“I find it interesting that you need an influx of white New Yorkers for the services to go up,” filmmaker Spike Lee told CNN‘s Anderson Cooper (2/26/14). “You cannot deny race plays a part.”
The north-central Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights,” reads a piece in Long Island Newsday (1/9/14), “has transformed into a hot spot for young artists, entrepreneurs and foodies.” The author then launches into a list of things for any newcomer to do in the neighborhood, which, it says, has become “a melting pot of the [Caribbean and Hasidic Jewish] cultures with a few others sprinkled in.”
The clichéd “melting pot” has long been invoked to put a harmonious spin on unequal social relations within a diverse population. Crown Heights isn’t a melting pot any more than the United States is. Some people in the neighborhood are displaced when others move in: In the northern section, there were 12 percent less black people and 186 percent more white people in 2010 than there were in 2000, a change that has surely accelerated if the new Starbucks on Franklin Avenue is any indication. Median income rose nearly 30 percent in that time.
But the metaphor abounds in many corporate news outlets when a changing neighborhood is a central character. “It’s your classic New York melting pot,” the Wall Street Journal (2/4/12) quoted one source in a story about Prospect/Lefferts Gardens, another gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. “So it’s this melting pot,” a New York Times source (11/13/13) said of a weekly event in Bedford/Stuyvesant.
Gentrification isn’t confined to Brooklyn, and neither is the metaphor: The Chicago Tribune (10/22/10) extolled that city’s West Town as a “cultural melting pot”; the San Francisco Examiner (12/18/11) called the Mission District a “true melting pot”; the Long Beach Press Telegram (11/19/14) referred to its hometown as “a varied and dynamic melting pot of cultures and socio- economic structures.” The pot is also international: CNN (9/23/14) called Istanbul’s Beyoglu neighborhood “a bohemian melting pot.”
The “melting pot” as an urban ideal can be traced to activist Jane Jacobs’ 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which continues to be the bible of urban planning today. Living and writing in New York City’s Greenwich Village, Jacobs advocated for “integrated diversity” in city neighborhoods.
The vision called for an eclectic population and a medley of older and newer buildings—with mixed uses, residential and commercial. Jacobs argued—persuasively—that this arrangement would give neighborhoods a complexity that urban planners of that time stifled. It was an idea that resonated in the soon-to-come John Lennon years: that people and their things could coexist in peace.
The simple idea that everybody can join hands and sing a colorblind kumbaya—without recognizing how social relations still reflect power dynamics between class and race—is an easier pill for white, affluent and educated urbanites to swallow than any analysis implicating them in structural oppression. It is this crowd that composes the main audience for publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It makes sense, then, that these outlets frame gentrification in a way that relieves readers of responsibility in an unequal systemic process.
Back in 2005, when it was less of a faux pas to haughtily announce one’s arrival to a changing neighborhood, New York magazine (9/25/05) published a piece about a magazine editor from the Upper West Side who had “discovered” Brooklyn’s Prospect/ Lefferts Gardens. The neighborhood, which “few [Manhattan-expats] have probably heard of till recently—is fair game,” it read. The editor told New York that he wanted something “more surprising” than Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights, two expensive neighborhoods that smack of suburbia.
What could be more “surprising” about Lefferts Gardens? It is much poorer, with cracked sidewalks, faded window signs and graffiti scrawled everywhere. The people are also darker, with less income. It’s the kind of place a developer might brand as “gritty,” an allusion to the “wildness” of the early American frontier—a rugged, unknown, and dangerously exciting place to newcomers.
The mainstream media tends to parrot the analogy uncritically. “The whole history of this neighborhood is a series of frontiers!” said one developer to GQ (1/14) for an article about Downtown LA’s hyper-gentrification. GQ’s Brett Martin plays along, sauntering around town to sample craft pizza and green tea Heinekens, trumpeting the developer’s narrative for nearly 4,500 words:
After decades of being all but forgotten, Downtown has approached a critical mass of cool…an empty city, preserved in amber, waiting to be rediscovered and reoccupied…. [Downtown] is a bet on urbanism itself, a conviction that the past 50 years of outward, sprawling cul-de-sac development was just that: a dead end.
