Search Results for: gentrification

Just a Spoonful of Siouxsie

Illustration by Mark Wang

Alison Fields | Longreads | April 2019 | 14 minutes (3,609 words)

She showed up on an overcast Friday afternoon in January. She barreled into the driveway in an old mustard-gold Buick with a black vinyl top, its back dash decorated plastic bats, novelty skulls, and dried flowers. She was wrapped in black sweaters, black tights, black boots. She wore clunky bracelets, loads of them on the outside of her sleeves. Her hair was long and henna red. She carried an Army surplus satchel pinned with old rhinestone brooches and Cure buttons. She was 19 years old. When I opened the front door and she smiled at me, I thought she was the most perfect person I’d ever seen.

“I’m Gwen,” she said. “I’m here to interview for the nanny job.”

That’s when I noticed the nose ring and I blubbered something incoherent, then apologized because I was both overwhelmed and mortified that someone this cool was going to come into my stupid house.

Read more…

This Month In Books: Botanize Your Past To Save the Future

Jaredd Craig / Unsplash

Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter is overflowing with regional fiction and travel writing. Kali Fajardo-Anstine and Bryan Washington have both written short story collections set in the cities they are from (in Washington’s Lot, each story is even named after a different street in Houston) and featuring characters that are representative of the communities the authors grew up in. Speaking about her collection Sabrina & Corina Fajardo-Anstine describes her struggle to stake out physical space in literature for herself and for the Chicano and Indigenous community she is a part of:

I’m always writing against this idea that Denver’s a white space … How does my community loom so large in my consciousness and in all the choices I make, but when I talk to people on the street they’re like, “What do you mean you’re from Colorado? What do you mean there are brown people here?”

In an essay from his new collection This One Will Hurt You, Paul Crenshaw also writes about his childhood home: in the hills of Arkansas, in a rented house on the grounds of an asylum where his mother was an employee. Crenshaw revisits his old home in search of ghosts, both figurative and literal.

Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift and Nathan Englander’s kaddish.com are novels set respectively in Zambia (the book takes its title from a region near Victoria Falls) and in the transitional space along the “commute from Jerusalem to Manhattan” that is commonly made by Orthodox Jewish New Yorkers (“for the people who are financially able to travel that way, Orthodox New York and Jerusalem almost touch,” says Englander).

Some other books in the newsletter this month that feel particularly grounded in space and place are Alex Kotlowitz’s An American Summer (Chicago); Delphine Minoui’s I’m Writing You From Tehran (Tehran, of course); Yuval Taylor’s Zora and Langston (the American South, on the road between Mobile and Tuskegee); and Will Hunt’s Underground, in which Hunt recounts an astonishing adventure: his three-day expedition to walk across Paris entirely underground. “Paris’s relationship to its subterranean landscape [is] a connection … more obsessive, and more intimate than that of perhaps any city in the world,” writes Hunt, interlacing the narrative of his expedition with a history of Paris’s subterranean side.


Sign up to have this month’s book reviews, excerpts, and author interviews delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up


Of course, all of these books, not just Hunt’s, use history to some extent — to situate a story in time, to play with the implications of the past on the present and the present on the future. Most books in general, you could say, do something to that effect. But somehow, in the newsletter this month, the overall implication of so many books located so precisely in space, at such fixed points in time, has, for me, a disconcerting — or dislocating? — effect.

The books themselves, as books are wont to do, deal with the dislocation just as much as the location created by their narratives; they address time’s messiness as much as its tidiness. Fajardo-Anstine, speaking about gentrification in Denver, says,

When I drive by one of the old houses that used to belong to my family, I’m triggered. It’s a deep, deep grief. I think there are a lot of people walking around mourning. You don’t recognize your space anymore. You don’t have access to your space.

Speaking about gun violence in Chicago, Alex Kotlowitz grapples with the unboundedness of the disaster — the lack of temporal markers, either beginnings or ends, for the victims and survivors:

On one level or another, [the survivors] were all suffering from post-traumatic stress. Though, ‘post’ may not be quite right. Because again, they’re still in the midst of it … In a war, there’s a sense that some day there might be resolution to the conflict. Somebody’s going to win or lose. And that’s not the case here. Nobody sees a way out.

