What Happens When a City Neighborhood Goes Upscale?
Professor Neil Smith asks if there's a price to be paid... and who pays it.
Anyone who has looked for affordable housing in Manhattan in recent years has come face to face with a striking reality. A relatively modest apartment can cost $1.1 million or more, even in neighborhoods that not long ago provided basic, unpretentious homes for low-income and working-class people.
The process known as gentrification (a term coined by sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964) has influenced the character of neighborhoods and, consequently, the quality of life, for millions of American city dwellers. So it’s not surprising that the phenomenon has received serious scholarly attention at the CUNY Graduate Center, which is situated at a crossroads of one of the world’s leading cities.
Neil Smith, a distinguished professor of anthropology and geography, is an expert in geography, social theory, and urban anthropology. His research addresses questions of regional and global import, but the city block, the local grocery store, and the neighborhood playground also figure in many of his analyses.
“Gentrification is a process by which fairly poor people – working-class people – get kicked out of their lives; not just their homes, but their whole lives – networks of child care, jobs, community support,” says Smith. “That’s a tragedy, and it’s not an accident. It’s systematic, and it’s utterly logical. If someone can make a lot of money by reinvesting in the middle of the city, why is it not going to happen?”
As a teenager growing up in a small town near Edinburgh, Smith was fascinated by the physical landscapes of his native Scotland – landscapes “gouged out” by glaciers millions of years ago. Later, in the 1970s, he moved to Philadelphia for undergraduate study. He found that city’s class and racial landscapes equally dramatic, and just as intriguing.
“Society Hill didn’t fit the models I’d learned,” says Smith. “Those models were all about disinvestment from the center, and used the language of ‘ghettoes’ and ‘urban blight.’ Here, the opposite was happening. State, city, federal, and private money was going where it hadn’t gone before.” This type of transformation became a focus of his research and, as a graduate student, he wrote an article titled “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People.” It remains, to this day, his most often cited article.
At that time Smith didn’t understand just how important the process of gentrification would become, but as far back as the 1980s he and his colleagues were taking a close look at a New York community of world-renown – Harlem. They believed that Harlem would see an explosion of gentrification and, indeed, in the ensuing years both investments of finance capital and evictions have increased. However, they did not expect to see such a significant number of upper middle-class African American families moving into the neighborhood. Some have argued that this is a highly positive development, but Smith is quick to point out that “… if you’re the one being evicted, it doesn’t make a lot of difference whether it’s a black landlord or a white landlord.” He adds that it also doesn’t make a difference if it’s a black family or a white family moving into the apartment you’re being evicted from. “The real issue,” he says, “is who is making the profit.”
Where and when will gentrification take place? Smith’s research has shown time and again that the answer to this question is determined not by individuals who move out of or into a particular neighborhood. Rather, it is determined behind the scenes, well out of public view. He recalls the maps that banks once gave to their mortgage lenders that would display red lines around a neighborhood where they did not want loans made. “Those same banks, by about the early 1980s, figured out that there was a lot of money to be made,” he says, “so they changed the red lines to green lines and said ‘Any mortgage you can make in this neighborhood, go for it!’”
And by no means is the process of gentrification limited to U.S. cities. Smith recently spoke at two events – one in Harlem and the other in an area east of downtown Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. Both neighborhoods are in a state of transformation, and though the specifics are somewhat different, he was struck by the similarities in the broad politics. “The overall story and even the language is the same.”
Smith believes he has found an ideal home for his research interests at the CUNY Graduate Center in the heart of New York City. “There is,” he says, “no better place to be studying urban issues. There are so many people around here doing that work.”
—Gail Goldberg
