After graduating I want to move back to my hometown. I know that’s a little boring, but I feel that we are unfinished. I was born in Queens, my dad grew up there and so did his mom. You can hear it when we say ahh-range instead of orange. Walking around the city with my dad would unfailingly consist of a story of how this block, or that neighborhood, wasn’t the way it was when he was growing up. And unfailingly, this was the result of either the hipsters or the yuppies or the trust fund babies, some kids like us.
Can I gentrify my own city? Part of the reason I’m reluctant to move to another city is because I don’t want to mirror the post-grads hanging out in Bushwick bars or riding the L train with their nose in a David Foster Wallace novel. I don’t want to be the San Francisco or Seattle version of that. So if I go back home, can I escape that trope? I’ve decided it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what I look like in my city, or in a new city. What matters is what I do in that city.
I like to think I’m the same kid who took the subway to my 4,000 student, mediocre, public high school. In many ways I am, but now I am that, plus a girl with a liberal arts education from an elite institution. That entails opportunities and sets of knowledge that aren’t available to most people—particularly the ones who are most often negatively impacted by gentrification. And though I don’t have a trust fund for gentrification rent money, or parents willing to fund my anticipated gentrification, I will probably find myself in this web of real estate domination. At least I hope to have a job that will provide that possibility.
The place we choose to move is going to affect someone else. That is unavoidable. But this process of displacement is somewhat out of our control, unless you find yourself dabbling in real estate. The major issue I have with people who gentrify isn’t the simple fact that they move into a certain neighborhood—it’s how they refuse to interact with it.
Over the summer, I spent a lot of time talking to muralists in the South Williamsburg community of Brooklyn. Williamsburg provides a fascinatingly unfortunate example of gentrification—the worst-case scenario. Over a very short period of time, the entire character and landscape of the neighborhood has changed—racially, spatially and economically. A particular anecdote of one of the artists encapsulates the wrong way to move into a community: South Williamsburg has historically had a large and culturally lively Puerto Rican community. Over the years, that community, like many others in New York, has grown accustomed to hanging out on brownstone stoops and playing live music. One new, culturally unaware resident decided to call the police with a noise complaint. That is not how you interact with a community or try to become part of it.
To be a compassionate community member is to interact with the community, and try to learn from it. It doesn’t mean instinctively calling the police when you hear music. It means talking things out and having a willingness to learn. It doesn’t mean forging a separate community from the one that has historically been there. I believe that the damage that gentrification inevitably causes to low-income communities can be effectively lessened if those who move in engage with the community. This engagement can take the form of participating in existing community organizations, supporting local businesses or using your educational privilege to help local residents. If someone is being pushed out of his or her apartment, see if there is something you can do to help. In many cases, people are pushed out illegally, and when they are pushed out, they don’t have the resources or means to find a new apartment.
As future graduates who will have a particular know-how, which includes dealing with bureaucracy, we should feel empowered to help those in our future communities. Don’t just move somewhere and engage with the coffee shop intelligentsia or the rooftop bar hoppers. Try to have a positive impact on your community, while acknowledging your role in a complex and unfortunate historical process. Use your education to strengthen what’s left of the community that you choose to make your home.