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'Stie
qu'il fait frette
TUESDAY,
JANUARY 20, 2003 - CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF
MONTREAL, 17.01.04 : ON THE 24 BUS
MONTREAL, 11.01.04 : SUNDAY IN A ROY STREET DINER
MONTREAL, 10.01.04 : A COLD STE-CATHERINE STREET
MONTREAL, 07.01.04 : HYDRO CREW ON PARC AVENUE
MONTREAL, 10.01.04 : PINE AVENUE FRIPERIE
MONTREAL, 10.01.04 : IN A MILE END CAFÉ
MONTREAL, 10.01.04 : WOMAN IN THE METRO
MONTREAL, 07.01.04 : CONSTRUCTION ON SHERBROOKE
MONTREAL, 08.01.04 : ROSE IN THE WINDOW, AYLMER STREET
RINK
MONTREAL, 17.01.04 : PEEPHOLE IN THE ICE
MONTREAL, 10.01.04 : NORTH UP HENRI-JULIEN STREET
MONTREAL, 19.01.04 : SCHOOLBUS ON MILTON STREET
It's pretty damn cold
outside. Or, as one might say here in Montreal, "Ostie qu'il
fait frette!" Since the brutal wind has sapped the energy it
takes to do anything but nap in an armchair, I'm going to
refrain from posting any commentary this week. Instead, a
piece of news. According to the US News and World Report,
two
new studies throw into question the notion that
gentrification displaces poor residents, one of the issues I
mentioned last week. Here's an excerpt from the article:
New research from Columbia University's Lance Freeman
suggests that displacement is not all that widespread--and
in fact may not disrupt many people's lives. Freeman and
coauthor Frank Braconi set out to quantify the rate of
displacement caused by gentrification in New York City in
the 1990s. They discovered that poor residents in
gentrifying neighborhoods were actually less likely to move
than poor residents in nongentrifying neighborhoods.
(...)
Other studies support this optimistic view. Duke
University Prof. Jacob Vigdor analyzed the gentrification
process in Boston over the last 25 years. While landlord
harassment and steeply rising rents do occur, he says, many
original residents find ways to stay in their homes
regardless of these changes. Indeed, they may prefer the
changes. "Their neighborhoods become nicer places to live,"
says Vigdor. "Even if the rents are going up, they might be
willing to pay the increase because crime could be going
down." Vigdor also found that residents' incomes sometimes
go up along with their rent, as they benefit from jobs
created by gentrification.
(...)
Not everyone accepts this new view of victimless
gentrification at face value. ... Neil Smith, professor of
anthropology and geography at the City University of New
York, says that low mobility in gentrifying neighborhoods is
to be expected. Low-income renters tend to move very short
distances, and gentrification of one neighborhood also tends
to raise rents in nearby neighborhoods. So residents
struggle to stay put
–
even if it means families doubling and tripling up in an
apartment.
I'd also
like to mention that my short article, "Dépanneurs," appears
in the current issue of
Maisonneuve. My contribution isn't available online, but
the magazine is definitely worth picking up (and not just for
what I wrote!). It's available at most newsstands across the
continent and at Chapters/Indigo in Canada and Barnes and
Nobles in the US. They've even got a nifty little
store locator form so you can pinpoint the
Maisonneuve-hawking shop nearest to you.
Discuss this post
on our discussion forum
Head over to the
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last month's posts
Bombs away
MONDAY,
JANUARY 12, 2003 - CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF
MONTREAL, 07.01.04 : GARBAGE TRUCK ON
ST-VIATEUR
MONTREAL, 07.01.04 : STARING OUT AT
PARC AVENUE
MONTREAL, 07.01.04 : ÉDOUARD-CHARLES
STREET FROM GROCERY
MONTREAL, 08.01.04 : WAITING IN A
FROSTY SHERBROOKE METRO
MONTREAL, 08.01.04 : SCHOOL'S OUT ON
UNIVERSITY STREET
MONTREAL, 08.01.04 : JEANNE-MANCE
STREET IN MILE END
MONTREAL, 08.01.04 : HUTCHISON STREET
NEAR ST-VIATEUR
MONTREAL, 08.01.04 : GIRLS ON
ST-VIATEUR IN OUTREMONT
MONTREAL, 09.01.04 : ICING THE HOCKEY
RINK
MONTREAL, 08.01.04 : PRINCE ARTHUR
STREET FROM MCGILL
MONTREAL, 09.01.04 : SHERBROOKE STREET
Gentrification’s back in the
Montreal
news. Last Monday, five suspicious packages were
left outside condominium projects in the
Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood, accompanied by an angry
email sent to several media outlets by a heretofore unknown
Comité antigentrification. “This
is aimed
at denouncing the construction [of condos] in the third
poorest neighbourhood in Canada. … You want to wage war on the
poor, so the poor will reply,” it proclaimed, sneering at the
“trendy little cafés” and luxury condos supposedly being
inflicted upon notoriously poor Hochelaga by an invasion of
well-off newcomers.
The
police swept in with their little bomb-exploding robots,
destroyed the packages and confirmed that they had been fakes.
It was a crude and nasty ploy, but, as one housing activist
pointed out,
it definitely worked.
