Food is undoubtedly one of the most important things in my life. Aside from the fact that I am human and my survival depends on it, in some of my most profound memories I am surrounded by food ⎼ Thanksgiving dinners with both the traditional turkey and jollof rice; large, roundtable dim sum meals with college friends; or passionate family arguments over moussaka and horiatiki salad. Food is a powerful tool; it satisfies needs, cultivates experiences, and is most often shared with others.

I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, the City of Roses and… food carts (not trademarked, yet true). By the time I was old enough to start “going out” with friends, the thing to do was find the new, up-and-coming food spot. We would go to the known “hip” areas, like the Alberta Arts District, Hawthorne Boulevard, or North Mississippi Avenue. There, we frivolously spent our few dollars, grabbed lunch followed by an afternoon snack, then hopped into a vintage shop or small boutique. Little did I know at the time that these blocks were products of drastic shifts that marginalized communities of color.

On one particular day in the spring quarter of my first year in college, I was sitting in my “Introduction to Sociology” professor described revitalization in urban neighborhoods that can lead to the displacement of those already there⎼most often poor, communities of color. Following her description, she introduced the word gentrification⎼the first time I honestly heard and understood the word. I realized this was the word for what I saw happening all over Portland. I became unshakably aware of the extreme transformations in my neighborhood and over my lifetime, realizing the difference between the Portland I knew versus the Portland my older brothers knew. With new eyes, I saw what happened and what was happening to Martin Luther King Boulevard, the street I grew up on. With new eyes, I recognized that my favorite go-to food spots were all in areas that underwent and are undergoing similar changes.

I remember coming home for winter break during my junior year of college and taking my father and stepmother to a French-inspired restaurant I had tended frequently in the past. As we were ordering our food, I watched my father inspect the building and the people dining alongside us, while repeatedly acknowledging his disbelief that a restaurant like this existed in this particular area, Alberta.

Food is a powerful tool; it satisfies needs, cultivates experiences, and is most often shared with others.
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Alberta, known now as the Alberta Arts District, was a predominantly Black neighborhood in the mid-1900s. It was a poor neighborhood with neglected residential areas. In the 1960s, crime rates, vandalism, and looting increased as a product of racial discrimination. By the late 1980s, gang activity increased exponentially. Grassroots organizations swooped in to save the neighborhood, providing low income housing for residents and inviting in new businesses and art spaces. The revitalization was pivotal for the community, in more ways than one— soon, longtime residents could not afford the rising housing prices, and several were approached to sell their homes. And, thus began the change of the Alberta district to how we see it today.

As I watched my dad nibble at the calamars fris and happily finish his chicken cordon bleu, I felt conflicted. On the one hand, I loved this restaurant, and it seemed that my father appreciated the food too, yet it may never have existed in the old Alberta. On the other, its existence represented the displacement of poor residents, and the centering of the desires of the typically white, yuppie transplants that had moved in. This restaurant likely didn’t have my family in mind when they thought about their clientele. But I went there all the same.

I’ve been having this experience all around the world. Recently, I visited Deptford, South East London, a district within the London Borough of Lewisham. Like Northeast Portland, this area is becoming a trendy arts and music hub. I was in the area for an Afrobeats-meets-Jazz show at a local vegan bar. Walking around, I saw vendors closing shop, families that looked like my own, and heard my mother tongue, Yoruba, spoken casually with myself not included in the conversation. These are extremely rare occasions in Portland and Seattle to say the least.

With much time to spare before the show, I found a restaurant that looked familiar. It had the trademark, millennial chic aesthetic — a small room accented with white marble and wood, small tables pushed close together for an intimate feel, and no chairs, but benches and chic barstools. I sat down at the windowsill for a dinner of gnocchi accompanied by a glass of trendy orange wine and, of course, complementary bread. I sat, ate, and observed.

I realized that there was a lively Nigerian fast-food restaurant busy with customers across the street. The restaurant was like a phenomenon to me, having never seen an establishment of the sort in Portland and Seattle. The restaurant I was dining in soon began to fill, leaving me and the woman across from me as the only people of color there. Passing commuters would glance at the restaurant, look at me inquisitively, and then look up to check the name of the space. A particular man, I suppose intrigued by me, paused and began to act out eating motions, pointing at my food and giving me a suggestive thumbs up.

Still stunned by this non-verbal conversation and attempting to fully grasp what he was saying, the man took this as an opportunity to come into the restaurant and speak to me. I listened as carefully as I could through his thick Caribbean accent, as he chatted with me about his inexperience with Italian food. At the corner of my eye, I saw the waitress make a beeline towards him, anticipating escorting the man out. Still expressing, and almost hitting her in the face with his hand motions, he said goodbye, leaving me with the phrase, “Rasta, Pasta.” After this, I knew I had to leave. It wasn’t the man that troubled me, or the waitress rattled by his presence. It was my familiarity with every moving part.

This restaurant likely didn’t have my family in mind when they thought about their clientele. But I went there all the same.
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As cities continue to grow rapidly, re-develop their identity, and invest in the “revitalization” of supposedly dismissible areas, gentrification feels more and more inevitable. Though, gentrification does not have to mean colonization. In an article with The Root, restaurant owner Preeti Mistry in Oakland, California, admits she is a part of the gentrification, but is not the colonizer. She ensures that she does not disregard the people in the community present before her. The colonizer strips identity, creates boundaries, disregards ancestry, and separates themselves from the people who they took from. So, are my favorite restaurants colonizers or gentrifiers?

As I ponder this question myself, I am stumped with deciphering what the appropriate actions are for me and my fellow foodies. In Deptford, I recognized the disconnect between the restaurant and its environment. They were across the street from each other, but existed worlds away. I do believe that it is important to be actively conscious in the businesses we invest in, aware of the owner, the work they do beyond the menu or services provided, and their impact in the community. Yet, the businesses doing great work can still be a part of the impending gentrification or even the colonization of the area.

I think it is imperative that while our palates thrive, we remain aware of the impact of the dish, beyond what we taste, and hold restaurants accountable to their position in the community. An awareness in food is also understanding how it is being used as a tool—a tool either to destroy or to cultivate from what has already been built, maintaining tradition and preserving culture. New restaurants can still work to serve the whole community, not just yuppie white transplants. I want to be sure the integrity of the community is preserved when I enjoy my next glass of orange wine.

The tragedy of Grenfell Tower has awakened the London community, in the most violent way, to the negative impacts of gentrification and “regeneration” projects on social inequality. The fire of June 14 that consumed almost 80% of the social housing tower block should have been a self-contained incident within that 1970s brutalist structure. Instead, the flames turned into a fireball, thanks to the newly fitted cladding placed on the building to “beautify” its appearance for those who looked at it from luxury apartments nearby.

Regeneration plans were set in motion for the Silchester Estate and Lancaster Estate of Latimer Road, to be torn down in the beginning of September 2018. It was the fire at Grenfell that stopped those plans from happening — for now. The severity of this event has left a physical and emotional mark on the community of North Kensington — and many residents have been dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and flashbacks of that terrible day.

In Brutal Presence is an ongoing documentary project I started in 2016 that focuses on certain realities surrounding social housing in London, and the impacts of gentrification and “revitalization” to urban communities through the borough of North Kensington. The neighboring council estates and tower blocks of Grenfell have all shared the same history and are all part of the same story. They have witnessed the changes to their neighborhoods over the years through the process of gentrification and are increasingly concerned about the impacts this will have on their future.

These photos and resident quotes—collected between June 14, 2017 and the present—help shed light on what’s happening in the area.

