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Gentrification is a powerful, unrelenting force, writes DAVID S. ROTENSTEIN
Gentrification is a powerful, unrelenting force.
As a historian researching gentrification, my work takes me to lots of neighborhoods undergoing change. These neighborhoods are communities where decades of disinvestment and abandonment are giving way to waves of new capital and new people. I’m an unfamiliar white guy with a camera and notepad; to the Black residents in these neighborhoods I look like a real estate speculator, a house flipper.
The first few times that I was profiled this way happened in Oakhurst, a gentrifying neighborhood in Decatur, Ga., just outside of Atlanta. It also happened to me in Atlanta neighborhoods. Each of these times, I filed away the stares and occasional questions without following up on them.
And then it happened in Washington, D.C., and again in Pittsburgh in the Hill District.
When I decided to engage the people who asked me if I was in their spaces taking pictures because I was planning to buy homes or to demolish buildings, I was unprepared for the discussions and the implication that I was being profiled in a way not unlike young Black men are profiled when they walk, drive or bike through spaces generally thought of as “white.”
Unlike the many African American men (and women) who all too frequently end these encounters in handcuffs or body bags, I can walk away unscathed. Black people who violate unwritten rules about urban and suburban spaces and invisible boundaries are perceived as threats, their bodies instantly criminalized.
Yet, as a white person in Black spaces, I too am perceived as a threat. I am seen as an advance scout in an uneven battle pitting wealth and power versus longtime residents in neighborhoods stigmatized as blighted, crime-ridden and disinvested — code words denoting spaces ripe for gentrification.
The winners take the buildings. The losers are displaced. In March 2017, I was working on a documentation project for a client in Washington, D.C.’s Congress Heights neighborhood, east of the Anacostia River. At the time, the neighborhood had the highest concentration of poverty in the District of Columbia. Real estate speculators were beginning to leave big footprints there as the sublime
Chocolate City neighborhood became diluted, with longtime residents being pushed out to the Maryland suburbs and beyond.
As I was photographing a restaurant from the middle of the street, a woman called out to me from a bus stop: “Are they going to tear it down?”
The “it” was an IHOP built a decade earlier. In reporting plans to open the new business, the Washington Times wrote that it would be “a major coup for the community.” For more than a decade, there were no sit-down restaurants in the majority Black neighborhoods in the ward.
The IHOP closing would be a major symbolic and economic loss in the neighborhood.
Instead of succinctly answering the woman’s question and returning to my work, I walked over to the bus stop. I powered-up my digital recorder and I asked the woman if we could speak, with the recorder running, about her question.
She consented and I asked her why she thought I was working for folks planning to demolish the IHOP.
“They’re buying up the land and they’re pushing people out of D.C. to bring certain people back into D.C.,” replied Carol, who declined to provide a last name.
White gentrifiers were pushing people out and it upset her and many other people.
“If they moved you out and moved us in, how would you feel? You’d feel the same way, wouldn’t you,” she said. “You can’t get a decent apartment to live in. You can’t find jobs in the District.”
Carol caught her bus and I went back to shooting photos and video for my project.
Two years later, I was living and working in Pittsburgh. In October 2019, I was photographing the Crawford Grill No. 2 building on Wylie Avenue. The building, which in July was listed in the National Register of Historic Places, is the only structure left on its block fronting Wylie. Its nearest neighbors are new developments across the street, vacant lots and other nearby abandoned buildings.
The 2100 block of Wylie Avenue is prime gentrification territory. There were three men standing nearby on a street corner and one of them hollered, “Are you going to tear it down?”
This time, I replied that I was
just a historian taking pictures of the old buildings. The men moved on down the avenue and I got in my car to go to the next site on my list.
The second time it happened to me in Pittsburgh was in January. I was in the Hill District photographing homes previously owned by gambling entrepreneurs, numbers writers and bankers.
A woman drove into a driveway at one of the houses. When she got out of her car, she asked me if I was a speculator. I replied that I wasn’t and told her why I was photographing her home. She explained to me that she asked if I was a speculator because there is a lot of new development in her neighborhood, before chatting about the Prohibition-era racketeer who had lived in her home almost a century ago.
In July, I interviewed the woman, who asked to remain anonymous for privacy reasons.
“This is a hot area, up and coming, and so there are investors buying up houses,” she said. “Some are just buying houses and just flipping them. They’re flipping them and selling them.”
The woman and her family own their home and they have lived there since 2005.
An investor owns the home next door and rents it out.
“When I saw you, I just thought, ‘Oh, he’s just somebody looking, scoping the neighborhood,’” she said. “I mean we get letters in the mail from people I’ve never met saying, ‘Hey, we want to buy your house.’”
The unsolicited letters, phone calls and even visits are commonplace in gentrifying neighborhoods across the United States. Some people simply toss them. Some take the flippers up on their offers. Everyone I have interviewed in my work views them as an ugly reminder of the powerful and unrelenting displacement forces arriving at their doors.
“We live here,” the woman said. “This is our home. We have nowhere to go.”
Homeownership and wealth are unevenly distributed in Pittsburgh and throughout the United States. Recent studies show that African Americans, especially Black women, have less wealth and fewer economic opportunities here. Homeownership as a pathway toward building intergenerational wealth has been denied to generations of Blacks through racially restrictive deed covenants, redlining and violence.
Gentrification and displacement can derail families from building intergenerational wealth that has long been denied to Pittsburgh’s Black residents. The woman who owns the numbers racketeer’s home recognizes that.
Still, she fiercely clings to the wealth she and her husband have built for their family.
“My hope is to pass this home down,“she said. ”Growing up, we’ve never owned property. My mom was the first of her family to own a home.”
To be able to pass that home down, she and her family, neighbors and friends must endure a regular barrage of unwelcome visitors and uninvited offers to buy their homes — offers that frequently begin after white guys with cameras and notepads start appearing in the street.