Gentrification is about real estate scarcity and high prices being a factor in community displacement. It's not just Black folks that are affected by it, e.g. plenty of people complain about highly-paid "techbros" and "Facebuqueros" displacing pre-existing communities in the Bay Area, and that's essentially the same dynamic.
"Nothing about us without us" is another good example. It impacts Black communities, but also gets brought up a lot in LGBTQ+ spaces and in other minority communities. This stuff is really intersectional.
Fair warning, we disagree severely on this topic, but I’ll leave that for another day. That said, this is actually one of the most competent summaries of the problem I’ve yet seen from its perspective.
But, yea, how do you operationalize “nothing about us without us”? I’m not sure I understand. If it means what I think it means, how do we solve this issue without looking at it purely through skin tone and fomenting division?
Assuming I understand the question correctly: increased representation within industries lowers social pressure and means people from the dominant culture need to spend less time self-policing, because the less of a monopoly that the dominant culture has over representation, the less that it needs to worry about that representation being perfect.
There's a subtle phenomenon that I don't always communicate well, but I try to get across to people often: the tone and nature of conversations around representation varies so much when you're inside of a community vs outside of it. When people are fighting for their equality, the stakes of everything just shoots up. And for communities where there isn't a lot of representation, I often see conflicts even within those communities become a lot more tense and a lot more fraught than I think they otherwise would be.
So for example, the way that I see LGBTQ+ people talk about LGBTQ+ issues inside of LGBTQ+ communities is often much more open ended and much more experimental than the way that I see LGBTQ+ people talk about issues outside of LGBTQ+ communities. My feeling is that one of the big reasons for that is that inside of the community those people aren't as worried about being shouted down or having discussions used against them in the future to deny their rights.
What does this mean for "nothing about us without us"? Well, I'm not an expert on this stuff and I don't want to oversimplify it, but in my opinion, a big part of that movement (regardless of which minority group we're talking about) is that people want agency to describe themselves and agency to present themselves in popular media, and they want a degree of agency over how people learn about issues affecting their community. How racial minorities are represented in media is a lot more complicated and a lot more fraught when it's mostly just white people writing that representation -- not because it's a problem for white people to write about minorities, but because it means that the primary form of representation is by people outside of those communities.
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Another subtle idea that's kind of complicated to explain but that I think is important: in my opinion, minority groups often don't want to be protected by majority groups, they want agency and power to protect themselves, and more than that, they don't want to need to be protected. And there's a really big difference between advocacy that primarily takes the form of majority groups promising to use their power responsibly, and advocacy that take the form of dismantling a power structure entirely. There's a difference between advocacy that says that minority groups are always going to be at a disadvantage but we'll accommodate them or protect them from threats, and advocacy that removes the threats.
So going back to the question of representation, even the most well intentioned white person can't really be responsible for handling all representation of a minority group they're not a part of, not because they're necessarily evil or bad, but because that's just really heckin hard to do, and nobody has the expertise to do that. It's asking too much. And it's putting that white person in a position where they are attempting to use their power responsibly to represent the minority community rather than getting rid of the need to have a majority-group writer advocate for them in the first place.
An understated consequence of these power structures is that they make it hard even for white people to navigate these conversations; the monopolization of media and the under-representation from people who are intimately familiar with those communities makes everything higher stakes. It means that the limited representation that does exist has to be really good and apply to everyone, because there aren't as many alternatives. It means that representation from people who aren't in those communities becomes more problematic, because that's now the primary way that people outside of the community are going to see it.
I really do honestly believe that as communities feel less threatened about how representation might be used against them, and as communities feel like they have more legitimate power over their own representation, and as they feel that they're not only able to rely on a few sources to communicate about themselves, and that they start to feel like there's not a limited quota of representation where someone outside the community tackling a subject means there's suddenly less funding or availability for them give their own perspective -- I think that has an effect of lowering the stakes of conversations and of increasing the ability of people to extend grace to imperfect representation or to representation that comes outside of those minority communities.
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So I guess the TLDR there is that redistributing power over representation and getting more community members involved industry-wide in representation of their communities has a positive side effect for majority communities of decreasing the pressure on them to be perfect. You can think of it as redistributing power, but you can also kind of think of it as redistributing responsibility.
