Gentrification, Stalled

Gentrification is the renewal of an urban area, accompanied by the displacement of poorer residents by more affluent ones. Stalled gentrification occurs when the processes that propel gentrification slow down. These processes include economic changes that create a gap between actual rents and potential property values, inducing financial institutions to invest capital in neighborhoods they once abandoned. The processes also include cultural and political changes that encourage middle-class people to move into the area. When interest rates rise, or financial institutions direct their resources to other areas, gentrification stalls. Stalled gentrification often creates urban communities that are uniquely integrated by race, class, and lifestyle.

Such communities face the challenges of accommodating diverse populations living alongside one another. These groups bring to the neighborhood different resources, ways of living in the city, and perceptions of public and private life. They may have discrepant visions of the community's past and future. Such communities also hold out the promise of richly integrated urban life.

For example, the Mount Pleasant neighborhood in Washington, D.C., experienced stalled gentrification during the 1980s. Following white flight in the 1960s, African Americans from the crowded center city had moved into the neighborhood. Refugees from El Salvador and Southeast Asia, displaced by wars, civil unrest, and assassinations in their home countries, moved there also, into the large, old apartment buildings along the neighborhood's main street. As the housing stock aged and the rent gap increased relative to other city properties, investors sensed the economic potential of affordable, historic row housing close to downtown, and they began to buy and renovate properties. Property values rose, and many poorer people were displaced. But as gentrification stalled during the recession of the 1980s, white middle-class residents, mostly homeowners, found themselves living alongside black, Latino, and Asian renters, as well as longtime black property owners. Many of these older residents had lost family members and friends to the dislocations sparked by gentrification. Many feared being displaced themselves. The historic preservation movement embraced by newer residents, which harked back to the nineteenth century when the neighborhood was first developed, celebrated an earlier past.

Conflicts arose over other differences. For example, renters who were poor often had to double up, and their extended family households spilled out into hallways and sidewalks. They sometimes socialized or shared goods and services on the street. Older homeowners whose backyards and gardens opened onto sociable alleys felt offended by some of the newer residents' fence-sheltered private homes. Newer residents were likely to range widely across metropolitan space, while older residents valued the close, repetitive interactions of dense local life.

These differences escalated into political conflicts when newer homeowners, who used formal political channels, expressed concerns about the behaviors of the men who participated in the public life of the street (such behaviors as gathering on the street to talk and sometimes drink), or when renters felt that the more cosmopolitan owners did not fully attend to local problems and resources. These conflicts were aired at community meetings but never resolved.

Stalled gentrification offers city dwellers unusual opportunities to embrace and protect diversity. This can happen when all the neighborhood's residents support neighborhood businesses, schools, and social services, and act to protect its most vulnerable citizens from displacement. Alternatively, when economic conditions change, displacement may resume, and a diverse neighborhood will become a more homogeneous one.

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