Where is it occurring?
What are some resources?
What is being done?
What can we do?
What should we do?
Super Pricey Apartments In New York
9 years ago
30 April 2009
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This blog serves as a transparent point of discourse for You Are Here--a Columbus collective that grew out of the Comparative Studies Undergraduate Group at the Ohio State University. It consists of people from all academic and social backgrounds with an emphasis on social theory. Most succinctly put, it is creative scholarship in affect--whether it be from academia, popular culture, art, language, or personal observation. The ideas expressed in this blog are by no means reached by consensus and do not necessarily reflect those of other members. The comments doubly so. Feel free to critique, question, or agree with any views expressed. You don't have to reside in or be familiar with the city of Columbus. As far as we're concerned, you are here.
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Gentrification is the movement of more affluent people into a less affluent neighborhood, thus dispersing communities who find rent and general cost of living to be too expensive. It's occurring in every city, but notably in Ohio. The 2003 PBS documentary Flag Wars chronicles the gentrification of Olde Towne East, which has started a chain reaction of "refugees" to the east. Most "Villages" (Victorian, German, Italian) have already undergone heavy gentrification. The hip bars and restaurants are the result.
ReplyDeletehttp://local.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=olde+towne+east+columbus,+ohio&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=24.039383,56.601563&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=14
I'll try to goad the real geographers of YAH to tackle what can be done about gentrification. I only know a bit.
this is a start... id like to see something akin to this in columbus...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.righttothecity.org/what-we-do.html
or more specifically-
ReplyDeletego to city council meetings and raise questions/awareness
understand your role in the issue..
are you a gentrifier?
does the school you go to or the job you work at contribute to the displacement and violence against the poor in your community? use your connections to the issue where you are to fight micro colonialism in your neighborhood
gentrification isn't a natural process.. given this we should rethink our approaches to research on this topic with more of an emphasis on the link between partisan research and grassroots activism.
and theres always the landscape riot.
Carefully research the day-to-day purchases you make to ensure that products were made gentri-free and without using gentrified materials.
ReplyDeleteI highly recommend Flag Wars to anyone who's interested in gentrification--especially those in Columbus. It's directed by Linda Goode Bryant and Laura Poitras.
ReplyDeleteYou can find it easily at the Columbus Public Library: http://catalog.columbuslibrary.org/?q=flag%20wars
Here's a link to the Flag Wars website: http://www.flagwarsthemovie.com/films_fw_synopsis.html
Synopsis:
Flag Wars is a stark look inside the conflicts that surface when black working-class families are faced with an influx of white gay homebuyers to their Columbus, Ohio neighborhood.
Filmed over four years, Flag Wars' "as-it-is-happening" verite style captures the raw emotions and blunt honesty of unguarded moments as tensions mount between neighbors.
The story begins with Nina, a lesbian realtor who lives and works in the neighborhood and is at the center of the changes taking place. The changes include having areas of the neighborhood designated a Historic District (creating restrictive housing codes), an increase in code enforcement complaints, and efforts to reduce low-income housing in the community. Code enforcement is complaint driven and Linda believes the new residents moving in on her block are responsible for the code and zoning citations that have landed her in Judge Pfeiffer's Environmental Court. Linda suffers from cirrhosis of the liver and lives on disability. She refuses to address the zoning violations and her limited resources prevent her from making repairs to her home. This puts her in jeopardy of arrest. Baba, a black Yoruba priest and plumber, is the founder of the community gallery in the neighborhood, which occupies the bottom two floors of his three-story house. The name and address sign that he hangs above his porch is now in violation of Historic (i.e., Victorian) Code because it is carved in an African-relief style. Baba is also prosecuted in court before Judge Pfeiffer and faces fines and possible arrest for refusing to remove his sign. Jim, a working-class gay man, works two jobs to buy a boarded up Victorian house in Olde Towne. He risks his financial future when he purchases and begins renovations on the house using credit cards.
From porch conversations and family dinners to public hearings and street protests, Flag Wars provides a rare and extraordinarily intimate account of the social and human consequences of capitalism and the pursuit of the "American Dream" told through the lives of residents in a community confronted by gentrification.
Awards:
Best Documentary, Grand Jury Award
SXSW Film Festival, 2003
Filmmaker Award, Center for Documentary Studies
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, April 2003
Centerpiece Program
OUTFEST 2003: Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
so... let me see if i have this straight.
ReplyDeletea neighborhood that was originall affluent is invaded by poor families, turned into one of the highest crime areas of the city, and now that the houses and neighborhood are being restored to their former glory... you consider it to be a bad thing?
"the displacement and violence against the poor in your community"
i grew up poor. keeping the poor boxed into one location causes violence. many poor people are violent by nature. only people who didn't grow up poor, or choose to live poor as a lifestyle choice would be ignorant to think otherwise.
