Abstract
In January 1922, 40 years before sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term, a group of Greenwich Village artists organized one of New York City's earliest protests against gentrification. In an appeal to the District Attorney's office, the League of American Artists complained that rising rents in the bohemian district were pricing out painters and sculptors. The group blamed both landlords and wealthy newcomers. “Real estate agents are booming the studio idea and stressing the idea of the so called ‘free–life’ of artists to such an extent that bona–fide artists are being denied renewals of leases and are unable to obtain suitable studio quarters,” said League secretary Julian Bowes. Pseudo bohemians paid exorbitant rents “in order to win the reputation of being artistic, though they know no art,” complained illustrator Howard Chandler Christie. “Prices have gone up so that the poor artist who is struggling to make a start is being driven out of Manhattan,” warned Bowes. “Many artists have been driven over to Brooklyn.” The League admitted that the connection between urban bohemianism and real estate speculation was not new. “There has always been more or less invasion of the artistic quarters of this city by hypocrites and fakers, but the situation has become acute because of the greed of the landlords in deliberately seeking to supplant genuine artists with wealthy and questionable tenants.” Bowes implored the city to raid buildings. The District Attorney pointed out it was perfectly legal for anybody to live in a studio whether an “art– artist” or an art “pretender” (New York Times, September 1922).
New York City was not alone. As rents rose in New Orleans' French Quarter, Boston's Beacon Hill, and Charleston's Tradd Street, the New York Times predicted that sociologists would one day take interest in the mysterious process that as of yet had no name. “As in Greenwich Village,” mused the newspaper in 1922, “the most ardent of the poseurs [in the French Quarter], the youths with the longest and girls with the shortest hair, hail from Peoria and Oshkosh. Someday a patient sociologist will chart the invisible watershed which turns some of these acolytes of art toward New York Bay and some toward the Gulf” (New York Times, July 1922).
Gentrification is much older than Ruth Glass. Yet it is a phenomenon still without a history. One can find examples of adaptive reuse of ruins in cities from ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy (Jacks 2008). In the early 20th century, architects and artists rehabilitated townhouses, horse stables, adobe homes, barns, and tenements in New York City, Charleston, New Orleans, Washington DC, and many other cities, often displacing the poor (Osman 2016). Yet despite calls by scholars for more attention to process and change over time (Lees 2000), detailed historical research about the phenomenon is still scant. Scholarship about the “space” of gentrification is theoretically sophisticated with rich debates about displacement, landscape, region and scale. The “time” (Borer 2010) of gentrification is in comparison underexamined.
Gentrification history is still in its infancy. Urban historians have been slow to tackle the subject. But several recent books by young historians are a harbinger of a growing interest (Shkuda 2016; Goldstein 2017). Social scientists have made more progress. Smith (1996) gave the first stab at a “short history” in his seminal New Urban Frontier. Lees et al. (2007) distinguish between the small–scale, sweat equity “classical gentrification” first described by Ruth Glass in the 1960s and the more mature and multivaried phenomenon spearheaded today by developers, speculators, and the state. Hackworth and Smith (2001) offer the first periodization of gentrification that, although too strictly bound to neo–Marxist theory (Lees et al. 2007), provides a good foundation to build upon. Others have since modified and added to their three “waves” (Lees 2003; Osman 2016). More detailed research into the legal, political, social, and cultural evolution of gentrification will flesh out these initial frameworks or help develop alternatives.
Aside from the trite observation that gentrification has been around for a long time, what might historical analysis add to what is already an abundant scholarship on gentrification? First, a “long history” complicates theoretical frameworks that point to gentrification as evidence of a “new” city. Second, historical analysis, memory studies, and the sociology of time can help scholars better analyze the politics of space–time that are unique to gentrifying districts. Finally, by examining process and change over time, a historical approach might help break through the “theoretical logjam” and “protracted definitional debates” that hamper the field.
The Non–Newness of Gentrification
In contrast to suburbanization, which scholars consider a long–standing feature of growing cities, gentrification is often mistakenly treated as a break from the past. Many point to the phenomenon thus as evidence to support competing theories about the emergence of a “new” city (Beauregard and Haila 1997) that is neoliberal, postmodern, “inverted” (Ehrenalt 2012), or globalized. Gentrification though is a far older urban process. (In fact, the better research question may be why gentrification slowed during the mid–twentieth century in North America and Europe rather than why it emerged in the late twentieth.) This is not to debunk what are highly sophisticated and useful theoretical frameworks. But as Beauregard and Haila (1997) point out, cities are always incomplete with past and current influences and a mix of old and new processes. A “long history” will help scholars more accurately pinpoint continuities and breaks.
