A recent segment on WAMU, one of the NPR affiliates in Washington, DC, focused on efforts to change the name of the largely African-American neighborhoods “East of the River” to “East End.”
The station reported:
Residents insist the name change only encourages gentrification, and the term “East of the River” must stay put. “My question is: Who are we trying to change that connotation for? And my sense is — the developers,” Jo Knight, a resident of historic Anacostia, said at a recent community meeting about the area’s rebranding.
While Knight is doubtlessly correct about who would benefit from the euphemism, it’s worth noting that this short paragraph contains at least one other major euphemism: “developer.”
It’s an incredibly positive term that has burrowed so deeply into our language that we rarely think to question it. In practice, “development” often means the destruction of historic architecture, the disruption of neighborhood interconnections and, of course, the driving out of existing residents—often low-income people, people of color or immigrants. None other than Frank Lloyd Wright derided the influence of “advertising men; the realtor, the so-called ‘developer’—all defacing life,” in his 1957 book-length essay A Testament.
But scare quotes around “developer” have long ceased, with even their most ardent critics accepting that flattering term. Our language has become so distorted, it’s hard to keep track.
Part of the issue is that there’s no obvious replacement for the term. Perhaps, taking a cue from Wright, we could adopt the dysphemism “defacer.” This notion was a regular refrain from Wright, who continually called for an architecture “that belonged where you see it standing—and was a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace.”
And it is, after all, “developers” who are likely responsible for defacing, or at least distorting, our language, such that euphemisms like “rebirth” and “revitalization” have become euphemisms for gentrification. I should hasten to add that Barbara Schiffler charged in a letter to the Los Angeles Times (12/1/15) that “‘gentrification’ is a euphemism for market cruelty.” Indeed, it just might be euphemisms all the way down.
This is all part of a process Neil deMause (FAIR.org, 2/19/16) has called “developer-speak,” in which “rebirth or revitalization or renaissance is what happens to neighborhoods when you build new stuff.” Ironically, the word “developer” is itself one of the greatest triumphs of “developer-speak.”
Then there’s WAMU‘s use of the word “rebranding” here. In this context, it’s something of a euphemism as well. The “East End” proposal isn’t like a radio station, like WAMU, switching from promoting itself as “88.5—listen when you drive” to “88.5—now with less baloney and jive,” or some such. Instead, the new neighborhood name is part of a process that will, as residents charge, help drive them from the community.
WAMU promotes itself as “Washington’s public radio station,” which is quite dubious, given its long list of corporate sponsors and board members, some of which are involved in defacing.
As Wright told Mike Wallace in 1957:
Our natures are now so warped in many directions, we are so conditioned by education, we have no longer any straight, true, clean reactions that we can trust, and we have to be pretty wise and careful what it is we give up to, what it is we admire, what it is we are inspired by.
Not just our natures, but our language—and not just by education, but by media as well.
Language is a virus in a diseased culture
I’m reminded of an incident some years ago when a developer – and I note here that I honestly doubt that for most people the term carries the positive implications you suggest; it certainly doesn’t for Jo Knight – anyway, a developer wanted to put a garden apartment (I know, another euphemism) complex on a marshy area behind where I lived.
Arguing for the project before the town Planning Board, the guy pushing it said at one point that it would be an “improvement on existing use, which is empty land.” In response, I invented the word “deprovement,” denying that vacant land is inherently inferior to construction and insisting that the existing habitat for birds, frogs, and lightning bugs was a better use than parking lots and apartment buildings.
I lost. The buildings are there. The lightning bugs are gone.
I agree. Improve used to mean to make better. Unfortunately the Capitalist ethos has so permeated the culture that “improvement” now means to increase the market value of the land.
One of the concepts used by “developers” is putting property to it’s “highest and best use”. On our Old Florida vacation island which is now booming with 3 story million $ condos. Whenever a small cottage becomes available for sale it is snapped up and replaced with another multi-million $ condo or “party house” that sleeps 16, reducing the number of full time residents, destroying the character of the community. and overtaxing infrastructure and city governments.
Seems like you older full-time Island residents are the only or main full-time residents. Why don’t you create an island/city council and draft some building ordinances? Do you have anyone with connections to the Florida state House/Senate? You could also pursue those channels if so.
I was a longtime member of WAMU, back when its programming was largely bluegrass, folk music, and traditional country. Then some consultant convinced management that the format was too down market for DC public radio station. Now it’s nothing but news/talk, a change that happened immediately after the last pledge drive under the old format. One week WAMU was saying, “Please give to keep this kind of music on the air.” The next week, the music was gone. They lost me as a member when they lied. No wonder the station sees nothing wrong in “developers.”
This is just as bad as “developer” in the other direction. Without developers, Manhattan would be farmland, no, forest land. Developers change neighborhoods, sometimes on a large scale, for better or worse, almost invariably upsetting and sometimes injuring existing residents. It’s up to public policy makers to channel development, particularly by building appropriate infrastructure, and to protect residents–within reason. That should not include zoning out higher density housing to protect “the character of the neighborhood” from lower income or minority residents. See https://www.propublica.org/article/how-some-of-americas-richest-towns-fight-affordable-housing.
Gentrification = White people = evil, privileged oppressors = black populations immediate go-to for their uncivilized behavior against white people. Perpetuated by the anti-white (((media))).
I dislike the word, ” development” too. Mainly because “development,’ makes everything more expensive.
Considering how negatively that neighborhoods are often affected after being “developed,” perhaps we need a new word.
Is your neighborhood becoming less people friendly? Have high prices exploded? Has Nature disappeared?
Maybe DESTRUCTIVEMENT will work; it’s an ungainly word —but more fitting to 21st century America.
“If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.”
― Joseph Wood Krutch