From Ruth Glass to Spike Lee: 50 years of gentrification | Cities | The Guardian

30/03/2016 16:25

From Ruth Glass to Spike Lee: 50 years of

gentrification
The film-maker's condemnation of the influence of white New Yorkers on his native
Brooklyn was foreseen 50 years ago by the Marxist planner who first coined the 'g-word'

Robert Bevan
Thursday 27 February
2014 14.32 GMT

"G

entrification is just the fin above the water," the San Francisco writer Rebecca
Solnit once warned of the changes to her home town. "Below is the rest of the
shark." The shark being a "hollow city" with an economy where "most of us will
be poorer, a few will be far richer, and everything will be faster, more
homogenous and more controlled or controllable".
Just over a decade later, her fellow citizens have been on the streets blocking Google's
private buses, which ferry the company's workers from their expensive downtown pads to
Silicon Valley offices. The tech industry rich have, it is argued, priced everybody else out of
the city.
Gentrification is a western world phenomenon: brogue-heeled Brooklyn hipsters tarting up
first Williamsburg and now Bushwick, leaving better coffee in their wake; Parisian bobos
(bourgeois bohemians) pushing steadily eastwards from the Marais to Bastille to the 20th.
Sydneysiders, meanwhile, are reclaiming the "Paris end of Macleay Street" from the
backpacker brigade.
New Yorker Jane Jacobs would have been astounded. Her 1961 book The Death and Life of
Great American Cities was a call to arms, a desperate defence of the positive qualities of
urban villages in the face of the modernist's bulldozers that were intent on flattening large
areas of Manhattan. Its neighbourhoods became drug- and crime-ridden ghettoes as "white
flight" saw large corporations relocate to the suburbs, leaving the city close to bankruptcy by
the 1970s. Similar protests were unable to save UK cities such as Manchester from flattening
much of its historic inner area in the name of slum clearance.
Unlike the neutral-sounding "regeneration", however, gentrification has always had its
negative connotations which is why it is a term avoided by contemporary developers. The
word was first coined in 1964 by Marxist planner sociologist Ruth Glass, for whom the
rescue of Notting Hill and Islington streets by "pioneering" London bohemians with the cash
to do up attractive old houses that banks wouldn't lend on went hand-in-hand with the
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/27/ruth-glass-spike-lee-gentrification-50-years

Page 1 of 3

From Ruth Glass to Spike Lee: 50 years of gentrification | Cities | The Guardian

30/03/2016 16:25

displacement of long-standing, blue-collar communities who could no longer afford to live

there. She identified the supplanting of net-curtained cheap lodgings by owner-occupiers'
carefully stripped floorboards as a class struggle played out in three dimensions.
By 1988, rioters in New York's Tompkins Square Park were carrying placards reading
"Gentrification is class war".
Gentrification's defenders have argued that repopulating the inner cities has been good for
all, creating sustainably dense neighbourhoods that are not car-reliant, saving our
architectural heritage, rebuilding derelict sites and introducing articulate new residents who
then press for improved schools and services for all locals rich or poor in a kind of trickledown aspiration.
Back in 2003, Columbia academic Lance Freeman argued that his quantitative research in
Harlem shows that even low-income renters stay put and benefit from changes such as
lower crime rates. Some of this, at least, may be true, but why should it take a middle-class
invasion to improve poor people's environments?
Freeman's findings have been rediscovered recently by New York commentators in favour
of gentrification, leading to this week's outburst by film-maker Spike Lee at an event in
Brooklyn. "Why," asked the Brooklyn-born Lee, "does it take an influx of white New Yorkers
in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better?
"The garbage wasn't picked up every motherfuckin' day when I was living in 165
Washington Park. PS [Public School] 20 was not good. The police weren't around. When you
see white mothers pushing their babies in strollers, three o'clock in the morning on 125th
Street, that must tell you something."
Even if Freeman's claims are accurate, the crucial caveat here is that New York has many
rent-controlled or rent-stablised apartments (in 2011, just over 47% of NYC apartments
offered some form of rent protection [PDF]). In the UK, such controls have long been
abolished, and Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy scheme saw ownership of the best councilowned street properties shift en masse to the private sector. Precious little affordable
housing has been built to replace these losses, and even Brutalist council estates such as
Sheffield's Park Hill or London's Robin Hood Gardens are now being part-privatised in the
name of regeneration.
This demonstrates nicely that you don't need Georgian mouldings or Victorian stained glass
to find something to gentrify. Since the first conservation areas in England were designated
under the Civic Amenities Act 1967, heritage has become a whipping-boy for those arguing
that conservation favours the rich. If it does, that is not the down to the protection of
architectural history per se, but to a property market that now places a premium on heritage
properties after previously decrying conservation's restrictions on change. Where property
values remain low, such as Liverpool's Welsh Streets, entire 19th-century neighbourhoods
are still under threat of demolition.
With London, on the other hand, in the throes of "super-gentrification", fuelled by foothttp://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/27/ruth-glass-spike-lee-gentrification-50-years

Page 2 of 3

From Ruth Glass to Spike Lee: 50 years of gentrification | Cities | The Guardian

30/03/2016 16:25

loose international property investments, some of its outer suburbs are getting poorer as
higher rentals spin the low-paid outwards. Government policies such as housing-benefit
caps and the bedroom tax can only fuel this centrifugal force, while rising land values make
social housing provision ever more difficult.
This drives out both the low-paid workers and the initial pioneers the artists, designers
and young entrepreneurs who helped save our historic inner cities in the first place. It is a
future that has long-term consequences for creative- and knowledge-based economies.
And it is happening faster than ever before. The vitally productive time-gap between artists
using their own "sweat equity" to create studios in empty industrial buildings and their
marketing as lofts to hedge-fund managers has dwindled from decades to a matter of
months.
Collecting his 2014 gold medal awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects last
month, the historian and theorist Joseph Rykwert argued that "the price of property in city
centres is making it impossible, particularly in the big cities, for any kind of social mix to
take place. It's castrating the whole notion of city life."
It is entirely possible that the capital will end up resembling Paris or Sydney where social
problems and poverty are, on the whole, confined to the very edge of the city, and creativity
is stifled by noise- and mess-averse new residents. Glass predicted as much: "London may
soon be faced with an embarrass de richesses in her central area," she wrote in 1964, "and
this will prove to be a problem too." The sharks are circling.
Or, as Lee so pithily put it: "There were brothers playing motherfuckin' African drums in
Mount Morris Park for 40 years, and now they can't do it anymore because the new
inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father's a great jazz musician. He bought a house in
nineteen-motherfuckin'-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin' people moved in last year and
called the cops on my father He doesn't even play electric bass! It's acoustic! Get the fuck
outta here!"

Robert Bevan is a writer on architecture and cities, and a regeneration consultant.

More features

Topics
Urbanisation Regeneration Communities Spike Lee New York More
Save for later Article saved
Reuse this content

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/27/ruth-glass-spike-lee-gentrification-50-years

Page 3 of 3