Bryan Washington’s elegant short story “Navigation” touches on, I think, a similar notion, in the context of a conversation between two lovers, one of whom is teaching the other Spanish:

He wanted to know why every morning had to be bueno.

Some days are just bad, he said. Some people live their whole lives and not a single good thing happens to them.

I told him those were just the rules. He should follow them unless he had something new to say.

Speaking about his latest Trainspotting sequel, Dead Men’s Trousers, Irvine Welsh says that he, and his Trainspotting characters, have become more dislocated with time:

It’s not just me, it’s also a lot of people’s experience now. To kind of have any success at all, you have to chase money, you have to chase different markets, you have to chase different cultural experiences, you have to go into different territories and operate, and that takes a lot of time. It places a burden on your life as well … And that’s one of the costs of the modern era, so many people just don’t have enough work, and they can’t make enough money. And other people who can make enough money, they’re just working all the time, they don’t have a chance to enjoy it. Both the massive inequity of wealth is also a massive inequity of work, in the way it’s kind of shared around.

I know people now who are just on and off planes all the time. They’re people who are not on huge money and huge salaries, they’re just jumping on and off planes and doing things all over the place and living in Holiday Inns and all that and trying to eke out a living, basically. And so that’s really the kind of riddle of all of this, now, eh?

Welsh also says:

I think that so much of what we’re doing now, so much of the politics, the way people react and everything, is very much based on emotion, and it’s based on a fear that there is this existential threat to us, but we don’t quite know what it is.

But, of course, as we all know — as we almost all sort of know — and as Welsh goes on to say — the unknowable, unspeakable threat is global warming.

More accurately, though, as I think Jenny Odell, artist and author of How To Do Nothing, would explain it: the threat is our inability to deal with global warming. In Rebecca McCarthy’s profile of Odell for Longreads, Odell talks about her new interest in bioregionalism and ‘retro-botany’:

“I’ve been using this term ‘retro botany,’” Odell tells me, “like botanizing your past?” She only recently learned what kind of tree was in front of the house she grew up in (Modesto Ash) and why they don’t plant them anymore (they attract aphids). “People talk a lot about how climate change is not … well, now it’s very palpable, but something that people were saying is that it’s so gradual you can’t perceive it. But there are populations of birds that, within a year, can disappear. And if you care about them and you like seeing them, you care about that in a really different way — it feels like a personal loss to you, it’s not a statistic.”

Paying attention to where we live — attention to where we really very specifically are, in space and in time — might give us the empathetic capacity to save the planet, is basically the idea. I hope it’s true. I’d like to try. McCarthy also writes something that I think gets at what I’ve been trying to say about location and time, about the feeling you get when you drive by a house you’ve been priced out of, or when you realize that every morning will not good:

I went … in search of a word that would help me explain what Odell’s work communicates and initially settled on shadowtime: “a feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously, or acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present.”

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

Sign up here

‘I’m Always Writing Against This Idea That Denver’s a White Space.’

Adam Morgan | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,462 words)

 

There’s a section in Robert Bolaño’s 2666 — “The Part About the Crimes” — where women are raped and murdered for nearly 300 pages, their mutilated bodies abandoned in the deserts of northern Mexico. The violence is brutal enough to seem gratuitous, even sadistic, but Bolaño was merely fictionalizing the real-life female homicides of Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. And while 2666 circles these murders like a vulture, the women themselves barely get a chance to speak.

The women in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s debut collection of short stories, Sabrina & Corina — Chicana and Indigenous women living in Denver and southern Colorado — suffer similar fates. But we meet their sisters, mothers, and daughters. We meet the men who abuse them. And finally, we hear their voices.

In the title story, a teenaged cosmetology student is tasked with applying her murdered cousin’s funeral makeup. In “Sisters”, a double date leaves one sibling blind. In “Cheesman Park”, a bank teller flees Los Angeles for Denver after she and her mother are attacked, separately, by the men who claim to love them. And in “Any Further West,” a sex worker and her daughter travel in the opposite direction in search of a better life.

Sabrina & Corina is a moving, textured, masterful collection, saturated with a strong sense of place. I spoke with Kali Fajardo-Anstine about her book, the cycles of violence, and the gentrification of her hometown’s Chicano and Indigenous communities. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Ted Soqui / Corbis via Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Molly Redden, Sarah Schweitzer, Andrew Dickson, Namwali Serpell, and Lukas Hermsmeier. 