The GQ and New York pieces were aimed at affluent whites who had the privilege of growing up in cul-de-sacs (which are now becoming the new sumps of poverty nationwide —Time, 7/31/14). Sixty years ago, most black and Latino people couldn’t even have gotten mortgages to move to the suburbs if they wanted, and they settled in places like Lefferts Gardens and Downtown LA a mere decade before federal, state and city governments divested in urban neighborhoods along racial lines.
In this context, the frontier framing used by GQ and New York is insidious: Not only does it erase the presence of people in “undiscovered” neighborhoods, but it glosses over the structural reasons why they are now “gritty” and “forgotten.” Institutional racism gets a free pass, leaving only neighborhood people to blame for the blight and crime. This framing makes it easier to indict the perceived cultural failures of poor minorities for their squalid environs, which, it goes without saying, reinforces an idea of racial and socioeconomic superiority.
Yet even the nation’s paper of record uses this framing. Critics (Atlantic, 10/10/14) have noted that when the New York Times writes about a changing neighborhood anywhere, it’s likely to compare it to “Brooklyn,” as if the only parts of the borough that matter are those where gentrification is happening.
But there is reason to believe the Times is less oblivious to this framing than it once was: A feature (3/13/14) on Lefferts Gardens mentions resistance to fly-by-night development. If readers can wade through all of the “on the map” and “best kept secret” in the first two-thirds of the article, they may actually get the full story. That is, unless they’re so engrossed by the photo slideshow of light-skinned people (the neighborhood is 75 percent black) and bourgeois eateries (the neighborhood’s median income is below the city’s) that they start browsing Zillow and forget to finish the article.
But with all the advertisements for luxury property that grace the Times’ real estate pages, that’s probably the most honest it’s going to get. Not that real estate advertising in the press is anything new; the first newspaper advertisement in American history was sold in 1704 by the Boston News-Letter to a company selling real estate in Long Island.
That is the historical tradition on which Curbed, Lockhart Steele’s urban real-estate blog, grew into a go-to news site for yuppie living and playing. Steele was reared in New England boarding schools and moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early 2000s, where he began blogging about the neighborhood’s gentrification. His audience grew, and soon real estate companies were buying up ads. Gawker Media—where Steele was an employee—invested in the website. Eventually, Curbed was purchased by Vox Media (where Steele is currently the media editorial director).
Asked by the New York Times (3/19/10) about his role in sustaining the gentrification machine, Steele basically shrugged. “If we’re serving our audience, which is what any self-respecting publication should do, then undeniably we’re serving a more upscale audience than any slice of New York,” he said. And affordable housing? “We try to cover that, but when we do, we end up as dry and self-important as those topics can be.”
Ten years after Curbed was formed and expanded to cities like Miami and Los Angeles, its various websites now include a “Gentrification watch” section. But even here, Curbed (10/27/14) casually frames gentrification and displacement as “inevitable,” with little acknowledgement of the names, institutions and global processes facilitating it.
Joshua Greenan of the New York Daily News (2/26/14) gave a full-throated defense of “innocuous [and] inevitable” gentrification after Spike Lee’s now-famous tirade (Pratt Institute, 2/25/14) against changes in his old Brooklyn neighborhood. “Americans of all races, motivated by economic and cultural currents, have moved from city to city, and from neighborhood to neighborhood, since civilization began,” wrote Greenan.
While this is true (if wildly simplistic), the reurbanization of the last two decades—spurred by whites leaving the suburbs—isn’t the same thing as Lee’s family escaping to Brooklyn from pre–civil rights Atlanta (which Geenan compares to his own move to New York). There’s a difference between being beckoned to come and forced to flee.
Gentrification may be politically inevitable in current circumstances, but it is not an organic force. It only became possible after a pair of decades-spanning phenomena: wide-scale divestment in poor urban communities, and changes to the global economy that sent developers chasing after wherever return on property investment was highest. These phenomena—both of which reinforce class and racial strata—began unfolding ten years after Jane Jacobs floated the idea of “integrated diversity,” and they’ve stayed hidden behind corporate media’s melting pot metaphors.
Readers who move to changing neighborhoods may be aware on some level that their presence causes displacement, but deeper reflection is stymied by myopic framing. It is true that gentrifiers are part of a larger process, and it is unrealistic for anybody to shoulder excessive guilt for a systemic problem. But if we cannot even access the whole story, then we have no way to challenge the myth that all of this is inevitable and ultimately benign.
Aaron Cantú is an independent writer based in New York.
