Cooper-Young Gentrification

And without fail, urban social problems once again presents a frustrating problem that I wish had a simple all encompassing answer to, but I that's why this class even exists. Gentrification is an issue that I have been intrigued with ever since moving to Memphis. My first encounter with this phenomenon was while visiting the Cooper-Young area with my parents a few years ago. My parents went to Rhodes in the late 80's and their experience with this area was a lot different than mine is today. They told me that it was a pretty run down impoverished area where no Rhodes students really cared to venture. They were bewildered to see the amount of gentrification that has taken place just in the last 30 years.

The first month that I moved here to Memphis I began wandering around the Cooper-Young area and began to envision myself living there one day. The houses seemed nice and homey, but not too big. There seemed to be a great lively community feel about the area as well.  As I explored the area more I began to realize that the further south I went, the less gentrified the area was. I don't have any specifics on this or home ownership costs but judging by my parents description of the neighborhood 30 years ago, I would venture to say that the value of homes has skyrocketed over the last 30 years north of the Cooper-Young intersection. Will this slow creeping of gentrification take over more of south Cooper? How long will it last and how far will it travel?

 Like Brown-Saracino, I too noticed gentrification before knowing exactly how to term it. Gradually learning about the negative affects of gentrification have darkened my naive innocence of living in this neighborhood one day, but the descriptions about social preservationists give me hope. I think social preservationists have the right idea but I'm not sure how successful they are in stopping the negative aspects of gentrification. Is it even possible to move into an area such as Cooper-Young and not impact the original neighborhood in detrimental ways?

Crosstown and the Neighborhood

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of gentrification for awhile and in particular the concept of social preservation, though I never really had the vocabulary for it until reading Brown-Saracino’s article.  Last semester for an urban politics class I wrote about the potential for gentrification stemming from the Sears redevelopment.  I anticipated what one scholar writes:  “they’re only saving the shell of the buildings.  They’re going to completely gut the inside” (Brown-Saracino 264).  However, what I found was something in between gentrification and social preservation.

The Crosstown area definitely needs a facelift, especially at the corner of Watkins and North Parkway.  Yet, the households diagonally across from the superstructure and in the nearby Overton Park vicinity are some of the most affluent in Midtown.  I think gentrification will not totally encompass the area because the impoverished have already been pushed to the periphery of Midtown.  If anything, hopefully the services provided by the new Sears Crosstown will make the street a regional hub once more.  Lloyd’s article about “living like an artist” makes me wonder if the Sears Development will diversify the breadth of yuppies, artists, and the poor, turning the neighborhood into a Cooper-Young facsimile or instead become a haven for a creative class alone.  Regardless, I am confident that the Sears Development is a positive step in trying to maintain some of the authenticity of Memphis while strengthening a meager population of young creative community leaders.

Here is the link for the Crosstown Collaborative if you want to stay up to date.

I could go on for awhile, and would post the paper I wrote but that doesn't seem to be an amenity of Blogger.

Gentrification vs Decay

I found all three of these articles to be very helpful in understanding the issues surrounding gentrification and redevelopment.  I thought it was very interesting how gentrification tends to occur in multiple waves in the same area that the first set of gentrifiers get a taste of their own medicine when even more affluent people begin to move into the neighborhoods.  This was especially apparent with the Wicker Park Artists.

One thing that I continually wonder about is whether or not the process of gentrification can happen in reverse- that is can a neighborhood decline? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, but what I think is fascinating about this is the different forces that are driving some neighborhoods to "decay" and other to "flourish."  In an ideal world the market would not be corrupted by race or class and yet this is pretty much what causes one neighborhood to decline and another to flourish.  For the most part when whites move into an urban neighborhood it causes it to become gentrified and when minorities move into another neighborhood it causes white flight and the neighborhood to go into decay.  So if both of these are true then the real issue is the uprooting of social networks of poor minority neighborhoods due to gentrification, but the reverse is not true because middle class whites choose to move out of neighborhoods that are starting to "decay."

Do Gentrification and redevelopment always come hand-in-hand?

             I’ve been really fascinated with our discussions lately about gentrification and redevelopment in class and in our readings. I think that this particular issue has stuck out to me specifically because both of my parents are in the business of redevelopment, though in very different capacities. My mom works for a non-profit organization called The Trust for Public Land. They are a national organization which works to conserve land throughout the US so that it may be allocated for public use, mostly parks, rivers, trails etc. My dad is a real-estate consultant and has specifically been working on a project recently to revitalize the former Macy’s department store as a multi-use space (offices, restaurants, venue, etc.)

I’ve always considered their work very valuable and constructive for the greater Atlanta area but the question of gentrification has made me take a closer look at redevelopment projects I had always considered necessary and productive for city life. I recently went on a tour of one of my mom’s projects which includes an 11-mile walking or biking path that will go primarily through a lower-middle class African American neighborhood. This is spoken about as an transformative and innovative project but even at the time I couldn’t help but wonder what effects this would have on the neighborhood. I would imagine this brand-new walking trail would dramatically increase the value of the surrounding neighborhoods. When I asked if they had met with any of the neighbors about the project, they said they weren’t going to until all of the plans were finalized.

