Is it really
a problem when poor areas get richer?
What the
American ghetto reveals about the ethics and economics of changing neighborhoods.
by Kelefa Sanneh - The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2016
At the Golden Globe Awards, in January, Ennio Morricone won Best
Original Score for his contribution to “The Hateful Eight,” the Quentin
Tarantino Western. Accepting the award on Morricone’s behalf was Tarantino
himself, who brandished the trophy in a gesture of vindication, suggesting that
Morricone, despite all the honors he has received, is nevertheless underrated.
Tarantino proclaimed Morricone his favorite composer. “And when I say favorite
composer,” he added, “I don’t mean movie composer—that ghetto. I’m talking
about Mozart. I’m talking about Beethoven. I’m talking about Schubert.” The
backlash began a few moments later, when the next presenter, Jamie Foxx,
approached the microphone. He smiled, looked around, and shook his head
slightly. “Ghetto,” he said.
Tarantino’s comment, and Foxx’s one-word response to it, became a
big story. In the Washington Post, a television reporter called Tarantino’s
“ghetto” comment a “tone-deaf flub.” A BBC headline asked, “IS THE WORD
‘GHETTO’ RACIST?,” and the accompanying article summarized the thoughts of a
Rutgers University professor who accused Tarantino of implying that “the ghetto
was not a place for white, European, male composers.” Of course, “ghetto” is
itself a European term, coined in the sixteenth century to describe the part of
Venice to which Jews were confined.* And Tarantino, in suggesting that the
category of film composition was a ghetto, was using a common dictionary
definition: “something that resembles the restriction or isolation of a city
ghetto.” But “ghetto” is also an idiomatic way of dismissing something as cheap
or trashy. And the adjectival “ghetto” owes its salience to the fact that a
modern American ghetto is not only poor but disproportionately
African-American. Recent census data showed that 2.5 million whites live in
high-poverty neighborhoods, compared with five million African-Americans.
Earlier this year, Senator Bernie Sanders went further, saying, “When you’re
white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto.”
What is a ghetto, really—and who lives there? In “Dark Ghetto,”
a pioneering 1965 sociological study, Kenneth Clark depicted Harlem, a
paradigmatic ghetto, as a “colony of New York City,” defined by both its
economic dependence and its segregation. In the decades that followed, scholars
argued over the limits and the utility of the term— did it apply to any poor
neighborhood, any ethnic enclave? The word may have various definitions but it
arouses singular passions, which is why, in 2008, the sociologist Mario Luis
Small suggested that his colleagues stop using it altogether. He argued that,
in many ways, “poor black neighborhoods” were neither as distinctive nor as
homogeneous as “ghetto” implied, and warned that academic theories of “ghetto”
life might “perpetuate the very stereotypes their proponents often aim to
fight.”
Mitchell Duneier seems to have taken Small’s pronouncement as a
challenge; his response is “Ghetto”
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a history of the concept which also serves as an
argument for its continued usefulness. Duneier is a sociologist, too, sensitive
to the sting of “ghetto” as an insult. But for him that sting shows us just how
much inequality we still tolerate, even as attitudes have changed. Where the
ghetto once seemed a menace, threatening to swallow the city like an
encroaching desert, now it often appears, in scholarly articles and the popular
press, as an endangered habitat. Academics and activists who once sought to
abolish ghettos may now speak, instead, of saving them. This shift, as much as
anything, accounts for the vigorous response to Tarantino’s comment: people
wanted to know just what was so bad about a ghetto, anyway.
In 1945, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton published “Black Metropolis:
A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City.” When they wrote about a
“Black Ghetto” in Chicago, they were making a provocative analogy. Duneier
notes that, in explaining how blacks were prevented from buying or renting
homes in white neighborhoods, Drake and Cayton referred to “the invisible
barbed-wire fence of restrictive covenants,” a formulation that was calculated
to evoke gruesome images of the Third Reich. Despite the long history of Jewish
ghettos in Europe, Duneier is at pains to show that the Nazi ghetto was not a
revival of European history but a break from it. In the old Italian ghettos,
Jews, who were ostracized by authorities, created their own tightly organized
communities. The restrictions were onerous but not absolute; residents were
sometimes permitted to leave during the day and return at night. (Duneier
suggests that some inhabitants of the Roman ghetto might have viewed it as “a
holy precinct, its barriers recalling the walls of ancient Jerusalem.”) By
contrast, the Nazi version was a brutal, short-lived experiment. Duneier
describes the debate, among Nazi officials, between “productionists,” who saw
the inhabitants of Jewish ghettos as a useful source of slave labor, and
“attritionists,” who preferred them dead.
