A Genealogy of Gentrification

First-wave gentrifiers defined gentrification. We’re still stuck in their semantic trap.

Gentrification can mean a million different things to a million different people. Everything from a lack of parking to violent evictions, from the sound of silence to the privatization of public housing have been held up as examples of gentrification. Depending on one’s perspective, gentrification can be a source of profound anxiety or a welcome change. When I reported from Atlanta’s heavily gentrified Old Fourth Ward earlier this year, I met folks who were resentful about rising rents, but grateful for reduced crime. 

I find “displacement” to be a much more useful term for describing the negative side of gentrification. Nonetheless, I don’t think gentrification has lost its meaning or should be jettisoned from the lexicon, as some urbanists periodically suggest. Rather, I find gentrification to be an incredibly rich concept that conveys how people understand cities and their place in them. Ironically, many of the meanings ascribed to gentrification emerged out of a worldview originated by gentrifiers themselves. 

Nowhere is this lens on gentrification better articulated than in Suleiman Osman’s 2011 book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York, which tells the story of the first-wave gentrifiers who crossed the East River in the 1960s and ’70s. Osman’s literary sensibility, combined with the historically distant nature of his subject matter, allow for a depth of inquiry seldom seen in other works on gentrification. It explores gentrification as a political, cultural, aesthetic and even philosophical force, which are, in my opinion, the right themes for the concept. The impact of neighborhood change on low-income residents, by contrast, is best described with more precise language: evictions, housing costs, racial discrimination, economic inequality, etc. For those fighting gentrification in good faith, these are the substantive issues. For those interested in exploring the theoretical undercurrents of the postmodern city, gentrification is your word. 

Before there was gentrification, there was “brownstoning.” This was the movement of middle class professionals and creatives, beginning as early as the 1950s, to the ring of 19th century residential neighborhoods surrounding downtown Brooklyn. Brownstoners despised the alienation of Midtown Manhattan and the sterility of newly built suburbs. In Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Fort Greene, and surrounding neighborhoods, they discovered a “middle landscape” rich in history and community life. They were adherents of the gospel of Jacobs, cherishing the street ballet, small businesses, and the Victorian cityscape. 

Brownstoners and their analogues in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and other cities were inspired by the ideologies of the New Left, the environmental movement, and the student movement, Osman writes. Their way of being in the world was post-materialist, an expression of taste and cultural values rather than practical needs. They often described themselves as pioneers exploring rugged, exotic territory. Above all, what brownstoners discovered in Brooklyn was authenticity.

Brownstoners projected an imagined past onto the neighborhoods they inhabited. “The historic landscape had to be made historic,” Osman writes. Brownstoners invented several neighborhood names to better fit their vision: Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens. Viewing the 19th century history of Brooklyn as more authentic than its early 20th century history, they restored their subdivided brownstones back into “aristocratic” single-family homes, evicting their tenants in the process. They fetishized certain kinds of small businesses, but deplored the industrial businesses that formed the borough’s working class economic base. 

Opposition to modernist urban renewal and highway plans — what Jane Jacobs called “cataclysmic change” — played the biggest role in forging the brownstoner identity. Brownstoners embodied the inflection point where big-city NIMBYism went from being idealistic and progressive to being self-centered and reactionary. In the ‘60s and early ‘70s, brownstoners formed alliances with low-income communities of color in opposition to projects like the failed Cross-Brooklyn Expressway. But these alliances fizzled once browntsoners started reflexively opposing virtually everything: affordable housing projects, grocery stores, fast food joints, and working class industrial development. 

Despite being culturally on the left, brownstoners didn’t fit neatly into existing political boxes. Early articles about brownstoning in publications like Dissent and the Village Voice mixed “anti growth politics” and “countercultural critiques of mass consumer culture” with “real estate boosterism,” Osman writes. Brownstoners believed “the problem for the poor was not material but existential. Mass production, air-conditioning, formalist architecture, and bureaucracy crushed the human spirit.”

By opposing urban renewal projects, brownstoners were anti big-government in the most literal sense. Instead of the “slum clearance” of Robert Moses, brownstoners believed in Jane Jacobs’  theory of “unslumming,” where neighborhoods were restored by way of historic preservation and the conversion of brownstones back into single-family homes.

