The Gentrification of the Mind

by Sarah Schulman

  In the meantime, I do take risks to address a wide range of frameworks of power and replacement, gentrification and supremacy ideology. I do it enough to cause some trouble for myself, but mostly with institutions who would completely exclude me if I didn't speak up, even though they pretend that I've caused the exclusion by being “a bitch.” I don't do it enough to get completely ejected, unless I underestimate dramatically the cowardice and brutality of the power I am addressing. In those cases I get crushed. When I came out as a lesbian and decided to be truthful and out in my work, I lost a lot, which does reduce my happiness. I have to meet a higher bar in all arenas. Because of my character, I am willing to experience a continued diminishment of stature and access, a loss of safety and currency and a disdain of the powerful as a consequence of being truthful in my work. But this causes me enormous pain and anxiety which also reduces my happiness. But, simultaneously, I am willing to be uncomfortable if that's what it takes to understand what is actually going on. Insight increases my happiness. I feel happy having a sense of intellectual integrity and integrity of action. I need to feel aware to feel content. I enjoy understanding things. Being willing to be uncomfortable in order to strive towards accountability brings me inner strength, which is a source of happiness. I love discovery. It's fun. I need a sense of decency towards and from others in order to be happy. I feel happiness when I figure out what is really going on. However, if in the end my search for what is real results in so much marginalization that I will not have a safe old age, then I will not be happy. Time will tell.

  In the meantime, I'm excited to see what will happen next.

  July 8, 2009—I read two interesting and relevant pieces in the news. The New York Times reports that speculators in Harlem are having trouble selling their wares. White developers who bought a series of brownstones on West 134th Street can't unload them. The cost of appropriate renovation is too high and the white gentry who were snapping up Harlem brownstones just don't have the cash. A companion piece on NPR reports that while housing prices are going up slightly, foreclosure rates are also increasing. This news reinforces my belief that the expansionism of gentrification has come to an end in New York City in our era.

  But at the same time that I am taking this in, reading this article online and listening to NPR online, I am sitting in a hotel room in Suzhou, China where I have spent the last few weeks in my capacity as a college professor on an “educators' tour” of China. It did not take long for me to perceive that gentrification, the replacement of dynamic urban communities with homogeneity, is a wild elephant rampaging through the streets of eastern China much as it has in the East Village. Michael Meyer's superb and humane book The Last Days of Old Beijing documents the gentrification of Beijing in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. He describes the hutong, winding small-scale courtyard complexes—communities of neighbors who know everything about each other and share food, information, and toilets. As part of modernization, the Beijing government ordered these communities destroyed and their inhabitants resettled. In their place are modern high rises, highways, privatized housing, projects.

  Meyer's description of life in his hutong reminds me of life in my building on Ninth Street, where I have lived since 1979. There are still about ten of us who have lived together as neighbors for twenty-five to thirty years. We have witnessed every relationship each other has had. We've watched each other through drug addiction, childbirth, changing sexual orientation, success, failure, screaming fights, financial disaster, EST, death, marriage, mental illness, joy. We had a successful rent strike for four years. We've united to save the apartments of two helpless tenants. The first was a shell-shocked Ukrainian World War II veteran whom the landlord tried to evict when his mother died. Willie Utkowitz thanked us with a case of Budweiser bought on his disability check. The second was a mentally ill, old-style butch lesbian who was born in the building and has spent the last twenty-five years barely getting by on methadone. None of the postgentrification neighbors have entered this relationship. Even the ones who have been here for fifteen years. The only times I hear from them are when faulty plumbing leaks into their apartment from mine and they get “angry.” Or if I run into them at the gym. When they first move in, I try to be friendly—I introduce myself, invite them in for a chat—but it's never reciprocated. So the old timers exist in a community— gathering together annually for a solstice party. We are: me (a writer/teacher), Bill and Maria (a union cameraman/DP and his painter girlfriend), Lisa and Marta (an American/Polish lesbian couple with a teenage son who run a bookkeeping business), Sydelle (a retired school secretary). And we stay in touch with our old neighbors who have since moved out: Sarah (a social worker) and Steve and Monica (bakers). The other day I asked a new tenant what she does for a living. “I'm in branding,” the thirty-something said, smiling.

  In China, the hutong are being replaced in two distinctly different ways. When I was in Shanghai the city was in a turmoil of round-the-clock construction preparing for its celebration in 2010. Hutong, old neighborhoods, and human scale housing are being bulldozed and replaced with seventy-five-story buildings. You can drive on the thruway for forty-five minutes and never exit a sea of forty- to seventy-story apartment buildings housing Shanghai's twenty million inhabitants. So Chinese are being moved from neighborhoods where they knew everyone to gigantic buildings where they may never even know everyone on their floor. But there is another force after the hutongs— yuppies. The last ten years have produced the first crop of rich Chinese, and the entrepreneurial wild west environment is highly dynamic. Even though their businesses are theoretically taxed under socialism, actually—as in America—some elite businessmen don't pay taxes, so they have a lot of money, most of which is reinvested in their businesses. The government knows what is going on, but lets it happen as the extra cash makes economic development more dramatic. But the kinds of rich people being produced in China strangely replicate Western paradigms. On one hand there are the yuppies—they buy hutong and renovate them into luxury housing. When my friend Ismene, a German marketing executive, generously showed me the international businesswoman's side of Shanghai, I spent a great night talking and drinking white wine under the rarely seen Chinese moon on the roof terrace of her fully renovated rented hutong triplex. Stumbling home at 2 a.m., we passed her unrenovated neighbors, a family living behind a tailor shop in the place next door. Yuppie Chinese gentrify in classical style. Not only do they evict the poor, renovate their old buildings, and replace, but in Shanghai at least, they like to go out for martinis and Cold Stone Creamery ice cream in an upscale mall called Xintiandi, where identical pan-Asian designed expensive restaurants that could be found in any major city in America are filled with Chinese and foreigners in identical expensive clothing.