Vasiliki Stavrou of Bramley House, 35 years resident of North Kensington, W10

“Bramley House, where I have lived for 35 years, was significantly impacted during the fire of June 14. There was burning debris landing on and around the building like rain, and access to Bramley House was restricted by the police for safety reasons. Further concerns were raised about the stability of the tower, which was likely to fall directly onto us.

Some residents were taken into emergency accommodation, while the majority of us were left behind […] forgotten.

Witnessing the fire has caused emotional trauma in the community, which has had severe consequences on both our physical and mental health. We have been directly affected by the events that took place, as well as the response of central government in the days immediately following the fire. We face the future with uncertainty, and no one knows what the long-term effects might be.

There was a time when a question was raised whether it was reasonable to have social housing side-by-side with the private houses. I think most people felt that we shouldn’t live separately; otherwise we’re going to create ghettos. In North Kensington, you will find one long street where one side is social housing — and across the road  are private Victorian houses. We have always had a good mixture of both.

But then the question about the future of North Kensington and its residents became a concern, once the council started trying to implement a long process of regeneration schemes to the area.

People worried a lot about these regeneration schemes. We personally didn’t agree to them, but unfortunately, in all three different plans our building — Bramley House — was included as part of the Silchester Estate. They would have used every single inch of the estate possible. […] Many people decided to move out. Of course, their lives were very much disrupted.”

Lynda of Silchester Road, 38 years resident of North Kensington

“That cladding they put on Grenfell to make it look more glamorous, that’s all they put it on for — because what good is it to anyone? It’s not good, is it? Thank God they didn’t put it on the others.

We had letters come through that said the council was going to pull down the other estates — but since Grenfell happened, it’s all backfired. That’s why they didn’t want to spend any money doing work on them.

They gave us all the plans and they put them through the letterbox, telling us what they were going to do in the area. They wanted to do it up like a little village, build little houses, make it all nice and that.

And where were we supposed to go? Out in Mongolia, I suppose! They don’t care, do they? As long as they get what they want. And now, they’ve had to put it off. They’ve got no money because of Grenfell. It’s all gotten away.

I’ve paid into the system all of my life. Unless you own it [your flat], you’ll never get anything out of it.”

Tarek Gotti of Henry Dickens Court W11, 26 years resident of North Kensington

“When I think about being offered a flat on the 24th floor of Grenfell Tower, before the fire, and how the council claimed they didn’t know I was disabled and mentally ill — I realize now what could have happened to me had I gone through with it by force. Because it was forced — they said ‘take it or leave it’ when I was looking for housing.

I lost a lot of friends in the fire. I lost a total of 13 friends, including one family member. My kids lost most of their friends from the nurseries, and from the primary and secondary schools next door.

The council was never there for us; we told them about these buildings. We saw they had lots of major work that needed to be done. We told them about this cladding, ‘What is it? Is it necessary? […]’ And we know it was done because of the rich gym and the rich school next door. You can’t put an ugly building next to two rich, fabulous buildings.

As a resident, I feel I’ve been failed. The Government has failed me in every way. They see us as third class citizens, and then ignore us.

It shouldn’t have taken Grenfell to happen for every ward, or every country, or every community to come together. It should have been happening from before Grenfell. Grenfell wouldn’t have happened if they had listened before about what the community wanted.”

Teresa Griffin of Bramley House W10, 28 years resident of North Kensington

“The night of Grenfell, I really wish I’d stayed in bed and not seen anything. I really wished and prayed to God that I hadn’t heard (my daughter Amelia), and I’d just stayed in bed.

Bramley House would’ve been in the prize line for it (Grenfell), had the building fallen. There are people living here that should’ve been evacuated. The council didn’t value our lives enough to do that.

When we got a letter from the council about three years ago, talking about refurbishments and ‘upping’ the area, and knocking down these flats in order to get the area looking ‘nice’ — I just couldn’t believe it. They wanted to knock it all down and build new homes.

We had the choice that if we wanted to come back [after the refurbishment], we could come back, but we wouldn’t be able to afford the rent and they knew that. When the council says, ‘You haven’t got an option, we’re knocking them down and that’s that,’ they can do it; it’s called a compulsory purchase.

I went to a couple of these meetings where they’d show us the plans for Notting Hill. It would knock us out in every way. Every working class person would be put out of the field — people who have been here a lifetime.

It was class cleansing. […] They were going to put us out and we had no choice in it — nothing — we didn’t have a say in it. They were doing it and that was that. A lot of people had sleepless nights because of it.”

Elizabeth Stravoravdis of Kensal House W10, 26 years resident of North Kensington

“Before the fire, you would walk down and see Grenfell — with its panels — and it looked absolutely smashing! Then you saw the gym — this massive structure — with its beautiful architecture, and the academy looking like Lego Land […] but none of it was functional; it was all done for the money. It’s like having a suit sewn to look pretty but it’s not actually sewn properly; you wear it once and it falls apart.

We aren’t short of talented architects or talented designers, or knowledge in structure. And yet, we can’t build or renovate a simple building and make it stand or not burn. How? Why? The answer is the money.

What we want is some common sense, a few more mums running the world.

Mums care about the future generations. They don’t just care about their pockets and what’s in their fridge today, or what’s in their bank account today. They’re thinking about what they’re going to leave behind.

Since the fire, I have seen survivors more than survive. I have seen them become warriors. These are the people who are still in temporary housing, who are still in hotels. I’ve seen the bereaved become conquerors. Because this is not normal to be crushed to such a point, where you turn into Hercules.

Despite knowing how powerless we are and not funded, we are still carrying on for our children and our grandchildren. I like to think that even if they succeed in doing their social cleansing in this area, our children and grandchildren would’ve seen a heroism in us. I hope we’ve given our young people and our children a good example of what a decent human being does, and what a decent human being is.”

Singh Minder of Goodrich Court W10, 50 years resident of North Kensington

“The media has always stirred things. Do you think they’re really worried about what’s happened here (at Grenfell)? They’re not going to solve anything. They’re here to discuss it. They’ll discuss about how Syria has been bombed, Russia and America…so that people can ring up and offer their opinions. It’s a ‘whisk in the water’. Nothing is produced except bubbles.

Here at Goodrich Court, we’ve heard about the Housing Trust, which runs the estate, but they’re like gods — invisible. I said to myself ‘It’s easier to say a prayer to God, but it’s very hard to contact these people.’ I don’t know where they are.”

Joseph Alfred of Hurstway Walk Lancaster Estate W10, 40 years resident of North Kensington

“The local authority and central government showed very little interest in this half of the borough. To this present day, when compared to the south, the north is at a disadvantage in all aspects — like employment, crime, investment, and education.

My concern about the future of North Kensington and its residents pre-Grenfell fire, is that the council proposed the regeneration project that would demolish the houses surrounding Grenfell tower. My fear is that it will be disastrous if that occurs; a break up of a close-knit community, relocating residents to far-away places, and then having to adapt to a new environment.

I’ve lost a friend in the fire, and there were some people living around here that I knew. They’ve moved now. Some friends moved because they were more affected than me by Grenfell. Once they move, friends are lost.”

Noreen King of Trellick Tower W10, 30 years resident of North Kensington

“Whatever effort they (the council) makes, it will never be enough.

People still need to be housed. And no, we can’t all afford what you (the council) have. We are at the bottom. But being at the bottom doesn’t mean we can’t be happy.

And no, we’re not going to Manchester, we’re not going to Nottingham — because that’s what one council officer tried to make me do. I said, ‘Get lost. Born and raised in London, and you want to send me somewhere? Why?’

