Fifty for twenty. Fifty for twenty.
More victim than predator, the poor hustler was selling food stamps—$50 worth of food stamps for $20 cash—so he could buy liquor, which you cannot do with food stamps.
Dudes like him—and women too—roam the parking lots of retail food establishments in devastated urban landscapes across America. They find someone who looks like he or she doesn’t rely on food stamps and then they make that someone a profitable proposition. Lots of people take up the offer, which only expedites the drunk/junkie/thief’s downward spiral and helps entrench neighborhood rot. It makes me crazy.
I just stared at him. And then I let loose. That he was old, tiny, and harmless must have had something to do with my sudden burst of courage, that and the fact that I was beyond pissed.
“Do you think I’m going to give you my money so that you can go out and get drunk?” I yelled. “How stupid do I look?”
I pointed at the food stamps in his hands. “Why don’t you quit hassling people and use those things for what you’re supposed to use them for? Just for tonight, for a change,” I said. “Get yourself some food and take a break from the drinking. Just for one night. Okay, sir? Make an effort. Just this once.”
He didn’t say anything, just looked at me with yellow, bloodshot eyes, and I knew he was gone, lost a long time ago, and I felt bad. But the ire wouldn’t pass.
“Unbelievable.” I just about spit the words at him. “Get out of my way.”
I stomped past him and headed for the lights of the store. Feeling the anger begin to dissipate, I started babbling to myself about the miserable history and the dreadful current conditions that put this guy in this predicament: the racism, the poverty, the lack of jobs, the hopelessness. And I started to feel ashamed of myself for yelling at him.
Inside, the mart was filthy, impersonal, like some store you’d see in a war zone, which I guess wasn’t all that far from the truth. The cashier was walled off by what looked to be six-inch-thick bulletproof glass. He spoke to customers through a speaker linked to a mike on his side of the barrier. The only thing close to actual contact could occur through a slot at the bottom of the glass where money exchanged hands.
I sighed, shook my head again, and went looking for milk and any other reasonably edible food. I did locate milk and Pop-Tarts and knew the girls would be excited about the real cheese I found. Near the line at the cashier, some large, menacing guy was speaking in a loud, deliberate tone, talking smack about “the A-rabs.” Of course, the cashier, who was probably the owner or a relative, looked Middle Eastern.
“I don’t want to be givin’ my money to these people,” Angry Brutha said. It was obvious why he was upset. Like a lot of Black folks in these areas, he was disgusted with how his neighborhood looked and how everyone in it was poor and suffering. Seeing these thriving business owners making money from him and his community, coupled with the certainty that they did not employ locals, live, or otherwise reinvest here, fueled an ugly anger. “For all I know, they’re turnin’ right around and givin’ it to Osama. Shit.”
As I stood in line and tried to tune out his tirade, all I could think was, What are you doing to change that, asshole? Angry Brutha was still going on about “motherfuckin’ terrorists” when I reached the front of the line. I used my gas card, and the cashier slipped me some plastic bags through the slot at the bottom of the glass.
Angry Brutha abruptly stopped his rant and came over. He started helping me bag my groceries. I just looked at him and thought, So much is wrong here. His small gesture of kindness, helpful as it was, seemed to serve as more evidence of my growing belief that the situation is intractable. Here is this angry, hate-filled man who has stopped to help me. Despite his animosity, he clearly has a basic desire to lend a hand. I’m sure he has a sense of community spirit too, somewhere deep within him, and yet he is so frustrated. He’s expending so much energy on the bitterness that he is incapable of focusing on the bigger issues.
Or maybe he isn’t. Maybe he understands but he’s overwhelmed. As much as his behavior infuriated me, I got it. In fact, he and I might not be all that different after all.