In the end, Jacobs and the brownstoners were right. Unslumming, i.e. gentrification, was a much more effective method of neighborhood revitalization than blank-slate urban renewal. It was not, however, an effective means of providing low-income housing. Today, modernist housing projects that brownstoners vehemently opposed, like Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn or those in the Western Addition in San Francisco, are far more diverse than adjacent, untouched historic neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights or Alamo Square. 

Brownstoner values also made a significant impact on urban policy, providing political and philosophical justification for winding down Great Society-era programs. By the mid-1970s, federal and state governments mostly stopped initiating top-down housing and commercial projects, putting urban development largely in the hands of the free market. Planners would no longer plan; they would react to the plans of developers and non-profits. 

Brownstoners quite literally established the “template for a new postmodern school of [urban] planning,” Osman writes, defined by festival marketplaces, historic preservation, traditional architecture, and local control. Indeed, brownstoning can also be understood under the rubric of postmodern philosophy. Brownstoners sought authenticity and rootedness in an increasingly fast-paced, ephemeral world. They rejected master narratives of progress and the big-government initiatives they inspired. They pursued self-expression and aesthetic beauty over material gains. 

We continue to live in the city that brownstoners built. Nonetheless, as brownstoning and its associated politics went from the radical fringe to the mainstream, brownstoners remained in their defensive posture. By the mid-1970s, the triumphal “urban discovery narratives” of brownstoning were replaced by the resentful, guilt-ridden narratives of gentrification. Low-income communities of color began organizing against gentrification and shifting the tone of the discourse. Still, the Black and Latino population of brownstone Brooklyn continued to grow over the course of the 1970s, even as it gentrified, due to the exodus of white ethnic communities. The gentrification narrative was taken up most passionately by those who initiated it. “No one seemed as troubled by the changes as the brownstoners themselves,” Osman writes. 

Browntstoner neighborhood groups became some of the leading anti-gentrification activists, protecting neighborhoods like Cobble Hill from the types of people who came up with the name Cobble Hill. The same policy prescriptions brownstoners had advocated for unslumming their neighborhoods and returning them to their aristocratic glory were now trotted out in the name of preserving racial and socio-economic diversity. Reflexive NIMBYism, historic districts, hyper-local politics, and delicate aesthetic sensibilities saved brownstone Brooklyn from Robert Moses’ wrecking ball. Now, these very policies would rescue the borough from gentrification.

We’ve seen how that worked out. The same tactics yielded the same results. Unslumming continued. The first-wave gentrifiers were gentrified, and so were the second and third waves. Brownstone Brooklyn, like its peer districts in San Francisco, Boston, Washington DC, and elsewhere, became some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

Still, the brownstoner anti-gentrification playbook persists because it prevents a skin-deep version of gentrification: it keeps neighborhoods looking the same. This playbook almost never helps ameliorate the substantive housing and economic problems associated with gentrification, because it’s not really meant to. And it offers a false sense of comfort and accomplishment to those who really do care about these substantive issues, convincing the general public that adequate housing can be provided without the “cataclysmic change” that Jacobs deplored.   

The preeminence of gentrification as a catch-all frame for urban inequality obscures the true status of the least fortunate city residents. Despite the romantic visions spun by brownstoners and their descendants, there was no Golden Age of pre-gentrification, in Brooklyn or any other now-gentrified area, where the racialized urban poor had it good. Their only solace was lower housing costs — often in substandard housing — and, in some neighborhoods, stronger community institutions. Problems of poverty, political power and racism persist regardless of gentrification. For low-income people, rates of displacement and evictions are similarly high in gentrifying neighborhoods as in neighborhoods defined by concentrated poverty and disinvestment. Safety, health, and educational outcomes tend to rise for low-income people who remain in gentrifying neighborhoods, though so may encounters with law enforcement. 

Most perniciously, brownstoners, with their enormous political and cultural influence, shaped how we understand gentrification. They infused the term with their own sensibilities, turning gentrification into an expansive concept signifying any change that incumbent residents don’t like. Serious concerns about keeping existing residents housed and preserving vital community spaces get tangled up in self-serving grievances and an unfulfillable longing for neighborhood authenticity. When any change can be a sign of gentrification, the logical path forward is to prevent change from happening at all.