Again with a programming analogy -- this is super-forced and not really the same, and there are lots of problems, but there are also sort of similar principles at play if you squint: when I distribute FOSS software, one of the advantages to me of allowing forking is that I don't have the same level of pressure to force my software to perfectly align with everyone's goals. If there's only one piece of software for an entire field, that piece of software is the only choice people have, and the stakes are much higher in the debate over what that software has to be able to do. In a field where there is a large diversity of software to solve a problem, and (even better) if the people who have that problem feel like there are software solutions even being built directly by them -- in that world, nobody is going to care if my specific piece of software isn't perfect.
But getting to that point where there is a lot of diversity and freedom within the software field and people have other options that they can go to instead of me -- that means me giving up a level of monopolization and control over that field, and sometimes even requires special effort to make building software within that field more accessible to members of that community (ie, making a program scriptable, releasing libraries, maybe even helping foster alternative efforts, etc...). But if a company is a gatekeeper over an entire field, more pressure is put on them to perfectly serve that field.
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There are other aspects of "nothing about us without us" that I'm not touching on, and I don't speak for everyone, but in my personal opinion based on what I know and what I've seen, I think the above is a big part of that phrase, and I think that increasing resources for and stories specifically by members of minority communities has a way of defusing high-risk conversations about representation and allows for a lot more grace.
The original businesses serving the poorer income inhabitants can't keep up with the rents as they rise which forces them elsewhere. The minority inhabitants that were lucky enough to own their houses now have to go across town to their barber and perhaps over the years they are more likely to sell. As they slowly sell they're replaced with the more affluent population and aren't replaced in kind.
The thing I can't understand (maybe you could explain) - it seems to me these original inhabitants don't have to lose their homes and if anything they are the winners of this change. If they (or their kids) ever decide to sell, the land has more value now. I don't think neighborhood desirability is a zero-sum game. As mentioned in the article typically this desirability has a lot to do with proximity (nowadays) which is efficient for everyone. Many local businesses do own and they wouldn't be forced out. The lower class isn't the only demographic that has to decide between where they live and future financial opportunity.
Finally, I have compassion for people caught in the above tradeoff, it's part of life but having to leave your home due to changing circumstances around you isn't ideal. The thing I can't stand is when this is turned into a racial issue. This is a socioeconomic issue not a racial one and trying to make it racial helps absolutely nothing. If a problem is a problem, the first rule is to figure out what the problem actually is. The worst thing you can possibly do is take a problem and attribute it to the wrong cause. This alienates people and doesn't help anything.
This is starting to move a little bit past my pay grade, I am not an economic expert on stuff like house valuation. But there are a couple of factors I would bring up:
- We want to keep renters in mind in this situation; a lot of the people impacted by gentrification don't own their own homes. Rent control can be a mitigating factor here, but if you basically get stuck in the same apartment because you can't afford to move anywhere else... it's still not a great situation. Gentrification is something that affects owners to a degree (more on that below), but most of the time I see it talked about, renters are a big part of it.
- Access to local services can be a big deal, so original inhabitants might be able to sell for more but they are still going to be pressured into selling. I think SF is a really good example of this honestly. Yes, your house is worth more, and that's great, but if your income isn't enough to handle normal living, eventually you'll sell and move move, and even if you're individually better off, the community migration will still happen and you'll still end up moving to a poorer neighborhood and leaving behind the opportunity that attracted people to your original neighborhood.
- The article brings up, a lot of gentrification happens before houses spike up in value or early on in the spike. So yes, a low-income inhabitant might recognize that gentrification is happening and try to stick it out to get the best deal, but particularly if they're losing access to local services or getting priced out of normal cost-of-living, they'll be tempted to sell early.
- All of that put together, gentrification also isn't only about the small number of people who live in a community, it's about the transformation of the community overall. Maybe some members of that community do manage to get ahead, but the people renting, the smaller families that are looking to move into larger housing as they grow, the people trying to come back to a hometown, they get left behind. I think that focusing on the small number of homeowners or longtime residents that manage to wait out the process and see benefit from it somewhat misses those stories.
