Boston University Sociology Professor Japonica Brown-Saracino has spent her career chasing the idea of gentrification from academic department to academic department and then out into the wider world. Her new book, The Death and Life of Gentrification, documents what happens when a concept goes feral, refusing to be restrained by consistent meanings or definitions and instead become the toothy metaphor that eats everything: every conversation about urban affluence, every conversation about race, every conversation about displacement.
Brown-Saracino tracks not only how gentrification became the all-purpose explanation for how Americans live now, but also it became a shibboleth for well-meaning gentrifiers attempting to signal to each other that they get it even while worrying about being pushed out of their own neighborhoods by finance bros.
Upper Middle spoke to Brown-Saracino about a word that won’t settle down. (The Death and Life of Gentrification is now available on Amazon. Big recommend. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Why has “gentrification” become such a powerful word for educated urban people – almost a kind of moral shorthand for understanding how power, money, and inequality work?
We really struggle to talk about social inequalities, and especially about social inequalities related to capitalism and racial capitalism. Gentrification is often an indirect way of signaling not only that we understand these things are at play, but that there’s a big us versus them dynamic. Many gentrifiers are self-conscious and self-critical. Some are also engaged in performative hand-wringing because they are surrounded by people who do not consider it acceptable to say that gentrification can be a good thing. The term has become a criticism, right? When Dunkin’ Donuts starts selling churros, for instance, there was a discourse about the “gentrification of the churro.” That’s an implicit critique.
Also, it’s a good word. It suggests action. It implies that there are characters involved and that something is happening. It serves as a storytelling device. I think we experience a lot of grief about how communities transform, and gentrification is a way into talking near some of those feelings. It’s evocative in that way.
Is gentrification common? Is it more common than it used to be? Or are we just stretching it to cover different issues for which we lack more precise language?
If we think of gentrification as it was first defined—the movement of the professional classes into working-class neighborhoods, leading to displacement and a change in social character – that’s fairly rare today because many cities are already affluent. Those places have already gentrified. But if we take a more generous approach and include what my colleague Loretta Lees calls super-gentrification – the replacement of professional classes by people in tech and finance – it may be more common.
Any debate around this is also affected by a lack of data. Because poor people move a lot, quantitative studies of displacement are difficult, especially in neighborhoods below the MSA median household income. Then you have neighborhoods like Jamaica Plain in Boston, where I live, that are deemed “ineligible” to gentrify because they’ve already changed so much – but continue to change massively. They don’t get studied. I think that has given us a false sense that displacement is less common than it actually is.
When we talk about gentrification, are we really talking about displacement or race – or, more specifically, the experience of Black Americans?
More often than not, conversations about gentrification aren’t about home prices – or at least not just about home prices. When Ruth Glass defined the term in 1964, she was mostly talking about white professionals moving into white, working-class ethnic enclaves. The racial preference of white gentrifiers was to move into Italian, Jewish, Irish, or German neighborhoods. But once those neighborhoods gentrified, the focus shifted to Latinx and Black neighborhoods. Now, some people define gentrification explicitly in racial terms because that’s where capital is moving.
That’s understandable, given that gentrification is often driven by racial capitalism and the racial preferences of white gentrifiers. But we also have Black gentrifiers. Reality is complicated.
During the Black Lives Matter protests, some people were chanting, “Fire, fire, gentrifier!” The word absolutely evokes racial politics. But it can also allow people to avoid discussing racial experiences directly. In the book, I write about a documentary on the loss of Boston’s North End as an authentic Italian American enclave. By focusing on gentrification, the film sidesteps white flight, the bussing crisis in Boston, and the changed racialization of Italian Americans, which allowed them to move from a poor, redlined neighborhood into the suburbs3. Sometimes gentrification provides a way of talking about race without having to talk about race; sometimes it’s a way of avoiding talking about race.
How can a professional person with some home equity talk about super-gentrification – that is, their fear of being pushed out or hemmed in by the very rich – without sounding like a total prick?
That’s a good question, but a hard one. I used to tell students in urban sociology that a basic fact of urban life is that which goes up must come down. Gentrification only began because neighborhoods that were middle class were disinvested and became working class or poorer, which allowed capital to move in. But as affluence concentrated geographically, we entered a kind of holding pattern. Neighborhoods just go up.
The result is that homeowners with significant equity wind up unable to move, unable to afford renovations, or unable to use that equity without losing their job or pulling their kids out of school. There are people with big paychecks who have privileged problems that are problems nonetheless. The issue is that we treat these as individual problems. They’re not. They’re collective problems.
That idea—that gentrification recasts complex issues as “us versus them”—runs throughout the book. How did you see that dynamic play out in your research on lesbian bars?
I did a research project on dyke bar commemorations in four U.S. cities, and I found that a lot of commemorative projects held up gentrification as the cause of the loss of lesbian spaces. But when I spoke to the commemorators privately, their explanations for the closure of bars were much more complex: online dating, access to straight bars, debt – lots of things.
Gentrification loomed so large in the public discourse because it elicited an emotional response from audiences. It created a sense of shared marginality among a racially diverse, class-diverse group of people who weren’t totally sure what they had in common anymore. Gentrification made everyone in the room feel marginal together.
It’s striking that so much gentrification rhetoric focuses not on people, but on small businesses. Why is that?
Loss of institutions is a marker for the loss of people. You might not notice if a few people on your block leave over a six-month period, but if the last lesbian bar in your city closes, or the last independent bookshop can’t afford to stay open, or a mom-and-pop grocery store that’s operated for generations shuts its doors—that’s very noticeable.
Why is the conversation about gentrification so focused on urban spaces rather than on rural areas, where you often see conflict between the professional-managerial class and people with money—often right-leaning small business owners—who identify culturally with the working class?
This has always bugged me because I’m from a small town that went through this. Sociology in the United States emerged in the early part of the twentieth century from urban sociology at the University of Chicago, and my whole discipline has stayed locked into that perspective. Of course there’s gentrification in rural areas, and of course shows like Fixer Upper are about that kind of gentrification.
In the late 1970s, the family farm was struggling as industry was leaving cities. Both of those forces opened up opportunities for Baby Boomers facing a housing shortage and culturally rejecting the suburban lives of their parents. The alternatives were both urban and rural. It’s always been more than one thing.
No one thinks America’s housing crisis is getting resolved anytime soon. Does that mean the gentrification discourse is here to stay?
As long as this dilemma remains, I think we’re going to keep talking about gentrification. We don’t have a better word for what’s happening, so we’ll keep using this one for want of better language.
