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The Nation's Pulse
The New Colonialists
The upside of gentrification.
I’ve been called a lot of things in my day, but never a colonialist. That is, until now.
Our neighborhood anarchists — grubby twenty-somethings who squat in abandoned buildings and wage war on local business owners’ surveillance cameras — have begun using that term to describe people like me: yuppies who move to a down-and-out urban area and purchase and rehab a dilapidated house.
Not only that, but we homeowners (the so-called gentry class) have the cheek to become involved in our communities in the hopes of making our streets more livable. Some of us even attend neighborhood meetings, organize neighborhood watch groups, pick up litter and report crime to the police.
What could possibly be wrong with that, you ask?
It’s a textbook case of gentrification, that’s what. Or worst case, it’s the new colonialism.
The term gentrification has been around since the 1960s. Our local hipsters, on the local hipster website, define the term as: “the process of renovating and improving (especially a house or district) so that it conforms to middle-class taste. [It] is entwined with issues of politics, class, and race” (my emphasis).
There it is again, that appalling “middle-class taste.” What could be more despicable? You wouldn’t think that buying a former crack house and turning it into a nice home would be “entwined with issues of politics, class and race,” but you would be mistaken.
Evidently, what makes homeowners like me so contemptible is that by purchasing and renovating a ramshackle house, by taking care of my property, and by working to make my street safer, I am potentially raising the value of my property. And if enough people like me move into my neighborhood (sadly, this is unlikely), it just might become a decent place to live.
That’s not to say there are no negative effects to gentrification. Sometimes an urban pioneering couple will purchase a rental property from some soulless slumlord who wants to get out of the business, and thereby take that particular piece of low-income housing off the market. This, of course, reduces the number of low-income/government subsidized housing units and forces would-be renters to find housing in some other dangerous, noise and litter-infested neighborhood, which is apparently a cruel injustice. Or so the argument goes.
NEW COLONIALISM is a whole other matter. It is not just idealistic urban pioneers passively displacing the poor from their neighborhoods — neighborhoods that forty or fifty years ago were made up of the working class — it is a more aggressive form of gentrification and comes complete with racial overtones.
Here, in the words of a stereotypical unrepentant socialist academic, is how people like me exploit the poor:
Gentrification is a continuum of modern man’s land and human exploitation. Similar to colonialism, gentrification not only usurps local and economic power to newer and often wealthier residents, there are also implied class and racial components attached to it as well. A number of individuals amass wealth and power through gentrification…both gentrification and colonialism require an economically empowered few…to economically and politically displace one group for another, while achieving financial gain and political power.
The individuals supposedly amassing wealth are, of course, the capitalists, i.e., the landlords, contractors, real estate developers, and bankers. With the exception of the drug dealers, I have yet to see anyone amassing wealth in my neighborhood. Though, unlike the opponents of gentrification, I would not have a problem with that.
Here in St. Louis the gentry class is by no means affluent or powerful. They are, with the exception of me, liberal, lower-middle class idealists who work in social services or nonprofits or own small unsustainable businesses. All are guilt-ridden Obama supporters who moved to the city because they loathe the “staid, conformist suburbs” and longed to live among the “real people.”
Far from being demonized, the gentry class ought to be prized for leaving the security of the suburbs and risking everything on a ramshackle house in the ghetto, for bringing a semblance of order and stability to deteriorating neighborhoods, and, not least, for making city life a bit more tolerable.
About the Author
Christopher Orlet writes from St. Louis.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (41) | Leave a comment
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Mike Hawk| 11.10.11 @ 6:37AM
I would suggest a heavy dose of "gentrification' for someplace like Detroit. It may be too late depending on what left of it.
Mike D.| 11.10.11 @ 8:40AM
Its too late, I grew up there. It will take generations to fix the destruction.
Alert1201| 11.10.11 @ 6:49AM
25 years ago went to graduate school at a seminary about 10 blocks outside of downtown Dallas. The school was in very depressed, seedy location that at one time was a flourishing upper class to wealthy neighborhood. When I went for walks at night I would crisscross the street to avoid drug dens and places where the not-to-friendly's where hanging out on their porches. About 15 years ago wealthy to upper middle class people started buying the old homes and restoring them to their original state. Now it is a beautiful flourishing neighborhood that has attracted stores and shopping centers to meet the needs the new residents.
This is a classical example of gentrification and it is good.