The modern history of American ghettos, then, begins with a
misunderstanding: the term acquired its awful resonance because of the Nazi
ghettos, even though the conditions in American cities more closely resembled
those of the older European ghettos, which were places capable of inspiring
mixed feelings, among both inhabitants and scholars. American ghettos were the
combined product of legal discrimination, personal prejudice, flawed urban
planning, and countless economic calculations. For more than thirty years,
starting in 1934, the Federal Housing Authority steered banks away from issuing
mortgages to prospective buyers in poor black neighborhoods, which were deemed
too risky; black tenants or prospective homeowners were often stymied by banks
that doubted their creditworthiness, or by deed requirements that sought to
maintain a neighborhood’s character and forbade blacks to buy or lease, or by
intimidation and violence. Disconcertingly, white homeowners who worried that
integration might erode the value of their homes may have been correct, even as
their decision to flee exacerbated the problem. Drake and Cayton described
their subjects as less bothered by segregation itself than by its stifling
effects. “They wanted their neighborhoods to be able to expand into contiguous
white areas as they became too crowded,” Duneier summarizes, “but they did not
actually care to live among whites.”
Scholars who studied the ghetto tended to be motivated by sympathy
for its residents, which often resulted in a complicated sort of sympathy for
ghettos themselves. Clark, making his study of Harlem, spent time with Malcolm
X, who insisted that segregation —“complete separation”—was the only way to
solve America’s problems. Clark didn’t go that far, but he did express a
certain skepticism about the wisdom and the prospects of school desegregation.
Better, he thought, to “demand excellence in ghetto schools,” as Duneier puts
it. Similarly, the anthropologist Carol Stack, in an influential 1974 book
called “All
Our Kin,” suggested that the black ghetto fostered social
coöperation, knitting its residents together in extended “networks” of families
and friends. At the same time, scholars sought to pin down the relationship
between “ghetto” and its Spanish-language analogue, “barrio,” and to compare
poor black neighborhoods with other enclaves. When an activist named Carl
Wittman announced, in 1970, “We have formed a ghetto, out of self protection,”
he was calling for a different kind of separatism: he was writing about his
adopted home town of San Francisco, in a pamphlet titled “A Gay Manifesto.”
Duneier’s book makes it easy to see how, through all these
changes, black ghettos in America have remained the central point of reference
for anyone who wants to understand poverty and segregation. By some estimates,
African-Americans are more isolated now than they were half a century ago. In a
study published last year, scholars at Stanford reported that even middle-class
African-Americans live in markedly poorer neighborhoods than working-class
whites. And the linguist William Labov has suggested that, during the past two
centuries, African-American speech patterns have been diverging from white
speech patterns, owing mainly to “residential segregation.” By many
measures—marriage rates, incarceration levels, wealth metrics—poor black
neighborhoods stand out.
Even so, Duneier’s review of the scholarly literature cannot
obscure the fact that the term “ghetto” does seem to have faded somewhat from
common usage. In the past decade or so, the adjective has overshadowed the
noun: a word that once conjured up intimidating neighborhoods now appears in
unintimidating coinages like “ghetto latte.” (This is a coffee-shop term
popularized in the aughts, in honor of the parsimonious customer who, instead
of ordering an iced latte, orders espresso over ice, which is cheaper, and then
dumps in half a cup of milk.) On hip-hop records, “ghetto” has largely given
way to the warmer, more flexible “hood,” which sounds less like a condition and
more like a community; Kendrick Lamar’s ode to the bad old days is called “Hood
Politics,” not “Ghetto Politics.” The persistence of residential segregation
has tightened the relationship between concentrated poverty and
African-American neighborhoods, and made the word “ghetto” harder to use.
“Ghetto” has come to sound like an indictment of a people as well as of a
place.
Our doubts about the word may also have something to do with our
changing view of cities. Many of the studies in Duneier’s book were conducted
in the shadow of white flight and, starting in the nineteen-sixties, rising
crime rates. The term suggested that a particular sort of dysfunction was
native to urban environments and, possibly, inseparable from them. But fewer
people talk about cities that way anymore: among contemporary urbanists, a
dominant influence is Jane Jacobs, known for her lifelong commitment to the
simple but radical notion that city life can be pleasurable. To judge from the
literature, the major preoccupation among today’s urbanists is not the ghetto but
a different G-word: “gentrification,” a process by which a ghetto might cease
to be a ghetto.
It is an inelegant term, and must have seemed a strange one when
it was first introduced, in a 1964 essay by Ruth Glass, a British sociologist.
