Gentrification Is Inevitable and other lies

by Leslie Kern

I have a personal mia culpa in terms of gentrification: though its been over a decade, I can still clearly recall arguing with someone–and feeling fully justified that I was correct–that gentrification was an economic term detached from any racial component. In my (white, suburban, male) mind, invasive colonial whiteness wasn’t inexorably linked to gentrification, but merely (“merely”) happenstance due to structural co-incidents. Fifteen years on, even without Gentrification Is Inevitable and other lies supplying me with a slew of foundational stories, anecdotes, and examples to help build out a framework of comprehension, I clearly see that this was naïve at best and willfully ignorant at worst. It is exactly this type of academic-but-not-practical “understanding” of a term that continues to support de facto whiteness and cultural supremacy–it is a weasel-word way of pushing through forced displacement of non-white non-het non-cis people while ignoring the racialized evils of capital-influxed “progress.”

A nasty little feature of whiteness as cultural power is that it operates under a cloak of invisibility and deniability. Because it is both the water we swim in and a largely empty void into which whites can selectively pour whatever cultural norms and tastes they desire, it is hard to see whiteness in action. Rather, it is not hard for non-white people to see, but it is easy for white people to deny that their tastes, norms, and actions have anything to do with whiteness.

One pillar of “cultural power” classically steeped in whiteness that I have re-engaged with is reading The New Yorker: that magazine, even with its self-satirizing Eustace Tilly mascot, is a synecdoche for economic class divisions. Though the content seems to have shifted in the last few years to a more pluralistic view, the tax bracket its advertisers target is still haunted by the spectre of economic suppression—those ads scream at a white demographic. I don’t doubt that non-white people read The New Yorker, but I’ve been to the offices more than once for law symposiums and such—The New Yorker, like the term “gentrification,” has a component of historical white élitism baked in because economic class in America has a component of racialization baked in. To pretend otherwise is, again, willful ignorance or embarrassing naïvete. If you want an opinion about Mostly Mozart leaving Lincoln Center after 57 years or tips on what West Village café has the best sidewalk seating, you’ve got some disposable income, I suspect.

Keeping all that in mind, I am aware it sounds a bit pretentious to relay that when twitter died in late 2022, my social media browsing ended and was replaced by The New Yorker. Because I had spent years culling my twitter feed to surface comedians and writers and clever folks, twitter was endlessly amusing and a pure joy for me—it was never bleak or sad or tedious, but full of beautiful illustrations and my favorite game to play, which was “How long can I see an veiled reference to a current event I don’t understand until I figure it out without explicitly looking it up?” I will forever miss these halcyon days, but I have a different endless feed to flip through, now. Endless stack, perhaps, as I am perpetually two to three issues behind.

I saved dozens of my favorites before I left.

dang twitter was good.

This switch from twitter to The New Yorker has created a different sort of kismet for me—gone are the interconnected cobwebs of meaning that I randomly brushed against during extended algorithmic scrolling, replaced by unexpected themings selected by the dab hand of editors and the whims of research and verification. Matters of coincidence are simply a different sort than they used to be: No more pithy tweets or funny memes, but wider pulls with occasionally deeper roots. References to bean dads have been replaced by countless citations to Virginia Woolf: I’m pretty sure I’ve pieced together A Room of One’s Own one sentence per week over the course of six months.

It was in this new atmosphere of socialless media that I started reading Gentrification Is Inevitable and other lies. I was immediately impressed by the the acknowledgements section being up front—opening the book with Acknowledgements is a pro move. However, I could not help but feel some way about including kudos to the publishing house Verso, after seeing a casual mention that Astra Taylor pulled her forthcoming book: “It was going to be published this year, by Verso Books, but then, following a dispute between the Verso union and management, Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix pulled it, in solidarity with the workers.” (The NYer, Aug 14th, The Gift)

The other huge swing for me is that The New Yorker expands to fill the time I allot for it: my ability to read a book requires the same type of setting as picking up a magazine; unlike a phone, a book and paper magazine aren’t always in my pocket. Gentrification took me a long time to work through, even though it is relatively breezy for non-fiction. During that protracted period, multiple articles leapt into relevancy: Directly, the gentrification of Boerum Hill, where my now-wife lived before we both moved to Park Slope, brought back vivid personal memories: walking down Dean Street in October to visit her apartment from my more questionable place in Gowanus remains a beautiful fall-in-NYC tableau in my mind. The brick homes, the beautiful decorations, the crisp early sunsets. Knowing that those memories–my memories–are built on the back of dispossession is upsetting.

My plodding pace through Gentrification allowed time for yet another related NYer article to spring forth: this time, it offered lean hope in the form of housing solutions.

Whoa Jennifer Egan, good for her!

Gentrification is a very anecdotal book. Having exterior verification in the form of other writings that feel more like traditional investigative reporting supports the colloquial storytelling quite well. The biggest moment for me—the moment that made the whole book worth the time it took to read—was recognizing that gentrification is part of a process designed to create profit from land-use that was originally artificially undervalued by racist institutions. “Gentrification proceeds in part because of the stripping of wealth and the chance to accumulate it from racialized communities.”

The book itself is conversational. Reviewing most of the quotes I pulled was uneventful; they don’t have much oomph excised from their textual home. If you liked hearing me ramble on about how I restarted my love affair with reading The New Yorker, you might dig the format of Gentrification: its pages give the reader space to stretch out and really bask in their own personal thoughts about what housing is, and should be. It is anecdote and suggestion, a personal story over coffee. The book is a strong place to start if you’re new to the concept of gentrification, and offers a non-bleak expression of possibilities for how to live in the world.