My hope would be for the government and those that have the power to make decisions, to just look after those that are below your pay grade. Put enough housing out there for those who have got their children that need to move on, and can’t move on, or become independent.

Stop segregating our communities. Stop clumping people in as a majority and making others feel uncomfortable in their own skin, or in their own area. Stop spending your money in the wrong places. Fix your country.”

Judith Blakeman of W10, 29 years resident of North Kensington 

“I lived in Ladbroke Grove from ’71, and then I moved here next door to Lancaster West in ’89. The area was very diverse then, but it was very rundown. It didn’t have the gentrification it’s got now. All the houses back then were falling apart. That’s when the council built the Lancaster West Estate. It was a slum clearance program.

[…] Towards the mid-1990s, they started improving the area and getting planning permission for all sorts of lavish developments of luxury flats.

Soon, council residents were told — before the Grenfell fire — that basically “this land is now very high value, and you’ve enjoyed living on it for long enough, but if you can’t afford to stay here then you’ll have to move. We (the council) will redevelop it and regenerate it, and only those of you with completely secure tenancies will get the opportunity to come back.”

It was social cleansing. The original proposal for this area was far vaster. […] That would’ve gone ahead had Grenfell Tower not happened.

I want justice for Grenfell. I mean, it’s a slogan, but I want justice for Grenfell. Really nice people just died, they were burned to death for no reason, and it couldn’t have happened anywhere else. There were too many different things that all came together, and nobody listened to them.

The very, very small children, both those who escaped and those who were evacuated — they’re going to tell their grandchildren about this. That’s going to be three generations after us.”

 

This is not about worker safety and public welfare. This is about paving the way for politicians and the elite to gentrify cities.

T he year was 1995. Deity Delgado was about to take the stage at the Blue Angel Cabaret — an underground strip joint tucked away in a basement in Tribeca. The club was packed to the brim. Sweating from the heat of the room, she sauntered on the small platform to dance for a buzzing crowd.

Worn down from the midtown gentlemen’s clubs, Delgado started working at the Blue Angel to express herself more freely and comfortably while still earning a living. There, she performed cabaret and lap dances in a communal room in the back which she remembers as safe, fun, and lucrative. She was making an average of $600 a night.

She appreciated the diverse hiring practices not commonly found in upscale clubs in Manhattan. The stripper-owned club hired queer, punk, tattooed people of all shapes and sizes and colors. “I could show up to work without shaving my legs,” Delgado said. “Many of the upscale clubs are set on one look, but at the Blue Angel you worked with what you had.”

Located off Walker Street, the Blue Angel was weaved into the fabric of early ‘90s Manhattan — a place where queers, sex workers, artists, minorities, and outcasts once lived, worked, and thrived.

The club, however, became one of the 170 clubs targeted by Mayor Giuliani’s iron fist against the commercial sex trade. Two years after the club opened, he signed into law a new zoning ordinance that prevented adult businesses from operating within residential areas and near each other (as well as schools, places of worship, and cemeteries).

In response, police amped up surveillance of the sex industry, eventually stamping an eviction notice on the Blue Angel’s door due to the club’s illegal mixture of alcohol, lap dances, and nudity. Delgado mournfully had to say goodbye to her beloved club.

Gentrification is often seen as an organic process that cities undergo. Jeremiah Moss, the author of the book and blog Vanishing New York — a detailed analysis of how New York City lost its soul to corporations — says, “Gentrification was originally defined as the process by which working-class neighborhoods are changed into middle-class neighborhoods by the middle-class who buy homes there.”

Moss explains, however, “Now we’re dealing with something much larger and more destructive — what I refer to as hyper gentrification which is not an organic process. It’s the government stepping in with policies and zoning to remake the city for the upper classes. In order to that, outlaws have to be removed, including sexual outlaws. So adult businesses have to go.”

“The hyper-gentrified city must be safe, friendly, and welcoming for tourist families and major corporations,” Moss says.

Shutting down adult businesses was on the top of Mayor Giuliani’s list throughout his terms. Giuliani claimed strip clubs, peep shows, and x-rated video stores were “corrosive institutions” that contaminated neighborhoods and prevented “legitimate businesses” from prospering.

The relentless spreading of disgust with and fear of adult businesses was fueled by the real-estate recession in the early ‘90s. Prior to that, corporations like Disney with a vested interest in attracting family-friendly tourists had little interest in devoting capital to parts of the city lined with street workers, x-rated stores, and strip clubs. The low-socioeconomic and “sleazy” stigma attached to sex work (of which stripping is a form) stood in stark contrast to Mickey and Goofy. But the market collapse opened a window for investors to turn a keen eye to urban real estate and its possibilities for profit.

Lower property values provided real-estate developers an opportunity to attract newcomers with visions of a “cleaner city.” Jayne Swift is a doctoral candidate in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota who examines how gentrification played a role in the closing of the Lusty Lady, the only worker-owned unionized peepshow, in Seattle and San Francisco. She explains that visible sex work can stand in the way of developers trying to attract certain groups of people with an upscale image. “Sex work is seen as lower class and dirty in the imaginary,” she says.

Twenty years after the Blue Angel closed, I stood in the basement of a corporate-chain strip club in Midtown with three other dancers, each awaiting the verdict on whether we would get hired. I had just auditioned in front of three unimpressed male managers, feeling self-conscious about the small layer of fat on my slim 5’2” frame.

After working in one of the few Times Square clubs that took 70% of my earnings in the private rooms, I was desperate to get hired elsewhere. The house mom came back. “The managers said okay…but they want you to lose weight.” I sighed a breath of relief. I had a job and that’s all that mattered. Afterward, though, I realized the other two dancers didn’t get hired, one older than me and the other more tatted. My heart sank. How many people did they turn away a day?

The low-socioeconomic and ‘sleazy’ stigma attached to sex work stood in stark contrast to Mickey and Goofy.

I have never known Delgado’s New York — a sex industry booming among artists, minorities, queers, and working-class people. I have only known $12 beers, $2,000+ monthly studio apartments, and pricey artisan cafes. My experiences dancing in New York were dampened by rigid hiring practices, poor security, and steep commissions.

I was lucky that day. My blonde hair, white skin, and youth got me through the door, but unless I’d glam up and slim down my employment was precarious. And after a year of doing exactly that, I was worn down to the point of quitting.

Instead, I left for New Orleans and found an accepting, accessible, and much friendlier and safer work environment. Not quite the Blue Angel, but I felt at home dancing in the creative city of grit and soul.

But then, two weeks before I was due to fly into New Orleans to work my second Carnival season, I heard the news that four strip clubs were raided along Bourbon Street. Sickened, I researched more and discovered the City Planning Commission was pushing a strip club cap and limit per block-face, essentially de-clustering strip clubs along Bourbon Street. A week later, four more were raided.

I Ain’t Saying She’s A Gold Digger: Sex Work, Money, And Upward Mobility

On the surface, these crackdowns were stoked by a city’s 2016 investigation into clubs’ harmful effects on strippers and the community. But the reality is, just like New York 20 years ago, corporations and developers have a stake in eradicating the industry from tourist areas. The devastation of Katrina provided an opportunity for developers to lure white millennials and upper-class families to the city with lush condos and pedestrian walkways, as locals have bitterly watched as houses remain in despair, potholes unfixed. The officials at the cruise ship port of New Orleans have been trying to capitalize on this makeover and charm Disney with promises of a clean family-friendly destination.

As cities turn their backs on residents to attract the elite,“sex workers are not part of the economic vision,” Swift explains.

