Member-only story
Gentrify This!
The Work of Saving Urban Communities
My friend Edwin, a resident of Flatbush Brooklyn, moved to New York from Houston almost twenty years ago. He’s a theatre and acting teacher. Edwin once told me that when he first moved to Flatbush his white friends and colleagues wouldn’t even come to the neighborhood to hang out with him, thinking the area was a little too real, rough around the edges and much of the interior too. Ten years later, Edwin said, when he walked his dog down the same block ex-suburbanites peered suspiciously from the windows of swank brownstones. The rent was significantly higher by then, and the kids playing Jacks on the sidewalks had been replaced by new moms who jogged behind pricey baby carriages that looked like race cars.
Back in Houston, where I still live, the same tide is surging, seemingly unstoppable, like storm waters through a broken levy. Neighborhoods like Houston’s Third and Fourth Wards, have undergone facelifts that make them more and more unrecognizable with each passing day, with each complex of luxury apartments, with each park that now has a dog park where the basketball court used to be.
The common feature of all such “revitalized” neighborhoods is that they’re close to downtown. Close to work, close to the stadiums, close to the action. Traffic Savers.