I trudged back to my car, dropped the groceries in the backseat, and drove home, all the while thinking that what we’re doing isn’t going to make a difference. The Community Mart will probably be closed in a month, and why am I helping that place, anyway? I don’t want it to grow. The lost brothers and sisters who wander in and out of that place, other shops like it, and the miserable Citgo will always be there. Everything is so messed up and has been for so long. Once home, I walked in the door and collapsed in John’s arms, sobbing.
That time of year, maybe more than at any other point in our odyssey, was full of contradictions. One moment I’d be foraging for food in a frozen, gray urban landscape. The next moment I’d be attending or planning an event at a swanky establishment. Our latest was another wine tasting and fund-raiser, envisioned as an EE victory party, to be held in December in Bronzeville, the South Side neighborhood known in the early twentieth century as the Black Metropolis. The neighborhood became a haven for thousands of African Americans fleeing the hostilities of the South. Over the decades it developed into a vibrant community, home to some of the most famous African Americans, including Joe Louis, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ida B. Wells, and Andrew “Rube” Foster, founder of the Negro National Baseball League. At that time, apart from those folks, Bronzeville supported several Black newspapers, 731 businesses—including several Black banks and seven insurance companies—106 lawyers, 192 churches, and one of the top Black hospitals in the country. By 1929 Bronzeville Blacks had accumulated real estate holdings totaling $100 million.
After World War II, however, Bronzeville started slipping, in part because of less restrictive housing elsewhere in the Chicago area, and the community became one of those rough, somewhat deserted sections of town. Things started picking up again in the mid-1990s, when folks began to appreciate its undervalued real estate, battered but beautiful houses, and its proximity to downtown, McCormick Place, the University of Chicago, US Cellular Field, and the beaches along Lake Michigan. That residents had easy access to a pair of major expressways didn’t hurt either. All of that blended together to make Bronzeville a textbook example of gentrification, one of the thornier issues for Black America.
In Chicago much of the gentrification of the 1990s first occurred in neighborhoods like Bronzeville, places close to the Loop that were low-income and predominantly Black. That revitalization sparked a huge jump in home prices. According to Derek S. Hyra, an associate professor at Virginia Tech University who studies gentrification in Chicago, “Between 1990 and 2000, real estate prices in Douglas and Grand Boulevard, the two contiguous districts that make up Bronzeville, rose 67 and 192 percent, respectively.”
The population of Bronzeville, while still 92 percent Black, has become increasingly White. In 1990 census figures showed that a total of 2.5 percent of the community’s population of 66,549 was White; by 2000, when Bronzeville’s population actually shrank to 54,476, the White population grew to 4 percent. Some research suggests the White population is now closer to 6.6 percent.
Though we’re all for diversity, the mix doesn’t necessarily mean that Whites are being inclusive and welcoming Blacks to their neighborhoods. Rather, what seems to be happening is that Whites are coming to an all-Black neighborhood on its way “up” because of the amenities it offers.
The problem, according to Professor Hyra, is that “we typically see whites moving in and taking over all the public spaces and putting [in] their own cultural values, and making the community their own, as opposed to integrating the values of individuals who have lived in these communities.” Professor Hyra and other experts have noted that retail growth in urban areas is occurring where the White population is rising. The research says that those merchants are following the money. I say that they are following White money.
And it’s not only middle- and upper-cla
ss Whites who are elbowing out lower-income Blacks; it’s also middle- and upper-class Blacks too. In fact, researchers suggest that middle-class Blacks are playing a larger role than Whites in driving out lower-income Blacks from once-impoverished neighborhoods like Bronzeville. Members of the Black middle class have had their options limited due to discrimination from banks and realtors, what scholar Sheryll Cashin calls “integration exhaustion.” As a consequence, those Blacks are moving to poorer, predominantly African American neighborhoods and exerting their influence.
When wealthier newcomers push for economic growth so that property values will rise and more upscale businesses and restaurants will be lured to the area, it’s often done with complete disregard for the original residents. Large financial institutions, government agencies, and land developers also influence the changes that occur in a neighborhood. According to Professor Hyra, “it is undisputable that the black middle class and their preferences for ‘community improvement’ are associated with rising property values and the displacement of the poor.”