Even though the targeted elite frequently patronize strip clubs, our visible presence must be sanitized and contained. “Sex workers are part of a city that is more open and less policed. But when a city is being forcibly hyper-gentrified by city and state governments, they have to be surveilled and controlled,” Moss says.

After the raids, I lamented to a friend, “It feels like they’re trying to clean up Bourbon Street.” She chuckled, “People don’t go to Bourbon Street for family fun.”

But that’s what people once thought of Times Square and Downtown Manhattan.

Stripping is protected by the First Amendment, but city councils have the power to curtail the industry through zoning if they can provide evidence of “secondary effects” that outweigh the right to self-expression.

The secondary effects doctrine is used to rob cities of strip clubs or push them out to the margins in gentrifying cities. And it doesn’t take much. Cities rely on slapdash reporting that claim clubs decrease property value, heighten crime, and more recently contribute to human trafficking. At best, these claims paint a picture of correlation rather than causation; at worst, they convince the public that strippers inflict harm on the community (and themselves).

This doesn’t just reshape the city, but changes who can be a stripper. Swift explains, “As cities try to limit the size and scope of the industry, they contribute to its monopolization.” Stringent regulations and club closures allow corporate strip clubs with big lawyers to prosper. And since strippers face fewer options for work, clubs get choosier, which looks like capping people of color and shutting the door on the tattooed and bigger-bodies workers.

The Insidious Planning That Goes Into Gentrification

Like the Blue Angel, three clubs that welcomed diversity in New Orleans shuttered during this round of police crackdowns. As cities gentrify, so do our clubs.

“Were there protests against the zoning ordinance?” I asked Delgado.

“We didn’t really have a voice,” she responded.

On February 4, 2018, though, something changed. The silenced stormed the political conversation and demanded a voice. Hundreds of workers took the streets in New Orleans to march for our jobs. We chanted “No new Bourbon Street” and “Bourbon Street, not Sesame Street.” I cried as allies joined — hopeful that maybe, for the first time, people will see that sex workers make valuable contributions to the city’s economy and culture.

“The protest in New Orleans was a break of tradition. For the first time there was a collective voice of dancers saying ‘No’ to being shuffled around by the city and targeted by police,” Swift says.

The protest reminded the city officials that there is a human cost to a sanitized city. And they heard — because on March 22nd they voted 4–3 against capping strip clubs. It was a landmark decision for the rights of strippers, but it’s not over. The secondary effects doctrine is alive and well, still threatening New Orleans, and more recently, Reno and the Bronx.

As long strippers are feared and devalued members of society, our bodies will be seen as a deterrent in gentrifying cities. In order to mitigate our threat, officials and police will regulate, criminalize, and dispose of us without a care.

by Melissa Chadburn

Cold brews and fourteen-dollar raw juice joints and white folks everywhere; in what seems like a blink of an eye, your neighborhood has changed completely.

But, despite how abrupt it can feel, gentrification doesn’t happen overnight.

Gentrification happens after months, and sometimes even years, of preparation — crafted in the offices of real estate moguls and in the halls of city government.

New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York have gentrified not because of the wishes of a million hipsters, but because of just a few hundred politicians, planners, and heads of corporations.

New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York have gentrified not because of the wishes of a million hipsters, but because of just a few hundred politicians, planners, and heads of corporations.
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It’s difficult to understand when it begins and how it all plays out. Often, areas that are gentrified were neglected for so long by the majority of the city that it can seem to be a sudden awakening.

But when transportation provides access from these once-forgotten neighborhoods to areas with more investment, and the place becomes teeming with young, (mostly) white Millennials it becomes hard to ignore.

So, I wanted to break this process down in a way that clearly breaks down the big, overwhelming process of gentrification and how it happens. Check out the four stages below.

Stage 1: Hobbyists and People Priced Out of Their Community Scan For Tax Liens

The more public resources taken away from a community, the more profitable it is to gentrify.

For example, I’m a Gen Xer and my partner is a Baby Boomer and if we want to retire and own property there’s no way we can afford it in Los Angeles.

So we may move to the next, more affordable community over to buy property. It’s the revolving door of gentrification — we were pushed out of our community and will become gentrifiers in the next.

Every city has a map of tax-data, homes, and property that are being auctioned away due to outstanding taxes owed.

Punch in a zip code and you could pinpoint blocks that are the next communities to be gentrified, which usually means buildings are in disrepair (so they could be bought cheap) and it’s close to other gentrified areas (so it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for gentrifiers to move in).

Stage 2: Local Governments Contract With A PR Firm

This concept of cities branding themselves began in the ‘80’s when Reagan cut funding for public housing and transportation. Those cuts forced cities to turn to alternative sources of funding, in particular bonds, to finance things such as public transit and road repair.

But not just anyone can issue a bond — governments first had to prove they’d be able to pay them back.

And there are only two entities that decide if a government or company is capable of paying back a bond: Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s rating agencies.

These entities would downgrade the rating of any government with high spending (basic social safety net) and not enough income (i.e. too many poor people).

To increase their credit ratings, cities were forced into becoming more entrepreneurial in a short period of time. They hired city managers and public relations teams in a quest to turn themselves into profitable entities — as if cities were corporations.

To increase credit ratings, cities hired city managers and public relations teams in a quest to turn themselves into profitable entities — as if cities were corporations.
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This remains very much a part of one of the first steps gentrification: when people from higher income neighborhoods and hobbyists begin buying up real estate. This is the phase when the media might write an article about how this neighborhood is the next hot new thing or even the “next Williamsburg.”

You may have seen these deplorable billboards that are posted throughout Detroit:

Detroit is 83% Black, but the new Detroit that gets all the attention in the press is overwhelmingly white, which brings us to…

Stage 3: Cities Contract With Developers To Tap Into That Gen Y Skrilla

Ever since the advertising agency Barkley put out a report that the direct spending power of millennials is expected to reach $200 billion, cities have been partnering with retail developers to bring in mixed-use projects.

Mayor of Somerville, Mass. negotiated with the Developer of Reality Investment Trust in Maryland to build Assembly Row, 2100 apartments and condos, 1.75 million square feet of office space, and 500,000 square feet of space dedicated to retail.

Before this, Assembly Square was the least developed area of the city. After the flight of manufacturing in Somerville, it was free of housing and cut off from the rest of the city.

Ever since a report projected that the direct spending power of millennials is expected to reach $200 billion, cities have been partnering with retail developers to bring in mixed-use projects.
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This was by far one of the more affordable and diverse areas of the elite Eastern state housing for people who worked in property services and retail at one of the prestigious nearby colleges. Today the median age of residents living within a mile is 35 and within five miles it is 33.

Finally, with new revenue coming in, city mayors forge deeper relationships with developers, further privatizing public services. This privatization allocates public funding away from much-needed infrastructures such as transportation, education, and more.

For example, Dan Gilbert, a downtown Detroit investor and the guy who owns the development company that made the above billboard, developed a security force that patrols downtown Detroit and monitors more than 500 security cameras attached to Rock Venture’s buildings.

Gilbert’s security, along with a police force privately funded by Wayne University in Midtown, has become a police shadow agency, ensuring that low-level offenses in Detroit’s gentrified core remain at a minimum.

Wayne State, Detroit’s main university, has taken security one step further by certifying sixty officers with the state so that they can perform the same functions as real police. Now 60% of calls within Midtown are answered by Wayne State’s patrol.

The average response time in Midtown is ninety seconds. In the rest of Detroit, it can be up to an hour, even for deadly crimes. What does this say about how little we value poor and/or Black bodies of Detroit?

