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May 29, 2008
Portland Journal
Racial Shift in a Progressive City Spurs Talks
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
PORTLAND, Ore. - Not every neighborhood in this city is one of those Northwest destinations where passion for espresso, the environment and plenty of exercise define the cultural common ground. A few places are still described as frontiers, where pioneers move because prices are relatively reasonable, the location is convenient and, they say, they "want the diversity."
Yet one person's frontier, it turns out, is often another's front porch. It has been true across the country: gentrification, which increases housing prices and tension, sometimes has racial overtones and can seem like a dirty word. Now Portland is encouraging black and white residents to talk about it, but even here in Sincere City, the conversation has been difficult.
"I've been really upset by what I perceive to be Portland's blind spot in its progressivism," said Khaela Maricich, a local artist and musician. "They think they live in the best city in the country, but it's all about saving the environment and things like that. It's not really about social issues. It's upper-middle-class progressivism, really."
Ms. Maricich, 33, who is white, spoke after attending this month's meeting of Portland's Restorative Listening Project.
The goal of the project, which is sponsored by the city's Office of Neighborhood Involvement, is to have white people better understand the effect gentrification can have on the city's longtime black and other-minority neighborhoods by having minority residents tell what it is like to be on the receiving end.
What is the Right to the City Alliance?
Right to the City (RTTC) is a newly formed alliance of base building organizations from cities across the country as well as researchers, academics, lawyers, and other allies. We came together in January of 2007 to build a united response to gentrification and the drastic changes imposed on our cities. We stand together under the notion of a Right to the City for all.
Right to the City offers a framework for resistance and a vision for a city that meets the needs of working class people. It connects our fights against gentrification and displacement to other local and international struggles for human rights, land, and democracy.
We are coming together under a common framework to increase the strength of our community organizations and our collective power. Our goal is to build a national urban movement for housing, education, health, racial justice and democracy.
AMSTERDAM, Aug. 8 — On a recent Saturday during the confusion of this watery city’s annual Gay Pride Parade along the majestic Princes Canal, a beach umbrella was knocked into the water from the foredeck of Jackie Wijnakker’s houseboat, so she dove into the water to fetch it, unsuccessfully. It was only the second time in 17 years that she had jumped into the canal, and she cannot recall what she was trying to retrieve the first time. At any rate, she said with a laugh, “I’m too old to be diving into canals.”
She told the tale as a testament to how clean the water is, despite its murky, khaki color. “The canals are flushed regularly,” said Ron Van Heukelom, a neighbor who lives on dry land and has never ventured into the canal.
The flushing is necessary because, while most of Amsterdam’s 2,800 houseboats have running water, electricity and gas heat, few are connected to sewerage systems and continue to spill their waste into the canals.
The houseboats’ lack of toilet training is their dirty little secret, one that sits uncomfortably with a new generation of wealthier, more demanding owners who are leading a gentrification of the houseboat scene. In the process, they are displacing the less affluent boat people, many of whom are relics of the 1960s and 1970s era of flower power now struggling to pay the upkeep on their boats.
“The water is cleaner than it looks,” said Monique J. M. Jacobs, an official of the city agency responsible for water and the boats. The canals, she explained, are flushed by opening and closing locks about twice a week, and in summer more often. “Small fish are coming back, and also birds that feed off the fish,” she said. “In the old days it was awful. It stank in summer.”
Judith Rodin transformed the relationship between the University of Pennsylvania and its Philadelphia neighborhood. What can she teach Lee Bollinger about Columbia and Harlem?
by Matthew Schuerman Published: July 31, 2007
Tags: Real Estate, The City, Columbia University, Judith Rodin, Lee Bollinger
This article was published in the August 6, 2007, edition of The New York Observer.
t is not clear what exactly Judith Rodin, former president of the University of Pennsylvania, has been whispering in the ear of Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, but trust that it has something to do with Harlem.Just as Columbia presses its case for its expansion into Manhattanville, Dr. Rodin, now president of the New York–based Rockefeller Foundation, has published a book on her decade at Penn, where she initiated a number of town-gown projects that both improved the surrounding neighborhood and eased animosity toward the Ivy League school. Ever since, she has been widely lauded as the arbiter of modern, enlightened community-university relations. When she announced she would leave Penn, the Philadelphia Daily News, a tabloid, put her photo on the cover above the words: “Judy! Judy! Judy!”
