The Gentrification of the Mind

by Sarah Schulman

  There is a weird passivity that accompanies gentrification. I find that in my own building, the “old” tenants who pay lower rents are much more willing to organize for services, to object when there are rodents or no lights in the hallways. We put up signs in the lobby asking the new neighbors to phone the landlord and complain about mice, but the gentrified tenants are almost completely unwilling to make demands for basics. They do not have a culture of protest, even if they are paying $2,800 a month for a tenement walk-up apartment with no closets. It's like a hypnotic identification with authority. Or maybe they think they are only passing through. Or maybe they think they're slumming. But they do not want to ask authority to be accountable. It's not only the city that has changed, but the way its inhabitants conceptualize themselves.

  Looking back, when gentrification first started, we really did not understand what was happening. I recall thinking or hearing that these changes were “natural,” and “evolution” or “progress.” Some people blamed artists, even though artists had lived in this neighborhood for over a hundred and fifty years. The theory behind blaming the artists was a feeling that somehow their long-standing presence had suddenly made the area attractive to bourgeois whites who worked on Wall Street. At the time there was no widespread understanding of how deliberate policies, tax credits, policing strategies, and moratoriums on low-income housing were creating this outcome. In 1988 Manhattan was 47 percent white. By 2009 it was 57 percent white—an unnaturally dramatic transformation over a short period of time. But these statistics don't really tell the story. My anecdotal lived experience tells me that surveys don't tell us what “white” means. There is a difference to the life of a city between low-income marginalized whites moving into integrated neighborhoods to become part of that neighborhood, and a monied dominant-culture white person moving to change a neighborhood. Does “white” mean working-class Italians, new immigrants from Eastern Europe, low-income artists, low-income students, low-income homosexuals who are out of the closet and don't want to be harassed? Or does it mean whites who are speculators, or who come to work in the financial industry, to profit from globalization, or who live on income other than what they earn?

  Of course this was far from the first time that specific New York City neighborhoods were deliberately turned. The Bronx was famously burned to the ground for insurance money. In their brilliant 2009 (Drama Desk Award–nominated) theater work Provenance, Claudia Rankine and Melonie Joseph show how loyal Bronxites who stuck with their borough through the aftermath of the burnout made reconstruction possible. But now these residents were endangered by new developers ready to snatch the recreated neighborhoods back for resale. In his book How East New York Became a Ghetto, Walter Thabit shows how in Brooklyn, from 1960 to 1966, “two hundred real estate firms worked overtime to turn East New York from white to black.” In From Welfare State to Real Estate by Kim Moody, we can understand how developers used redlining, deprivation of city services, and block busting, and in six years transformed Brownsville/East New York (where my mother was born and raised, from 1930 to 1950) from 80 percent white to 85 percent Black and Puerto Rican, while trashing all the social services, including public education and hospitals. In gentrification the process was being reversed, with financial incentives and social policies designed to replace one kind of human being with another.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Gentrification of AIDS

  Key to the gentrification mentality is the replacement of complex realities with simplistic ones. Mixed neighborhoods become homogenous. Mixed neighborhoods create public simultaneous thinking, many perspectives converging on the same moment at the same time, in front of each other. Many languages, many cultures, many racial and class experiences take place on the same block, in the same buildings. Homogenous neighborhoods erase this dynamic, and are much more vulnerable to enforcement of conformity.

  AIDS, which emerged as gentrification was underway, is an arena where simple answers to complex questions have ruled. “Keep it simple” only works if you are an alcoholic who doesn't want to take another drink. In most other areas of life, complexity is where truth lies. AIDS has been bombarded by simplification since its beginning. The people who have it don't matter. It's their fault. It's over now. Easy to blame AIDS on the infected, and much more difficult to take in all of the social, economic, epidemiological, sexual, emotional, and political questions. Even treatments have turned out to be combination medications, not a single pill that just makes AIDS go away.

  The relationship of gay men to gentrification is particularly interesting and complex. It is clear to me, although it's rarely stated, that the high rate of deaths from AIDS was one of a number of determining factors in the rapid gentrification of key neighborhoods of Manhattan. From the first years of the epidemic through to the epicenter of the AIDS crisis, people I knew were literally dying daily, weekly, regularly. Sometimes they left their apartments and went back to their hometowns to die because there was no medical support structure and their families would take them. Many, however, were abandoned by their families. Sometimes they were too sick to live alone or to pay their rent and left their apartments to die on friends' couches or in hospital corridors. Many died in their apartments. It was normal to hear that someone we knew had died and that their belongings were thrown out on the street. I remember once seeing the cartons of a lifetime collection of playbills in a dumpster in front of a tenement and I knew that it meant that another gay man had died of AIDS, his belongings dumped in the gutter.