Stage 4: Neighborhoods Are Affordable Only To The Global Elite (#MissionGentrification Accomplished)

The results: buildings are no longer meant to house regular people and instead house millionaires and billionaires.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the Big Apple.

A New York Times investigation found that 50% of apartments are vacant for the majority of each year.

In other words, the fourth and last phase of gentrification goes beyond neighborhoods being more friendly to money than to people — they cease being places where one can live a normal life and become luxury commodities.

Perhaps the worst symptoms of all this planning are when the displaced individuals of gentrification see their old neighborhoods plastered on billboards and in advertisements — the message that’s touted: this place has value now.

A flipside to this is that many Americans still don’t accept the existence of extreme racism and extreme poverty in this country.

In New York City, 50% of apartments are vacant for the majority of each year.
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Usually, the idea that there are whole groups of people whose rights and lives are violated and threatened on a daily basis occurs to many Americans only in moments of national trauma.

For example, a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the lead story in the post-Katrina issue of Newsweek deemed New Orleans’ “forgotten” people “The Other America.”

Four days after Hurricane Katrina, Michael Brown, then-director of FEMA explained the disastrous emergency response by saying: “The American people don’t understand how fascinating and unusual this is — is that we’re seeing people that we didn’t know exist that suddenly are showing up on bridges or parts of the interstate that aren’t inundated.”

In order to curb gentrification and other types of systemic oppression, society must first recognize the humanity of those most deeply disenfranchised by these systems, otherwise, they might never be dismantled.

This story originally appeared on Everyday Feminism. Republished here with permission.

By Michal “MJ” Jones

When she returned one evening from what I thought was a routine dog walk around the neighborhood, my partner was nearly in tears. Perplexed and concerned, I probed for an answer.

She explained the sinking feeling of watching her hometown of Oakland, California, become unrecognizable: The urban farm and playground that recently popped up on Peralta Street had not a person of color in sight. Tent encampments with dozens of newly shelterless black people sprawled out beneath freeway overpasses. White neighbors shot quizzical or fearful looks as she passed. Walking the dog — a practice that once brought her joy and rejuvenation — now left her feeling deflated, angry, and seemingly powerless. Her home, her community, had vanished. It had all been building up over the past few years, and in those moments as she walked, it became too much to take.

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Walking the dog — a practice that once brought her joy and rejuvenation — now left her feeling deflated, angry, and seemingly powerless.
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A news search of “gentrification” will land you with thousands of perspectives both for and against. Though the debate has emerged most vocally in the past several years, for residents born and raised in major cities, the ongoing loss of home is felt deeply.

“It is a feeling of powerlessness,” says Bie Aweh, who was raised in the Roxbury and Brighton neighborhoods of Boston. “You’re already vulnerable because of poverty, and it makes you feel like you have no power because capitalism talks the loudest.”

While many in support of urban renewal and development cite decreased crime rates and increased revenue as benefits, long-term residents from coast to coast echo concerns about the impact of gentrification on historically poor, predominantly of color neighborhoods.

Each of the people I spoke to were raised in historically black, poor communities now experiencing continued or more recent waves of gentrification. Noni Galloway, of Oakland, defines gentrification as, “when an environment or culture is taken over or redefined by another culture.”

On a surface level, the changes that come with gentrification are physical — new beer gardens, condominiums and bike lanes — and happen seemingly overnight. Many residents are left to grapple with what, where and whom to call “home.”

1. Shifts in demographics: ‘White people jogging was the first sign.’

When I first moved to Berkeley as a teenager in the early oughts, my peers had endless warnings for me about the neighboring city of Oakland. People living outside of Oakland, many of them white and/or middle to upper class, generalized it as “sketch,” “dangerous,” and “crime-infested.”

The neighborhoods they cautioned me against visiting are now, over 10 years later, spaces where young professionals are flocking to, often describing them as “up-and-coming.”

When asked to reflect on the first signs of gentrification they saw in their cities, three of four interviewees specifically mentioned “white people jogging,” especially in areas they previously would not have set foot in. The influx of white and middle-class newcomers on its own is not the issue; rather the loss of culture and diversity that comes when a city’s long-term inhabitants can no longer afford to stay.

“We used to be a Mecca for black home ownership. Now illegalforeclosures.org reports that thousands of illegal foreclosures take place in Wayne County,” said Will, an activist from Detroit. “The discussion of so-called ‘improvement’ should not be separated from the misery being created for tens of thousands of Detroiters.”

Much of the conversation in support of gentrification is coded in a racist and classist belief system that blames the residents themselves for crime rates, rather than lawmakers, local politicians, and complicit newcomers who are disinvested from solving the causes of poverty.

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Much of the conversation in support of gentrification is coded in a racist and classist belief system.
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The increase of white and/or middle-class new residents to traditionally poor neighborhoods tends to follow or reflect changes in infrastructure, another highly discussed symptom of gentrification.

2. Shifts in infrastructure: ‘Government housing began to disappear.’

“Government housing began to disappear and the projects were being torn down,” said Crystal Lay, of Chicago. “People were being displaced to other areas and put in these quickly built homes.”

The shifts that happen to city landscapes undergoing gentrification are more than physical, they are symbolic of efforts to “improve” an area for incoming residents.

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The shifts that happen to city landscapes undergoing gentrification are more than physical, they are symbolic of efforts to ‘improve’ an area for incoming residents.
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For those who have called these cities home since childhood, there are some strange contradictions: new bike lanes and rent-a-bike programs on streets riddled with potholes; sleek, market-rate apartments popping up beside historic Victorians; urban gardens and beautification in prior dumping grounds.

Oakland’s Noni Galloway summarizes the complex feelings that arise from witnessing these shifts overtime: “I have mixed emotions because… there were much-needed upgrades to the area that I feel didn’t happen until the gentrification started,” she said. “But it hurts to see my old neighborhood turn into the hot spot for someone else to enjoy.”

Another undeniable impact of the skyrocketing housing market is the increase in individuals without shelter, some of them former residents who have been recently evicted. In Oakland, homelessness increased by over 25%, and complaints went up by 600% between 2011 and 2016.

When developers are allowed to build housing starting at $3,000 a month in a neighborhood with a median family income of $35,000, what is being improved? Where can a family call home after their house becomes unrecognizable and unaffordable? What is the cost of gentrification? And who pays?

“Whites and the rich benefit the most,” said Crystal Lay. “I believe poor people and people of color lose. I think any mom-and-pop businesses also lose their customer base and those familiar faces.”

3. Shifts in safety measures: ‘Police make areas safer for suburbanites.’

“We saw blue lights go up in high-crime areas; it was like a sign for people to stay out of those areas. I feel like it was the early 2000s when they began,” said Lay.

Creating the perceived sense of safety associated with suburban areas, including policing, is part of what facilitates the process of demographic changes in major cities.

Sites such as Nextdoor and SeeClickFix encourage residents to report various issues, from car break-ins to graffiti, for resolution. These methods rely heavily on collaboration with law enforcement and public works officials, but also limit community members’ ability to resolve and express concerns together.

The desire to live in an environment that is free of violence, building decay and trash is obviously not unreasonable. I am certain that many long-term residents in urban areas have long wanted to see these changes. The issue is that local governments only invest in these changes when the demographics shift, and that the strategies of “safety” fit the new demographic as well.

The presence of law enforcement does not equal safety in many inner cities, but in urban environments undergoing gentrification, it is common to witness increased policing.

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The presence of law enforcement does not equal safety in many inner cities, but in urban environments undergoing gentrification, it is common to witness increased policing.
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Not only does gentrification push residents out of their homes, it can make them feel unwelcome, or even feared, on their own streets. “

I’m going to have a shirt made,” my partner said, once again returning from walking the dogs, “that says, ‘I’m not a criminal, I’m just from here.’”