“He and I have talked several times,” Dr. Rodin said about Mr. Bollinger, without elaborating. “We’ve talked very minimally. The work is still ahead.”
Her book, The University & Urban Revival: Out of the Ivory Tower and Into the Streets (University of Pennsylvania Press), came out July 24. Already, Robert Kasdin, Columbia’s senior executive vice president, said he is reading it. Mr. Bollinger was traveling, but a spokesman said he had eagerly been awaiting its publication.
All of which should counter the refrain that some detractors of Columbia’s plan to rezone 17 acres of West Harlem for a third campus have been voicing recently, which is, “Do it like Penn!”
Penn, for example, donated land for a public school and helped plan and run it. The university set up a business-improvement district that picked up litter and brightened street lights. It gave university employees cash to buy homes near campus and invested in renovating rental buildings. This all happened, however, not to butter up neighbors for an expansion, but because crime and blight were threatening the university’s survival.
Columbia has been eyeing Penn’s example for a while: David Stone, who was hired last year as executive vice president for communications, worked for Dr. Rodin as a consultant on the West Philadelphia initiatives, and a couple of other high-level hires worked for Penn or are otherwise familiar with the collaborations.
“There are a number of us here now that were involved in the West Philadelphia initiatives who are here to ensure and clarify the focus that universities are important civic and economic actors in the community,” Mr. Stone said.
*GRASSROOTS ORGANIZING: Right to the City
Tony Roshan Samara
On January 11, 2007 at the Japanese American Cultural Community Center in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles, Gihan Perera, the executive director of the Miami Workers Center, addressed an energetic crowd of over 100 community organizers, representing over 30 organizations and 8 major cities. They came to build a national urban justice movement around the concept of a Right to the City. The intention was to begin building collective capacity for local struggles to become a national movement. Perera declared, "We are leaving here with a game plan. This is a working meeting."
by Randy Shaw‚ May. 08‚ 2007
San Francisco progressives have spent decades in a multi-front battle against gentrification. The struggle to prevent the displacement of low-income working people from the city has led to rent controls and eviction protections, zoning restrictions, highrise limitations, inclusionary housing, and a constant push for truly affordable housing. But stopping gentrification alone does not make low-income neighborhoods desirable, or even livable. In San Francisco, neighborhoods that have defeated gentrification have been treated as "containment zones," meaning that unreasonable levels of crime, violence and drugs are tolerated so that such activities do not spread to upscale areas. The Tenderloin has long been one of the city's leading containment zones, but those days are over. A large contingent of residents, workers and merchants will be delivering this message to city officials today, in a March for Safety that heralds a new chapter in the Tenderloin's---and San Francisco's---history.
New Winds at an Island Outpost
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
STANDING behind the cramped counter of Los Guarinos, his bodega in Washington Heights, Joel Olivo deals not in big money but in small change. Jolly Ranchers candies, at a nickel apiece, are among his biggest sellers. Los Guarinos also sells cold beer and cigarettes, but on most days it is sweetness that prevails there. Neighborhood children ask for chocolate bars, and an arcade game in the corner fills the bodega with an electronic lullaby.
In Mr. Olivo's establishment, in a modest storefront on Amsterdam Avenue near 161st Street, gambling is discouraged. Yet there is a running bet in the store that is a sign of changing times in this neighborhood: How many years will it take for Dominicans, who have dominated Washington Heights for decades, to become the minority there, and for whites to become the new majority?
Some of Mr. Olivo's customers and friends say five years. Others predict seven. "I say 10 years," Mr. Olivo said.
This is not your ordinary gentrification story. Washington Heights, the densely developed square mile that extends from 155th Street to roughly Dyckman Street, and from river to river, is to Dominicans what Harlem has been to blacks: a cultural capital with deep symbolic meaning. But over the past few years, this neighborhood of five- and six-story prewar apartment buildings has grown wealthier, hipper and better educated.
We are working from the following mission statement with the hope that community residents will give us additional feedback about how students can best support the needs and concerns of people who would be affected by the proposed West Harlem expansion:
University expansion and gentrification are processes that affect everyone in our community. As students we recognize our unique position in relationship to the university and community at large, and simultaneously, the necessity of our action in support of an equitable and just conclusion. To this end, we are unified in our commitment to continue to work and stand in solidarity with those most affected by the process of gentrification, and in our commitment to educate and mobilize the student body towards a goal of greater university accountability.