- Also, always kind of important to bring up, we haven't necessarily abandoned racism in home valuation, there are stories that often pop up about home valuations changing depending on the race of the person applying. This kind of stuff is naturally illegal, but it still happens, and we all know it doesn't immediately fix a problem just to make it illegal :)
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> This is a socioeconomic issue not a racial one and trying to make it racial helps absolutely nothing.
This could also be a really large conversation, and again it isn't necessarily one I'm qualified to have, but I think it's really hard to disentangle socioeconomics from race, both because race impacts socioeconomic status and also because discrimination around socioeconomic status has historically often been used as a proxy for race.
I think it's important to distinguish between them in the sense that socioeconomic issues do not only affect people based on race -- there are communities that are predominantly white that get hit with issues surrounding gentrification. But (again, potentially much larger conversation) part of the insidious nature of racism is that it can put processes into motion that become entirely self-sustaining, and it can kind of tangle separate issues together and complicate them and correlate them in ways that are hard to then separate after the fact.
It's hard to have a conversation about socioeconomic issues without both acknowledging that:
- economics affects everyone regardless of race, gender, religion, or orientation, and that these systems are not dependent on any kind of racist intention and are not only restricted to affecting minority groups. But also,
- that America still has attitudes about what a "good" neighborhood is that play into racist stereotypes and that occasionally break out even into mainstream political discussions about housing policies, and that part of the history of racial oppression was the deliberate movement through mechanisms like redlining and housing laws of minority groups into a lower socioeconomic status.
I think back to some of the conversations that were being had around me about urbanization during the last few election cycles; it's just really hard for me to think of them as purely economic in nature. But even if that wasn't happening, it's still hard for me to forget that there are a large number of socioeconomic trends and differences between communities that aren't accidental -- they were historically very deliberate and purposeful. So for me to now say that they're purely economic issues and that the history is irrelevant would require me to treat the issues as if they were equally or randomly distributed among the population, when I don't personally think that they are.
Like if I find someone who's been mugged, and they're bleeding out, it's not wrong to say that the bleeding is the real problem and that specifically the bleeding should be addressed, but it's also very hard to ignore that (in this specific case) the mugging was the primary cause of that bleeding and talking about the mugging is somewhat relevant to the overall conversation.
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> A recent Vox article discussed the phenomenon of people seeing new buildings and calling them gentrification—despite the buildings being low income housing. I used to work in building low income housing and on two occasions I found people taking photos of my nonprofit’s complexes and calling them gentrification. This conflation of modern architecture as a “gentrification style” was so common that low income builders began erecting signs explaining they were affordable housing.
> I’ve seen real people state that improvements to traffic safety is gentrification, as though disproportionately Black and brown people getting mowed down by cars keeps the rents down. An actual supervisor in San Francisco is insisting that removing cars from parks is racist against Black people right now. In Oakland, people argued about whether a bike lane was causing gentrification and whether a $1 rent-a-scooter was hostile to people of color. The scooter narrative died down because it became obvious that the scooter users were largely Black and brown school kids. But the bike lane narrative persisted for quite some time among merchants and nonprofits.
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In a way, the article is kind of touching on the confusion that OP has. People think about gentrification as being an architectural style, when it's not. Gentrification isn't about what style of house exists, it's about driving Black community members out of communities.
There's real danger in making this mistake because it leads (hopefully well-intentioned) allies to get mad about silly things -- as if they're helping Black communities by demonizing efforts to improve those communities, to build better public transportation for those communities, to help improve their infrastructure.
It isn't being an ally to advocate for worse infrastructure in Black communities. The way to fight gentrification is to ask who the infrastructure is benefiting, and whether or not that infrastructure is actually accessible to marginalized groups within that community, and whether or not other changes in that community are driving out those marginalized groups.
The article addresses some of of the ways this can manifest. Note that the problem talked about here is not that white people moved into the neighborhood. It's the creation of a housing market that is only accessible to certain people, often spurred on by regulations and NIMBYism from the very people that decry bike lanes or accessible public services as being tools of gentrification:
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> Caricatures like skinny white bike bros or some scooter make convenient distractions away from the longstanding unaffordability that the original gentrifiers often created. Many of the first wave gentrifiers had consumed existing housing back when it was cheap, then made it impossible to add more housing to mitigate additional residents like themselves, thus increasing displacement onto incumbents.