"Carefully research the day-to-day purchases you make to ensure that products were made gentri-free and without using gentrified materials."
this might be the most idiotic thing i've heard in a VERY long time. what does that even mean?
so far, i don't think anyone here can see the forest for the trees. you want to "help" the poor by doing whatever you can to make sure they stay reliant on the rich, in effect, keeping them poor. you don't identify with them or truly care about them. you just want to feel better about yourselves and have a cause to fight for.
go back to campus, put on your colored "cause" bracelets, and feel free to think you're making a difference when you somehow buy "gentry-free" products.
the poor don't need your pity.
Fortunately alex's comment was meant to be facetious.
ReplyDeleteI don't think anyone would disagree that poor areas of the city have lots of problems and that boxing them in exacerbates the situation. However, this is exactly what gentrification does. It compartmentalizes the poor in different areas, sometimes making it easier to ignore their situation. At this point in Columbus, the poor are being forced farther and farther east.
The problem of returning neighborhoods to their former glory is where the poor are supposed to go afterwards. Become homeless? Move to another poor area? Opposition to gentrification isn't about "solving poverty," but about preventing whole groups of people from being harassed, forced to uphold Historic Codes, and eventually being forced out of their neighborhoods.
It's not a matter of pity for the poor. Systematic creation of refugees in our own communities is the matter. I don't think anyone could disagree with that. Gentrification is just another obstacle to helping people out of terrible socioeconomic situations.
Also another note: "The poor" didn't "invade" affluent neighborhoods. White flight to the suburbs left these areas open for all kinds of different groups of people.
ReplyDeletemateria:
ReplyDeleteyou're full of shit. and you know it.
good luck to both you and your bootstraps at decreasing crime, ending the increasing rich/poor gap and restoring houses and neighborhoods to their former glory.
So easy to be a hater.
ReplyDeleteIt's ok. I'm pretty sure he was kidding too :)
ReplyDeleteRemember: trolls are your friends.
i think brent hit the nail on the head - the primary process of resource accumulation operable under capitalism is so-called primitive accumulation. PA is covered in chapters 26-7 of Marx's capital volume 1.
ReplyDeleteThe key factors for primitive accumulation (as the historical phenom, though it is also an ongoing process of formal subsumption) were
1) the commons are enclosed
a) creating private property and rights to items previously held as collective (the soil which can be farmed, wood than can be used in a stove, game that can be hunted, etc etc)
b) kicking feudal serfs off the land - separating them from the means of production (which is called being alienated from the means of production)
2) massive dispossession of feudal serfs who no longer have a way to provide for themselves
a) many become "free labor" - free in that they don't have other obligations (indentured and otherwise)
b) have "nothing to sell but their labor-power" because the means of production have been forcefully taken from them
c) are available to be bought/sold on an open market in a commodity form (I would like 4 serfs for 4 hours, please! what's the going price?)
3) capital owners now can invest capital in labor-as-commodity to work the means of production for them. therefore their productive contribution to the commodity process is reduced to almost nothing. M-C-M'.
in his recent book on neo-liberalism (a brief history of neo-liberalism), marxist geographer david harvey gives a pretty good account of how the current regime of capital accumulation ("neo-liberalism") continues this process through a process he named "accumulation by dispossession" - a process used by capitalists to generate wealth.
other "theory" resources on primitive accumulation include
**jason read's essay in the rethinking marxism journal (i have a copy and i'll send it along if you ask nicely).
**massimo de angelis' article that talks about the continuous process of primitive accumulation - the violence inherent in capitalist accumulation - Marx and primitive accumulation: the continuous character of capital’s “enclosures”. The Commoner, N. 2, September 2001, http://www.commoner.org.uk/02deangelis.pdf.
as you can imagine, this whole "moving people in, moving people out" thing fits almost perfectly within a marxist depiction of the violence necessarily associated with capital accumulation. materia himself demonstrated how strong the connection between accumulation and violence is, he semiotically linked the two in his first proposition (though to encourage dehumanizing, essentializing, and hate-mongering).
neil smith's book "new urban frontier" is excellent on how the village in NYC was gentrified in these terms. smith outlines not only an excellent representational analysis of the frontier 'how the west was won' narrative that associates working poor, immigrants and people of color with 'undesirables' that need to be cleansed in a manifest destiny-esque manner, lead by the vanguard of yuppies and developers. in other words: materia's argument is straight out of the racist, white supremacist, yuppy playbook that was used to motivate some of the greatest genocides and atrocities the united states has perpetrated.
to think that gentrification isn't bathed in the same blood as the genocide of 99% of the first people's who inhabited the continent or the on-going ethnic cleansing in Iraq that has displaced 20% of the population and killed over a million (far surpassing the evil shit saddam did) is an exercise in either historical amnesia or naive exceptionalism.
Anti-gentrification is pro-what?
ReplyDeleteAnti-gentrification isn't necessarily "pro" anything. It's not an attempt to solve poverty or to bring about fair housing. It's just a response to something that is severely hindering those things. It's necessarily unfair--poor people living in a poor neighborhood being pushed out of that neighborhood and forced to settle somewhere else so more affluent people can go in and fix it up and make it nice? It's just making things worse.
ReplyDelete