Although interview participants overall were not optimistic about the possibility of stopping gentrification, they did have words, advice and requests for new residents.

“Are you moving into the community with the intentions of contributing to the existing culture, by supporting our businesses, or are you coming to disrupt it?” asked Bie Aweh of Boston. “If the answer is disrupt, then please don’t move here.”

“Consider the history of the neighborhood; understand the relationships that are among the neighbors,” Oakland’s Galloway concluded.

This story originally appeared on AlterNet. Republished here with permission.

Susan was found in a city park one chilly October morning, her beloved cattle dog guarding her body. Her death was unexpected. Everybody thought she’d been doing so well. In my office, my phone began buzzing with texts from long-term research participants and mutual friends wondering whether I’d heard the news. I curled my grief inward, a bundle of anger and confusion, scientific objectivity suspended, replaced by indignation. In a country that touts itself as the wealthiest and greatest in the world, how is it that so many live in the streets? How is it that people die there?

Susan was the first person to join my study on methamphetamine use in northern Colorado. She was the first of my research participants-turned-friends to die during its course. We first met in a borrowed office at the local resource center on a surprisingly sweltering spring day. Susan fussed over her dog, Rick, who was always at her side. She wouldn’t settle until he had water and a comfortable place to nap in the cool of the air conditioning.

She wasn’t naturally talkative, but she was candid and kind as she shared her history, her story. She cried as she explained how her husband’s illness was the beginning of their financial downturn. He couldn’t work, and eventually, neither could she. She left her job to care for him and for a while the two made do on social security.

But when Susan’s husband died, just a couple of years before we met, she was faced with more than grief. She lost both his social security income and hers as a caretaker. In her late forties at the time, she struggled to find work. Taking the time to mourn wasn’t an option as she struggled to navigate insufficient safety nets she’d never before needed to use. They had always been fine financially. They’d had dogs and motorcycles, a house, jobs and friends and money to splurge and go out on occasion. They’d had a “normal” life.

Soon, she found herself homeless. Having lost her own house and exhausted friends’ couch-surfing generosity, she was on the streets. Since Rick wasn’t a service dog, shelters weren’t an option, but neither was abandoning her one friend and connection to her old life. As a homeless woman on her own, Susan depended upon Rick’s loyalty, not just as a faithful companion but as a dauntless guardian.

Each night she managed threats that came from all sources, all directions. She was the first to tell me that sometimes she had to walk all night to stay alert and avoid the police or the risk for harm. She was the first to explain the importance and challenge of finding a safe place to rest.

Susan’s story provided my first window into the complex and harrowing realities of homelessness and housing insecurity in the United States. And while her story is individual, it isn’t unique.

On a single night in 2014, the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development’s (HUD) Point-in-Time survey counted nearly 600,000 Americans without shelter. As people struggle with unemployment, the battle for a living wage, and a shortage of affordable housing, the risk continues to grow. Increasingly, too many of us teeter on the brink, just one illness, car repair, or short work-week away from the streets.

Yet most places lack the resources to combat the underlying causes or immediate consequences of homelessness and housing insecurity. The same HUD study shows that 62% of reporting jurisdictions nationwide cannot meet the demand for shelter beds in their communities. In 2014, over 153,000 people had to sleep in the streets or actively seek alternate shelter each night.

Nearly two hundred years ago, America formally abolished its debtors’ prisons, institutions where the poor were incarcerated for failing to make payments. Following this, the notion of some people’s poverty as a social ill slipped into the background until the mid-20th century. Not until the early 1960s did we renew dialogue suggesting that hardship and vast wealth disparities represent a national problem.

Although many scholars and politicians agree that poverty in the U.S. tends to be intergenerational, there remains dissent as to the underlying causes. And while we, as a nation, struggle to get on the same page about the sources of these economic gaps, our communities are once again criminalizing poverty, especially homelessness. According to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, 34% of U.S. cities ban public camping, 57% prohibit it in certain areas, and 43% disallow sleeping in vehicles. Others have policies against sleeping in public, begging, and sharing food with homeless people.

Charles, a tall man with a booming baritone, first found himself on the streets in his early fifties. Previously an entrepreneur, a husband, and a father; he’d never imagined himself homeless. He’d always seen himself as a community member, a leader, never a criminal. But as we settled in on the porch of a local coffee shop, his eyes were bloodshot and squinty from lack of sleep. Clumsy with fatigue, he fiddled with his bag, pulling out his phone to charge at our table’s electrical outlet. He was waiting for a call from two young girls he had met the night before, who he had talked into attending an NA meeting with him later in the day.

“You ended up in jail because of all those camping tickets?” I asked. Charles looked at me solemnly. He was exhausted. He’d been up all night. Since we first met, when he had just lost his home, I had watched him become rundown, emotionally and physically. His girlfriend, Jackie, had been in jail all this time, but he never failed to keep money on her books.

Whatever he brought in panhandling or hustling or working odd jobs went to Jackie. She was his girl, his ol’ lady. And Charles had a traditional view of relationships. No matter what else he did, he had to continue to provide. So he typically spent his days working, earning, and to ensure there was money for her, his nights passed without shelter. This in a city with a camping ban and not enough beds.

“Yeah, I failed to appear,” he explained. “They caught me surviving, literally. The first ticket, the very first ticket, was our very first night outdoors. Less than eight hours from them giving us the sleeping bag. They’re gonna charge me $100 plus for each one of those. A $100 ticket and then there’s court costs and all this other stuff. It turns out to be $275, or sixteen hours of community service or six days in jail.”

“So you took the six days in jail?”

“Yeah, I took the six days in jail,” Charles said. “By default.”

For countless individuals like Charles, it is the crime of being poor that ultimately results in jail time when they are unable to pay their escalating fines. But the criminalization of homelessness has consequences that extend beyond spending a few days in jail. Some scholars and activists suggest that the underlying social intent of so-called “crimes of homelessness” may be to render these individuals invisible rather than reduce the problem itself.

University of Colorado Denver’s Dr. Stephen Koester has spent decades studying drug use and homelessness in Colorado. He observes, based on recent research on Denver’s camping ban, that the city’s police “don’t seem to want to give them [the homeless] tickets. They want to keep them moving, or out of sight.”

In the northern Colorado town of Fort Collins, recent plans to bulldoze a park where many homeless gather throughout the day support Koester’s theory. Los Angeles has tried on five separate occasions since 1997 to remove the “visual blight” of the homeless by removing and destroying their belongings. Though the city has repeatedly lost these cases, officials drafted a new ordinance for 2015 permitting law enforcement officers to promptly confiscate homeless individuals’ unattended property. Under the guise of gentrification, appealing to many for the ensuing influx of hipster-friendly, edgy watering holes, cities push their poor and homeless further toward the margins.

If the aim of criminalization is, in fact, to make the homeless disappear, we must consider its range of consequences. Surely, an abundance of these repercussions are intangible, even philosophical in nature. The haves wield their social power over the bodies of the have nots to avoid feeling uncomfortable over their craft cocktails or upon leaving their lunchtime yoga classes. But scattering the homeless doesn’t just damage disenfranchised bodies in the abstract. It directly and deeply damages social ties and disrupts access to social resources. Several researchers have highlighted the fact that when the homeless are relocated, they often lose access to safety net organizations and resources.

From a human interest perspective, the criminalization of homelessness is clearly bad politics. It dehumanizes people and perpetuates both poverty and suffering. But more specifically, notes Dr. Lee Hoffer of Case Western Reserve University, the promise of punishment forces geographic and social dispersion, and the results of these policies are “detrimental to public health.”

