I think a lot of the college educated professional set have trouble really understanding the issue with gentrification. I’m beginning to think its because that class of folks don’t really get what it means to be part of a neighborhood because its just not part of their experience.
My husband has been doing a lot of canvassing lately, and so has brought home the usual complement of interesting stories and observations. A recent one involves the neighborhood near South Park St in Madison, the neighborhood currently under threat of losing its only grocery store, and the neighborhood I was warned against getting near when I first moved to Madison.
My husband’s take? “Its a really interesting place!”. He found it to be not only racially diverse (and not “diverse” that is code for “this is where black people live” – but diverse in the way that means there’s an actual mix of people) but surprisingly diverse along income as well.
But the most surprising thing to him was the amount of close relatives that all lived near each other, and the close ties between the people that lived there.
You see, his canvassing script includes a bit where he asks the canvasee (is there a better word for this?) to think of 12 friends or family members that the canvassee is then encouraged to reach out to and remind to vote, and then the canvasser looks these people up to see who out of those 12 is the most urgent person to call based on how often they vote.
From both this question and talking with these people in general (he’s pretty chatty, which is both a curse and a blessing in canvassing), he was able to suss out that there was considerable overlap in the social networks of the people there, and that much of this was familial in nature.
Among a town that has a lot of mid to upper middle class white people with college educations, this is an aspect that stands out. As a class, we’re generally expected to move away from home first for college and then yet further when we enter the job market. I remember being told to expect to move to a different city every few years, chasing the best job opportunities. I am not unique in this way- I know almost no one in this town whose parents are even in Wisconsin.
And this is why I think it is very hard for the college educated, middle class white people of the world to understand and empathize with the neighborhood disruption that occurs with gentrification.
Most of the tangible benefits of living within a dense network of family and friends are things we’ve expected to either do without or just pay for- childcare, elder care, any kind of “care” really – those are things we saw our parents pay strangers to do and are things that we expect to pay strangers to do. I can’t really begin to talk about the social or emotional benefits of this, either – I’ve never really had it. I came close in the last neighborhood I lived in – I attended a church a few blocks from my apartment and all my bandmates lived within walking distance, and it was revolutionary to me – the things we could just help each other out with! We could even do with less stuff – if one guy on the block has a snow blower then really, does anyone else need one?
But these experiences of being in a close knit interdependent social and familial network are pretty sparse in the college educated professional class. And this is why the common response to gentrification among it is “I dont get why its a big deal to have to move elsewhere”.