Glass, who wrote under the influence of Marx, was distressed to see that “the
working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes.” As
the gentry moved in, the proletariat moved out, “until all or most of the
original working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character
of the district is changed.” The story of gentrification was, curiously, the
story of neighborhoods destroyed by desirability. As the term spread through
academic journals and then the popular press, “gentrification,” like “ghetto,”
became harder to define. At first, it referred to instances of new arrivals who
were buying up (and bidding up) old housing stock, but then there was
“new-build gentrification.” Especially in America, gentrification often
suggested white arrivals who were displacing nonwhite residents and taking over
a ghetto, although, in the case of San Francisco, the establishment of
Wittman’s so-called “gay ghetto,” created as an act of self-protection, was
also a species of gentrification. Even Clark’s “dark ghetto” was a target. In
1994, Andrew Cuomo, who was then at the Department of Housing and Urban
Development, told the Times, “If you expect to see Harlem as gentrified and
mixed-income, it’s not going to happen.” He was, in due course, proved wrong.
A gentrification story often unspools as a morality play, with
bohemians playing a central if ambiguous part: their arrival can signal that a
neighborhood is undergoing gentrification, but so can their departure, as
rising rents increasingly bring economic stratification. Stories of
gentrification are by definition stories of change, and yet scholars have had a
surprisingly hard time figuring out who gets displaced, and how. In 2004, Lance
Freeman, an urban-planning professor at Columbia, and the economist Frank
Braconi, who ran the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, tried to answer the
question. They produced a paper called “Gentrification
and Displacement: New York City in the 1990s,” which has been
roiling the debate ever since. In the paper, which was based on city survey
data, they came close to debunking the very idea of gentrification. Looking at
seven “gentrifying neighborhoods” (Chelsea, Harlem, the Lower East Side,
Morningside Heights, Fort Greene, Park Slope, and Williamsburg), they found
that “poor households” in those places were “19% less likely to move than poor
households residing elsewhere.”
While traditional gentrification narratives suggest that poor
residents, if not for the bane of gentrification, would have been fixed in
place, the truth is that poorer households generally move more often than
richer ones; in many poor neighborhoods, the threat of eviction is
ever-present, which helps explain why rising rents don’t necessarily increase
turnover. And gentrification needn’t be zero-sum, because gentrifying
neighborhoods may become more densely populated, with new arrivals adding to,
rather than supplanting, those currently resident. Freeman and Braconi
suggested that in some cases improved amenities in gentrifying neighborhoods
gave longtime residents an incentive to find a way to stay. At the same time,
New York’s rent-control and rent-stabilization laws have protected some tenants
from sharp rent increases, while others have an even more reliable refuge from
rising prices: subsidized apartments in city buildings. “Public housing, often
criticized for anchoring the poor to declining neighborhoods, may also have the
advantage of anchoring them to gentrifying neighborhoods,” they wrote. When two
scholars who took a dim view of gentrification, Kathe Newman and Elvin Wyly,
did their own investigation, their conclusion was mild. “Although displacement
affects a very small minority of households, it cannot be dismissed as
insignificant,” they wrote. “Ten thousand displacees a year”—this was one
estimate of New York’s total—“should not be ignored, even in a city of eight
million.”
Newman and Wyly’s paper was called “The Right to Stay Put,
Revisited,” in tribute to a decades-old question in urban sociology: Do tenants
have a political right—a human right—to remain in their apartments? In New
York, regulations like rent stabilization not only limit the amount by which
some landlords can raise rents but also restrict a landlord’s ability to
decline to renew a lease. In Sweden, the rules are tighter: rents are set
through a national negotiation between tenants and landlords, which means that
prices are low in Stockholm, but apartments are scarce; a renter in search of a
longterm lease there might spend decades on a government waiting list. Another
solution is to allow more and taller buildings, increasing supply in the hope
of lowering prices. Often, the steepest rent increases are found in places,
like San Francisco, that have stringent building regulations: a recent study of
the city found that fewer poor residents had been displaced in neighborhoods
with more new construction. In seeking to preserve what Ruth Glass called the
“social character” of a neighborhood, antigentrification activists echo the
language that was once used to defend racially restrictive covenants. Arguments
over gentrification are really arguments over who deserves to live in a city,
and the notion of a right to stay put is sometimes at odds with another,
perhaps more fundamental right: the right to move.
Earlier this year, in the pages of National Review, Kevin D.
Williamson devoted a typically astringent column to the kind of poor community
that is rarely called a ghetto and even less often targeted for gentrification.
A fellow-pundit had suggested that Donald Trump, unlike many other Republican
politicians, spoke to and for white voters living lives of economic frustration
and opioid dependency in towns like Garbutt, New York. Williamson, no fan of
Trump, responded with a withering attack on Garbutt and its ilk. “The truth
about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die,”
Williamson wrote. Their inhabitants, in his view, “need real opportunity, which
means that they need real change, which means that they need UHaul.”
