from ruth glass to spike lee

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30/03/2016 16:25From Ruth Glass to Spike Lee: 50 years of gentrification | Cities | The Guardian

Page 2 of 3http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/27/ruth-glass-spike-lee-gentrification-50-years

displacement of long-standing, blue-collar communities who could no longer afford to livethere. She identified the supplanting of net-curtained cheap lodgings by owner-occupiers'carefully stripped floorboards as a class struggle played out in three dimensions.

By 1988, rioters in New York's Tompkins Square Park were carrying placards reading"Gentrification is class war".

Gentrification's defenders have argued that repopulating the inner cities has been good forall, creating sustainably dense neighbourhoods that are not car-reliant, saving ourarchitectural heritage, rebuilding derelict sites and introducing articulate new residents whothen press for improved schools and services for all locals – rich or poor – in a kind of trickle-down aspiration.

Back in 2003, Columbia academic Lance Freeman argued that his quantitative research inHarlem shows that even low-income renters stay put and benefit from changes such aslower crime rates. Some of this, at least, may be true, but why should it take a middle-class

invasion to improve poor people's environments?

Freeman's findings have been rediscovered recently by New York commentators in favourof gentrification, leading to this week's outburst by film-maker Spike Lee at an event inBrooklyn. "Why," asked the Brooklyn-born Lee, "does it take an influx of white New Yorkersin the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better?

"The garbage wasn't picked up every motherfuckin' day when I was living in 165Washington Park. PS [Public School] 20 was not good. The police weren't around. When yousee white mothers pushing their babies in strollers, three o'clock in the morning on 125th

Street, that must tell you something."

Even if Freeman's claims are accurate, the crucial caveat here is that New York has manyrent-controlled or rent-stablised apartments (in 2011, just over 47% of NYC apartmentsoffered some form of rent protection [PDF]). In the UK, such controls have long beenabolished, and Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy scheme saw ownership of the best council-owned street properties shift en masse to the private sector. Precious little affordablehousing has been built to replace these losses, and even Brutalist council estates such asSheffield's Park Hill or London's Robin Hood Gardens are now being part-privatised in the

name of regeneration.

This demonstrates nicely that you don't need Georgian mouldings or Victorian stained glassto find something to gentrify. Since the first conservation areas in England were designatedunder the Civic Amenities Act 1967, heritage has become a whipping-boy for those arguingthat conservation favours the rich. If it does, that is not the down to the protection of architectural history per se, but to a property market that now places a premium on heritageproperties after previously decrying conservation's restrictions on change. Where propertyvalues remain low, such as Liverpool's Welsh Streets, entire 19th-century neighbourhoodsare still under threat of demolition.

With London, on the other hand, in the throes of "super-gentrification", fuelled by foot-

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/03/chattering-classes-islington-housing-markethttp://www.welshstreets.co.uk/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2009/jul/28/robin-hood-gardens-architecturehttp://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/dec/30/park-hill-estatehttp://www.theguardian.com/http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/26/spike-lee-gentrification-rant-transcripthttp://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1827_reg.html


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30/03/2016 16:25From Ruth Glass to Spike Lee: 50 years of gentrification | Cities | The Guardian

Page 3 of 3http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/27/ruth-glass-spike-lee-gentrification-50-years

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loose international property investments, some of its outer suburbs are getting poorer ashigher rentals spin the low-paid outwards. Government policies such as housing-benefitcaps and the bedroom tax can only fuel this centrifugal force, while rising land values makesocial housing provision ever more difficult.

This drives out both the low-paid workers and the initial pioneers – the artists, designers

and young entrepreneurs – who helped save our historic inner cities in the first place. It is afuture that has long-term consequences for creative- and knowledge-based economies.

And it is happening faster than ever before. The vitally productive time-gap between artistsusing their own "sweat equity" to create studios in empty industrial buildings and theirmarketing as lofts to hedge-fund managers has dwindled from decades to a matter of months.

Collecting his 2014 gold medal awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects lastmonth, the historian and theorist Joseph Rykwert argued that "the price of property in city

centres is making it impossible, particularly in the big cities, for any kind of social mix totake place. It's castrating the whole notion of city life."

It is entirely possible that the capital will end up resembling Paris or Sydney – where socialproblems and poverty are, on the whole, confined to the very edge of the city, and creativityis stifled by noise- and mess-averse new residents. Glass predicted as much: "London maysoon be faced with an embarrass de richesses in her central area," she wrote in 1964, "andthis will prove to be a problem too." The sharks are circling.

Or, as Lee so pithily put it: "There were brothers playing motherfuckin' African drums in

Mount Morris Park for 40 years, and now they can't do it anymore because the newinhabitants said the drums are loud. My father's a great jazz musician. He bought a house innineteen-motherfuckin'-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin' people moved in last year andcalled the cops on my father … He doesn't even play electric bass! It's acoustic! Get the fuckoutta here!"

• Robert Bevan is a writer on architecture and cities, and a regeneration consultant.
http://www.robert-bevan.com/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/sep/18/riba-gold-medal-joseph-rykwerthttp://syndication.theguardian.com/automation/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcities%2F2014%2Ffeb%2F27%2Fruth-glass-spike-lee-gentrification-50-years&type=article&internalpagecode=2051246https://profile.theguardian.com/save-content?INTCMP=DOTCOM_ARTICLE_SFL&returnUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcities%2F2014%2Ffeb%2F27%2Fruth-glass-spike-lee-gentrification-50-years&shortUrl=/p/3n5y2&platform=web:Safari:desktophttp://www.theguardian.com/tone/featureshttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/new-yorkhttp://www.theguardian.com/film/spikeleehttp://www.theguardian.com/society/communitieshttp://www.theguardian.com/society/regenerationhttp://www.theguardian.com/cities/urbanisation

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