Response to the Gentrification Series

Over the last six months, Weld for Birmingham has produced a series on gentrification from an oral history standpoint.  Overall, the series is good and puts a human face on the changes we are undergoing in Birmingham.  No fewer than three of the articles have focused on the Avondale/Crestwood area, which, due to the completeness of downtown gentrification, is ground zero for neighborhood change in Birmingham.

This post looks at Weld's approach to gentrification, points out some blind spots, critiques the response by those promoting gentrification, and provides some data that highlight the downside of neighborhood change.

First, there seems to be little in terms of displacement in census tract 24, home to Avondale and parts of Crestwood.  There has been only a 5% change in terms of the demographics in the census tract.  However, property values have risen dramatically, to the tune of 61% over the past ten years.  This is more than the increase in property values of Homewood and Mountain Brook, but less than the increases in downtown Birmingham.  If this trend continues, widespread displacement will be inevitable, particularly of low-income residents.  One of the Weld series' largest blind spot is the lack of voices representing low-income renters.  They have almost exclusively interviewed privileged white residents.  Are low-income residents' rents increasing, are they contemplating moving to a cheaper zip code, and are landlords attempting to push them out?  

(In fairness, I'm not under any illusion about how difficult it may be to develop the connections necessary to get an interview with renters who may not want to get caught up in a political fight.)

As an artifact of this blind spot, the response to the most recent gentrification series post "Leaving Crestwood" displayed an incredible amount of privilege and entitlement.  Posters wrung their hands and navel-gazed about a privileged white resident leaving the community- all of these lamentations coming from other privileged whites.  

In an earlier article by Nick Patterson, "New Students, New Parents, New Reality, and Change," the author documented how white residents make decisions about school choice.  Tellingly, the residents highlighted in the article consulted other whites when deciding about which schools their children should attend. (The Bigas stated that they changed their mind after consulting with Reverend Brandon Harris, a white man.)  

Does this really look like integration, a situation in which white residents' community looks not unlike the community that s/he would have in Homewood or Mountain Brook?  Maybe this is untrue, but the articles, with a dramatic lack of black protagonists, portray a lily-white community within a larger black neighborhood.  The articles give the distinct impression that gentrification and neighborhood change are driven by a small cadre of privileged, white advocates of a type of economic development that can best be termed municipal trickle-down economics.

I'm quite pleased with the gentrification series from Weld, and this critique is just an attempt to make it better.  The series has spurred conversation in Birmingham that otherwise never would have happened. However, there are blind spots that need to be addressed in future articles in the series, and the number one blind spot is "are there people experiencing displacement pressures?"

Gentrification and the White Savior Industrial Complex

This post is written in response to the post Gentrify Me on the blog Life and Law on 23rd Street.  Gentrify Me was written in response to my piece in Weld for Birmingham called My View: Gentrification.  In a nutshell, the author of Gentrify Me agreed with all of my conclusions, but insisted that gentrification was, in fact, good.

In response, I want to delve deeper into the underlying causes of such a view of gentrification - namely: the white savior industrial complex. Teju Cole coined this term in response to Kony 2012, a widely maligned video that thought to represent white people as saviors of Africans.  I believe that this impulse is vividly shown in Birmingham, in which white gentrifiers characterize themselves as the saviors of Birmingham, and by extension the black people in it.

Using Cole's seven points about the white savior industrial complex and excerpts from Birmingham blogs and journalists, I will show that the white savior industrial complex is alive and well in the Birmingham area.

1. "From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex."  Clearly, gentrification is the fastest growth industry in the Birmingham region.  The city just constructed a 58 million dollar baseball stadium and a 20 million dollar park.  Home values are rising dramatically downtown to the tune of 90% over the past 10 years.

2.  "The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening."  Clearly, white saviors are promoting policies of gentrification.   REV Birmingham, a new joint venture combining Operation New Birmingham (a tireless promoter of gentrification) and Main Street Birmingham (also a promoter of gentrification; see work in Avondale) is a charity dedicated to revitalizing Birmingham.  Main Street Birmingham won the Birmingham Business Alliance's nonprofit of the year award in 2012.

3.  "The banality of evil transmutes to the banality of sentimentality.  The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm."  For evidence of this I turn to a recent blog post on Magic City Made by Avondale resident L.K. Whitney.  In it, she shows how her concerns for Birmingham are rooted in sentimentality for a "community" experience of difference.  She states that she is emotionally shaken when someone undermines the liberal utopia of different people all thinking alike.  Rooted in this is the inability to understand how or why someone could have a difference of opinion, and how those differences are rooted in culture, race, and history.  She believes, instead, that all the deep seated and profound issues of the region can be solved through enthusiasm for this liberal utopia.  This sentiment also rings heavily in Gentrify Me, though less overtly.