Initiating And Encouraging Drug Use

Fort Collins, Colorado is a medium-sized college town that has been voted one of America’s “most livable” cities several years running. Between college students, growing tech and start-up companies, and booming gentrification projects, affordable housing in the city is increasingly difficult to find. Vacancy rates continue to fall (1.8% in 2015) while housing prices and rental costs rise.

Like other cities along Colorado’s Front Range, Fort Collins has had a camping ban for years. In August 2014 alone, police targeted 54 illegal campsites and issued 32 citations. Those unable to find an approved place to sleep must remain invisible or risk incarceration. Thus, the town’s homeless stay on the move, camp solo and in small groups, and creatively bargain for couch space. These processes can have a peculiar but logical consequence of their own, encouraging and perpetuating drug use, even among people who would like to quit.

Before moving to Fort Collins in the mid-aughts, Dorothy had spent over a decade of her life on the streets. In her early thirties, she lost her children to policies that deemed her an unfit mother due to mental illness and her constant struggle to keep a roof over her family’s head. Though she had dabbled with methamphetamine to work strange hours driving a truck, she used regularly only after becoming homeless. At first, meth was merely a means of networking and negotiating for a place to sleep. By the time we met, nearly two decades later, she described herself as a full-blown addict.

“A lot of my meth use when I first started was, ‘gee, I suddenly became homeless and the way to find a bed to crash on is to get high with people,’” she explained during one of our early meetings. “ ‘Here, I’ll go buy a bag for you. I’ll do the running. I’ll take the chances.’ I’ll come back, I’ll get high. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I fell asleep.’ You know, they gave you a bed and a hot meal. When you’re homeless, it’s how you put your feelers out. It’s how you couch surf.”

For homeless individuals who are already drug-dependent, quitting may be especially difficult. Eddie, a former health professional in his thirties, struggled to quit abusing meth. After losing his job he faced eviction and, eventually, landed on the streets with Boris, his best friend and dog of several years. Like Susan, Charles, and others who find themselves without shelter in cities with camping bans, Eddie sometimes walked all night. But hours of shuffling over concrete and asphalt, icy sidewalks or parched fields tore Boris’ feet apart, a consequence Eddie couldn’t accept. When he was denied entry or long-term stay in treatment and sober living facilities due to their “no dog” policies, Eddie turned to the only people who seemed willing to accept him — former drug using partners.

Like Dorothy, Eddie established credibility with his hosts by his willingness to use, undermining his intentions to quit. But there was also something simpler at play — temptation. By staying with fellow addicts and, specifically, people with whom he had previously used, old patterns quickly reared their heads, and thirty days sober became zero.

For others still, it’s the specific nature of methamphetamine that holds the key for survival. The central nervous system stimulant enables users to stay awake and alert, sometimes for days at a time. By some accounts, it even enhances vigilance. Policies that keep people on the move perpetuate the need to stay on the lookout for law enforcement, to remain ever-ready to get up and go.

Thus, many homeless meth addicts, including several participants in my own research, report using specifically to avoid problems with the police. Charles often camped on his own or with only one or two acquaintances. Not wanting to make the long trek out of city limits to avoid the authorities, he and a partner would sleep in shifts along river banks or under bridges. But he always felt vulnerable: “Some folks, they enjoy the mental torture of being up for days and days and days,” he explains. “And I don’t understand that part. I really don’t. I use the excuse, and generally it’s not an excuse because being out here living in the forest, to me, I’m vulnerable. If I go to sleep, I don’t hear nothing. That means somebody can slip on me, you know?”

The especially cold nights make even alert camping unrealistic and dangerous. And when left with no other options, Susan, Eddie, and others found that meth made the endless walking more bearable.

Aggravating Pre-Existing Mental Health Conditions

In the U.S. today, there are only about fourteen inpatient psychiatric beds for every 100,000 individuals in need. This is less than 5% of the resources available in 1955 and about the same coverage we saw in 1850. Official estimates suggest that between 20 and 50% of homeless individuals in the United States suffer from mental illness.

Given these severely restricted resources, they may represent one of the most drastically underserved segments of the homeless population. Conditions and particular experiences run the gamut but, in my work, I saw a lot of bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia, and PTSD.

For many, the consequences of mental health issues are greatly intensified by the circumstances of the street. Similar to addiction, mental illness can render sufferers ineligible for generalized safety nets, including some shelters unequipped to deal with related complications. Outbursts associated with schizophrenia resulted in Charles being temporarily banned from one Fort Collins shelter.

Paradoxically, homeless status can be cause for ineligibility to in-patient psychiatric services. When Dorothy sought in-patient psychiatric and drug abuse treatment, she was ruefully informed that no beds were available for people lacking a permanent address.

Furthermore, it is difficult to maintain a treatment schedule and adhere to prescribed medications when routines change daily and belongings must be carted around in a backpack. Many psychiatric medications not only demand ingestion on a strict schedule but some must be taken with food while others without.

For individuals rushing to make meal times at charities or hustling all day for cash or a place to crash, meeting these requirements is a challenge. And if that backpack is lost or stolen, as Charles’ was, people who can’t afford a place to sleep can rarely afford to replace expensive psychiatric medications.

But it’s not just the specifics of homelessness that present a problem. Policies that disproportionately target the poor and those without homes cause damages of their own. Having a history of arrest and incarceration limits access to safety net resources, including mental health services.

Not only can time spent in jail prevent individuals from meeting important appointments with mental health professionals, convictions can preclude them from access to supportive services, even outpatient services.

The very real and constant threat of getting caught is a source of stress that can directly damage psychological well-being. Of 441 homeless individuals surveyed, 36% had been arrested, 70% ticketed, and 90% harassed. Even the promise of such encounters with law enforcement presents a risk, especially for people with histories of trauma.

As Nancy Peters of Denver Homeless Out Loud (DHOL) explains, “There is all this emphasis right now on trauma-informed care.” And that’s fine; it’s important. “But,” she continues, “before we ever get to that, there is this potential for re-traumatization that is inherent in our policies.”

And while policies such as camping bans do nothing to prevent homelessness, they do ensure people stay hidden and on the move, devastating chances for social support. The streets thus become more dangerous, and those camping alone or in small groups become more vulnerable to violence. Homeless women are especially affected by the damage to social safety nets.

While Charles felt vulnerable when camping alone, as a large man, he knew most people, besides law enforcement, would leave him alone. Staying awake and alert all night was generally a sufficient, if still undesirable, precaution. But Susan, a petite woman on her own, was rightfully wary of any encounters. To avoid both law enforcement and intoxicated men, she and Rick often slipped into the auto-locking bathrooms in Old Town just before they closed. The small space provided a safe spot to overnight. But it wasn’t always an option.

Policies that scatter the homeless also undermine a very basic human need: sleep. In No Right to Rest, researchers observed that lack of sleep results in reduced quality of life, negative mental states, and an increase in visits to emergency departments. Bolstered by an abundance of supporting research, Peters will address sleep deprivation as a mental health priority in Denver Homeless Out Loud’s future campaigns.

Public Health In The Community At Large

As the bodies of homeless people are increasingly restricted by criminal legislation, policy undermines public health in the broader community as well. In an effort to keep people from using public bathrooms for personal hygiene, several communities place restrictions on their use. For example, a Denver Homeless Out Loud survey showed that, despite being inhabited by thousands of homeless, Denver has only 25 public restrooms that are accessible to the homeless. None of these are open around the clock, and many lack running water. Grand Junction, a smaller city on Colorado’s Western Slope, locks public bathrooms and shuts off water fountains in certain parks. And day shelters that offer showers often have long lines and lottery systems that interfere with the rest of the day’s survival tasks.