This diagnosis sparked an outcry. But was Williamson wrong to
insist that people are more important than places? Arguments about gentrification
sometimes imply that places matter most. Jane Jacobs, for instance, could seem
to cherish Greenwich Village more than she cherished the people who lived
there, to say nothing of the people who might have liked to join them, if only
there had been more and cheaper housing. When it comes to the neighborhoods
that Duneier would call ghettos, there is some evidence that the most humane
approach is not to improve them but, in effect, to dismantle them, by
encouraging their inhabitants to move. A program called Moving to Opportunity,
which was initially judged a failure, now provides modest evidence that
removing children from high-poverty neighborhoods can have lasting positive
effects on their lifetime earnings. And a recent study by Deirdre Pfeiffer, a
professor of urban planning, suggests that racial minorities encounter “more
equitable” conditions in newly built suburbs than in cities.
The uneasy way we discuss ghettos and gentrification says
something about our discomfort with the real-estate market, which translates
every living space into a commodity whose value lies mainly outside our
control. Things that happen across the street, down the block, or on the other
side of town affect the worth of our homes, and this lack of control is predestined
to frustrate capitalists and community organizers alike. “Bushwick is not for
sale!” Letitia James, New York City’s Public Advocate, announced at a recent
anti-gentrification protest in Brooklyn. She was hoping to get the city to
force developers to set aside more units for low-income families, but she was
also voicing a familiar and widely shared distaste for the way the character of
a neighborhood is hostage to its market price. The opposite of gentrification
is not a quirky and charming enclave that stays affordable forever; the
opposite of gentrification is a decline in prices that reflects the
transformation of a once desirable neighborhood into one that is looking more
like a ghetto every day.
In a recent Times Op-Ed, the Harlem historian Michael Henry Adams
lamented the changes in his neighborhood, complaining that “poor black
neighborhoods” were “irresistible to gentrification.” But New York is an
unusual place, and it’s possible that the conversation about gentrification has
been distorted by our focus on neighborhoods like Harlem. A recent study found
that Chicago neighborhoods that were forty per cent or more African-American
were the least likely to experience gentrification. This statistic was cited by
the journalist Natalie Y. Moore in her new book about her city, “The South Side.”
She recounts the pride she felt when she bought a condo in a seemingly
up-and-coming South Side neighborhood: she paid a hundred and seventy two
thousand dollars, and she was shocked when, five years later, an assessor told
her that its value had depreciated to fifty-five thousand. She writes about
herself as a “so called gentrifier,” adding, ruefully, that “black Chicago
neighborhoods don’t gentrify.”
In May, on CNN, the comedian W. Kamau Bell hosted a one-hour program
about gentrification in Portland, Oregon. He has a keen eye for irony and a
high tolerance for awkward situations, so he walked around the city, chuckling
at hipsters—a word at least as hard to define as “ghetto” or
“gentrification”—and listening sympathetically to residents of the city’s
dwindling African-American neighborhoods. An older woman named Beverly said
that her neighborhood was gone; standing on the porch of her mauve-trimmed
house, she gestured across the street at a new apartment building going up,
which seemed likely to ruin her lovely view. To hear the other side, Bell met
with Ben Kaiser, a local developer, who was unapologetic. Bell told him, “I
talked to an older black woman in this neighborhood, and every so often
somebody knocks at her door or calls her and is offering to buy her home, even
though she’s made it clear that she wants to keep her home. And somebody’s
telling them to make that phone call.”
“We always think it’s a somebody, and in my opinion it’s an
economic force—there’s no one orchestrating this outcome,” Kaiser said. “What’s
happened, historically, is they’re offered a tremendous amount of money, and
they’re kind of nuts not to take it. At some point, her kids—or she—will say,
‘I am nuts not to take this offer.’ ”
Bell was unconvinced. He wasn’t sure how many new “twelve-dollar
juice bars” and “high-end vegan barbecue” restaurants the neighborhood needed,
and he worried that the old neighborhood wouldn’t survive. In the ghetto
narrative, a poor neighborhood falls victim to isolation; in the gentrification
narrative, a poor neighborhood falls victim to invasion. These stories are not
necessarily contradictory—they reflect a common conviction that the sorrows and
joys of neighborhood change tend to be unequally shared. One effect of
gentrification is to make this inequality harder to ignore. The call to save a
neighborhood is most compelling when it serves as a call to help a
neighborhood’s neediest inhabitants. That might mean helping them stay. But it
might also mean helping them leave.
*An earlier
version of this article incorrectly stated that Jews in sixteenth-century
Venice were confined to the ghetto by papal decree. The papal decree applied to
Jews in Rome.
Kelefa
Sanneh has contributed to The New Yorker since 2001.
This article
appears in other versions of the July 11 & 18, 2016, issue, with the
headline “There Goes the Neighborhood.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/11/is-gentrification-really-a-problem
