Stop blaming coffee shops and cool boutiques for gentrification

06 Sep Stop blaming coffee shops and cool boutiques for gentrification

There are few things simpler than a bowl of cereal. Faster to prepare than even a piece of buttered toast, cereal gets millions of people, children especially, fed and out the door as quickly as possible each morning.

But what if cereal could be so much more? This was the question apparently asked and answered by Alan and Gary Keery, two Belfast brothers who opened the Cereal Killer Café in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood in 2014.

Until the coronavirus pandemic came along, you could walk into one of the poorest boroughs in London and buy one of the city’s most expensive bowls of cereal at their Brick Lane counter. Not surprisingly, their £3.20 bowl of corn flakes served just steps away from one of the country’s lowest-income public housing projects made the café into an international symbol of gentrification.

The cereal café and other businesses like it, ones that fetishize and upscale simple, nostalgic foods or experiences, point toward another kind of story about gentrification. This book explores a range of stories about—or ways of understanding—gentrification, stories that home in on different aspects of a complex process. From the idea that gentrification is natural to the story of capitalism’s relentless search for profit to the realities of displacement, there are many angles from which to glimpse the causes and impacts of gentrification. I argue that each of these perspectives only give us a partial view. It is important to look at each more closely to discern what has been taken for granted and what remains overlooked.

This story, the one that starts with cereal, focuses on the tastes of a white, urban middle class as markers—or harbingers—of neighborhood transformation. As potent symbols, these businesses often become targets of anti-gentrification activism.

The case of Cereal Killer and its ilk reinvigorates questions that have been plaguing observers of gentrification for decades and highlights a narrative that centers its less tangible elements: a protest against the normative suburban dream; a set of tastes, styles, and aesthetics; and a desire for a particular kind of urban lifestyle.

Peeling back the layers of this gentrification story reveals lingering questions about power and identity. The role of taste is an important one, but I don’t think any of us believe that banning fancy coffee, vegan donuts, Mac laptops, or dark-rimmed glasses is the answer to what ails the city. Still, cultural power has material effects that contribute to the remaking of neighborhoods in substantial ways. There are, however, parts of this story that are taken for granted and others that are overlooked.

Desiring Different

In the middle of the 20th century, some people defied the social, economic, and political pressure to suburbanize by buying up working-class urban houses, moving into empty lofts in areas like New York’s SoHo and gradually transforming the social character of all sorts of neighborhoods. What they were searching for, according to scholars of this phenomenon, was a kind of authenticity that could not be found in cookie-cutter suburbs.

The change in values that the presence of artists creates cannot be underestimated as a force in gentrification. Although lacking the financial power to transform space through capital investment, artists and other creative people are a bridge that takes a neighborhood from industrial, rough, and dangerous to vibrant, interesting, and edgy. Artists are often deemed to be part of a “first wave” of gentrification in a model that sees successive waves bringing more and more financial and cultural power to bear on a neighborhood. In the first wave, there is little financial might, but there is just enough cultural and tastemaking influence to attract a next wave of attention.

Artists, musicians, students, and single moms do not tend to be multi-million-dollar investors. They’re probably not even homeowners. The early gentrifiers who sniffed at the heels of artists to find interesting and cheap neighborhoods were not part of an investor class, either. This group was defined less by income and more by an adherence to a new set of tastes. Or, perhaps more accurately, a set of tastes that were new for an educated group of white professionals. The question is: How much does taste and preference matter? What does it have to do with class?

Culture and Class

When we use the term class in everyday conversation, we are usually referring to income level or wealth, albeit somewhat vaguely.

At the same time, however, our judgments about class—our own and others—are inflected by less tangible qualities. For example, the status that accrues from the kind of car you drive is not only related to its cost, but to its status or “coolness” at a given moment and within your cultural group. These distinctions translate into what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu famously called “cultural capital,” and can include everything from taste and skills to clothing and credentials.

Although they might be “symbolic,” these assets are very real in that “certain forms of cultural capital are valued over others, and can help or hinder one’s social mobility just as much as income or wealth.” What this means is that even without a huge amount of wealth or a terribly high income, people who hold the right kind of cultural capital at the right place and time can enact class power. Of course, the possession of cultural capital is related to financial capital in that you are likely to develop these assets by growing up in a middle- or upper-class household or going to school with others from these class groups.

