GENTRIFICATION AS CODE FOR BIGOTRY

I am an urbanite. I was born in a city adjacent to Boston which was voted "most densely populated city in America" in the 1950's. Yes, my home city beat out New York and Chicago. There were almost 50,000 residents in 2.2 square miles. My city was diverse culturally. In that small patch of land, there were four synagogues of various ilks. There were three Roman Catholic churches and one Russian Orthodox. Half dozen Protestant congregations spoke to the older demographic of Pilgrim blood lines. My city was settled in 1624. Our local wholesale produce market, lodged among scrap metal yards, small factories and tire recycling yards, served Greater Boston. It employed the local Latino immigrants from Puerto Rico and Cuba. The city was a sanctuary city before that became a thing.

Blight had swallowed my home city after an immense 1908 fire leveled much of its historic past. It had been a genteel summer refuge for wealthy Bostonians in the 18th and 19th centuries. Somewhat comparable, I suppose, to the country landscapes of Britain with large homes interspersed with acres of rolling farmland, dotted by herds of sheep and cows. Breezes flowed across the town which sat on Boston Harbor. Ferries moved the wealthy and their carriages across the harbor. It was still called Winnisimmit until 1739, so named by the Massachusetts Indians, the natives who resided there in 1624, when the first settlers arrived from England.

My city, renamed Chelsea in 1739 after the London neighborhood, was not pastoral when I was born in the local hospital several years after the end of WWII. Farms and estates had been replaced by 3-story wooden tenements, stacked along the narrow streets like dominoes. During my early childhood, the state demonstrated its contempt for the poor immigrant city by plowing through it with a huge bridge from Boston and an expressway to the North Shore, where the wealthy heirs of the early settlers had migrated over the many decades. The new elevated expressway gave them easier access in their cars to their horse farms, polo matches and sprawling ocean views. Its elevation spared them the unsightly view of wash hanging over shabby wooden porches in Chelsea below.

My parents were reverse gentrifiers. My mother had grown up in Chelsea's cold-water flats without central heating. Her family moved a lot due to her father's tendency to drink the rent money. She was loyal to the city, despite many rational reasons why she should not have been. She managed my father's money and her own into enough cash to buy a lot of land, the site of a Victorian home which had burned down, on the edge of the city, where a remnant of Chelsea's better times remained. It had survived the 1908 fire.

My father built a new house for us. I mean that literally. He was a relentless engine of determination who had crossed Europe in WWII as an artillery sergeant. When he returned from the war to my older brother and mother, he took jobs with carpentry crews in his spare time from his regular job in light-bulb factory. He was learning how to build his own house. After several years, he borrowed money from his brother-in-law to buy materials and to pay for a foundation to be poured. Then he built the house during the day while working night shifts at his new police job. I was told that older residents, some with Mayflower roots, were not enthusiastic about this sweaty interloper and his tireless hammering.

Moving from our tenement flat to our new house was huge to me as a 4 year old. The newness of everything had its impact on me. I became withdrawn for several years thereafter. But I think that experience innoculated me against the fear of moving on in life. In fact, I think it presented moving on to my impressionable brain as an easy solution, perhaps too easy.

Being the newbies with the new house in a settled neighborhood of old homes set us apart. Others would follow, but we had broken the quiet sameness of this conclave up on a hill above people like us, ethnic and poor in the case of my mother's family. A senior Massachusetts judge from an established political family lived two doors away. Another family with Mayflower ancestors lived farther up the street. And, even though the father of that family was himself a carpenter, an icy distance prevailed between them and us.

Today's concept of gentrification describes wealthier hipsters or investors buying property in rundown urban neighborhoods. This brings with it property improvement of older buildings and the construction of new architecture. It usually raises overall property values after a certain tipping point. It restores street life, encourages the revitalization of local services, and boosts public safety, since police are more likely to respond to calls more quickly in wealthier neighborhoods.

The New Left decries gentrification as an evil of capitalism. Many Leftists do this on social media via iPhones, which truly represent the evils of capitalism from a monopolistic and unfair labor practices perspective. Gentrification is painted as racist by some. Cities governed by Left-leaning politicians have taken to an apologetic attitude when presenting plans for urban renewal. They pander to local neighborhood associations in blighted areas, often lead by under-employed loudmouths and ancient slumlords. Permitting processes drive many innovative developers away. The result is the dominance of high-profit investor groups who are just exploiting low property values to build over-sized rentals, which get permitted because they offer several low-income units. It's a bait-and-switch racket.

