Gentrification Quotes

“But artists aren’t the only marginalized folks controlling real estate. Think about the colonizing role that wealthy white gay men have played in communities of color; they’re often the first group to gentrify poor and working-class neighborhoods. Harlem is a good example. Gays have moved in and driven up rents, as have renegade young white students, who want to be cool and hip. This is colonization, post-colonial-style. After all, the people who are “sent back” to recover the territory are always those who don’t mind associating with the colored people! And it’s a double bind, because some of these people could be allies. Some gay white men are proactive about racism, even while being entrepreneurial. But in the end, they take spaces, redo them, sell them for a certain amount of money, while the people who have been there are displaced. And in some cases, the people of color who are there are perceived as enemies by white newcomers.”
― bell hooks, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism

“People bury the parts of history they don't like, pave it over like African cemeteries beneath Manhattan skyscrapers.”
― Alyssa Cole, When No One Is Watching

“Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

“... the truth is that not enough carriers of this virus have ever been willing to risk the potential loss of any aspect of their social capital to find out what kind of America might lie on the other side of segregation. They are very happy to "blackout" their social media for a day, to read all-black books, and "educate" themselves about black issues—as long as this education does not occur in the form of actual black children attending their actual schools.”
― Zadie Smith, Intimations

“We have more space and less time. And the love we had for our whole neighborhood now only fits into this wood-frame house in the middle of a quiet block. We don't know the people who live across the street or on either side of us.”
― Ibi Zoboi, Pride

“Over a decade of citywide rezonings, land speculations, and corporate bidding wars for available commercial space has produced a Darwinian habitat where corporate retail proliferates, and where mom-and-pops have become an endangered species.”
― Alessandro Busà, The Creative Destruction of New York City: Engineering the City for the Elite

“There was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by a meteorite, for example, would count as gentrification.”
― Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

“Since the mirror of gentrification is representation in popular culture, increasingly only the gentrified get their stories told in mass ways. They look in the mirror and think it's a window, believing that corporate support for and inflation of their story is in fact a neutral and accurate picture of the world. If all art, politics, entertainment, relationships, and conversations must maintain that what is constructed and imposed by force is actually natural and neutral, then the gentrified mind is a very fragile parasite.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“A friend of ours was arrested because he painted a slogan that said, 'Tourists, you're the terrorists.”
― Mariana Enríquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

“Grips slipped. Hers had from every surface. She's shaped nothing after all, only been crushed and reshaped. No wonder she felt for the brownstones, the cripples, now filling chaotically with no regard for her plan.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“You know gentrification is deep when a garage rock band made up of three white boys is called "Harlem".”
― Kara Lee Corthron, The Truth of Right Now

“And in every afflicted city, the story is the same: luxury condos, mass evictions, hipster invasions, a plague of tourists, the death of small local businesses, and the rise of corporate monoculture.”
― Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul

“There is no there there,” he says in a kind of whisper, with this goofy openmouthed smile Dene wants to punch. Dene wants to tell him he’d looked up the quote in its original context, in her Everybody’s Autobiography, and found that she was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“A display cake read JUNETEENTH! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery's owner wasn't. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song's words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone's backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer's sales pitch--so much hanging on that We all know--was targeted not to the people who'd celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who'd feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“You may think these streets are yours to walk, but they belonged to someone else before: the queers, the hobos, the junkies, the trannies, the prozzies - those streets were theirs before they were yours so be careful, you may find you have to wipe your shoes clean before going into your nice apartment.”
― Tilly Lawless, Nothing but My Body

“The end result is that the United States is today a more segregated country in many respects than it was twenty years ago. Problems of education, transportation to jobs and decent living conditions are all made difficult because housing is so rigidly segregated. The expansion of suburbia and migration from the South have worsened big-city segregation. The suburbs are white nooses around the black necks of the cities. Housing deteriorates in central cities; urban renewal has been Negro removal and has benefited big merchants and real estate interests; and suburbs expand with little regard for what happens to the rest of America.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“Remember that the work is the actual practice of the writing, the creating, and that there’s no rush. The work has value in and of itself apart from any kind of end result."@zafatista on ‘Halsey Street,’ gentrification, and writing”
― @zafatista

“Artmaking has been, at least since bohemia and modernism appeared in 19th century Paris, largely an urban enterprise: the closer to museums, publishers, audiences, patrons, politicians, other enemies, and each other, the better for artists and for art. For if cities have been essential to artists, artists have been essential to cities...Being an artist was one way of being a participant in the debate about meaning and value, and the closer to the center of things is the more one can participate. This is part of what makes urbanity worth celebrating, this braiding together of disparate lives, but the new gentrification threatens to yank out some strands together, diminishing urbanism itself. Perhaps the new urbanism will result in old cities that function like suburbs as those who were suburbia's blandly privileged take them over.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism

“In articulating their theory of growth machines, Logan and Molotch contrast the exchange value of land (its economic worth) with its use value (value as living space) to illustrate the conflicting interests of developer-led growth coalitions focused on exchange value and the interests of city residents on use value. In North America, according to the two authors, exchange regularly trumps use. This fact underlies the development of a growth machine. Growth machines develop in the following manner: place entrepreneurs see the potential for profit from the development and intensification of their property holdings, namely, through the increase in rent. These "rentiers" develop a close relationship with other local business interests. In particular, businesses that rely on the growth of a city to increase their profitability, such as newspapers, are likely to support the interests of developers. Developers and their allies, through constant interaction with government, through ample campaign contributions, and through their ability to organize and mobilize, can co-opt local politicians, effectively coercing their involvement in the growth coalition. They supply politicians with the funds necessary to run effective election campaigns. Politicians, in turn, along with local media and other members of the growth coalition, help to perpetuate a link between civic pride and a city's economic and physical growth. This link undermines interest in the use value of land (specifically the use and maintenance of existing areas) as the city focuses increasingly on growth. Molotch argues in a later article that this coalition of growth interests reflected the most common political coalition in American cities, while acknowledging its limited applicability elsewhere. He argues that Americans' acceptance of developers' actions " as the baseline of urban process, rather than as disruptions," is evidence that Americans take developers' "presence for granted"....Numerous authors, in adopting growth machine theory, also added anti-growth citizen coalitions to the mix. Current analyses adopting the theory now invariably include the neighborhood-association-led anti-growth coalition as the foil of the developer-led growth coalition.”
― Aaron Alexander Moore, Planning Politics in Toronto: The Ontario Municipal Board and Urban Development