  In the early years, people with AIDS had no protections of any kind. Homosexuality itself was still illegal—and sodomy laws would not be repealed until 2003 in the Supreme Court ruling Lawrence v. Texas. There was no antidiscrimination legislation, no gay rights bill in New York City, no benefits, no qualifying for insurance or social services. There were no treatments. Particularly gruesome was that surviving partners or roommates were not allowed to inherit leases that had been in the dead person's name. Everett Quinton, the surviving lover of theater genius Charles Ludlum, famously fought eviction after Ludlum's death from the apartment the two of them had shared. ACT UPer Robert Hilferty was evicted from his apartment in the mid-eighties when his lover, Tom—the leaseholder—died of AIDS. And this policy was true in public housing projects as well as in private rentals. So for every leaseholder who died of AIDS, an apartment went to market rate.

  While, of course, AIDS devastated a wealthy subculture of gay white males, many of the gay men who died of AIDS in my neighborhood were either from the neighborhood originally, and/or were risk-taking individuals living in oppositional subcultures, creating new ideas about sexuality, art, and social justice. They often paid a high financial price for being out of the closet and community oriented, and for pioneering new art ideas. Indeed, many significant figures in the history of AIDS, like iconic film theorist and West Village resident Vito Russo, died without health insurance. So the apartments they left were often at pregentrification rates, and were then subjected to dramatic increases or privatized.

  In my own building, our neighbor in apartment 8, Jon Hetwar, a young dancer, died of AIDS after our tenants' association had won a four-year rent strike that resulted in across-the-board rent reductions. After his death, his apartment went from $305 per month to the market rate of $1,200 per month. This acceleration of the conversion process helped turn the East Village from an interracial enclave of immigrants, artists. and long-time residents to a destination location for wealthy diners and a drinking spot for Midtown and Wall Street businessmen. Avenue A went from the centerpiece of a Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood to the New York version of Bourbon Street in less than a decade. I similarly observed the West Village change from a longtime Italian and gay district with an active gay street life into a neighborhood dominated first by wealthy heterosexuals and then by movie stars, as new gay arrivals shifted to other parts of the city. Now you have to be Julianne Moore to live in the West Village. The remaining older gay popul
ation is so elite as to have an antagonistic relationship with the young Black and Latino gay men and lesbians and transgendered kids who socialize on the streets and piers of the West Village. Organizations like FIERCE (Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment) had to be formed to combat harassment of young gay kids of color by wealthy white West Villagers. Gay life is now expected to take place in private in the West Village, by people who are white, upper-class, and sexually discreet.

  Strangely, this relationship between huge death rates in an epidemic caused by governmental and familial neglect, and the material process of gentrification is rarely recognized. Instead gentrification is blamed on gay people and artists who survived, not on those who caused their mass deaths. We all know about white gay men coming into poor ethnic neighborhoods and serving as economic “shock troops,” buying and rehabbing properties, bringing in elite businesses and thereby driving out indigenous communities, causing homelessness and cultural erasure.

  While the racism of many white gay men and their willingness to displace poor communities in order to create their own enclaves is historical fact, gentrification would not have been possible without tax incentives for luxury developers or without the lack of city-sponsored low-income housing. That the creation of economically independent gay development is seen as the “cause” of gentrification is an illusion. We need to apply simultaneous thinking to have a more truthful understanding of the role of white gay men in gentrification. It is true that like many white people, many white gay men had a colonial attitude towards communities of color. Yet at the same time, it is helpful to think about why white gay men left their neighborhoods and homes to recreate themselves in Black, Latino, Asian, and mixed neighborhoods. It seems clear that heterosexual dominance within every community does not aid and facilitate gay comfort, visibility, and autonomy. The desire to live in or to create gay enclaves was a consequence of oppression experiences. Only gay people who were able to access enough money to separate from their oppressive communities of origin were able to create visible, gay-friendly housing and commerce and achieve political power in a city driven by real estate development. This does not excuse or negate the racism or the consequences of that racism. And these observations in no way negate gays and Lesbians of color living successfully and unsuccessfully in Black, Latino, Asian, and mixed neighborhoods. But if all gays could live safely and openly in their communities of origin, and if government policies had been oriented towards protecting poor neighborhoods by rehabbing without displacement, then gentrification by white gay men would have been both unnecessary and impossible.

  It is crucial at this point to understand how overt and vulgar the oppression against gay people was at that time. There was not even a basic gay rights antidiscrimination bill in New York until 1986. I remember being on a date with a woman at a restaurant called Kenny's Castaways on Bleecker Street circa 1980. We were kissing at the table and the waitress came over with a distressed expression.

  “I don't know how to tell you this, but the manager says that you are going to have to leave.”

  In the same period (1979–82), I was with a group of lesbians at a Mexican restaurant, Pancho Villa's on pregentrification Broadway and Ninth Street. We were sitting on each other's laps and again were told to leave.

  It was perfectly legal to deny public accommodations (restaurants and hotels) to gay people. And these events both took place in Greenwich Village!

  It took the disaster of the AIDS crisis for New York queers to win the right to legally kiss in a restaurant unmolested. This helps us understand how the implementation of gentrification policy could have been invisible to the average New Yorker, while the presence of openly gay men rehabbing a building was extremely visible.