Local newspapers were filled with gentrification stories: the
Gazette ran a rather facile little editorial expounding the
virtues of development and gentrification and La Presse
published
a piece describing
the ongoing embourgeoisement of Saint-Henri, the
working-class neighbourhood made famous by Gabrielle Roy’s
novel The Tin Flute. Gazette columnist Henry Aubin,
produced a
more thoughtful column
expanding upon his paper’s original editorial: new development
in Hochelaga, he argued, has not displaced any current
residents, is mostly small-scale and unobtrusive and will
refuel some of the neighbourhood’s most derelict sections. Of
course, that ignores the long-term affects of gentrification:
poorer residents priced out by an increasingly high cost of
living. A ghetto of the poor could become a ghetto of the
rich. Hochelaga-Maisonneuve seems like it would be
particularly susceptible to over-gentrification because of its
housing stock alone, which is by and large old, handsome and
easy to convert into condos.
But
let’s be clear: Hochelaga-Maisonneuve is far from being
gentrified. A quick scan of the Voir classifieds reveals some
of the cheapest apartments in the city.
An article in last weekend’s Devoir
underlines the Comité antigentrification’s leap of logic: “Its
analysis of the situation is based more in the ideology of
class war than in the rigourous study of the facts,” the
author observes. So far, the condominiums being sold in the
area are cheap – Le Devoir gives the example of a 26-year
resident of Hochelaga who bought a condo in one of the
targeted developments – and, unlike in other neighbourhoods,
rental units are not being illegally converted into condos.
It
sometimes takes a shock to make people aware of the pitfalls
of gentrification, but Monday’s bomb hoax was worrying. For
all the discussion it provoked, it could be an early sign of
polarization between anti-gentrification forces and everyone
else. Gentrification has a turbulent history, especially in
the past thirty years. Just think of the fights in San
Francisco’s Mission district or the anti-yuppie vitriol being
spewed in, say, Williamsburg. The nastiest gentrification
battle, however, was waged in the streets of downtown
Manhattan a little over a decade ago. In the first part of his
book The New Urban Frontier, Neil Smith writes about
the gentrification of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the
1980s. Broken down and depopulated, the once-teeming
neighbourhood – and, in particular, its Alphabet City section
– had been left in the hands of a marginalized few: poor
Latino immigrants, the homeless, drug addicts and plenty of
squatters, many of them artists, who occupied a growing number
of abandoned tenements. The section was shunned by uptown
money and mainstream Manhattanites, but – as is always the
case – those squatting artists were the harbingers of future
gentrification.
In
describing the Lower East Side, Smith carefully constructs the
image of an urban frontier. In popular imagination, civilized
New York ended at the Bowery; the gaptoothed streetscapes of
rugged Alphabet City evoked images of the Wild West’s jagged
mountains and barren landscapes. However, bit by bit over the
course of the 80s, a handful of well-to-do newcomers took
advantage of rock-bottom prices and snatched up derelict
brownstones, renovating them to their former glory. The new
residents thought of themselves as pioneers and most New
Yorkers saw the gentrification of the Lower East Side as a
good thing. But rather than revitalizing the neighbourhood,
Smith argues, the newcomers actually de-vitalized it.
While Lower East Side natives were poor, there was still a
sense of community. People hung out on their stoops, local
kids sat around in parks. The pioneers, on the other hand,
fearful of the area’s reputation, barricaded themselves inside
their luxurious outposts. Conflict was evident even in the
different names given to the neighbourhood: newcomers
preferred to call it the East Village while Latinos called in
Loisaida. Elijah Anderson, an anthropologist who studied a
gentrifying neighbourhood in Philadelphia, once observed that
there is “a good deal of suspicious and district” among
gentrifiers of an area’s native inhabitants. The settlers meet
the Indians; frontier mentality sets in.
As the
Lower East Side gentrified, tensions rose – and on August 6,
1988, they exploded into a vicious riot. That night, the
police were called in to enforce a 1:00 am curfew in Tompkins
Square Park, a square in the middle of Alphabet City. It was
the heart of the neighbourhood, a seedy place where homeless
people camped out, local Latino kids gathered late into the
night and drug dealers plied their wares. According to Smith,
Lower East Siders saw the curfew as a means of taming the park
for the benefit of the neighbourhood’s wealthy newcomers. When
the police arrived, an angry crowd of locals –
anti-gentrification activists, punks, housing activists, park
inhabitants, artists, residents and weekend partiers –
confronted them, chanting slogans like, “Class war, class war,
die yuppie scum!” A battle ensued and the police fought with
protesters, the homeless and innocent bystanders for four
whole hours in an attempt to drive them from the park.
The raid
was a failure. Police tried fruitlessly to clamp down on the
park and Lower East Side squatting for the following year, but
by the summer of 1989, over 250 people lived in Tompkins
Square Park. The media compared the conflict to the battles
against Native Americans a century earlier; Mayor Ed Koch
played the part of General Custer, the anti-gentrification
activists and Loisaida residents were the Indians. Smith
asserts that, as gentrification displaces poor people and
changes the character of a neighbourhood, the frontier
ideology rationalizes the ensuing conflict as natural and
inevitable. His argument, of course, is based in old
conceptions of class war, something evident in the Comité
antigentrification’s tirade against the rich and their “petits
cafés branches.” Such thinking is a little too reminiscent
of black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us thinking. Good
neighbourhoods, after all, can accommodate a wide range of
people. Hochelaga is bound to become a popular neighbourhood
in which to live. If its future growth – and gentrification –
is going to be managed without strife and without displacing
the area’s current residents, affordable housing needs to
coexist alongside middle-class market-rate housing. The key,
as A.J. Kandy at
West of the Expressway
wrote recently, is to finely integrate low-income housing into
existing neighbourhoods, rather than “warehousing the poor” in
housing projects or shoving them out of sight.
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