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Kurt Hutton / Picture Post / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Angella d’Avignon, Katie Englehart, Caitlin Dewey, Eric Benson, Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom. 

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

The Power of a Neighborhood’s Name

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

Sometime in the late 2000s, Google Maps started calling Buffalo, New York’s Fruit Belt neighborhood “Medical Park,” even though long-time residents didn’t call it that. Home to Buffalo’s black working class, Fruit Belt residents feared this digital erasure was part of the city’s attempt at rebranding in order to sell it out from under them. For Medium’s tech channel, OneZero, journalist Caitlin Dewey writes about how data threatened this African American community, how residents are fighting to save it, and what Google Maps’ renaming reveals about the flawed ways data collection works. Many people deny that the renaming is part of any calculated rebranding, but what is clear is that data is not neutral. Neither are those who use Google Maps.

Worst of all, in May 2018, a young realtor named Kim Santana posted a glamorous Instagram post of herself standing on the corner of High and Lemon Streets, holding a large coffee cup. “Whether you call it the fruit belt or the medical park neighbourhood, this is a great opportunity to be part of the buffalo renaissance!” her caption read. (“I really believe that the Medical Campus is going to bring some attention to the formerly known Fruit Belt neighborhood,” Santana told me by email.)

Residents who saw the image seethed. India Walton, the co-founder of the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust, ticks off the many ways the Instagram post offended her: the tone, the use of the reviled Medical Park name, the presence of a “chai latte or whatever.” Walton includes the image in a presentation she gives to other activists around the country about the dangers of gentrification. The post proves, Walton says, that developers and realtors seized on Google’s mistake to market the Fruit Belt to rich white kids.

Read the story

How Google’s Bad Data Wiped a Neighborhood off the Map

Longreads Pick

The renaming of Buffalo, New York’s Fruit Belt neighborhood reveals as much about gentrification as it does the flawed ways tech companies add locations to their maps.

Source: Medium
Published: Mar 14, 2019
Length: 13 minutes (3,499 words)

The Problem With Nostalgia

Sascha Kilmer/ Getty, Unsplash, Illustration by Katie Kosma

Michael Musto | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,048 words)

Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used To Be was the hilarious title of Oscar winning actress Simone Signoret’s memoir in 1978, and it’s truer than ever. Seeing the past through rose colored glasses is an increasingly myopic process, especially as technology makes giant strides forward and former modes of communication resound with an astounding obsolescence. As I handily crank out articles like this on my computer and shoot them to my editor via email, do you really think I miss the days when I had to type out a piece on a ratty Smith Corona, make changes with Wite-Out, scissors and Scotch tape, and then hand deliver the thing — sometimes in a blizzard or rain storm — to the publication, only to have to redo the whole process when a rewrite was required (after pre-Google fact-checking took up to an entire day)? Do you somehow assume that I long for a return to the time when I was terrified to leave the house because I could miss a business call? (In the ‘70s, answering machines were not prevalent and cell phones hadn’t yet been invented.) The time when I would regularly cut calls short — even with my own mother — for fear that someone more important, career-wise, might be trying to reach me? (There was no call waiting. You had to pray that anyone who’d gotten a busy signal would try again and again. And not talk too long.) Some survivors and observers longingly look back at eras like that as “a simpler time” and “a more personal moment,” but for a writer like me, it was actually a personal nightmare.
Read more…

‘Black Flight’ out of Chicago

CHICAGO - AUGUST 23: Alison Saar's "Monument to the Great Northern Migration", sits on South King Drive in Chicago, Illinois on AUGUST 23, 2012. (Photo By Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

In a cover story for the Chicago Reader, urban planner Pete Saunders writes about how Black residents are fleeing Chicago in large numbers for suburbs and metropolitan areas in other regions as the city’s white, Asian American, Latinx, and multiracial populations increase. This “Black flight” reverses demographic trends of last century, which saw an estimated 7 million African Americans pouring into cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast from the rural South during the Great Migration. The Encyclopedia of Chicago says that more than 500,000 of those who left settled in Chicago; according to Curbed, “At some points during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, more than 1,000 new arrivals a week came through booming areas such as Bronzeville, many of them hoping to work in the heavy industry and steel plants on the city’s southeast side.”

