Concerning Gentrification, Injustice, and the Futility of Individual Action

Dear Billfold,

I would like to begin by saying how much I enjoy reading your posts every day and believe that the editors or the Billfold community may be able to help a dilemma that my roommate and I face.

Just some very quick background. I spent a large portion of my life living in center city Philadelphia. My mom grew up in the city and wanted the same for her kids. My dad (interestingly who grew up in a farm in Kansas) was not exactly thrilled about this, but agreed once we graduated grade school and outgrew the need for an acre of land in the burbs that the family would move to the city. School districts was a non-issue. Despite living in one of the top 3 school districts in the state, my siblings and I went to the local catholic parochial school K-8. Honestly, we may have received a better education at public school, but my mom was adamant that we carry on the long-held Irish-Catholic traditions and religious beliefs of the family. For high school, my siblings and I went one of the many same-sex private schools around the city (thus a downtown relocation was not a problem). This all being said, I loved living in a major urban center and hope to never EVER move back to the suburbs (kids or not).

I moved out of Philly for the first time about 1.5 years ago to attend grad school at Emory in Atlanta. Despite extensive research on more urban areas, I decided to live in an inexpensive apartment with a unknown roommate walking distance to school to save money (technically located in the city, but think suburbs: trees, large tracts of land, strip malls). I loved my roommate, but I was miserable. It was eerily quiet and there was nowhere to walk to other than school (oh besides a gas station and strip mall with a large grocery store). And — I’m sure as those who have lived in Atlanta would agree — not exactly a reliable public transit system that would allow me to travel elsewhere.

My second year, my roommate and I moved to a more urban neighborhood. It’s been amazing! Bars, small markets, restaurants within three blocks. So what’s the problem? Guilt, huge overwhelming guilt. My perfect neighborhood may be described as “up and coming” (not a fan of that term, but I think it’s the best descriptor). Cars were robbed and windows smashed at least twice a week for the first three months we lived there, all while a lovely sushi restaurant and fancy cocktail lounge were down the block. Additionally, my roommate who is an MPH student was assigned a semester-long project alongside her class to complete a community needs assignment on our specific neighborhood (a rapidly changing area in Atlanta). Basically the results boiled down to the evils of gentrification. Poorer minority communities were being priced out of a historically black neighborhood and the nonprofits that served the few remaining public housing blocks were contemplating relocating to “more needy” neighborhoods. We hadn’t realized the extent of this prior to moving.

I recognize that Atlanta is a rapidly changing city. This was further demonstrated by my roommate’s continued research on the needs of Atlanta’s neighborhoods. For another project, she drafted a grant to receive funding to build a playground in a low SES neighborhood located on the outskirts of the city. Of note, Atlanta had announced a few years back that the popular Beltline would be extended to pass through this specific community in the near future. Due to this, people were now buying large amounts of properties at inflated prices in hopes of making a large profit in the future. All the while, the kids who actually lived there at this time had no where safe to play.

So I suppose an easy solution would be to move to an “established” neighborhood like Buckhead or Midtown. Beside the fact that I can’t afford to live there, I have absolutely no desire to live in either place. Heavy traffic, overpriced condos, restaurants I can’t afford and, ugh, the bars (I’m a PBR, sticky bar, jukebox, and darts fan. The bars in those neighborhoods are way more expensive, blare obnoxiously loud music and are jammed-packed by girls in teetering heels/mini skirts and frat bros. Just not my scene).

So, FINALLY, my question. I’m leaving Atlanta post-grad and plan on moving to new city in the NE. What’s a future city dweller to do? How do I balance affordability with a great location without harming the communities who lived there for decades? Is that possible? Am I doomed to live in a soulless high rise surrounded by a sea of condos and overpriced restaurants or do I have to go back to the ‘burbs?

I greatly appreciate any comments or advice you or readers may provide may provide.

Thanks!

Oh interesting sidenote, my roommate and I will not be able to afford to keep renting our apartment next year with the proposed rent hikes. If we were staying in Atlanta, we would have to move again and find a more affordable neighborhood. We (evil gentrifiers?) have been priced out by richer gentifiers. Oh the irony…

How seductive is the notion that if we could just live purely according to our morals, we could step out of the great, grinding wheel of systemic injustice and see our benevolent energies cause the world to be better! But oh, how very difficult that proves to be! Capitalism, by its nature, does not allow for spectators: If you’re in it, you’re really IN it, and that seldom leaves you with an entirely good choice in any endeavor.

Housing is a great (terrible) example of this. Where to live, to varying degrees based on resources and logistical constraints, is a personal choice. But each person, owing to those same variations of resources and circumstances, is not JUST a person. She is also part of the larger movements of class, race, and money, and those large movements affect other people. You would like to conform your individual choice to a desirable larger scale outcome — which is good! You recognize that when many people act on their aesthetic desire for a certain living environment (shops, bars, &c.), their collective economic power will displace poorer people, which is bad. (This is called “Williamsburg.”)

