I had a great Thanksgiving. Just Maxine, Keith and me, at their house in Silicon Valley. An earlier year, the house would have been mobbed with family, but we’re at a point in our lives when some of those family members have passed on, and others have moved out of the area, in some cases halfway around the world. Keith has cancer, just recently diagnosed: he begins chemo today (Monday). All of which made this Thanksgiving, for the three of us, more poignant than ever.
We watched the entire “Get Back” series, walked a lot and enjoyed the crisp, sunny Fall weather. It was nice, to be honest, to not think about politics, police and encampments for a while—although I did not make the mistake of thinking that those issues have disappeared from my plate. They have not. I’m back now, and I think the Coalition for a Better Oakland is going to be very busy in the future, in our self-appointed guise of Guardians of the City.
I happened to pick up a book from Keith’s bookshelf called “How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood,” by P.E. Moskowitz, a gay freelance journalist native New Yorker, whose views are decidedly what we might call “progressive.” He is thoroughly, adamantly anti-gentrification, although he points out, with abashed modesty, that when he moved, a few years ago, from his birth neighborhood, in the West Village of Manhattan, to Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, because he could no longer afford to live there, he himself became a gentrifier.
I’m a gentrifier too, I suppose. I moved from Bernal Heights, in San Francisco, to Adams Point in 1987 because I wanted to own my own place and I couldn’t afford anything in San Francisco. When I came here, the neighborhood was poor and sketchy—which is why I could afford a mere $57,000 for a one-bedroom condo. Since then, my neighborhood has become part of fashionable Uptown, and new condos are selling for upwards of $600,000.
What’s happened in Williamsburg and Oakland is also happening in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco and many other big old American cities. But neighborhoods are always changing. I was born in the South Bronx, which for most of the preceding fifty years had been a Jewish community. When the Jews moved out, in the 1960s and 1970s, they were replaced by Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Haitians, who in turn were replaced, and are being replaced, by Yuppies. So it goes. You can’t freeze a neighborhood in amber. Change is constant. My attitude toward gentrification is that fighting it is like trying to stop the ocean.
For that reason, I never had the emotional response to gentrification here in Oakland that many others have. It’s true I’ve lost some good friends, who had to move to Portland, Redding or someplace else, when Oakland got unaffordable. I feel bad for them, but I don’t really know what to do about it. Even Moskowitz, the gentrifier who moved to Williamsburg, admits in his book, “It’s hard [for me] not to feel guilt living here…I was priced out of Manhattan, but I know my existence in this borough comes at the cost of the erasure of others’ cultures and senses of home.” He tries, Moskowitz says, to make amends in certain ways, “but I often fail. Brooklyn, like the West Village, is irrevocably changed, and I know I’m part of that.”
Moskowitz and I, then, are remarkably alike in our house-hunting activities and their effects. The only difference is that I don’t feel the “guilt” he does. At the same time, reading his remarkable book has made me more aware of the underlying reasons why neighborhoods like the West Village (and Adams Point) change: zoning laws, construction costs, the role of trade unions, urban renewal, fashionable ideas that seem good at the time, suburbanism, mass transit, the desire of people to live in nice places, and virtually every other aspect of modernism that impacts where people live—which means, pretty much, every aspect of modernism.
Viewed from that perspective, it seems to me that there are no simple answers to the problem of gentrification (and its bastard child, homelessness). There may be no answer at all, beyond nibbling at the edges of the problem. I grow impatient at the sweeping “solutions” advanced by people like Carroll Fife and Car Brooks, who seem to feel that the simple expedient of voting for “progressives” is the magic bullet to end homelessness and make housing affordable again. There is no magic bullet. The suggestion that there is makes ameliorating the problem that much more difficult.
Steve Heimoff