While limiting public restroom access may seem appealing to retailers and even customers, it directly curbs people’s ability to survive in public spaces and negatively impacts community health. Hindering access to basic hygiene services, and even all-important hydration, drives hygiene activities into far less appropriate, unsanitary places. Forcing homeless people to wash, urinate, and defecate in the open not only violates the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, but is also detrimental to community sanitation and public health.

What Now?

Several organizations and communities nationwide are fighting for the reevaluation and dismantling of such troubling policies and pushing for the development of protective legislation. Thirteen cities and states have passed or are considering a “Homeless Bill of Rights.” The Western Regional Advocacy Project continues to advocate for a “Right to Rest Act” in California, Colorado, and Oregon. And some communities have begun to implement innovative programs that not only address the consequences of homelessness but also offer alternatives to its criminalization.

Initiatives such as Housing First have dramatically reduced homelessness; Utah was the first state to adopt the policy and their success has been astonishing. The Houston Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team works to obtain housing for the chronically homeless. And Philadelphia’s Medical Respite Center assists in the transition of homeless people from hospitals back into their communities. Thanks to these and other programs, we now have a working laboratory from which to learn.

Still, challenging the criminalization of homelessness itself remains essential, not only in improving public health, but as a social responsibility. In recent years, many Americans have openly pushed for the reevaluation of policies and programs that disproportionately harm (or benefit) segments of our population. Yet as a society, we continue to be comfortable blaming and punishing the poor for “their” circumstances and “our” problems, ignoring any hint at social accountability.

As we support efforts to reenergize and “clean up” our urban downtowns, countless communities continue to adopt policies that directly and indirectly punish the homeless. With each camping ban and panhandling prohibition, we recreate the debtors’ prisons banned nearly two centuries ago. And in so doing, we further institutionalize the systematic oppression of the poor.

This article was originally published on STIR Journal. Reprinted with permission.

SONY DSC

By Emma Bushnell

Once on a flight home to San Francisco for a visit from college in Boston, I sat next to an anarchist couple in their sixties. They were dressed all in black with matching fedoras over long, grey hair, and came armed with giant sketchpads. They were warm, happy people, who spent the trip sketching and encouraging each other. When not drawing, they turned their attention to me, and we chatted, pleasantly exchanging conflicting political and artistic ideals. They told me they admired my studies; I said I admired their sketches. I don’t believe any of us were lying.

Ten years later, in the English class I now teach at Brooklyn College, we were discussing Colson Whitehead’s “City Limits.” The conversation was animated — New York natives and transplants alike connected to Whitehead’s meditation on the changeable nature of the five boroughs. As we considered the many ways in which the city was re-inventing itself now, one student, a native of Bed-Stuy, said her parents were selling their house. She added, with a bemused shrug, that “I guess now people want brownstones in Bed-Stuy.”

I remember having this reaction on the phone with a friend a few years after my interaction with my anarchist seatmates. Then, she had told me they were building condos in a squalid area of downtown that had been re-branded as “SOMA.”

“SOMA?!” we had both laughed in disbelief. Calling that stretch of empty warehouses, urban crime, and homelessness near the train depot by a trendy acronym seemed like nothing more than a crude marketing ploy. And yet, only a few short years later, those condos, like the Bed-Stuy brownstones, were selling for millions of dollars; the tech takeover of San Francisco had begun in earnest.

Unlike New York, San Francisco has a somewhat parochial history. Each new group entering the city can be singled out, and conclusions can be drawn about that population’s contribution to the texture of the city as a whole. To name but a few, there were ‘49ers in the gold rush, the beats, the hippies, the gays, and now the techies. And then, of course, there have been influxes of various ethnic and immigrant groups that have played a significant role in shaping the city.

Something many of these movements had in common was a flocking to a city where thought could be freer, conventions more challenged. One need only skim through the great chroniclers of San Francisco — John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, William Vollmann, Gary Kamiya, Armistead Maupin, Amy Tan, Rebecca Solnit — to glean that the allure of San Francisco is not any one promise or movement in particular, but a revolutionary spirit that the city has always abided, one ideal after another.

It would take a much longer essay than this to really delve into the various transplant movements in San Francisco and how each was received and embedded in the city’s existing culture. But if we consider only a few of the most instantly recognizable ones, it’s easy to see how each vociferous counter-culture was able to change the city’s dialogue and image while remaining somewhat insular. Where were the hippies? The Haight. The gays? The Castro. The beats? North Beach.

I present this cordoning off as a mere fact — not to say that those challenging the status quo should keep themselves to themselves, but that one of the ways San Francisco has been repeatedly successful in accommodating strong-convicted and sometimes conflicting viewpoints is that each has been able to stake out its own little space without being forced to conform or compete with its neighbors.

In many ways, it makes a lot of sense that the tech movement has its roots in the Bay Area. Where else but San Francisco would a corporation take pride in thinking “different,” or bright young dropouts be accepted as pioneering geniuses instead of family screw-ups? On its face, startup culture seems a natural fit for the city’s other transplant movements — it claims to buck convention, be curious, and create a community of like-minded people.

But, as we know, the tech community has not “merely” gentrified “SOMA” and contributed its new voice to the larger conversation in San Francisco. With its attendant wealth and heady feelings of power, the tech boom is not-so-slowly colonizing the entire city, driving out whole communities and stamping out the possibility of pushback to its ideals from other populations. The harm of the tech takeover is not that this movement has turned out to be more square, nerdy, or moneyed than the city’s other revolutionary movements, but that under the guise of “improving” the city, it is literally bulldozing physical space for living, debate, and the exchange of ideas, thus ridding the city of its generations-long ability to support its local residents and receive non-conformers. The Tenderloin, a hub for cutting-edge social programming since single room occupancy hotels were established for family-less sex workers after the 1906 earthquake, is now the subject of myopic open letters accusing it of being a blight on the sort of San Francisco the tech industry desires.

The tech takeover is also fundamentally changing a city that, not so long ago, was considered an “island of diversity.” Startlingly, it’s projected that by 2040, San Francisco County will have a non-Hispanic white majority — jumping from 42% in 2013 to 52% in 25 years. The percentage of Asians is expected to fall from 34% to 28%, and the Latino population from 15% to 12%. The city’s already-declining African-American population, currently at just 6%, is expected to remain about the same. How will these shifting demographics further erode what once made the city great?

On a plane a few weeks ago from New York to San Francisco, I chatted with my seatmate, a nice woman from Long Island on her way to visit her son, who works in tech. By the time we had reached cruising altitude I knew about his education, his career goals, and the current housing hunt he and his fiancée were on for a place to accommodate their planned family of four.

This was a genuinely kind woman who spoke well of her son. A man who is, by her account, successful and in a happy relationship, and she is rightly proud of him. But our conversation introduced no viewpoint I had never encountered before, and was merely a way to idly pass time talking about nothing but the particulars of one’s own success. It brought in stark relief my experience 10 years ago, when the topics of conversation had been public funding for the arts, the difference between a democracy and a republic, and anecdotes about Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The contrast makes me wonder how often in the future I will encounter fellow travelers like that couple, and be confronted with people who think differently than I do and talk about subjects I do not normally consider. Or if whether, someday soon, they’ll disappear from planes to San Francisco altogether, when there is no longer a single neighborhood at the flight’s destination willing to keep them around.

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Lead image: flickr/Ricardo Villar

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