Saunders suggests a combination of factors have caused the current exodus, including slow declines in Chicago’s violent crime rate, school closures and a lack of investment in important local institutions. Shifts in the kinds of jobs available and, perhaps, a pull to the South of generations before have driven Black Chicagoans to Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego are also losing Black population, but the decline in Chicago, at “four to ten times the rate of the other three,” has been most dramatic. According to the Urban Institute, by 2030, it’s estimated that Chicago will have lost more than 500,000 Black residents in 50 years. Saunders believes that systematic racial discrimination, the biggest driver of Blacks to cities during  the Great Migration, is the key driver of the new pattern as well:

Segregation has created a lack of economic mobility. I’d argue that Chicago is economically stratified to the extent that upward mobility for blacks here is particularly difficult. The CMAP [Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning] report noted that the unemployment rate for blacks in Chicagoland stubbornly stays at more than twice the region’s rate, and that more than 60 percent of blacks who left the region were without a local job when they did so. Networks are hard to penetrate. The power structure is rigid. There’s also a lack of residential mobility. Chicago and its suburbs are more open to people of color than ever before, but blacks here are acutely aware that people still attach stigmas to places we move to. This has the impact of stagnating or lowering property values and rents where blacks move in large numbers, often wiping whole chunks of the region from the minds of many. The south side and south and southwest burbs don’t even occur to many whites seeking affordable options.

The hallmark of Chicago (and rust-belt) segregation has been black avoidance. Since the Great Migration the practice has been to explicitly or implicitly contain blacks within certain areas. But as metro areas got bigger, transportation more of a challenge, and city living more desirable, new attention was given to long-forgotten places. Here in Chicago that started with former white ethnic areas (Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, etc). Within the last ten to 20 years that expanded to include largely Latino areas (Logan Square, Humboldt Park, Pilsen). But for the most part the pattern of black avoidance remains.

In places with stronger economies, like New York and Washington, D.C., there’s been more direct engagement—even conflict—between white newcomers and longtime black residents in many communities. Spike Lee famously ranted about gentrification arriving in black neighborhoods in Brooklyn five years ago, and the area surrounding D.C.’s historically black Howard University has witnessed significant change in the last decade. But the rust-belt pattern is one of indirect conflict. Places collapse, then new groups come in.

Read the story

A New Low: Stealing From the Dead

Getty Images

Did William Ernest Johnson III steal the homes of the dead by forging notary signatures to transfer ownership and flip them for a profit in Philadelphia neighborhoods ripe for gentrification, or is he — as he maintains — a victim too? Craig R. McCoy investigates at the Philadelphia Enquirer.

They are all dead. Yet if city records are to be believed, they all walked into the office of a notary public and signed away their homes, which just happened to be in gentrifying neighborhoods with soaring property values.

Gail Harrison lived alone in the house where she grew up on Seybert Street in North Philadelphia. She had her quirks, but neighbors looked out for her. “She was a nice, friendly, Christian-hearted woman,” one said.

Harriet Dunn and Dorcas Moone lived quietly in a North 27th Street rowhouse in Brewerytown that they bought in 1950 after leaving the Army.

Alex Krasheninnikow survived a Nazi concentration camp. He later handed out the Communist Party paper on the streets of Philadelphia. His home on Agate Street in Port Richmond was overflowing with books.

Their properties all ended up in the hands of a stranger, a 43-year-old man named William Ernest Johnson III, who wrapped up some of the deals while still on parole from a long prison term for a string of violent crimes.

In all, an Inquirer investigation has linked Johnson to at least six suspicious home transfers over the last 2½ years. In case after case, he acquired vacant houses with longtime owners who were dead or so aged that their grown children would later say they never participated in the transactions.

The taking of Gail Harrison’s house was the first of a string of suspicious acquisitions involving Johnson. To look into them is to find more dead sellers, doctored deeds, and a city bureaucracy blind to it all. The thefts took place so quietly that in two cases the relatives did not know about the illegitimate sales until they were contacted by the Inquirer.

One theft required the forging of two signatures — those of longtime companions Harriett Dunn and Dorcas Moone. Dunn had been dead a quarter century and Moone a decade when someone signed their names to the deed selling their three-story house at 1323 N. 27th St., another Brewerytown address. Moone’s signature on the deed misspelled her name.

Read the story