4.  "The world exist simply to satisfy the needs - including, importantly, the sentimental needs - of white people and Oprah."  Same evidence as above.  Furthermore, Dan Carsen's article on "reverse integration," whatever that is, and a recent article by Mandy Shunnarah in the Magic City Post, speak to the complicity of and promotion by the media of white saviors.  Shunnarah's article seems to take the position that the conversation about Ensley needs to be shifted, and shifted by white people.  Shifted to what?  A nice place to experience sentimental diversity?

5.  "The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice.  It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege."  REV Birmingham, Magic City Made, and almost every charity in Birmingham never mention, much less fight for justice.  These charities exist to appease the needs of mostly white donors, funders and gentrifiers, to make them feel like they are participating in something good, no matter the effects.  To claim to fight for justice would undermine the monetary basis of most charities in Birmingham.  It is structurally prohibited.

6. "Feverish worry over that awful African warlord.  But, close to 1.5 million Iraqis died in an American war of choice."  Naturally, part of this is irrelevant to Birmingham, but the feverish worry over that awful African warlord, ignoring other factors is quite prevalent.  For instance, there was much journalistic concern over the corruption of Larry Langford - and no doubt, he deserved it.  But at the same time, white journalists privileged this narrative over the much more important one, that banks screwed Jefferson County.  It took Rolling Stone journalist, Matt Taibbi, to finally put the pieces together.

7.  "I deeply respect American sentimentality the way one respects a wounded hippo.  You must keep an eye on it because you know it is deadly."  While I don't think that the white savior industrial complex in Birmingham is at a deadly level yet, if the pattern of white saviorism and gentrification continue, it could lead to widespread displacement of poor, mostly black populations.

Let me be clear - my critique of the blogs and work of others in this article is absolutely not a personal attack.  The aim is to point out blind spots and unchallenged assumptions about the nature of Birmingham and the world at large.  Whites are not automatically owed the privilege of determining the direction of the city.  Whites should seek out neighborhood residents and leaders and try to understand how they can help and what those leaders want, not plow forward with critically-unassessed ideas founded chimeric utopias.  Justice - real, practical justice - should be the goal, not sentimental, feel-good experiences.

Review of Black, White, and Green by Alison Hope Alkon

It is an exciting day for me when I finally get to read a new book from one of my favorite thinkers on the alternative food and agriculture movement, Alison Hope Alkon. The book, Black, White, and Green: Farmer's Markets, Race, and the Green Economy, is a tour de force on the most important institution in the movement: farmer's markets.

Alkon covers a vast territory in her ethnography, looking at race, class, gender, and economics in the context of two markets in East Bay.  Those two markets, North Berkeley Farmer's Market and West Oakland Farmer's Market, represent two starkly different ways of approaching the green economy, though they share a common belief in producing social change through markets.  Both markets are about the performance of black and white identities in an effort to build community around buying and selling fresh produce.

In West Oakland, the market is commonly referred to as a "black farmer's market."  Many of the events revolve around the celebration of black holidays like Juneteenth or Black History Month.  The purpose of the market is to give an outlet to marginalized black farmers and to provide healthy produce in an area that lacks grocery stores, called supermarket redlining, a process specifically linked to institutional racism.  Alkon quotes Food First! in defining supermarket redlining:

"Redlining usually evokes images of insurance companies, realtors, and banks refusing to grant fair insurance policies, mortgages, or loans to residents of certain neighborhoods.  Now these images include the decaying shells of inner city supermarkets.  The supermarket industry has drawn boundaries defining where fresh, nutritious, and competitively-priced food is and is not provided for communities throughout the country."

The West Oakland market is, therefore, perceived by vendors, managers, and customers alike as a response to institutional racism within the food system.  Alkon states that the roots of this market lie in the Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast for School Children program, further placing the market squarely within the realm of resistance to white supremacy.

In contrast, the North Berkeley Farmer's Market is rooted in countercultural notions of what Alkon and McCullen have called elsewhere the white farm imaginary.  Drawing from authors such as Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan, the performance of white identity is central to the community that is formed through the market.  The market itself grew out of anarchist and socialist attempts to create a different kind of economy in Berkeley, including Chez Panisse and gardening in People's Park in Berkeley.  Today's iteration of the market focuses heavily on environmental and economic concerns, though there are secondary concerns about equity.  The market has also become more focused on elite Northern California gourmet food and the resistance to the industrial food system through the creation of alternative, high-end markets for farmers.

One of the most important points that Alkon makes is that though both markets are rooted in radical activism of the 1960s and 1970s, all of which was specifically anti-capitalist, today's version of both markets focuses heavily on the use of capitalism to promote social and environmental change.  While Alkon stops short of criticizing this development directly, she does note that policy change and the role of the state (local or national) have effectively disappeared from the agenda of the alternative food and agriculture movement.  In fact, many are completely opposed to participation in the government.  In my opinion, whiteness and the lack of critique of the state are the two most important issues within the movement today and must be addressed going forward.