But you also probably recognize that if those same people take the opposite course — segregating themselves apart from poorer people in areas more in line with their access to resources — the poor areas stay poor, isolated, and starved of services and opportunities. On top of that, the people with resources, who in this country are predominantly white, then exist in a white world, raise their white children in that white world, and find themselves alienated from the essential humanity of the predominantly non-white poor people from whom they have distanced themselves, which makes them disinclined to help those people through political action. (This is called “Connecticut.”)

You may recall a much-reposted article from 2014 called “20 Ways Not to Be a Gentrifier.” Its essential thesis was that “it isn’t the mere act of moving into a neighborhood that makes you a gentrifier; it’s what you do once you get there.” That article was a marvelous salve for the wounded self-image of a million college-educated, left-leaning white people like me, but it was really wrong, or at least wrongly titled. It should have been called, “20 Ways to Be a Good White Neighbor in a Non-White Neighborhood.” The advice it contained was mostly about how not to be the stereotypical asshole that people imagine when they want to personify a destructive economic force: “Smile and say hi to your neighbors when you see them, even if they seem scary or don’t say hi back.” “Really think before you call the police.” Those are good pieces of advice! But they will not save you from being a gentrifier — they will just make you the nicest possible gentrifier you can be. (This thoughtful response to the “How Not To” article breaks it down.)

So what’s the answer? What do you do when capitalism has been (relatively) good to you, even though you never asked for it? The prevailing wisdom in this country, espoused perhaps most recently by the New York Times’s “Ethicist” column, is that you should take care principally of yourself, and then try to solve the larger, systemic problems through political participation from a comfortable distance. I think that is a terrible solution. You, alone, can’t stop gentrification. But you can endeavor to take a truly moral approach to the problems of racial and economic injustice in this country.

Start with the so-called ways not to be a gentrifier, because those are important. But remember that those are not just a set of instructions that get you to moral righteousness. Their underlying philosophy is that when you choose to live in a neighborhood where the majority of people live because they have no choice, you still have a universe of options that are not available to your neighbors — especially if you are white and they are not. When someone is bumping reggaeton from a car parked underneath your window at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, don’t suppose that the reason no one is calling the police is because everyone else on the block just loves Tego Calderón that much. Consider that the police have a funny custom of not responding so nicely to people of color who call them, and of responding even less nicely to people of color who are the subject of those calls. Effectively, cops just aren’t available to people of color in poor neighborhoods for noise complaints, so when you call them for that, you’re taking advantage of an imbalance of power. Is that unfair? Yup. Is it annoying that you have to put on pants and go downstairs and ask some knucklehead to turn down his music? Yup. That’s the annoyance that your neighbors without resources and privilege face all the time.

Of course, there’s more. You should send your kids to the same schools that are available to your neighbors who don’t have the option of moving to another district. You should, as the Ethicist rightly noted, devote your political action to remedying the systemic injustices that perpetuate housing segregation and imbalanced public services. You should endeavor to make anti-racism and economic justice as pervasive in your life as racism and poverty are in the lives of people who have no choice in the matter.

And here’s the best part: you will fail, at least in part. The neighborhood may gentrify, no matter what you do. If your children are white, they may go to a majority-minority neighborhood school and end up getting better treatment than they deserve simply because of their color. You may find yourself in a situation where you truly have no choice but to call the cops, and the chances are good that their treatment of you will reflect your status.

Is that unsatisfactory? Yup. Our role as individuals in the great current of history is seldom decisive, and that can feel overwhelming. Even the landmark desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education was, in some sense, a drop in the ocean: it was preceded by 350 years of racist brutality and followed by 60 years of marginally less brutal but equally effective segregation, psychological and economic marginalization, and carceral control.

Your housing choices will probably not fix — or even affect one way or another — institutional racism and economic injustice in this country. But they might help you raise children with less implicit bias than you have, who will grow up to make hiring decisions, housing choices, romantic overtures, and eyewitness identifications less colored by race and status. And they might help show by example that people with resources and privilege don’t have to retreat to suburban school districts to be good parents. Last month at a panel discussion with Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, Canadian BLM activist Janaya Khan addressed white people in the audience (and I’m quoting from memory, so I may paraphrase a bit): “Years from now, what will you say when your children and grandchildren ask you what you were doing when black people were in the streets trying to get free?” There’s something to be said for having a good answer to that question.

Josh Michtom is a public defender in Hartford, Connecticut, but his writing here does not necessarily reflect the views of his employer. He writes Rambling Man, the Billfold’s advice column about trying to make a living a doing the best you can.

Support The Billfold

The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.