And the clueless "neighborhood activists" are ignorant of the part they play in fostering the type of gentrification which is geared to displace them, rather than improving their standard of living.

I have bought and improved property in three rundown neighborhoods while living in those locations. Before that, I rented in one epicenter of redevelopment in Boston, The South End, when it was undergoing its early transformation from ghetto in the 1980's. The South End experience informed me about the bigotry at the heart of cries of "Fight Gentrification!".

The issue in The South End in the 1970's and 1980's was less economic than it was ethnocentric, racial and homophobic. The fancy brownstones of that district were built to accommodate the growing post-Civil-War bourgeoisie of Boston, who profited from fishing, railways and even whale oil. The newly wealthy Famine Irish descendants were house proud and wanted to live in comparable neighborhoods to their WASP masters. Later, The South End deteriorated as trolley suburbs drew these same prosperous families to Brookline, Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury and Newton. Townhouses became rooming houses and partitioned tenements. 

The rising gay and lesbian population of the 1970's and 1980's, gaining economic and social ground due to Gay Liberation, developed a liberated neighborhood by buying up buildings in The South End, which had become an African-American and Middle-Eastern neighborhood. These gay/lesbian buyers were seen as gentry by the inhabitants. Wrapped in their use of the word, "gentrification", were all the slurs also publicly hurled at homosexual men and women. While the tradesmen of the area welcomed the young and prosperous newcomers, others lashed out. 

As late as 1986, I was threatened with assault by a Black neighbor in front of my building where I rented an apartment as well as shared an antiques store at street level. "Goddam gentrification!" he shouted as he took a swing. When I did not shrink, he reeled away and shouted, "You'll see, faggot! You'll see!" I sometimes feel his prophecy has come to fruition in the venomous anti-White racism of this time. But The South End now hosts two-bedroom condos which start in the low millions. It is a safe, artsy conclave populated predominantly by wealthy heterosexual couples, many with children. Eventually, most single gay men and lesbians were priced out of buying or renting in that neighborhood. The old guard gentrifiers had sold out and moved on. This has been a traditional part of the urban-gay subculture. 

In 1999, I purchased a tenement in another neglected neighborhood of Boston, East Boston. This neighborhood, separated from Boston's center by the harbor, had been densely Italian-American for a century. When I arrived, it was rapidly becoming Latino, populated by mostly undocumented immigrants who were cleaners, landscapers and all other forms of manual laborers. While I never encountered any problems with my Latino neighbors, the Italian-Americans loudly called me "gentry" and sometimes, more honestly, "gay guy". They stood in gangs outside my building as it was being renovated and loudly shared their disgust at the new windows, new roof and new siding. "Goddam preppy" was a common comment. They encouraged their children to play kick ball against the front of my house. The same kids wrote obscenities on the sidewalk in front of my house. I could go on, but I think I have made my point, based on my experience. 

So imagine my surprise when, months after moving to very middle-class Newton, I heard "gentrification" railed against over a loudspeaker in our village park during a Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in 2017. The village here was once the center of a densely Italian-American area, settled by factory workers, employed by the several large 19th century mills, now chic high-tech office complexes. The spill over from Boston's burgeoning professional population has created high demand for housing here. Shabby factory houses are now being rehabilitated or torn down to make way for snappy new duplexes resembling those on the West Coast. Two-car garages attached to traditional New England frame style. New bistros are popping up in the commercial main street and beyond.  The South End all over again with a more diverse young professional population. 

I attended a neighborhood association meeting out of curiosity. It was populated by a dozen regulars, mostly octogenarians and female, descendants of the old guard. Gentrification was cited with revulsion over and over, as an up-market rental development was presented by an anxious young architect. Lip service was paid to "affordable units". Yet one of the complainers about gentrification boasted that she owned a six-unit rental building. It soon became obvious to me that this  "gentrification" was code for the worst form of self-defeating bigotry, based in xenophobia and tribalism. Rather than focusing on the impact of requests by the developer for variances from zoning requirements, based on environmental factors, it seemed they were put out that these new units would not be occupied by working-class Italian-Americans, since they are a dying species because of education and social fluidity. And that is a good thing. Bring on the gentry.