Recently, in the comments section of Muskegon Critic's excellent diary on Benton Harbor I found myself in a discussion of gentrification.
There, I gave an example of a progressive and humane city that I know well, with an involved and active community. I described what happened in this progressive and humane city when faced with gentrification, what steps were taken by the government and the community. Yet even in this place, where our side held the cards perhaps more than anyplace else in the USA, gentrification could not be stopped.
And I asked the question: everybody says they are against gentrification in the abstract, but if it can't be stopped in a place like this ... where can it be stopped?
And if it can't be stopped, what are the alternatives? Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly, and expecting different results. If gentrification can't be stopped anywhere, is there a different thing that can be done?
The discussion in that comment thread provided no answers to these questions so I thought I'd ask again, in a diary.
Follow me below the fold, to Berkeley California, forty years ago.
Why Berkeley? Because if it can happen there, and it did, it can happen anywhere. I lived in Berkeley for a very long time, including in the 1970s when it got so gentrified, and was able to observe it all first hand. Here's what happened.
First, beginning in the late 1960s the risk takers, god bless 'em, created truly great resources for their own community where there had been nothing before. In some cases this began even earlier, for example the Berkeley Co-Op and KPFA. (However, that small political journal which also originated in Berkeley came later).
In the 1970s this blossoming of the community really got going. Restaurants, shops, cultural venues, plus pushing hard to get the government to support making it a really livable place. This was hard, because up to that point Berkeley was run by Republicans and conservatives (yes really). But the cultural and community pioneers had a parallel in the community-focused Berkeley Citizens Action (BCA) insurgent faction of the Democratic party, and its predecessors and successors, which was the political side of what created the Berkeley we think of today.
So far so good, all great stuff, and nobody in their right mind would have done anything differently (well, some things, sure, but that's another post). Berkeley became a more and more attractive place to live, for all the right reasons. But then what?
As a place becomes more attractive, it ... attracts. People want to move there. Cool people, good people, to be where the good stuff is. Then come the yuppies (and the very word yuppie was coined in Berkeley by the wonderfully snarky Alice Kahn), quickly followed by everyone else, pushing up property values in this now-more-desirable area. And, yes, pushing out the very people who created all this in the first place.
The Berkeley government and community worked hard to mitigate this, and they get full marks for trying all the anti-gentrification strategies we've seen discussed here on DKos and elsewhere. But property values and rents soared anyway, populations transitioned, and people got pushed out. I certainly did.
Looking at those steps, though, which would you have changed? The decent food stores? The concert venues and community spaces? BCA and progressive politics? The non-enforcement of cannabis laws?
This was a local process. Gentrification in Berkeley was not caused by outsiders or carpetbaggers. In Berkeley the first step was for the people who were already living in the community to try and change the community they were already living in for what they perceived as the better. Yes, as I mentioned, certainly there was an influx of people who moved to the area. But that was later, well after the people who had lived there all along worked to improve the place where they themselves lived.
The initial element was when the people who had been living there all along created businesses and institutions in their own communities. Chez Panisse is a good example. Now a very successful and influential restaurant that has literally changed the way the entire country eats, it started off as a local-focused establishment, intended simply to serve its own community. I mention Chez Panisse because people have heard of it but there were lots of other such places. Smoky Joe's cafe comes to mind (''Where the Elite Meet to Eat No Meat"). Or the Cheese Board, or Nabalom Bakery (who then and now make the best danish in the universe), which are both collectives and thus locally run, and have been from the beginning.
At that stage, there wasn't any externally imposed economic redevelopment because the people who wanted things (re)developed were the people living there. Did outside developers show up? Yes, but that was later, and by then the local progressive government was in power and tried to do things in the most humane way they could. They fought against gentrification. However as I mentioned above, they weren't successful by any means.
But they tried. For example take the whole Fourth Street development. I knew one of the main developers, he lives right in Berkeley and always has, and they designed that area as a local-oriented resource, with the local community in mind. In fact, the whole Fourth Street project came about because through the 1960s the (then-Republican) Berkeley city government had been trying to attract outside businesses to that part of town for years, and failing. It was local entrepreneurs who picked up the pieces of this failed bring-in-outsiders attempt, and created a local-oriented resource. Fourth Street was at the tail end of this wave of local bootstrapping, and it certainly was not a nonprofit organization. But it's the community attitude I'm focusing on here.
Or look at Telegraph Avenue south of the UC Berkeley campus. This was a hugely lucrative area that served the large campus population, any chain store's wet dream. You can imagine the pressure businesses like that exerted to try and get in there. Yet there was a concerted effort to keep out the chains, and for a long time it was largely successful. Much later in the process, the chain stores won access, but for quite a while they were largely excluded due to the efforts of the active and involved community.
Here's the thing. The bottom line is that this was a community that, perhaps more than any other in this country, had the activist base, the community institutions, and the political will to tackle the issue of gentrification. Yet even with all this community focused activity and energy Berkeley still gentrified.
If it could happen in Berkeley it can happen anywhere. Is there any alternative? And if there isn't, what are our options?