The efforts to drive out poor Blacks along with the threats they supposedly represent to property values are becoming less and less covert. Hyra affirms that upwardly mobile Blacks cooperate with various entities in gentrifying neighborhoods to exclude the most impoverished Blacks, so that those who have enjoyed “individual success and achievement” have pushed the neediest to other high-poverty neighborhoods.
The situation obviously generates a fair amount of hostility between longtime residents and the recently arrived middle-class Blacks and Black professionals, but some neighborhoods are working to minimize the tensions. In Bronzeville, for example, several African American community groups started collaborating in 1990 with the city government and private entities to encourage economic development while retaining longtime residents. Together they devised a plan, “Restoring Bronzeville,” which emphasized “historic preservation and racial heritage tourism.” The tours of “historic Bronzeville” featured signs and monuments paying tribute to local entertainment, business, and political heroes as well as pointed out sites of civil rights and music history interest. The plan also called for mixed-income housing and pushed for owner-occupied units.
Longtime residents and recent transplants liked the idea of economic development because they agreed that Bronzeville was dying economically and had been for some time. Instead, their goal was to attract members of the Black middle class, which is why their campaign emphasized, in part, racial heritage tourism.
The logic, as I see it, was to honor Bronzeville and to restore some cultural identity, which would prevent outsiders from taking over and converting the neighborhood into just another pretentious, overpriced, pseudosuburban enclave. The strategy did foster a sense of ownership in Bronzeville that only the people who were from there could feel, while indicating to the gentrifiers that the pride of Bronzeville was not for sale.
To ease low-income residents’ concern of being displaced just when the neighborhood was becoming a safe, desirable place to live, supporters of that middle-class influx promoted the belief that middle-class folks needed to embrace “group advancement” as part of their civic responsibility—a version of the “rising tide lifts all boats” aphorism.
According to Michelle Boyd, an associate professor of African American studies and political science at University of Illinois–Chicago, there is an assumption “that whatever class differences do exist among blacks are easily overshadowed by similarities. Blacks were united by the common threat of whites.... [But] the problem lies in how reference to these commonalities can be used to sidestep the issue of competing interests” between middle-class and low-income Blacks. Poor families in Bronzeville and other low-income neighborhoods want affordable housing, jobs that pay a living wage, and child care that suits their schedules in those jobs. Owners of higher-priced housing “want to increase the price of housing as well as the quality and cost of neighborhood goods and services,” Boyd notes.
The two often conflict. Guess who loses?
“One reason poorer residents do not present sustained opposition,” Boyd writes, “is that they are filtered out of the community development process.” Not only were their needs less likely to be discussed, but they experienced a great deal of friction with more affluent residents during the planning process. This “homogenizing” is a classic political technique used not only with gentrification but also in any process in which lower-class Black buy-in is needed to achieve the goals of others, including middle- and upper-class Blacks. Politicians, both Black and White, use it to get votes. Likewise, gentrifiers, both Black and White, use it—the “we’re all in this together” line or the “we are doing this to create jobs and improve schools” cant—to get approval for the profit-driven upheaval in their neighborhoods.
The Black middle-class alliances with outsiders complicate the dynamics of gentrification. Often White-owned development firms, financial institutions, and political power brokers convert middle-class Blacks into what sociologist Mary Pattillo calls “brokers.” Perhaps a better term would be sellouts. They bridge the gap between powerful Whites and neighborhoods looking to catch a break.
As Pattillo explains, “disputes between black residents with professional jobs and those with no jobs, between black families who have been in the neighborhood for generations and those who moved in last year, and between blacks who don fraternity colors and those who sport gang colors, are simultaneously debates over what it means to be black.”
