{"id":11085,"date":"2017-01-22T23:35:58","date_gmt":"2017-01-23T04:35:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=11085"},"modified":"2024-12-19T14:29:25","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T19:29:25","slug":"is-gentrification-going-the-way-of-slum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2017\/01\/is-gentrification-going-the-way-of-slum\/","title":{"rendered":"Is \u201cGentrification\u201d Going the Way of \u201cSlum\u201d?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"caption\"<\/a>
Second and Pine Streets, 1958 (PhillyHistory,.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When it comes to talking about urban change, words serve their purpose, until they are considered inadequate, wrong or just go out of style. \u201cSlum\u201d and \u201curban renewal\u201d for instance. Usage of these terms peaked<\/a> in the second half of the 1960s, but then faded. Could it be we\u2019re beginning to see a similar downturn for “gentrification\u201d?<\/p>\n

Sociologist Ruth Glass coined “gentrification\u201d in 1964. \u201cOnce this process of \u2018gentrification\u2019 starts,\u201d she wrote of a downtrodden district in London, \u201cit goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.\u201d Glass\u2019s word focuses on the shifting \u201csocial character\u201d of communities\u2014poor neighborhoods becoming upscale destinations.<\/p>\n

A year before Glass introduced the term, Nathaniel Burt wryly noted in Philadelphia Gentleman<\/em>: \u201cRemodeling old houses is\u2026one of Old Philadelphia\u2019s favorite indoor sports, and to be able to remodel and consciously serve the cause of civic revival all at once has done to the heads of the upper classes like champagne.\u201d Burt understood \u201cthe Renaissance of Society Hill\u201d was \u201cjust one piece of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle\u201d with the potential \u201cto transform the city completely.\u201d But a one-word shorthand for that complex puzzle? Not for Burt.<\/p>\n

City planner Edmund Bacon preferred “renewal\u201d in his 1962 film, Form, Design and the City<\/em><\/a>. But, according to Denise Scott Brown, Bacon put too much emphasis on retailing and on “a certain kind of \u2018center city living\u2019 as expressed by Society Hill \u2026 its coffee bars, tree lined streets, cobbled squares.” Such amenities appealed more to \u201csophisticated intellectuals and professionals\u201d than to anyone else. Anyway, Scott Brown concluded, they are “only part of the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the cat was soon out of the bag. The popular press and the public came to love the idea of gentrification. In October 1977, the Inquirer<\/em>\u00a0introduced the word on page one: “Gentrification is an imposing word for a process familiar to all Philadelphians,\u201d wrote Richard Ben Cramer, \u201cespecially to those who lived 20 years ago in Society Hill, or 10 years ago near the art museum or more recently and Queen Village\u2026 \u00a0A neighborhood close to Center City, filled with poorer residents, mostly renters, is suddenly “discovered\u201d by middle-class people who rush in to buy and renovate the houses in the area. The run-down neighborhood suddenly becomes attractive. Higher-priced shops and restaurants open. The sidewalks, gardens, curbs, even the streets themselves are better tended. And the poor? Well, the poor go elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Caption\"<\/a>
Society Hill – “Honeymoon Couple” near Second and Pine Streets, June 17, 1968. Office of the City Representative. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the year following Cramer\u2019s story, \u201cgentrification\u201d appeared five times in the Inquirer<\/em> and the Daily News<\/em>. In 1979 and 1980 it was used 25 times. Between 1981 and 1990, \u201cgentrification\u201d had become a staple of urban discourse, appearing more than 500 times. Just \u201cas Ruth Glass intended,\u201d noted social scientists, gentrification \u201csimply yet very powerfully\u201d captured \u201cclass inequalities and injustices\u201d\u2014even if some preferred the term for the wrong reasons. It implied the existence of a privileged \u201cgentry\u201d bored by their suburban experiment, willing to return to the city for less foliage, but a richer quality of life. Popular opinion assumed gentrification would, in time, significantly transform the entire city.<\/p>\n

The term gained credibility and legitimacy as an accepted shorthand for the cycle of disinvestment, decline, reinvestment and revival. Public and planners came to believe that gentrification\u2019s cycles of disinvestment and reinvestment were desirable and sustainable\u2014a viable model for urban change.<\/p>\n

As evidence, advocates presented the soaring values of Society Hill real estate, which rose nearly 250 percent during the 1960s alone. Discussions quickly turned to \u201cwhat would become the next Society Hill\u201d? Queen Village? Fairmount? Northern Liberties? But those were only three neighborhoods in a city with scores more, most lacking proximity to Center City.<\/p>\n

Critics saw gentrification as \u201cpompous and irrelevant,\u201d an \u201canti-vernacular\u201d \u201cTrojan horse for post-industrial sustainability.\u201d Neil Smith\u2019s close look at data on the newcomers to Society Hill in the 1960s revealed that the vast majority were not the suburban \u201cgentry\u201d being re-urbanized, but folks from other city neighborhoods. Only 14% came from suburbia. Smith concluded that \u201cthe so-called urban renaissance has been stimulated more by economic than cultural forces.\u201d When it came to making a \u201cdecision to rehabilitate an inner city structure, one consumer preference tends to stand out above the others\u2014the preference for profit.\u201d<\/p>\n

How had this flawed shorthand made its way into the heart of the urban lexicon? In \u201cWalking Backwards to the Future,\u201d researchers suggested that perhaps the original, heady promise of a dual upgrade in class and investment was the result of \u201ctoo many glasses of chardonnay \u2026 shared between researcher and gentrifier.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, more and more, studies discussing gentrification include commentary suggesting counter-intuitive, even contradictory findings suggesting that it is not the defining experience in Philadelphia, or most American cities. One recent Pew study found that only 15 of Philadelphia\u2019s 372 residential census tracts gentrified from 2000 to 2014, and that these tracts tended to be contiguous with, or near, Center City. Meanwhile, \u201cmore than 10 times that many census tracts\u2014164 in all\u2014experienced statistically significant drops in median household income\u201d during the same years.<\/p>\n

In other words, after more than half a century, \u201cgentrification\u201d may finally be fading as the reliable, accurate and useful description for urban change. Instead, we should be examining the more complicated \u201cbroad array of influences\u201d and those, for the time being, are averse to shorthand.<\/p>\n

[Sources include: Denise Scott Brown, Review of Form, Design, and the City, Journal of the American Institute of Planners<\/em>, 28:4, 1962; Richard Ben Cramer, \u201cBack to the City, London Style,\u201d The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, October 9, 1977; Susan Mayhew, A Dictionary of Geography<\/em>, (Oxford University Press; 5th ed.2015); Dylan Gottlieb, \u201cGentrification,\u201d The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia<\/em>, (Rutgers, 2014); Neil Smith, \u201cGentrification,\u201d The Encyclopedia of Housing<\/em> (Willem van Vliet ed., 1998); Neil Smith, \u201cToward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People,\u201d in The Gentrification Debates: A Reader<\/em> (Routledge, 2013); Tim Butler and Chris Hamnett, \u201cWalking Backwards to the Future\u2014Waking Up to Class and Gentrification in London,\u201d Urban Policy And Research<\/em>, 27:3, 2009; Philadelphia\u2019s Changing Neighborhoods\u2014Gentrification and other shifts since 2000<\/em> (PEW Report, May 2016).]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When it comes to talking about urban change, words serve their purpose, until they are considered inadequate, wrong or just go out of style. \u201cSlum\u201d and \u201curban renewal\u201d for instance. Usage of these terms peaked in the second half of the 1960s, but then faded. Could it be we\u2019re beginning to see a similar downturn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11085\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}