I have two critiques for Alkon, designed to be constructive.  First, the reader is left to wonder how Alkon's positionality as a white, female academic colored the analysis she produces.  She does include an epilogue that documents some of her struggles in the field, but fails to integrate this into her work.  I'm particularly concerned about a few statements that she makes in particular.  First, she argues

"At first glance, North Berkeley Farmer's Market participants seem to have a more inclusive, cosmopolitan notion of community that the multiple and contradictory definitions evidenced in West Oakland."

She then states in the epilogue that

"In North Berkeley, on the other hand, I could both literally and figuratively let my hair down."

It seems that Alkon's first impressions of the North Berkeley Farmer's Market had more to do with her own position and a white woman, and less to do with the market itself.  To borrow from my field work, a black food activist in Birmingham stated that Pepper Place is "for certain people."  It is reasonable to assume that had Alkon been black, she would have perceived the exclusionary nature of North Berkeley Farmer's Market immediately.  Now, there is nothing wrong with feeling more comfortable with people more like you, but those feelings should have been part of the analysis.

My second critique is that the West Oakland Farmer's Market failed, ultimately, while the North Berkeley Farmer's Market succeeded.  The reader needs to know more about the institutional and community reasons as to why one organization succeeded and the other failed.  Alkon makes an initial argument that conflicts about the direction of the organization led to the failure, but it also seems that there could be community reasons.  For instance, although West Oakland Farmer's Market is in a low income black neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying, very few black community members participated, and most of the customers were relatively affluent.  About 50 percent of the customers were white.  It could be that there may have been little real community buy-in, a problem that markets face on low income communities throughout the nation.  Why is this?  What would work better?

Secondly, we know almost nothing about the institutional landscapes in which the farmer's market operate.  Who funds the Ecology Center, the organization that backs the North Berkeley Farmer's Market?  Why can they maintain funding for the market when the organizations backing West Oakland cannot?  Can an argument be made that institutional racism also played a role in the demise of West Oakland Farmer's Market?  What kinds of food movement programs would work in low income neighborhoods of color?  Why?  I feel like these are pertinent, unanswered questions that I as both a practitioner, activist, and academic would like to know.

Overall, though, this book is really incredible.  Comparative studies are really hard to do, and Alkon pulls this one off nicely.  She communicates with a critical voice that doesn't get in anyone's face.  She communicates in a language that people involved in the research can understand.  Spend some time with this book.

Birmingham enters the 1980s: Gentrification, Hipsters, and the New Middle Class

I recently attended the PostScript blog launch party at 55th Place in Woodlawn.  The event was well attended by Birmingham's cadre of hipsters and showcased musical talent from across the country.

What is so interesting about the event is that while almost all of the attendees were white, 70% of the neighborhood of Woodlawn is black.  This immediately raises interesting questions like why are whites drawn to an event in a black neighborhood?  What are the promoters of such an event trying to accomplish by hosting a trendy event in a black neighborhood? And why did blacks not attend the event?

The crux of the answers to these questions lie in the idea of taste.  Bourdieu argued that taste is socially constructed by struggles among the upper classes over what is legitimate.  In other words, art considered beautiful, food considered delicious, and books considered profound are not so because of their inherent quality but because of the struggles of taste-makers over these works.  Gentrification, or the return of whites to inner city neighborhoods, is a similar field of struggle.  Young, trendy, up-and-coming individuals struggle to produce a neighborhood as a trendy (or tasteful) destination by hosting events like the one I attended Sunday night.  They work to remake the neighborhood in their image, and the desire here is for Woodlawn to become an artists hub.  But this is not the end of the story.

Main Street Birmingham has worked tirelessly to remake Woodlawn in this image.  They have promoted 55 Place Arts which is next door to Main Street Birmingham's main office.  They have promoted local food in stores in the neighborhood, and they have marketed the area as a magnet for arts and entertainment - consumption-side development.  Gentrification requires both the trendy hipsters willing to invest time and money into the neighborhood and government or quasi-government institutions backing neighborhood transformation.

All this seems well and good.  A depressed neighborhood receives investment, whites move into the neighborhood, schools get better, jobs are created, and everybody lives happily ever after.  However, what this story doesn't tell is that the people who pay the costs of this development are blacks, many of whom have lived in the neighborhood for years.  In 2000, Woodlawn was 77 percent black and 17 percent white with populations of 9,657 and 2,086 respectively.  In 2010, Woodlawn was 72 percent black and 23 percent white with populations of 8,284 and 2,656 respectively.  Woodlawn lost almost 1400 black residents during the past ten years, meaning that many blacks were displaced by the white invasion, rising property values, and rising property taxes associated with gentrification.  So while a Sunday night meeting of hipsters in a black neighborhood seems innocent enough, it is part of a larger process with dire consequences for blacks and black communities.