  Although I have spent thirty years of my life writing about the heroism of gay men, I have also come to understand their particular brand of cowardice. There is a destructive impulse inside many white gay men, where they become cruel or child-like or spineless out of a rage about not having the privileges that straight men of our race take for granted. They have grief about not being able to subjugate everyone else at will. Sometimes this gets expressed in a grandiose yet infantile capitulation to the powers that be—even at the expense of their own community. Professor John Boswell stopped the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) from coming to Yale because he insisted that its board be composed entirely of full professors, in an era in which there were no out-of-the-closet lesbian or nonwhite gay full professors in the country. CLAGS refused, and was moved by its founder Martin Duberman to the City University Graduate Center. Boswell died of AIDS, abandoned by the social system he so strongly defended. Or Daryl Yates Rist, who wrote a piece condemning ACT UP in the Nation, for being “obsessed” with AIDS, of which he too later died. Media pundit Andrew Sullivan produced one of the lowest moments in AIDS coverage, one we are still paying for, when he claimed in the New York Times Magazine on November 10, 1996, that we had reached “the end of AIDS.” No lie could be more dear to the dominant culture than that “AIDS is over.” For from the moment that the New York Times told us that AIDS was over—even though it was and is a phenomenon so broad and vast as to permanently transform the experience of being a person in this world—its consequences no longer needed to be considered.

  We still have to work every day to assert the obvious, that in fact, there are two distinctly different kinds of AIDS that are not over.

  1. There is AIDS of the past.

  2. There is ongoing AIDS.

  Neither is over, although they are treated quite differently in the present moment.

  Ongoing AIDS is both maintained and addressed by globalization—a sort of worldwide gentrification in which specificity of experience, understanding, and need are glossed over by a homogenizing corporate net, and existing knowledge—about medicine, water, housing, food—existing methods of education, and existing international resources are denied human beings in huge numbers so that a small group of privileged people can enjoy happiness.

  Those of us still living who witnessed the early days of the crisis know that had the U.S. government risen to the occasion (as many of our dead begged them to do), there would not be a global epidemic today. As well, we know that the obstacles— lack of clean water, economic underdevelopment, lack of health care, the high price of treatments, et cetera—are maintained by lack of political will above all. The need for our side of the world to live off the other and maintain them in poverty, dependency and underdevelopment, is HIV's best friend. And this divide is as powerful internally to the United States as it is globally.

  The confluence of gentrification and ongoing AIDS has been a true spectacle. Marketed as “AIDS in Africa,” ongoing international AIDS has inspired a kind of insipid charity mentality in the citizen who expresses her opinions through the products she consumes. Gentrifying chain stores like The Gap, which have replaced many independent businesses while creating homogeneity of dress across regions, have instigated programs where purchasing a particular shirt results in a donation, lower than sales tax, to “AIDS in Africa.” Instead of sharing the world's riches, the United States has responded with programs both governmental and corporate that fluctuate in their level of support and fail to address the underlying issues. In her book Dead Aid, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo explains how George W. Bush's AIDS fund delivered twenty cents on the dollar to its intended recipients, a rate typical of most international and domestic AIDS bureaucracies.

  Regarding ongoing AIDS at home, the March 15, 2009 Washington Post reported that 3 to 4 percent of Washington, DC is HIV infected, a higher rate than many West African countries. While death rates have declined domestically, infection rates are increasing. The failure of U.S. prevention programs to raise their percentage of effectiveness gets addressed with the gentrified cure-all: marketing. Periodically changing subway ad campaigns and alternating slogans abound. offering young men of color free Metro cards to come to “prevention counseling” doesn'
t change the fact that they are economically, politically, and representationally pushed aside. But the larger problems—the United State's refusal to destigmatize and integrate gay people on our own terms, treat drug users effectively, support reasonable public education, provide health care, and stop incarcerating Black males—these policies are what keep infection rates high. As long as prevention is the American gay man and straight woman's private problem, it will continue to be a public disaster. The insistence on bootstrap prevention has produced prevention campaigns for “men-who-have-sex-with-men” because we recognize that homophobia is so punitive that calling homosexual sex, homosexual, will keep people who are having homosexual sex from the support that they need to avoid HIV infection. We decide to replace truth with falsity, to gentrify the truth about sex in order to save lives. Lying becomes constructed as “saving.” Telling the truth, that “men-who-have-sex-with-men” are having homosexual sex, is assessed as ineffectual and therefore destructive because the prejudice that creates this environment is considered to be unchangeable. Yet this capitulation to and (therefore) prolongation of homophobia has not shown statistical success in lowering infection rates.

  On May 13, 2009, Obama revealed his new AIDS budget, a significant disappointment to activists. He replaced a Bush-era $99 million abstinence-only program with a new $110 million program to combat teen pregnancy, but it had no HIV component. There was zero increase for housing programs for people with AIDS. Most upsetting was Obama's decision to break his campaign promise and maintain the prohibition on federal funding for needle exchange. This followed his earlier removal of new funding for HIV prevention from the economic stimulus package, and the announcement of a new program targeting African Americans that had no funding.