DOI: 10.1177/1078087406295828
© 2007 SAGE Publications
Notes
Reassessing Gentrification
Measuring Residents' Opinions Using Survey Data
Daniel Monroe Sullivan
Portland State University, Oregon
Qualitative studies have focused on the proponents and the opponents to gentrification but have not provided a clear picture of the opinions of a truly representative sample of residents. This article uses probability sampling and a large sample size to examine residents in two gentrifying neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon. The results suggest that the majority of residents-including owners and renters, Whites and minorities, newcomers and longtime residents, those college educated and not-like how their neighborhood has changed and think it will improve even more in the future. However, regression analysis reveals that renters and longtime Black residents are less likely to view these changes positively.
Key Words: gentrification • survey methods • race • social class • homeownership
As East Harlem Develops, Its Accent Starts to Change
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and TANZINA VEGA
Inside a wooden shack set in a garden on East 117th Street, a group of Puerto Rican men, many of them in their 70s and 80s, are playing a spirited game of dominoes on a rainy winter afternoon. A painting of a woman wearing a burgundy shawl over a flamenco-style dress hangs on a wall, and in the garden, tomatoes, peppers, corn and culantro, an herb used in Caribbean cooking, grow in the summer.
But outside their little retreat, a thick dust, the pounding of hammers and the shouts of construction workers inundate the block, signaling the transformation of East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio (the neighborhood). Many see it changing from the Puerto Rican enclave it has been for decades to a more heterogeneous neighborhood with a significant middle-class presence, luxury condominiums and a Home Depot.
It is a familiar story of gentrification in New York City, but this one comes with a twist: the many newcomers who are middle-class professionals from other parts of the city are joining a growing number of working-class Mexicans and Dominicans.
Call#: Van Pelt Library HT177.N5 F74 2006
Discount Sneakers in a Duplex World
...
But a great deal of new luxury housing is built or on the drawing board for Downtown Brooklyn, from the BellTel Lofts one block north of the mall to the new condos one block southwest at 110 Livingston Street. With the influx of affluent neighbors, related plans to refurbish Fulton Mall have worried Ms. Cruickshank and some other patrons of the vibrant shopping strip. The mall, they fear, will no longer be for them.
“This mall caters to African-Americans, Latinos, Caribbeans,” said Ms. Cruickshank, sitting in Albee Square at the mall’s edge on an unseasonably balmy afternoon last week. Nearby, a jewelry counter displayed 200 styles of gold door-knocker earrings, and a small running-shoe shop offered Nike Air Force Ones decorated with candy-colored glitter and pictures of Tupac Shakur.
•“When they close down all these local shops that cater to our hair, the clothes we buy, the food we eat, where are we going to shop?” Ms. Cruickshank asked. “Round up 10 people here, and I guarantee you they won’t say they want a Banana Republic. We don’t want another Manhattan. Let Brooklyn be Brooklyn.”
October 15, 2006
East Village
For ‘One of the Last Buffaloes,’ It’s Time to Roam
By JAKE MOONEY
...But most of what has made Mr. Leggieri an East Village fixture — a status derived in large part from his role as an editor and owner of The East Village Other, one of the city’s more memorable underground newspapers — was gone, packed and shipped away.
Mr. Leggieri, 64, is moving out in the face of a 50 percent rent increase, just the latest, on an old storefront he moved into in 1990 when times were bad and the rent was low. Friends and neighbors collected about 150 signatures on a petition imploring the city, which sold the building to the current landlord, to intervene. But with a move-out deadline of this weekend, Mr. Leggieri was getting ready to close.
“I’m just one of the last buffaloes of a giant herd of buffaloes that used to be here, and those are the artists,” he said last week after a long day of cleaning.
Luxury Condos Arrive in Chinatown
By VIVIAN S. TOY
AT one corner of Mott and Hester Streets, sidewalk bins at a Chinese grocery overflow with dried shrimp, and a bakery sells sweets filled with red bean paste, while across the street, lunch menus at the Original Vincent’s Restaurant promote the day’s linguine specials.
But there is a new sign at this intersection, which many people now consider to be the heart of Chinatown. It reads: “Hester Gardens, Luxury Condominiums.”
by Daniel Brook
Call#: Fine Arts Library HT177.W3 W55 1988