This is exactly what is so disturbing about gentrification: its tendency to divide Blacks along economic lines. Wealthier Blacks need to be concerned about the displacement and exploitation issues that affect poor Black people in neighborhoods with rising property values. It is our duty as members of the Talented Tenth. Our ascendance was supposed to facilitate new systems and ideas, like gentrification, that would lead to our collective advancement. Instead of ensuring a higher quality of life for all of us, those developments created an environment that breeds the perpetual Black ghetto.
See what I mean about how complicated this can get? You have these honorable folks like Joslyn Slaughter of Jordan’s Closets and Tracye Dee of WineStyles scratching out an existence as they present wonderful role models and clearly help their neighborhoods. Yet conditions being what they are, the people most in need seem to have been abandoned.
These two women had slightly different experiences with gentrification. By the time Tracye had moved to the South Loop, it had already been gentrified, and she was grateful, as a businesswoman, for the neighborhood’s new cachet that, in her opinion, helped with community building. Joslyn, however, had located her boutique on the outskirts of Bronzeville because that was pretty much all she could afford. She witnessed former residents of the ’burbs rehabbing and inhabiting the buildings.
“They would go to work and go home and that was pretty much it,” she recalled. “They still didn’t feel safe shopping in the neighborhood. Their disposable income was not being spent here.” Part of the reason, Joslyn said, was that higher-end stores in Bronzeville were somewhat scarce.
Then the recession hit, and rehabbing slowed before stopping altogether. Now, in Bronzeville at least, gentrification is mostly theoretical.
“I had mixed emotions [about gentrification],” Joslyn said. “Bronzeville had been a beautiful area and . . . I’d love to see it return to that,” but she worried about a nicer neighborhood forcing out residents who’d lived there for decades. Still, she thought gentrification would improve the area.
“Things need to change and evolve,” Joslyn said. “As African Americans, we need to learn that we deserve to live in a different environment.”
And then there is my buddy, Mell Monroe, who has lived in Bronzeville since 2002. With nearly three decades of corporate, entrepreneurial, and community-organizing experience, Mell moved to Chicago in 1992 and then to the South Loop. In 2002, nudged by his wife, Angela, they moved to a historic, seven-thousand-square
-foot, red-brick Romanesque Queen Anne in Bronzeville. He fell in love with the history, beautiful homes, and prime location of the neighborhood. Mell founded and became president of the Bronzeville Area Residents and Commerce Council and created the Annual Historic Bronzeville Bike Tour. In 2006 he ran for city council. We met him in the middle of 2009, when he’d heard about us and asked, through a mutual friend, if we would have brunch at his home, which he was converting to a B & B. We enthusiastically accepted. He liked what we were preaching and, a few months later, agreed to host the December wine tasting at his elegantly restored home.
The buzz happening in Bronzeville excited Mell—and us too. It was hard not to be excited. He also bristles at the word gentrification, but for slightly different reasons than we do.
“I don’t know how to respond to that word when I hear it,” he told me. “It actually puts middle-income people on the defensive. I think a better way to put it,” he said, “is that middle-income people want neighbors to behave in a manner that doesn’t interfere with the public or social order, just like in any neighborhood. We would like to have nice amenities like everybody else.”
Low-income residents concerned about middle- and upper-income folks’ supposed plans to push out the less fortunate should stop worrying, Mell said. In Bronzeville the objective—as in virtually every neighborhood that may be experiencing the G-word—is safe, clean streets with decent services and businesses that provide jobs. Forget about all the class warfare, he said. If everyone pulls together to tout Bronzeville’s rich history, location, and housing stock—and everybody behaves—everybody wins.
Here’s the real rub for us: By patronizing businesses in Bronzeville and the South Loop, we were part of the problem.
Yes, those businesses needed our support and we loved them. The more their businesses grew, the greater the chance that other Black businesses could find success too, and probably, the more the neighborhood would improve, which would create the wonderful ripple effect John and I like to talk about.
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