Anastasia Mather| 11.10.11 @ 7:17AM
Envy is such an ugly thing. Laziness is just as ugly. Trying to make a virtue out of filth, decay and despair is just pathetic.
Appleby| 11.10.11 @ 7:17AM
The hippie squatters hate gentrification for the same reason the Palestinians hate the Jews: because they put the lie to the whine that Nothing Can Be Done, and thereby raise not only property values and security, but EXPECTATIONS. How are they supposed to convince The Man that they need Funding because, like, everythings WRONG, maaaaan, if people who look a lot like them (only clean and barbered) are actually Doing Something?
emo| 11.10.11 @ 8:34AM
Never head that hippies oppose gentrification. Usually it is black politicians at the district level. Black mayors usually support it because it means more tax revenue.
Appleby| 11.10.11 @ 11:37AM
They look like hippies to me. And it's pretty silly to keep on trying to look Hip in your sixties.
Jacob R| 11.12.11 @ 4:28PM
Yea but you don't seem like you know what you're talking about.
Tenn Slim| 11.10.11 @ 7:41AM
A familiar story, indeed. The noted area is rife with the NEED to SUSTAIN the Dependent Poor.
That area is noted or DEMOCRATIC Dependents. ANY Usruption to that bloc of voters, will be met with disdain at best, permit denials at worst, and a host of unseemly events between.
An effort to "Improve" the bloc areas is anathema to the need to sustain the status quo of Dependency.
A move to live with the Common Man, from affluency to actualy spending some on the Common Good, is directly opposite of the Basic Tenets of Dependency. Send your affluency to the Democratic "noted Area" pols for thier RE distribution and skimming. THATS THE RULE.
A neat article of awakening to Liberal Reality.
Semper FI
emo| 11.10.11 @ 8:32AM
Gentrified neighborhoods look fake, like they dont belong(modern homes make to look like they were built in the 1920s). They also usually suffer higher crime rates that "normal" middle class neighborhoods.
ConantheContrarian| 11.10.11 @ 11:08AM
Wrong. These homes are typically renovated. They suffer higher crime rates because of the remaining neighborhood hooligans burglarize the homes with wealth (and it is usually Black on White crime). I should know; it happened to me.
Seek| 11.11.11 @ 2:57PM
Spot on. To progressives, gentrification defined is urban revitalization for the "wrong" people. And those people have a tendency to be white. What these putative students of urbanism want is for old neighborhoods to be transformed into liberated urban zones where blacks can control the turf and terrorize or extort from anyone they wish, minus police interference.
Alert1201| 11.10.11 @ 11:25AM
Conan is right. The reason they suffer higher crime rates is because they are usually situated right on the border of bad neighborhoods. The areas I am aware of in Dallas you can go from 1M - 1ooK homes to virtual slums in the span of a block or two. This makes them the perfect target for the criminals who live near by. So, yes they are higher crime areas but not as high as they were before the gentrification took place and the crime that is there is not generated by the changes, it is imported from other nearby neighborhoods.
And they do look nice. I would love to trade my traditional brick 50s style suburban home for one of these beauties. The people who renovate them usually take special care to do it right.
Le Cracquere| 11.10.11 @ 2:42PM
If that's fake, by God let's have more of it! That's light-years better than any house that appears to BELONG in this architectural Dark Age.
But this whole "fake" nonsense generally comes from local grievance pols and hipster ignorati who think that dysfunction, filth, and gracelessness are somehow "realer" than their contraries. Sorry, not buying it.
TrueBlue| 11.10.11 @ 5:34PM
The problem is it means less places for them to shack up without having to pay rent, and they make it harder to get drugs.
scythe| 11.10.11 @ 8:48AM
Here's the sensible retort: if I was so flush with cash as to be able to colonize anything, why would I take a risk on a sh-t hole in an area like this? I would simply take my bucketloads of cash and plunk them down elsewhere. By using the words, middle class, race, blah blah the typical socialist knows they are pushing buttons for a knee-jerk response and they get it. All the time. Their statements need to be challenged for the inherent illogic that is contained within. The fact of the matter is that people settle in less than savory areas BECAUSE they are not among those who can go elsewhere without financial hardship. You are not a colonist. Tell the lefties you are just a better mannered "squatter" who is paying for the privilege. That ought to confuse the hell out of them.
VonMisesJr| 11.10.11 @ 9:01AM
The author's liberal policies of "big government" cause many of the problems. Rent control helped create the slums since the property was not profitable to own and operate. Then "Open Spaces" and ""Green Acres" laws create shortages and force up existing property prices.
