Chicago Gentrification-Woodlawn

Chicago has been a hotbed for Gentrification. As a "Business Town" it attracts allot of out of town Professionals and Graduates. It also attracts those who wish to attend prestigious schools like The University Of Chicago and Northwestern Illinois University. Most of these individuals come from families who have inherited generational wealth and did not have to deal with historical and present day discrimination whether from housing, employment, education, or other services that are usually privately run and available to affluent and privileged populations. Neighborhoods like Pilson and Humboldt Park are the most recent to fall prey to the indiscriminant practices of "market forces" and merchant systems adopted from Europe that see other cultures and their practices as expendable. Here is a clip from the "Woodlawn" community who is fighting these forces. It is from ABC news which surprisingly has made a story out of the issue and was supplied by a youtube account holder by the name of "mateochicago". The Pilson and Humboldt Park videos will be shown in another post.

"Members of Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP) + People Of Woodlawn took to the streets in downtown Chicago to protest the exclusion of low-income residents from neighborhood planning, leading to rampant gentrification and displacement. The New Communities Program, controlled in Woodlawn by the University of Chicago and its partner groups the Woodlawn Preservation + Investment Corporation and The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), has cut out the majority of the community and rubber stamped the gentrification already taking place. At the same time TWO was working on the New Communities Program and making claims to valuing affordability, they were trying to kick out 100 tenants from 5 subsidized buildings they own for a condo conversion. Tenants fought back and stopped the condo conversion and are organizing to take over their complex. This is the news coverage of one of their biggest actions in the campaign."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyXmFvHza6A

WHAT IS GENTRIFICATION-MAIN POINTS

PHOTO FROM: http://www.artreach.com/gallery/stevie/gentri.html

This is from the article "Gentrification In Brief" by Neil Smith, from the website "Enough Room For Space". It outlines the main points of the effects of Gentrification on the urban poor and those of non-hegemonic cultures. These issues are complex but the concept is simple. The wealthy, mostly European gentry, that has built generational wealth based on historical Imperialism and Colonialism goes into poorer neighborhoods and "rebuilds" for their own benefit based on consumerist obsessions with amenities, They also create jobs for those that "fit" into their hegemonic image of society.
GS

GENTRIFICATION IN BRIEF
http://www.enoughroomforspace.org/project_pages/view/198
Gentrification occurs in urban areas where prior disinvestment in the urban infrastructure creates neighborhoods that can be profitably redeveloped. In its earliest form, gentrification affected decaying working class neighborhoods close to urban centers where middle and upper middle class people colonized or re-colonized the area, leading to the displacement and eviction of existing residents. The central mechanism behind gentrification can be thought of as a “rent gap.” When neighborhoods experience disinvestment, the ground rent that can be extracted from the area declines, which means lower land prices. As this disinvestment continues, the gap between the actual ground rent in the area and the ground rent that could be extracted were the area to undergo reinvestment becomes wide enough to allow that reinvestment to take place. This rent gap may arise largely through the operation of markets, most notably in the United States, but state policies can also be central in encouraging disinvestment and reinvestment associated with gentrification. But only wealthier people are able to afford the costs of this renewed investment. Integral with these economic shifts are social and cultural shifts that change the kinds of shops, facilities and public spaces in a neighborhood. Early examples of gentrification might include the Islington area of London or Greenwich Village in Manhattan but by the 1970s there were many recorded cases of gentrification in Europe, North America and Australia. In Berlin, early examples of gentrification were recorded in Schöneberg and Kreuzberg, among other neighborhoods, but the fall of the Berlin Wall released a huge stock of housing that had undergone considerable disinvestment, leading to a widespread gentrification of Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte.

