joke about where I live. And if you’ve ever listened to Aaliyah, Lil’ Kim, Biggie, or Jay-Z, you’ve probably heard a reference to my community. If you haven’t done any of these things then you probably listen to Billy Joel and might recognize these fine lyrics: “I was stranded in the combat zone / I walked through Bedford-Stuy alone / even rode my motorcycle in the rain.” Of course, it’s not Bedford-Stuy, its Bed-Stuy. As in Bed-Stuy, Do or Die, the neighborhood’s well-known if not official slogan. But Billy Joel probably didn’t know that, because he is white, and so didn’t live here. Because this is a black neighborhood.
I hadn’t seen my apartment when I signed my lease. I was in the process of extricating myself from an ill-considered stint on the West Coast and left the bothersome task of finding a place to live to my overworked, underpaid future roommate, who did the best she could. We were broke, we were desperate, we were out of time, so she signed a lease and wrote me funny emails denigrating every other neighborhood in Brooklyn, from Park Slope, with its overabundance of children, to
I moved into my apartment on
Then we went inside. In my apartment, I can’t definitively say that anything is made of asbestos. I can’t prove that there’s no insulation or that there’s a crack in the wall through which I can see daylight. There’s really no one thing that I can point to and say, “See? This is a shithole. I live in a shithole.” But it’s the same way that you’ve probably had a boss who, while apparently a very nice person, made you want to gouge your eyes out with your thumbs. It’s the small things that make you hate that boss: the nervous twitch, the sweaty handshake, an incontrollable use of the phrase “vis-à-vis.” And thus is my apartment.
On the interior, the first encounter I had was with the doors. When entering the front door, you immediately encounter another door that leads into what I have decided is “the dining room.” My first night, I reached out to open this door and instead punched it with my hand. In my confusion, I groped for the doorknob in the dark and finally found it about a foot above where a doorknob is instinctually located. Realizing that personal experience is fallible I’ve experimented with a number of friends, family members and unidentified guests with the same result. Each and every person walks in, reaches for the doorknob and punches a smooth slab of wood. Your sense memory tells you that the doorknob is there, the same way it tells you that the elevator is there when the doors open and that the hot water is on the left. But in this case, the elevator is not there and you are condemned to wash your face in cold water, because every single door was installed upside down, making the doorknobs fall about chest high. While seemingly benign, this little bit of treachery will keep you punching doors at
But I could deal with the internal flaws. I accepted that all the electrical outlets were slanted, giving the rooms the appearance of a Dali painting. I accepted that the fireplace didn’t work but did let in the rain, making it an anti-fireplace. I even accepted that the dishwasher didn’t wash dishes at all but was instead a box of dirt in the middle of my kitchen. But lying in bed with my mother that night, talking about my new place, she said, “You’re father and I worked our whole lives to give you a better place in the world.” Then she stopped. But I'm pretty sure I knew where she was going.
My new neighborhood didn’t like me anymore than I liked it. I got yelled at in public. A lot. I got harassed if I responded to guys who hit on me. I was chastised if I didn’t. One night, a group of men started talking to me while I walked home. I was tired from a long day of not getting a job, and didn’t respond. One man yelled at me, “Who do you think you are? You come into our neighborhood and then you’re too good to talk to us?” I didn’t know what to say. What I wanted to say was that I didn’t feel too good, period, and that I didn’t know who I was or why I was in this neighborhood. I wanted to tell him that I was scared and failing and depressed and that all the doors in my apartment were upside down. But I didn’t. I just kept walking, and the girl walking behind me turned to the men and said, “Shut the fuck up.” That’s what I really should have said.
I eventually found work as a baker. I’m not a baker, I’m a cook, and couldn’t actually bake my way out of a paper bag before I started, but I needed the job and I worked hard at it. I got up at five in the morning and walked to the subway in the pre-dawn dark and tried to pretend that this wasn’t my real life. One day, while making my early morning walk, I passed a man who seemed homeless and drug-addled and possibly insane. He screamed, “What are you doing here, white bitch? Who the fuck do you think you are?” and then he followed me to the subway chanting, “Run, white bitch, run,” over and over again. This is not representative of my neighborhood. It is a highly residential area filled with families and small businesses. But at the time all I could think was that this would always be there. This feeling of not belonging, of being unwelcome. I asked myself, who do I think I am? I asked myself this as I looked into the face of every person I passed who watched this man following me and did nothing.
But as is usually true, my little life couldn’t sustain such a high level of dramatic tension. I kept walking to work in the morning. I went grocery shopping at The African Peoples Farmer’s Market. I met my neighbors, who are very nice and open the door for me when the lock is broken, which is usually the case. I felt myself move from an invasive, hostile force to a benign local oddity. I made friends. I developed a relationship with the guys who run the bodega on the corner, who call me mami or angel and disapprove of my smoking. I learned to enjoy being woken up by the first call to prayer issued by the local mosque. I learned why we have a local mosque from the many West Indian inhabitants who wear hijabs and say salaam to me in the dollar store. I got used to being seen as a freak, and in doing so, I began to seem normal.
Of course, there are larger concerns raised by my move than a bad day or some vague harassment. I never felt that the ire I aroused was personal; if anything, the only person who hated me personally was me. Rather, I stood for everything that is unjust in the cruel world of real estate: after going through the race riots of the sixties, the crime spree of the seventies, the crack epidemic of the eighties and the governmental apathy of the nineties, Bed-Stuy was experiencing a renaissance. Crime was down, renovation was rampant, and the police bothered to walk the streets. And as if on cue, there I was, not to the manor born, but a child of privilege nonetheless. There I was, ready to reap the benefits born of the labor of families that had lived in this neighborhood for generations. I am the vanguard of gentrification, and while I might be the only white person on my street besides my roommate, we are a sign of things to come. The architecture in my neighborhood is beautiful. It’s filled with picturesque brownstones that happen to be surrounded by urban blight. What a perfect fixer-upper scenario for someone who has some money, a college education, and wants to live somewhere unusual and interesting.
So there’s the rub. I got to know my neighbors. I integrated into the community. And as I was accepted by others, I condemned my own actions more and more. Who am I to move into this neighborhood? Who am I to raise rent prices and bring in wealthy businesses that shut down mom and pop stores? Who am I to turn family residences into oversized apartments for twenty-somethings and to renovate empty buildings into restaurants that most locals can’t afford? Who do I think I am?
I went to the liquor store at the end of my block the other night. A Chinese couple and their sons run it. While I was standing on line, an African-American man came in and started talking to me. He was drunk, and rude, and openly mocking. Eventually he said, “Shit, isn’t this neighborhood lucky to have you people. You here, the Orientals with their liquor store. Things are getting better.” I wanted to ignore his sarcasm and tell him that things weren’t getting better. I wanted to tell him that that I understood that my presence was proof of the cold, hard world we live in, where poverty is inherited and racial designations divide and suppress the population. I wanted to tell him that you no longer had to be black, you only had to be conscious to be enraged in this country. Instead, I said shut the fuck up.
—CEP