This is why, as Dr. Sowell teaches, the working class in NYC and San Francisco cannot afford to live where they work. So if government got out of the way, market forces would provide the best allocation.
This is what OWS mal-educated kids do not understand. They are experiencing problems repaying student loans that the government interference escalated by over 400%, and when they do get a job, they can't afford a house of decent quality in their liberal bastions.
Jacob R| 11.12.11 @ 4:31PM
It doesn't have anything to do with the fat boomers who own everything and claim they do all the work despite not looking like they can do very much besides order around "lazy" people??
Petronius| 11.10.11 @ 10:03AM
Oh dear. What's an urban pioneer with politically incorrect social attitudes to do? Being in the last stable middle class neighborhood in South St. Louis has become its own cross to carry. Even though Tower Grove is a good deal more sedate than the 70's when the worst elements of the local pond life were a majority there, the traditional middle class individual is still faced with the gangs east of Grand Avenue, or heading out among the troglodytes to Metherson County. The latest party piece here is the knockout game in which squads of adolescent jungloids clock middle aged whites in the back of the head just to put their lights out. The last victim of such an attack was on the news last night. His employer had a fund raiser to pay his hospital bill. The Mayor personally picked him up after witnessing the strike and had the punks hunted down, with at least half a dozen still at large. When the first bunch got caught, they were asked why they do it. The response from those savages was, "who cares about hurting Them?" Transalation: whitey is their prey species. These thugs also know that the libtards who sympathize with their "plight" really want them to knock out the exurbanites in Ladue and Chesterfield who send their kids to those stuffy private schools. Such are the vicissitudes one must suffer unless the McMansion west of Lindburgh is paid off. And the overeducated fleawits with white skin and no common sense in city hall gaze at their navels wondering what they must do to be accepted by these predators. Well moral cowardice is its own reward and refusal to deal with and defeat them will bring about nothing except more of Our Blood in Their Streets. Meanwhile the rest of St. Louis deteriorates slowly with people like me stuck here because our houses are not marketable except to property liquidators. Gephart's Bosnians have actually proved a boon to the area. As protected immigrants they are allowed to defend themselves. And being clannish, they stick together. Not that the mayor will get a clue. He could care less that decent people don't want to live here and get a fractured skull just for going to the library. Were he to get these vermin off the streets and run the lowlife out of town, he would lose all that federal money that keeps them here to terrorize Us.
Pelligrino| 11.10.11 @ 11:04AM
Petronious, you mention the Dick Gephardt Bosnians. Interesting. They probably started showing up about mid 1995?
What year did they stop coming? (Or have they?)
What mix do you have there? Purely muslim Bosnian or some Bosnian Serbs or even some Bosnian Croats, too? I'd be interested to hear. Thanks.
Petronius| 11.10.11 @ 1:21PM
There doesn't seem to be an over weighting among the Balkan groups coming here. They usually keep to themselves, insularity being a primary defense mechanism as the only downside to their presence is that they import their family feuds from back home and one can get caught in the crossfire which consists of the occasional punch up or brick through the front window. Some have opened stores, taverns, and cafe's along Gravois in the Bevo district. The only major trouble spot is the section 8 apartments between the Mopac tracks and Grand Ave which is now 1/8 of a notch above the bottom of the south side social barrel. The old established ethnic neighborhoods are no more. Kerry Patch disappeared soon after WWII. The Dutch and Germans who built the south side are at their rest. The Italians on the Hill still run their restaurants and businesses though few live there anymore. The houses are tiny shotguns and more trouble to maintain than they're worth. Chris Orlet's beat on South Grand is an interesting heady mix of Asian cuisine and resale shops with Dunway Books #1 on the list, and the one place I like to frequent. But this city as a whole won't begin to recover unless and until all the off campus properties owned by St. Louis U and Washington U are put back on the tax roles so that the beleaguered working class residents can have a break. The other component required is major businesses. Peabody Coal is the last heritage company remaining in St. Louis. No city can run on just chic clubs and boutiques which is what the denizens of city hall prefer.
Pelligrino| 11.10.11 @ 1:58PM
Thanks, Petronious. I think that the American Spectator editors should hire you for an online five part series of articles on what you've viewed in St. Louis over the years. You know it very well.