The Space–Time of Gentrification
More historical research will help scholars further analyze the politics of space–time (Clark 2005, Borer 2010) that are particular to gentrifying districts. Gentrification is a phenomenon uniquely invested in history. Gentrifiers are often drawn to “historic” areas and are motivated by a “preservation ethos” that is at times revanchist and at other times genuinely supportive of the poor (Brown–Saracino 2009). Long–time residents similarly draw from the past to fight gentrification in some cases and to market a sense of ethnic authenticity to eager consumers in others (Zukin 2009). Today all residents are influenced by the memory of earlier waves of gentrification. It would be fascinating to trace the evolution of this vernacular “historiography” of gentrification. What are the archives and other sources that residents use? How much of this history is real and imagined? “New arrivals,” “old timers,” “newcomers,” and “original residents” are temporal constructs that in every case study need to be rigorously historicized. In the 1970s, for example, many of the African–American and Latino renters facing displacement pressure from townhouse rehabbers in areas like Boston's South End or Brooklyn's Boerum Hill were relative newcomers. Harlem today has a much longer African–American history with a diverse constellation of African–American old–timers, middle–class newcomers, as well as Caribbean and African immigrants (Jackson 2003). Historical research and memory studies will help scholars more accurately unpack the ways residents mobilize time with varying degrees of power and success (Borer 2010). When do newcomers begin to position themselves as old timers? What groups of old timers do gentrifers valorize over others? How can history be used to emplace and displace?
Toward a History of Gentrification
After a golden age from the 1980s to the early 2000s, gentrification theory has hit a rut. Once groundbreaking debates about why the phenomenon happens on the local level, as well as its benefits and drawbacks, have largely been resolved or reached a “stalemate” (Zukin 1987). Attempts to look at gentrification on a global scale or at a wider array of urban processes are promising but spark criticism that the term has become too protean (Lees et al. 2016). “Protracted definitional debates” (Davidson 2011), rehashed questions, and “continued squabbles” (Slater 2004) have led to an “ontological crisis” and “impasse” (Davidson 2011; Lees 2000). The general public is more preoccupied with the issue than ever. But is there anything new to say? More historical and temporal analysis could perhaps offer one new avenue of research and help break through this “theoretical logjam” (Lees 2000).
Some of the knottiest debates about gentrification may have historical answers rather than purely theoretical ones. Is gentrification beneficial or detrimental for cities? A historical approach would reject a singular answer and instead draw on nuanced empirical studies (Freeman, 2006; Newman and Wyly 2006) and qualitative research to examine the changing impact of gentrification on the poor in different locations over time. When has gentrification caused more or less displacement and why? How has the role of the state changed over time and why? The answers likely do not fit into a neat declension narrative. But this does not mean a historical approach is necessarily devoid of critical perspectives, critiques of capitalism, or concerns about social justice (Clark 2005; Slater 2006). A rash of evictions in the late 1970s and early 1980s led to local mobilization against gentrification and condo conversions in cities around the United States for example. Who made up these early anti–gentrification groups? What were their political strategies and tactics? Fifty–four U.S. cities in the late 1970s and 1980s passed ordinances regulating speculation and condominium conversions (Hartman, Keating, and Legates, 1982). Did political activism successfully reduce rates of direct displacement (Ley and Dobson 2008)? Did the radicals of the late 1970s later support the social mix policies of the 1990s that displaced public housing residents (Goldstein 2017)?
A historical perspective can also provide a fuller understanding of the shifting cultural landscape of gentrification. Where scholars once debated about whether gentrification is emancipatory or revanchist, most agree now that the ideology and outlook of both new arrivals and long–time residents is quite diverse and nuanced (Brown–Saracino 2009; Freeman 2006; Jackson 2003). A historical analysis could add a temporal dimension to the mix. Different eras, such as the Lower East Side in the 1980s (Smith 1996), were likely more revanchist or emancipatory than others. The meaning of terms such as authenticity, diversity, the frontier, and even gentrification itself have changed over time. The evolving racial and class geography of gentrification could be better historicized. How did the racial, class, gender, and sexual politics of gentrification differ in Greenwich Village of the 1920s, Brownstone Brooklyn of the 1960s, the Lower East Side of the 1980s, and Harlem of the 2000s? One will likely find significant continuities and important differences.
Finally, a historical approach may offer an answer to the intractable debate about how to define gentrification. Should the term be limited to the rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of older buildings or expanded to include all types of development? I would argue that although the difference has blurred today, there does exist a salient historical distinction that should be retained. A purely class–based definition of gentrification fruitfully expands the scope of analysis in the present. But it becomes reductive when traced through the past. Greenwich Village rehabber Jane Jacobs and urban renewal czar Robert Moses may have been both participating in the embourgeoisment of the center city. But their histories intersect with the history of gender, architecture, historic preservation, race, urban politics, and environmentalism in unique ways. Townhouse rehabbers in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, had political and cultural links to antiwar activism, anarchist squatting, anti–expressway protests, urban homesteading, recycling, historic preservation, the “neighborhood movement” and “back to the land” environmentalism. Was their urban project really indistinguishable from Baron Von Haussmann in Paris? More work by historical sociologists can help develop a periodization for gentrification that expands its scope for the present without abandoning its distinct genealogy.
Conclusion
The goal of this short essay is not to provide a comprehensive overview of the wide–ranging scholarship on gentrification. I have likely overlooked work that has already addressed these themes. Nor is it to set up an outdated distinction between history and theory. Rather it is to suggest new research questions and to encourage scholars to examine the “time” of gentrification with the same impressive depth that they have its “space.” City dwellers around the world are struggling to make sense of gentrification. Time is of the essence.