This presents quite a predicament in my mind because in many cases it seems as if projects such as the one above are contributing directly to the wellbeing of Atlantans. This project will not only completely “clean up” the area surrounding the trail but will also provide a venue for citizens to exercise and make use of the beautiful wooded area,  but is it possible to do this without harming the immediate community, which is often lower class?

My question is how do we distinguish between productive development and growth and the process of gentrification? Is it possible to have a successful redevelopment project without gentrification as a side effect? If anyone has any examples of this I’d love to hear them.  

Long live the Corporate Oligarchy!

Screw this whole “representative government,” red tape bureaucracy bullshit; I think we should just turn it all over to the people who really know what they are doing: business leaders.  Yep, I think we ought to dissolve our failed government, and put business the rest of the way in charge of social services, taxation, law making, security, foreign affairs, etc. I mean these guys, these captains of industry, these leaders of our economy, let me tell you, these guys are geniuses, and so hard working too. How else would they have gotten to the top of such powerful companies? I think we need to let those smart fellows make the important decisions, and we can’t forget about the invisible hand of market forces, I mean who can argue with inevitability and omnipotence? I say privatize the whole lot, we are already half way there anyway, let’s just quit dancing around it, and jump on in: corporate oligarchy all the way!  Big business is going to get your taxes and rule the government behind the scenes anyway, so why don’t we just let them have it, they have earned it after all. That imbecile Karl Marx was absolutely wrong! We are not moving from capitalism to communism, we are to feudal-capitalism.  Those in power have earned their power through their hard work, intelligence and the favor of the omnipotent invisible hand of free market capitalism, so work for them, submit to them, and accept their loving and worthy sovereignty.

What does it take to be modern?

When driving around Memphis I find myself dreaming up the future for dilapidated structures and buildings of decades past. Especially when Downtown or driving east on Madison I am constantly distracted by the ruins of the past Memphis. After learning about the history of Beale, I ache for the business and cultural sector it used to be. There is a great chasm between how Memphis used to feel and how it is now perceived. The Judd reading highlighted the different forms of tourism that are used to "enrich" modern cities, primarily as an economic tool.

At the beginning he drew a comparison to the early Railroad industry to the today's tourist industry. It seems that the nature of this colossal business is that cities are in a zero-sum competition for convention centers, sports teams, casinos, etc. with complete disadvantage for the cities to claim rights to ownership of these businesses. In many ways I see the parallel of a monopoly of business of the railroad applied to the entertainment/tourist industry in cities today. Cities are under the impression that NBA teams, large convention centers and tourism are the keys to economic profitability and urban success. However, I thin Judd lays out the argument that these industries are not nearly as profitable as they are made out to be and lead to boom and bust economies that ultimately weaken cities and strengthen big business.

While I understand that Squires discusses the private-public partnership that is essential for cities, there should be more bargaining power for the cities in play. Since I have come to see the discussion of urban success through a Memphis lens, I cannot help but see how the larger private sectors have a powerful advantage over the needs and outcries from the urban poor who are forced to come with the terms laid out by the business elite.

In class Tuesday, we discussed the ownership of space and whose city is it? I would argue from Squires article, cities are held in the bonds of privatism, or the private city,  which can lead to the  "reduction  in the public debate over development and policy and the accountability of public officials and other actors for the consequences of their activities" (Squires 211). So what does this lack of accountability look like in the tangible world? Perhaps it's the blighted, forgotten neighborhoods surrounding the FedEx Forum or the absence of a free shelter. Maybe it is the Riverfront Development Project or the lack of accessible public transportation in Memphis.

It is not that private property or ownership are inherently bad or evil, but the effects that dismantle local political power are startling and unethical. The best example I can see of this is the use of personally owned automobiles. It is not that cars are bad inventions, however when an entire city is designed around the idea of privatized transportation, we end up with a underclass separated by the inability to travel around a city. My fear is for the cities we live in to be so focused on privatized, bug business, that we lose sight of the smaller collective issues within a city. This is how a I view the future city; one that is focused on providing effective, accessible services for all of its citizens, not just contributing to the pockets of big business.

I think it is really difficult to look into tourism without looking into how these groups that provide attractions receive incentives whether they need them or not to stay in the city. I went to Columbus, Ohio recently and wanted to research it. The top things to visit or do were a conference at a massive, massive convention center in a great neighborhood and take a tour of Ohio State the largest college in the US. Both of these were options that were free to me, if I wanted to take them because they were for the public. Where in Memphis besides chilling in Overton Park or Shelby Farms is free every day of the week? I should also note that both of those parks are now being run by private conservancy groups, not the public. So many places as Squires writes are publicly subsidized (for example TIF), but then the  public who once had that space for their purposes become unable to patronize because of de facto segregation or lack of interest or a fee. We see this in Memphis, not an excess of free things to do. I mean what if you don't have a car or didn't rent one?