1. Since the 1970s, gentrification has shifted from a marginal, fragmented process in the housing market to a large-scale, systematic and deliberate urban development policy. Gentrification has deepened as a comprehensive city-building strategy encompassing not just the residential market, but recreation, retail, employment, and the cultural economy. It has also spread geographically to Latin American and Asian cities with Shanghai and Beijing, for example, displacing hundreds of thousands of poor and working class residents. As a generalized urban strategy, gentrification weaves together the interests of city managers, developers and landlords, but also corporate employers and cultural and educational institutions which depend on a professional workforce. It is also the paradoxical but logical outcome of environmentalist demands for more dense living, pitting gentrifiers’ thirst for first-class housing against working-class demands for parks and community gardens. But these large-scale strategies are also integrated with much more local initiatives, and city managers around the world have become enamored of the idea of the “creative city.” As a matter of citywide strategy, they attempt to attract a so-called creative class of artists, intellectuals, entertainers, designers, high-tech engineers to specific gentrifying neighborhoods. This strategy was probably pioneered in New York’s Lower East Side where in the early 1980s landlords who were unable to rent commercial properties offered them at cheap rents to artists, giving them 5-year leases. After 5 years, with no rent control on commercial properties and with the neighborhood now gentrifying rapidly, landlords began to demand 400%, 600% even 1,000% rent increases to renew leases. The artists had done their work as the shock troops of gentrification and were themselves displaced. This more localized strategy is especially popular in places where perhaps there are more stringent rent controls or greater state regulation of the property market generally. The gentrification of Berlin has been more fragmented and slower than in London or New York, for example.
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3. Students, artists, and many other parts of the populace are part of the process of “cracking” neighborhoods that many other professionals may be unwilling to colonize. The question whether a particular neighborhood will or will not gentrify depends on the depth of the rent gap and the particulars of local policy, but it also depends on many other local issues, neighborhood characteristics and so on. If the rent gap is deep enough, I don’t think any neighborhood is “too bad” for gentrification, but at the same time there is no guarantee that a particular neighborhood will in fact be gentrified. Consider Harlem in New York City. In the 1960s and 1970s, Harlem was an international symbol of urban decline, a “bad neighborhood.” Not least, this was the product of racism as Harlem in 1980 was 97% African American. More than 20 years ago I interviewed an African American state bureaucrat in charge of trying to gentrify Harlem and as he put it: “If Harlem is going to be gentrified, whitey is really going to have to get his shit together.” Today, Harlem is gentrifying intensely, and has been after a hiatus in the late 1980s. African American professionals, students, lawyers, gays, white yuppies are all moving in, and property prices are sky rocketing. Columbia University is planning a huge university development in the area. If Harlem can be gentrified, I don’t think any neighborhood is immune. Or we could point to the early gentrification along the edges of Dharavi, the huge slum in Mumbai that is currently being dismantled.
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5. Neighborhoods gentrify in different ways, however. Some are cataclysmic, especially when there is centralized state sponsorship or large-scale institutional involvement, but others may gentrify slowly. Some become highly exclusive and exclusionary whereas others may remain more mixed hipster ‘hoods for a comparatively long time. The different fortunes of these areas depend on many things such as patterns of building ownership, state regulations, class structure and cohesiveness, community opposition, entrepreneurial initiatives. What ties all of these experiences together is the class shift in the neighborhood and the greater or lesser degree of displacement (direct or indirect) that ensues.

1. In the Lower East Side in the 1980s one of the anti-gentrification slogans was: “Die Yuppie Scum.” I still have a T-shirt given me by a friend with this slogan. It was an effective slogan for scaring off yuppies, and indeed the gentrification of the area stalled until the city evicted homeless people and protesters from Tompkins Square Park. But “Die Yuppie Scum” isn’t a very good analysis of gentrification. Even yuppies have very limited choices in the housing market, albeit far more choices than the poor. By contrast, the owners of capital intent on gentrifying and developing a neighborhood have a lot more “consumer choice” about which neighborhoods they want to consume, for the purposes of gentrification, and the kind of housing and other facilities they produce for the rest of us to consume. There is a huge asymmetry between the power of multi-millionaire capitalist corporations in the market and the “power” of someone trying to rent a flat on an average city income. So while the question of consumption and the availability of consumers is by no means irrelevant, it is secondary to the far greater power of capital.
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3. To the extent that gentrification has itself become a global urban strategy, anti-gentrification struggles have to work within this context. Local strategies are vital and have to highlight displacement, eviction, and the loss of services and jobs in neighborhoods leaving the existing working class stranded. But such struggles also need to have the global situation in their sights. Gentrification has become a strategy within globaliZation itself; the effort to create a global city is the effort to attract capital and tourists and gentrification is a central means for doing so. Some neighborhood activists – in North America I am thinking about people inspired by Jane Jacobs – have tried to rally small-scale gentrifies to fight large-scale urban redevelopment, but this is itself a gentrification strategy aimed at providing neighborhoods for the so-called creative class. The same can be said about “regeneration strategies,” endorsed as a central plank of urban policy by the European Union. In Britain especially, but elsewhere in the EU, “regeneration” has become little more than a gentrified word for gentrification. A kinder, gentler eviction is still an eviction.
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5. Instead, I think we need to start to think in terms of tenant collectives and neighborhood councils. These would both take over increasing responsibility for organizing neighborhood housing and at the same time build the power locally to force state anti-gentrification legislation – rent control, anti-eviction legislation, increased public housing, and so forth. But in addition to such local organizing, anti-gentrification organizers should be working with global social justice movements. Housing is a question of social justice, and gentrification is part of a wider global capital accumulation. Many gentrification projects today are designed, built and financed by international capital that makes decisions at a planetary rather than local scale. The case of the Beijing Olympics is only the most obvious. There, in preparation for that sports event which is also a bonanza for Chinese capitalists and the state, several hundred thousand poor and working class people have been summarily displaced from older neighborhoods in the city facing massive redevelopment. This connection between anti-gentrification struggles and world social justice movement activists can be extremely threatening. The recent desperate invocation of Section 129a of the German legal code, initiating “terrorism” charges against seven people, including several gentrification researchers, demonstrates exactly how threatening these connections can be. Class politics is equated with terrorism. Our response should be to intensify the connections among activists at different scales while refusing the state’s hysterical equation of class opposition with terrorism. Anti-gentrification struggles are part of that work.

http://www.enoughroomforspace.org/project_pages/view/198