When it comes to gentrification, this cultural power gets wielded through practices that begin to alter the appearance, function, value, and meaning of urban places. The conversion of factory spaces into lofts, for example, shifted their identity from dangerous and exploitative sweatshops to alternative live-work spaces for artists and countercultural bohemians to modern open- concept homes for an urban elite. Parks that served as gathering spaces for unhoused people can morph into children’s play areas as middle-class families arrive and begin to take over these spaces to serve their own needs.

The power to define the meaning of a place is also the power to create symbolic boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. These symbolic boundaries easily morph into more substantial gates and barriers. Eventually, the places that served the needs of long-time residents or simply felt like home are replaced by different, often more expensive, businesses that speak to a different set of needs and desires. Enter the yoga studio or organic grocery store. Exit the residents who can no longer afford rent, groceries, or a social life in the neighborhood.

This cultural capital or cultural power helps explain the seemingly counterintuitive moves of early gentrifiers. On the surface, it seemed like they were making choices that ran against their class interests by eschewing mainstream (and white) middle-class markers of taste and distinction in favor of a lifestyle that was rather more rough around the edges and perhaps less certain to translate into wealth and power. However, in finding ways to both define class through taste and redefine spaces through symbolic acts, these gentrifiers were still “doing class” in ways that would, in short order, result in more wealth and material advantage for many.

Artists move into factory spaces, and suddenly the potential to rezone and recapitalize on unused industrial spaces exists. Single moms open a co-op child care center and organize children’s activities in the park every Sunday, generating a family-friendly vibe. Students attract used bookstores and thrift shops and domesticate greasy cafés by studying there all day.

These subtle changes make it possible for professional households to see themselves in the neighborhood. Over time, the artists and others—groups that typically have little more than cultural capital—are priced out by successive waves of gentrifiers with relatively more capital of all kinds.

The wave narrative is helpful for understanding phases of placemaking and displacement, although it problematically erases what, and who, came before the marginal gentrifiers. It implies that nothing of value or interest was happening in the neighborhood before students, artists, and others came along. While it may be the case that the process of gentrification does not seem to start in some places until after the cultural changes initiated by artists, it is not as though those artists were working on a blank canvas.

Working-class, racialized, and immigrant communities whose neighborhoods are being transformed have of course been engaged in community building and social development. This work has often occurred under difficult circumstances. These neighborhoods have typically experienced a lack of investment in their physical and social infrastructure, including roads, schools, transit, and green spaces. Many are located near polluting industries. Many experience the violence of over-policing. And yet, families are raised, businesses are run, and communities are sustained. Rarely, however, is this work acknowledged or valued.

As important as cultural power is, there is a risk to focusing too much on this story about gentrification. If we follow the trends and not the money, we might unwittingly miss the big picture and the financial power behind the changes.

It’s not helpful in a critique of gentrification to get overly stuck on the styles and preferences of a group, when, for many decades now, gentrification has been propelled by much stronger forces than aesthetic trends. Certainly, these gentrifiers may be playing the part of unwitting (or mostly unwitting) foot soldiers of neoliberal real estate capital, priming minority and working- class neighborhoods for large-scale revitalization projects or new housing developments.

However, in the context of massive, state-sponsored, corporate redevelopment schemes, the power of these gentrifiers is questionable. Furthermore, what we have been calling cultural power is now strategically wielded by those who actually have enormous capacity to remake cities and neighborhoods, like developers and city policymakers.

When it comes to gentrification, it’s easy to focus on the world of taste, aesthetics, and cultural values. And this is not altogether wrong: Choices and tastes both reflect and harden into powerful cultural norms that have real-world effects. In most cases, however, the impact of individual choices—even multiplied across thousands or millions of people—will not make a substantial difference without the simultaneous action of the much more powerful corporations and governments who tolerate a gendered wage gap, permit terrible environmental degradation, and promote policies that prioritize profit-making over people.

Excerpted from Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies by Leslie Kern. Copyright © 2022. Available from Verso Books.

Source: Fast Company