  The other kind of Chinese gentrification was evident here in Suzhou where I had the great experience of meeting a Mr. Yee, an enterprising, interesting businessman who is part of a manufacturing business that has a thirty million dollar contract with Ikea. Yee believes that China will only get stronger and therefore invests in Chinese currency, not dollars, convinced that the yuan will gain in value. Yee kindly invited us to his “weekend” house outside of Suzhou. It was like a scene out of a Philip Roth novel. To escape from the crowded city—and Chinese people are almost never in quiet private places—his family bought a tract house in a luxury gated suburb. The kind of suburb that an American would buy a weekend house to get away from— antiseptic, new, and identical to that of his neighbors. Yee paid $150,000 four years ago (six years into his wealth) and claims that it is now worth $450,000, but a quick walk around the heavily guarded complex revealed that most of the cookie cutter houses were empty. He now plays golf at the adjacent course, a habit rich Chinese have recently acquired from the Japanese. His house is furnished around the plasma TV. The living room is filled with a collection of artificial stuffed dogs, and velour pillows in a faux Hopi pattern in Arizona earth colors. These pillows, I learn, are what his factory pro
duces for Ikea—and I realize that they are sitting in identical suburban houses in New Jersey and Long Island.

  A smart, interesting, and creative man, Yee sat with us in a teahouse and talked about the future of China. I asked him what he thought people could do with their money after they get their house, car, TV et cetera. He said he was asking himself the same question. It became apparent from our conversation that there is no culture of wealth in China. All rich are nouveau riche. And since the rich have only been that way for a decade or less, they have no sense of stable identity or confidence that their luck will continue. So they reinvest their money and buy schlock and kitsch for their homes. This led to a fascinating conversation about “power.” In China, “power” is something that belongs to the central government. It's not associated with money, because the link between money and governmental policy has yet to be born. Business doesn't determine policy. The government doesn't ask them, Yee says. There is no conversation and no negotiation. Everything in China is top down. The idea that the rich could influence the culture of China through what they buy—for example if they bought paintings instead of stuffed dogs—is not yet under consideration. So there is a kind of gentrification without taste that is expressing itself in homogeneity.

  Experiencing this made me wonder about the emotional attraction of gentrification. It's weirdly passive to commit gentrification, even though the consequence is brutal. It feels safe to be like others, and frightening to be one's self—because that requires knowing what one's true self is—and not in a New Agey sense where anything one “feels” (a euphemism for wants) is right. But in a truthful sense, to see one's dark side and conflicts and in that way, realize one's self as human. Not as an excuse to not change, but as a starting point for change. But the future of Chinese gentrification was personified for us by the son of one of Mr. Yee's friends. A young, spoiled, lost child of privilege who had already dropped out of four American schools including Tacoma Lutheran College (one of those institutions that fulfill the Chinese wish for an American degree, any American degree). Bringing everything full circle, we went for a walk around his complex and I asked him what he wanted to do with his life. He told me he wants to live in a loft in one of his father's buildings and play pool and do “art stuff.” Where did he get that paradigm from? It sounds so East Village.

  In Michael Meyer's book he quotes an unnamed French architect working in Beijing. After years of experience he told Meyer, “The key to restoring buildings is to keep the original people inside.”

  Yes, the people are the heartbeat of the building. But, I can attest that the building is also the heartbeat of the tenant. Even more poignant to me was Meyer's recollection that a resident of a Beijing neighborhood told him, “The Old Quarter is not easy to explain. It's something flowing inside me.”

  There is a loss of self in relation to others when that something flowing is destroyed. It leaves the replaced without context and the replacers with a distorted sense of self. How can we have a relationship with each other if one is forced to leave and the other naturalizes their unwilling absence? Then we don't know the truth about ourselves because we don't know the consequences of our actions on others—and this is the most destructive element, for it denies the fragility of our one and only life. Instead our lives become overwhelmed by either deprivation or delusion. And those can't be the only choices.

  Of course no book on gentrification is complete without a final word from Jane Jacobs, who wrote Death and Life of Great American Cities and managed to stop Robert Moses from building a highway through residential Manhattan.

  “Fix the buildings,” she said. “But leave the people.”

  And when we don't, we don't know who we are.

  Text: 10.75/15 Janson

  Display: Janson MT Pro

  Compositor: Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

  Printer and Binder: Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing

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