This would make for good, informative reading. So many of us have been life nomads. Here for 3, 4, or 5 years and then onwards elsehwere. That can be okay. But it is also problematic. The real information is found in truth: What was doing on here 30, 40 years ago? Who was in charge? What were living conditions like? What has all this city taxation money really done (or failed to do)? What ethinic groups have thrived? Which ones bring the troubles? Why is schools failure so cyclical?
Thanks for the Gateway City commentary; it is appreciated.
Mr. Antle, give Petronious the small contract for a five part series!
W| 11.10.11 @ 2:26PM
Pittsburgh is the Gateway city.
RCV| 11.10.11 @ 4:35PM
To what?
Petronius| 11.10.11 @ 6:31PM
Thanks P
And say an Ave for the repose of the Soul of the last White Mayor we had. Raymond R Tucker deserves better than just his name on what was 12th St.
We are hosting the NRA Convention April 13-15 next year.
Seek| 11.11.11 @ 3:02PM
Tell me about it. I grew up several blocks west of the Delmar Loop. The area was, ahem, "in transition," but generally safe. But anything north of Olive and south of Page...well, whites should do their shopping by the evening. And that was when the going was good.
Pelligrino| 11.10.11 @ 10:46AM
Mr. Orlet, I think you see, we're on your side.
Fixing up and making respectable a disheveled home or city block?
Goodness, that is the work of saints.
The man above who describes what he experienced 25 years ago in Dallas is what I witnessed in parts of Chicago and Washington, D.C. a quarter century ago.
I now see some progress on blocks I knew in Chicago; I don't dare go near blocks I knew in D.C.
Mr. Orlet, I once pulled off the highway too early looking for gasoline (I was on fumes) in East St. Louis. That is now a decade ago. What I saw then, that night, was pretty close to an artist's rendition of Hell.
Fixing these places -- NOW! -- is the work of saints.
Learn to be an expert with handheld video & audio. Edit well on your computer. Post to YouTube. Provide the commentary below and solid, scripted narration so viewers grasp quickly what you are depicting.
With your well-prepared web posted vids shame ALL those around -- from city hall to the state capital -- until the gentrification is complete.
Our inner cities (schools, drugs, gangs, no-go zones, pimps, burglaries, muggings, corrupt cops, union managed city services, corrupt politicians, evil city councilors) are what makes me deplore my own nation.
Fight. Don't stop.
GW| 11.10.11 @ 11:16AM
Yet, we are "de-gentrifying" our very country. Currently, Hispanics, Haitians and poor Asians continue to make up the vast majority of immigrants--both illegal and legal--and conservatives have no problem with this? Why are we letting in those who will get on the government dole as soon as they can? What is wrong with restricting immigration to only people of European ancestry?
Derek Leaberry| 11.10.11 @ 11:16AM
In Washington DC, many developers who are also politically liberal have made big money in the condo boom along 14th Street(much of it burned in the '68 Martin Luther King riots) in the Logan Circle neighborhood, and along Massachusetts Ave NW between downtown and the Capitol. Previously destitute, run down neighborhoods became vibrant and civilized once again due to liberal entrepreneurs wanting to make big money. The free market worked although the neighborhoods experienced radical demographic change.
ella8| 11.10.11 @ 11:45AM
I would think any person of any ethnicity or class would appreciate safer and nicer neighborhoods to live in.
JimG33 | 11.10.11 @ 1:21PM
Here in NYC we've been hearing this crap for years. I worked as a self employed cabinetmaker for 35 years turning broken down slum housing back into the middle class housing is was built as. You always knew when the neighborhood was no longer a "hood" when didn't have to worry about being jumped for your tools at the end of the day. Keep up the good work, we need more "middle class taste" in this country.
Pelligrino| 11.10.11 @ 1:47PM
JimG, you sound just like a guy I met in Baltimore two years ago. He and his brother did their own work out of the backs of their rattletrap pickups. They were self-employed and good craftsmen.
Their definition of "no longer a hood" was no more bricks thrown at their pickup windshields when entering the neighbor"hood" at the start of the work day or when departing in the afternoon.
cicero| 11.10.11 @ 1:45PM
Whole Foods recently announced the opening of a new store in the mid town section of Detroit. It is scheduled to open sometime in the next year or so. They made a concerted effort to include the City of Detroit, and its community activists/organizers in the loop. For their efforts, they were attacked because "they were only openning the store so they could make money off the the people". This is the mentallity of the poverty lobby. This in a "city" that has not had a full service grocery store within its boundaries fo decades, because of the "slippage" problems. Go figure.
oldfart| 11.10.11 @ 2:48PM
A Whole Foods was one of the stores attacked and trashed in Berkley by the OWS folks. Go figure.
