G. Gambill: "you also push out many others and, in some cases, folks who have
deep roots in a community. All too often the targeted areas are Black areas of
cities...that is simply a fact."
Yes, and the various ways they do it are both ignorant and hugely rude. Before
gentrification, my neighborhood worked its collective butt off with police,
CCP/SAFE, the court system, etc. to deal with the Rolling Thirties Bloods who
consider Central their home because the grandmother, mother, sons, grandsons,
great grandsons, and cousins by the dozens lived here. And we were successful,
not in getting them to move, they did that themselves through murder, prison,
disability, UDs, etc. The goal was to turn some of them away from those
behaviors. We are having some small success with that. It's a long-term
process.
Those of us who have been around the longest carry the history of the
neighborhood, we know the connections among families. At an all-neighborhood
public meeting, one of the "gentrifiers" (actually an upstart wanna be), got up
and said, "we don't want to hear from the old people, they'll just say the same
things again. 'Scuse me? I despair of people like this, they are what my mother
used to call, "Ignorant and proud of it."
I'm genetically opposed to pushing in and taking over. If you come from another
place, you owe it to yourself to look, listen and learn, be helpful if you can,
and try not to insult everyone on your first day. I welcome newcomers and I
would welcome seeing the back of some folks, but it would not just be some more
of the Bloods, it would be this bunch. They are not all gentrifiers, per say,
many of them come here, pick a huge, gorgeously appointed home and destroy the
character of the house with ill-chosen "updates," like removing the built-in
buffets, lowering the ceilings. painting the varnished woodwork. But worst of
all, they come into the neighborhood group and work actively through Robert's
Rules, sneering insults and outright pushing the chair out of place, to cut out
the people born and raised or long-time residents of Central.
My notion of community, which I think, if instituted would be more
long-lasting, is that one finds the resources and takes the time to uplift
those who are in the neighborhood, rather than displacing the people and
therefore the history, culture, and character of the neighborhood.