“By itself, gentrification can't explain the new geography of race that has emerged since the turn of the millennium... Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“I had been sleepin there for a long time hwen the Fort Worth police put up no-loiterin signs all over the place and made me have to move my sleepin spot. I found out later some rich white folks was "revitalizin" downtown. Raggedy black fellas sleepin ont he sidwalks wadn't part of the plan.”
― Ron Hall, Same Kind of Different as Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together

“No one had second-guessed whether we belonged or were a good investment. The realtors had talked about how we were a part of a wave of new people coming in to enrich the neighborhood, make it better and more valuable, without knowing a damn thing about us.
No, that's not true. The realtors had known one thing, that I was starting to see was more important than I'd realized.
Us.
Them.”
― Alyssa Cole, When No One Is Watching

“My neighbors’ distress didn’t surprise me. This was New Jersey, after all, home to the insecure and impressionable. Jersey was a land of lacking, the slow-footed little sibling to Manhattan: always never enough. My neighbors were tame, small-hearted gentrifiers who cared deeply about property value.”
― Alex McElroy, The Atmospherians

“He probably used the quote at dinner parties and made other people like him feel good about taking over neighborhoods they wouldn't have had the guts to drive through ten years ago.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“There are people who will tell you
that the building's neo-Gothic trash,
Victorian and fake, a front
pretending it's much grander than it is.”
― Luke Wright, Remains of Logan Dankworth

“If you want something to stay secret, don’t tweet about it for a decade. If you don’t want to ruin a neighborhood, shut the fuck up. (Or don’t move there in the first place.)”
― Attenberg, Jaimie

“The land had returned to its humble beginnings, back to before someone decided to overcrowd it with bricks and gates and too many people.”
― Toya Wolfe, Last Summer on State Street

“The third shooting happened at a kosher grocery store abut twenty minutes from my house. Antisemitic screeds found in the attacker’ vehicle and in their social media postings told a different story, as did the tactical gear they wore, the massive stash of ammunition and firearm they brought along, and security camera footage showing them driving slowly down the street, checking addresses before parking and entering the market with guns blazing. The real targets, authorities surmised, were likely the fifty Jewish children in the private elementary school at the same address, directly above the store – huddled in closets, listening to their neighbors being murdered. Reporting within hours of the attack gave surprising emphasis to the murdered Jews as “gentrifying” a “minority” neighborhood This was remarkable, given that the tiny Hasidic community in question, highly visible members of the word’s most visible members of the world’s most consistently persecuted minority, came to Jersey City fleeing gentrification, after being priced out of long-established Hasidic communities in Brooklyn. The “context” supplied by news outlets after this attack was breathtaking in its cruelty. The sole motivation for providing such “context” in that moment is to inform the public that those people got what was coming to them. People who think of themselves as educated and ethical don’t do this because it is both factually untrue and morally wrong. But if we’re talking about Hasidic Jews, it is quite literally a different story.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Mi fermai, fissando lo schermo incredulo. Un euro valeva più o meno settecento colones. Con i miei “miseri” seimila euro sul conto, avevo la bellezza di 4.3 milioni di colones costaricensi. Scoppiai a ridere e presi a girare in tondo sullo stretto marciapiede, le mani tra i capelli. Sembravo uno che ha appena vinto la lotteria: in Costa Rica ero, a tutti gli effetti, un milionario.”
― Gianluca Gotto, La Pura Vida

“At the same time that the Mayor and City Council acted courageously and progressively in ridding the city of those monuments to a loathsome past, the new regime that removal celebrates, as some skeptics note, rests on commitments to policies that intensify economic inequality on a scale that makes New Orleans one of the most unequal cities in the United States. ... Local government contributes to this deepening inequality through such means as cuts to the public sector, privatization of public goods and services, and support of upward redistribution through shifting public resources from service provision to subsidy for private, rent-intensifying redevelopment (commonly but too ambiguously called "gentrification"). These processes, often summarized as neoliberalization, do not target blacks as blacks, and, as in other cities, coincided with the emergence of black public officialdom in and after the elder Landrieu's mayoralty and continued unabated through thirty-two years of black-led local government between two Landrieus and into the black-led administration that succeeded Mitch.

Both the processes of neoliberalization and racial integration of the city's governing elite accelerated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It may seem ironic because of how the visual imagery of dispossession and displacement after Katrina came universally to signify the persistence of racial injustice, but a generally unrecognized feature of the post-Katrina political landscape is that the city's governing class is now more seamlessly interracial than ever. That is, or should be, an unsurprising outcome four decades after racial transition in local government and the emergence and consolidation of a strong black political and business class, increasingly well incorporated into the structures of governing. It has been encouraged as well by the city's commitment to cultural and heritage tourism, which, as comes through in Mayor Landrieu's remarks on the monuments, is anchored to a discourse of multiculturalism and diversity. And generational succession has brought to prominence cohorts among black and white elites who increasingly have attended the same schools; lived in the same neighborhoods; participated in the same voluntary associations; and share cultural and consumer tastes, worldviews, and political and economic priorities.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives