Gentrification: the second tier, as farce

Hipsters frequently play a vanguard role in gentrification. Sure, they seem harmless at first: the spiky-haired performance artist who just wants to deconstruct patriarchal settler colonialism, the quiet, intense bearded fellow who is obsessed with producing the finest artisanal small-batch sugared breakfast cereal, etc. But before you know it, the slightly run-down, funky neighborhood with cheap rents where they can follow their dream is filled up with trendy nightclubs, destination food spots and luxury condominiums.

This is what makes the "Old Market" neighborhood of Omaha, Nebraska seem so odd. In the big stretch of land between where we know people we can stay with (roughly, the part of the country east of the Mississippi, with an outposts just west of the river in eastern Iowa) and where H's family lives (the front range in Colorado), we needed to stop for the night in a hotel. We splurged on a semi-fancy hotel near downtown Omaha because, between long rides in the car, we wanted to stay someplace where we could get out and take a nice walk and find some good food, without having to get back in the car. I'm generally against gentrification of urban cores, but if you're travelling through a city where you don't know anyone, it does make for a more pleasant evening than staying in a hotel just off the interstate and driving across the mega-parking-lot to TGI Friday's for dinner.

We did find a decent place to eat — the Upstream Brewing Company, where I had a delicious saison seasoned with black and pink peppercorns, with a hit of ginger. And the food wasn't bad either: H and I split a 10-oz. steak with a perfectly tiny amount of a tasty crème fraîche sauce, and the kids' meals were very reasonably priced — something like five bucks for a burger, fries, juice and root-beer float for dessert.

But the walking-around-the-Old-Market part was just a little bizarre. It was like the city fathers of Omaha had decided to just import New-York- or San-Francisco-style gentrification and plunk it down on a place that was, well, empty. It was a Disneyland theme park version of urban gentrification. I mean, there was still the "Old Mattress Factory Bar and Grill," which was in a building which I have no reason to doubt used to be a mattress factory at one point, but it pretty much looked like it had transitioned directly from one to the other. There was an artists' cooperative gallery, but all the art was mediocre-to-mildly-interesting stuff clearly designed for people looking to decorate their "luxury downtown condominiums" which were, in fact, being advertised as "Downtown Living." There was no trace of hipsterdom, just a strange attempt to seem vaguely like the new face of the Mission district (in fact, I overheard a conversation in which a woman was describing how she had moved to Omaha from San Francisco, though she still "split her time" between the two cities).

There was even less trace of there having ever been any poor or working-class people living in the area. In fact, the powers that be seemed so completely sure of their domination of the place that they had clearly not even invested in the massive police state required for true urban gentrification. When I walked from the hotel to some "Downtown Food Market" in the morning to find something for breakfast, there was a homeless man sleeping in plain view on the side of one of the (otherwise empty) plazas.

Road Trip Day 1: Kingston, Ontario

We left Burlington today for the beginning of a 5-6 week road trip across the country. Well, across two countries, technically — the first leg of the trip is a three-day excursion through Ontario en route to the US Social Forum in Detroit next week. If you draw a straight line on a map from northern Vermont to Detroit, it more or less goes through the middle of Lakes Ontario and Erie. The Canadians thoughtfully built a major highway right along the northern edge of those lakes, which makes it much more efficient to drive through Ontario than to zigzag through upstate New York, across the top of Ohio, and then swing back up North.

There are also some cool places to visit — Toronto, of course, but also Kingston, a smallish city at the northeast corner of Lake Ontario. It's about the same size as Burlington's metro area, maybe a little bigger, and has some similarities. Both cities have a downtown shopping district with lots of restaurants and bookshops and funky boutiques near a picturesque waterfront. Both cities were major shipping and transportation hubs back in the 19th century when shipping on the lakes was the best way to move raw materials and manufactured goods, and both have lost lots of manufacturing jobs in the last few decades. But the differences are stark: while Burlington has successfully reinvented itself as a tourist destination and command center for the regional economy (with its attendant cultural institutions, "new economy" jobs in marketing and such, and general veneer of prosperity), Kingston still has the overall feel of a working-class de-industrialized city.

Most observers would say that Burlington is prosperous and Kingston is depressed, but I suspect the actual economic differences aren't as stark as the perceptions. Burlington has a lot of poverty — a full 50 percent of the kids in Burlington's elementary schools qualify for free or reduced lunch. It's just hidden and segregated into the Old North End (a working-class neighborhood just north of the downtown) and pockets of the more suburban New North End — a trailer park and two large affordable-housing developments. Despite merchants' complaints about homeless people panhandling on Church Street (the pedestrian mall downtown), you don't see many working-class folks from the Old North End on Church Street, which is maybe a block away. I suspect this is due to a mixture of economic reasons (most of the restaurants and shops on Church Street run to the expensive side), subtle and internalized social pressures not to appear in the playground of the upper middle classes, and, when necessary, explicit use of police power.

It's actually quite striking as you walk along the four "ped mall" blocks of Church street from south to north — for two and a half blocks the people walking about look healthy and wealthy, they're well-dressed and mostly white, and they're generally on their way somewhere to spend money. Then for the half a block between the Old Navy and the bus stop you'll suddenly notice more people of color, more working-class folks, more cigarette smoking and more "hanging around." Cross Cherry Street, and you're back to the middle class. Needless to say, that one half-block of Church Street has more "No Loitering" signs than anywhere else, and it's quite strictly enforced — I myself was asked to "move along" about a week ago. To be fair, I was leaning up against a column with a "No Loitering" sign talking to some people — but, being pretty middle-class looking, that's never got me in trouble on any other part of Church Street before.

Kingston is a bit like the Old North End had gotten more assertive and grown up over Church Street and the waterfront, as if to say, "you can have your fancy restaurants serving cod in a fennel ragout*, but you're not going to forget the fact that your fancy service economy has been built on a foundation of upwards wealth transfer, you're not going to forget that when we went from working union jobs in your factories to bussing your tables and cleaning your hotel rooms it has meant poverty and suffering and some of us are damn well going to be sitting in your doorsteps begging for change."

*which was delicious, by the way

* * *

Anyway, on account of H now working for an AFL union which pays pretty good, we decided to splurge on a fancy-ish hotel in downtown near the waterfront: the Hotel Belvedere:


It's converted from an old mansion, presumably built with some of that 19th century shipping wealth, and sits on a street of similarly grand buildings, some of which are private clubs, some of which have been converted into quaint museums, and some of which are apparently for sale. When we got into the room, we discovered that it featured a "walk-up" closet:


Part of how we are affording this is staying in a room with one queen bed and making the kids sleep on the floor on camping pads. We thought it would be cute to make the boy sleep in the closet:


* * *

After a nice dinner at Chez Piggy and checking into the hotel, we went for a walk on the waterfront:


There was a pretty spectacular view of thunderclouds over upstate New York. You can't really see them in this picture, but the large island that sits right where Lake Ontario flows into the Saint Lawrence River is now covered with industrial wind turbines, which I actually think are quite beautiful, especially when tinted pink from the setting sun behind us.


Definitely more beautiful than, say, a massive oil spill.

One of the cool things about the Kingston waterfront is that, interspersed with a small public walkway, boat rentals, a "steam-pump ship museum" and lots of tourist hotels, is a working drydock. While I generally prefer the Burlington waterfront, with its massive public space, I'm also a little sad that its history as a working waterfront only lives on in a few bits of ugly, abandoned industrial detritus (out of site of the main tourist sites of course) on the one hand and a handful of historical markers, maybe of interest to visiting yuppies, on the other.

"Our ability to see each other is the greatest threat to the status quo"

At the time, I was a little too stressed out about logistics and workshop facilitation and so forth to fully appreciate how excellent this event was. The workshops were, for the most part, even better than the speeches, but the speeches were pretty good:

My UE peeps in Chicago make some history

In January 2006, I got to spend a week in Caracas, Venezuela, as part of a UE delegation, along with Armando Robles, now president of UE Local 1110.

The truly amazing thing

Last night I dreamt that I was travelling with a friend and we were staying with a rich, older woman in my home town. She owned an imposing, three-story Victorian home that looked out over the park with the old locomotive in it, a park in between the only two one-way streets in town which often in my dreamscapes turns into a grand mall. She believed approvingly that my home town was "socialist" — a belief that only rich liberals could persist in.

I was woken up in the middle of the night and looked out the third-story window to see my friend getting into the car and I thought maybe driving off, but really just bringing in some forgotten items. I got up and helped out and with my trained parent's eye for small things left behind helped make sure it all got safely into the house.

* * *

In real life I woke up after that dream and had a bit of insomnia and thought about the connection between authenticity and colonialism, the powerful searching for "authentic" experiences in the lives of the less powerful.

* * *

The truly amazing thing about us is that we can heal. I suppose we wouldn't have gotten through evolution without the ability to make new skin cells and other cells and other repairs, but still. Every scar is an act of creativity.

Voice

The performing arts theatre where I work (as a low-wage box office peon) is calling part of its season this year "Giving Voice" — theatre pieces about food insecurity, class and culture in New England, and post-Katrina America.

But I can't stand the phrase "giving voice." In my experience, the problem isn't that (powerless) people don't have a voice, it's that no one listens to them. Nothing against the artists — they seem like good and interesting pieces, I may even try to go see some of the shows — but "giving voice" seems to me to be a marketing tool to get the theatre audience (which will be overwhelmingly white and middle-class) to buy tickets to these performances so they can feel good about themselves for having participated in "giving voice" to working-class folks, for having participated in an "initiative for diversity" (one of the institutional sponsors of one of the shows).

When, of course, the most useful thing white middle-class people can do is to shut up and get some humility and find ways to listen directly to voices from the grassroots.

* * *

I loved music as a youngster, learned the guitar and piano starting in junior high, wrote songs, played in bands, picked up other instruments, spent endless hours making home recordings on a 4-track tape recorder. But I never could sing; I'd always have to find singers and teach them the songs I wrote (which often had interesting lyrics, chord changes and rhythms, but were kinda weak on melody).

In my early 20s I finally taught myself to sing a little — I figured out I could pick out (simple) vocal melodies on the guitar or piano, then play the melodies back and sing along and slowly learn how to match the pitch with my voice. I started playing solo acoustic shows, with a repertoire of songs whose vocal melodies didn't go below C or above G. In general only close friends, and a few people who really liked the songs, were willing to endure my more or less on-key but not particularly musical singing.

Over the years I expanded my range a bit, even found a few singers with whom I could successfully harmonize, but it wasn't until I had kids and had to sing lullabyes a capella (and, incidentally, no longer had time to play the guitar) that I finally learned to sing consistently on-key. Instead of using my ears to match the pitch of my voice to the pitches of instruments I heard around me, I learned to find the pitch in the vibration of my own body.

What I learned in college

One of my forays into the world of higher education was at a small liberal-arts college located in a small town in the Midwest. I was there for two years.

The town had a little under ten thousand residents (I never knew whether this number including the 1200 students or not), was even more overwhelmingly white than the college (which was, um, pretty white), and was noticably divided by Sixth Street, which ran just along the south edge of campus and along the north edge of downtown. North of Sixth Street was the college campus, surrounded by leafy neighborhoods filled with the spacious victorian houses that most of the professors lived in. South of Sixth Street were smaller houses, a trailer park, the county fairgrounds, feed stores and Wal-Mart, and the five or so factories that provided what employment was to be had there in the 90s.

At one point while there, I was part of a multiracial group of students who decided to facilitate a workshop/exercise on racism and discrimination called Archie Bunker's Neighborhood. You can find a more in-depth description of the exercise here, but the basic gist is dividing the participants up into different "communities," each of which has to navigate a system of bureaucracy and law enforcement in order to build their community, and — as with real life bureaucracy and law enforcement — the facilitators playing the sherriff, mayor, permitting office etc. treat the white group more favorably and leniently. Then everyone breaks into small groups, blah blah blah.

In addition to doing this on campus, we also did it at the town's high school. I don't remember whether I got to be the sherriff, etc., but I did have to facilitate a small group discussion — not something I had a lot of practice with when I was twenty.

The small-group discussion with my small group of all-white high school students went about as one would expect — the liberal, middle-class children of the college professors and other professionals in town knew the right lines to say, summed up appropriate moral outrage, while the working-class kids kind of stumbled over themselves, kept their mouths shut, or said mildly inappropriate things ... until the subject of Rodney King and the LA riots — which had just happened a year or two previously — came up.

All of a sudden the entire group changed. The middle-class students' moral outrage was directed at the rioters (why couldn't they just be nice non-violent Negroes like Martin Luther King?) and the working-class students began telling stories of being followed and harassed by cops whenever they went north of Sixth Street, or just for being out in a group together. "I guess I kind of felt like I knew why those people rioted in LA."

* * *

One of my best friends at this college was T, from a lower-middle-class family in rural Wisconsin. She, like me, felt a little out of place there — the vast majority of students were from the suburbs of Chicago and other large Midwestern cities. One summer she stayed in town and supported herself by lying about not being a college student and getting a job at one of the factories in town, sewing sportswear in a poorly-ventilated metal box on the south side. She was an avid gardener — I still have photos from that summer of us balancing produce on our heads for laughs.

One day in the spring she was walking with another friend — J, a counterculturalist from the suburban tracts of Ohio — by the feed store. They had extensive and well-groomed flower beds out front. T noticed one extremely tall flower in a bed where the owners were clearly aiming for a uniform height. Almost absent-mindedly, from the know-it-in-your-bones-and-muscles that comes from true craft, T reached out and pruned the errant flower.

J — against all conformism and hierarchy — was appalled.

Sustainability classes

Last night the kids and I attended an informational meeting at E's school about sustainability. A local environmental non-profit will be spending two years at E's elementary school helping to "integrate the concept of sustainability into the curriculum." Last night was the first public activity of the year, a presentation by the fifth grade classes about the work they have been doing building a database (I suppose because it needs to fit provide math "components" for the curriculum) about "Quality of Life" issues. Essentially, this means asking a group of people to brainstorm about positive things they want to see in their neighborhood, then doing the exercise where everyone gets three dots and gets to stick them next to different options, and then identifying which suggestions got the most dots. The fifth graders had already done this exercise in their own class, and then with the fourth graders, and last night they did it with the semi-random collection of adults who came to the presentation.

The first noticeable thing when I walked into the room was that everyone there, and all of the kids doing the presentation, were white. Our neighborhood, and especially the school, is definitely not all-white; white kids are probably a minority in E's kindergarten class. But of course, this is hardly surprising — I would have been more surprised (though certainly pleased) if the environmental non-profit in question had prioritized reaching out to kids and parents of color and especially the immigrant population and made a specific effort to include them.

I suppose they probably feel they made enough of a "diversity" effort by coming to our neighborhood school at all. The last two years they were doing this program at a much more suburban school in the same city. And I don't think their program of just asking everyone what positive improvements need to be made and then ranking them has translated very well.

The problem of course is that the problems faced by working-class people in our neighborhood are not only more serious and complicated than those faced by many middle-class folks, they are also bound up inextricably in the very functioning of capitalism. For example, a theme in many of the improvements suggested by the adults and actually prioritized by some of the kids was the need for our neighborhood to have stores which sell basic necessities at a reasonable cost and provide a decent living for those who work in them, instead of the rent-a-centers and used furniture stores and the occasional coffee shop for gentrifiers and such like that populate our business areas. Years ago we had a grocery store, a hardware store, a clothing store, but they were all driven out of business by the suburban "big box" stores. Those who can afford to maintain a car will drive out to Wal-Mart and Price Chopper because it's cheaper, those who are too poor pay inflated prices for food at the corner stores and have few options for other staples beyond begging rides or lugging stuff home by way of the bus system. Now that the last holdouts in the neighborhood have closed, no investor in their right mind would put new capital at risk opening any kind of staple-selling business here, let alone one that would offer low prices.

The first few suggestions were the predictable "more bike lanes" and "more trees" made by some of the Americorps*VISTAs and middle-class parents in the audience, but we pretty quickly got down to the key issue for most people: drugs. The first suggestion, of course, was "no drugs," and the facilitators admirably tried to guide people into making positive suggestions which might help with the problem. So we moved from "no drugs" to "more cops" and the mantra of "educating the children about how bad drugs are." Growing up in the 80s, I was educated to the hilt about how bad drugs are and how I should "just say no," so given my own experiences, I have little faith that that approach has any effect in preventing drug use. And I don't think that more cops is going to work either, until we reach a 1:1 cop to kid ratio and each kid can be followed around constantly by their own personal cop.

What we really need is better jobs with higher wages and fewer hours, so parents can spend more time with their kids, more responsible adults can be out and around the neighborhood keeping an eye on things, and kids can look around them and see adults with productive lives instead of slaving away at too many crappy, demeaning jobs or, even worse, not even have a crappy demeaning job.

But of course we are not allowed to make these kinds of demands in this society. Everything tells us that your job (or lack thereof) is your own responsibility, the failings are your own failings. One participant in the meeting touched on the concept when she was bringing up affordable housing (still seen as a public good, at least in our neighborhood) as a need. She mentioned that if people had affordable housing they might not have to work multiple jobs and then might have more time to be around their kids. But no one brought up that if the wages were better at their first job, people wouldn't have to work the second job.

After thinking about it a bit, I decided that what I should have said I wanted to see in the neighborhood was a sense of hope in collective, social solutions to our problems, and an understanding that hopes for individual solutions are too often just recipes for heartbreak.

Pearly white

I took the kids to the dentist this morning. E, the older sister (almost six), is so grown up that she went off with one hygienist without a second thought while I accompanied her younger brother S (almost four) to the child-size sink where they give tooth-brushing instructions and then to the chair, where he got his first professional teeth-cleaning.

Pediatric dentistry seems to have changed a lot from what I remember of my own childhood experience. I'm sure we were also given cheap plastic trinkets, or at least stickers, at the end of the check-up as a concession to our young age, but the pediatric dentist we take our children to provides them with sunglasses to alleviate the brightness of the light shining in their face, allows them to choose from a menu of at least a dozen flavors for their fluoride (there is an actual printed menu, with the flavors illustrated by pictures), and commemorates each child's first cleaning by taking a polaroid shot of him or her reclining in the dentists' chair, wearing the sunglasses, and filling out a "Historical First" certificate.

But perhaps all the pomp and circumstance is an important ritual of conferring class privilege. After all, when I was growing up, my sister and I were constantly reminded by our mother, one of four children of a butcher and an asbestos-factory worker, that we were lucky to be getting regular dental care as children. The point was brought home by the fact that, while we had to endure cleaning and polishing (without sunglasses or fancy menus), she was having to go to the dentist regularly for vastly more unpleasant procedures such as root canals. If my parents had been class-conscious trade unionists, they might have also taught us that employer-provided dental benefits were the fruits of struggle, first won in the 1950s by a union local led by Tony Mazzocchi, one of the great working-class leaders of the later 20th century.

Privilege tries to maintain itself unchallenged by making privilege seem like the norm. If we assume that all the white kids in college got their on “their own merits,” then affirmative action for blacks seems like a “special preference,” because we forget that some of the white kids were “legacies” (accepted because their parents went to that college, like the current resident in the White House), most of them benefited from the uneven and discriminatory distribution of educational resources in the U.S., and so forth. If we assume that having enough nutritious food is normal, then hunger becomes invisible.

The certificate is a message to my children that one’s first teeth cleaning is one of the small, but universal, rites of growing up, and it’s one that the kids in our neighborhood who don’t have good union dental insurance will not have had, and therefore they will be less than “normal.” L, who lives down the street, or E’s best friend A, will have teeth that are not as pearly white and straight, and over the years they may subtly become objects of derision or pity.

We haven’t really started teaching our children about privilege yet. At not-quite six and four, their political analysis is still at the level of “fair” and “not fair,” and I don’t want them misunderstanding and boasting to other kids about their privilege. But maybe I should start looking for a good children's biography of Tony Mazzocchi.