Blackthorne| 11.10.11 @ 3:47PM
You do not appear to have experienced the joys of fighting off ACORN agitators and VISTA volunteers yet. In our Art Museum neighborhood in Phila. those wonderful folks used to agitate by telling the original inhabitants that we were pushing them out. They would round up gang members and other unsavory types to surround us at civic ass'n. meetings, forcing us to run a gauntlet as we exited. It didn't matter to them that the then-current renters of the slumlords' awful housing wanted nothing more than to move to another part of the city where many of their friends had already gone for better housing and lower rents! And it also didn't matter that many of us "gentry" were dirt poor, and that we had been encouraging them to buy the houses they lived in. Back in those days you could buy a house for a few thousand dollars and mortgage payments were lower than what the slumlords were charging them. But the "community organizers" managed to stir up so much resentment and hatred that we lived in a constant state of fear for our lives.
I was very liberal in those days, until I asked a Democrat Party worker why they were encouraging those people to stay on in that rat- and roach-infested housing when they could do so much better. He rolled his eyes and patiently explained that you had to keep them concentrated in certain areas, and miserable, so that they would be reliable votes for the Party! If they spread out, it would dilute the vote. That was my virtual mugging! Beginning with Ronald Reagan I have voted with Conservatives ever since. Good luck in your neighborhood, and may you be spared the grief of the generation that pioneered befor you.
jane | 11.10.11 @ 4:33PM
What ever you want to call it, taking your available funds and credit ceiling, fixing a house up to an actual level where there is Pride of ownership, and seeing the glass as half full regarding the neighborhood your renovated home is in, should be commended rather than condemned!
Flee| 11.10.11 @ 8:46PM
As usual no good deed goes unpunished. I know it's not govt help but it should still be appreciated.
wedding dresses | 11.14.11 @ 3:10AM
Mr. Orlet, I once pulled off the highway too early looking for gasoline (I was on fumes) in East St. Louis. That is now a decade ago. What I saw then, that night, was pretty close to an artist's rendition of Hell.
Fixing these places -- NOW! -- is the work of saints.
Learn to be an expert with handheld video & audio. Edit well on your computer. Post to YouTube. Provide the commentary below and solid, scripted narration so viewers grasp quickly what you are depicting.
With your well-prepared web posted vids shame ALL those around -- from city hall to the state capital -- until the gentrification is complete.
1blumutt| 11.17.11 @ 4:52PM
Reading this took me back to when my husband and I did the same, in a section of Asheville, NC. I could look out our kitchen window and see down to the folks in the bushes behind the bathrooms on the edge of the park giving one another shots of some kind of dope. On nice days, with our kitchen door open, we put up with the blacks behind the bathrooms drinking, smoking their whatevers and yapping at one another with their f-word used with the frequency the majority of the mountain preachers repeated 'Amen.' We
worked, ouselves, and sometimes with the help of one of our four grown sons, on making three nice apartments out of the house, then went farther up in those beautiful mountains of Madison County and built a mountain home on a scenic knoll. That was, we thought, about the nearest to living in Heaven one could be on this plane of one's existence. Those NC mountains are absolutely beautiful, at every turn. The apartment renting experience had more downs than upsides, sorry to remember, again. And you are so right, when you fix your home nice and become concerned for security, etc., the "older residents" with a few exceptions, seem unfriendly, maybe a bit resentful of the newcomers' desires to upgrade their homes. This was found with younger blacks, but the older blacks were always friendly to us. People are complicated. Thanks for writing this article. It brought back so many, many memories---most, now, looked upon with pleasant thoughts. Good luck to you! We, now, live in a retirement community. It's great, here, in central Florida, but nothing, nothing like those mountains of North Carolina.
kevin pieper | 2.27.12 @ 8:02PM
You people are all blind, your claim to your right to property is based on the right to conquest, youve already sold your souls and america to greed for a quick buck on a baseless fiat currency. Truly a bunch of jaded old people who follow blindly your racist historians and politicians as they rob you blind and deprive your children of their
kevin pieper | 2.27.12 @ 8:05PM
true inheritance of freedom. you have given up america to facism, and will always be remembered in history as the generation that sold out america, to corporations, banks, and an out of control federal government, and cowered in your corners afraid to take a stand, doped up on chemical food and television. pitiful