amador9 t1_j9idthu wrote
There is a neighborhood in a large Northern California city I am very familiar with. It was developed in the 1920’s and was working class white; mostly Catholic immigrants, until the 1940’s when Black shipyard workers began moving in. By 1960 it was mostly Black but it was mostly owner occupants and considered a good neighborhood. Between 1960 and 2000, a few Black families from the neighborhood began to buy up houses and the majority of the residents were Black renters with Black landlords. The housing stock may have declined a bit but it was still considered a good neighborhood. Beginning in 2000, white and Asian families began buying houses and moving in. This usually involved Black landlords evicting Black tenants who were generally unable to find rental housing they could afford in that neighborhood and had to move to less desirable neighborhoods. The white and Asians moving in were hardly rich. They were generally politically liberal and saw the diversity in the neighborhood as desirable. They were the marginal middle class who were buying in the only neighborhood they could afford. There is still a significant Black presence but they tend to be the more affluent homeowners. It is assumed that it will continue to become more white and Asian and more affluent. While one can view this as gentrification/colonialism it can also be seen as organic urban progression. Neighborhoods change in responses to multiple changes in the greater society. As can be expected, there will be winners and losers. The big losers now appear to be the Black renters who were forced out but the big winners were Black property owners.
[deleted] t1_j9jfk19 wrote
(That sounds like a very interesting racial diversification! Not the kind of gentrification that I've experienced! Cool to hear!)
From this comment and the one above, seems like too much discussion is about race. Race is just the most obvious visual aspect of gentrification. I worry that if we focus on it too much then we'll get bogged down in examples and counter examples that are all, frankly, kind of reductive. I don't think that people seeing each other as just members of a race. Like, if you're forced to move due to gentrification, you're upset about moving away from your neighbors that you love and not just about the color of their skin, right?
Which is why we need to stop tiptoeing around the idea of class. In some neighborhoods the whites are displacing the Latinos and in others it's the Indians displacing blacks. Whatever. In all cases, the rich are able to displace the poor when they feel like it because housing as an investment is opposed to housing as a right.
It's all just class struggle and we ought to not focus on race.
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