Gentrify, Gentrify

"Gentrification": the term evokes the political and mental life of two generations of city-dwellers. On one interpretation, it was the forced displacement of the urban working class by mobile, college-educated professionals. On another, it was the restoration of city life in the imagination of a West that had supposedly given it up for suburban sprawl. An entire understanding of what cities were for and where they were going was bound up in the ambiguous word. All the energies of urban thought went into debating its meaning.

The "landed gentry" alluded to in "gentrification" emerged as a new class in England in the late eighteenth century—a group of petit bourgeois possessed of country estates, but lacking the economic clout of the true aristocracy. Ricardo despised the gentry: they acquired land and sat on it, lazily and unproductively. But the gentry did have aspirations. Think of the Bennetts in Pride and Prejudice: lacking any obvious form of advancement besides marriage, they might also have considered revolution as a way of improving their lot. And to the English aristocracy, the gentry did represent a threat of the uprising that had engulfed their brothers in France. But not to worry. "To be mistress of Pemberley might be something!" the gentry concluded instead; the image of Fitzwilliam Darcy—or marrying up—symbolizes the alternative, individualistic means of social advancement. Likewise, the gentry of the late twentieth century: they were always uncertain whether their true interests lay with the people below or above them.

"Gentrification began in 1963 … " the poem might go. But an entire aesthetic order in architecture had first to be overturned. Against the modernist International style which dominated postwar development, rickety, dilapidated working-class homes suddenly revealed their charms. Georgian row houses in London, brownstones in New York, and Victorians in San Francisco acquired new value in the eyes of gentrifying visionaries, who prized smallness and simplicity in the face of a world tending toward gigantism and anonymity. Middle-class couples, affluent in the postwar boom, took over the upkeep of old housing stock after the poor, without much choice in the matter, had let pilings, stoops, and columns decay. In the heroic age of gentrification, the property buyers looked like pioneers and integrators. Banks had "redlined" largely black neighborhoods like Park Slope, Brooklyn, which meant that the gentrifiers couldn't acquire the easy credit that banks would one day lavish on their children. The gentrifiers went in anyway. In an age when millions of whites were abandoning Chicago for Naperville, Cleveland for Shaker Heights, plucky men and women adopted neighborhoods that were not only "mixed use" (a term of urbanist approbation) but mixed race.