"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. Read More

 

Brooklyn gentrification novelists have always alleged that aesthetics, not class, unite and divide their borough. Not so, Amy Sohn tells us  in her new novel Prospect Park West. What matters is money, and in Park Slope white people have it. Sohn's privileged characters do not pretend otherwise, nor do they deny their status as gentrifiers. At the end of the novel, a successful actress decamps from Brooklyn's Gold Coast to Manhattan; another woman receives her comeuppance when, after putting a down payment on a long-coveted apartment, she discovers that the school district has been rezoned. Her son must attend PS 282, two-thirds black, one-third Hispanic, and "the worst kind of school there was: too bad to be good but too good to be bad."

Sohn, the least self-avowedly serious of Brooklyn writers, is the only one who can afford to be so honest. In a genre that emerged in the 1960s and '70s, when droves of middle-class men and women moved to the borough to restore its Italianate brownstones and Victorian row houses, her more literary peers remain unable to take their eyes off the window-dressing. As Brooklyn has changed, so has the gentrification novel, and today's writers are more likely to romanticize grimy dive bars than cornice moldings. Still, taste continues to be presented as the force that defines city life. In the gentrification novel, questions of wealth and race are rephrased as inquiries into authenticity and what it means to be a true New Yorker. 

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"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.