Pilsen, Chicago - 17th St. and Ashland
Take a walk down your average gentrifying street. You have your pet grooming salon. Your laundromat. Your dollar store. And just in case you’re feeling fancy, your gastropub that features a $15.99 appetizer of fried pig face. Beyond this, you also have your community tension. Your awkward glances. Your occasional crude comment. And furthermore, you have your instability, in which no one group of people feels quite at ease or at home.
Gentrification may very well be inevitable. For as long as there are disinvested communities, there will be a continued gravitation of relative wealth towards these areas. It makes sense: as downtowns grow increasingly expensive, people seek more value for their dollar, and are generally able to find it in neighborhoods that are historically marginalized. It is the natural evolution of the urban populace. However, just because it can be explained by social and economic models does not mean it should persist as brazenly as it has.
Take Pilsen, for example, a primarily Hispanic community on the Southwest side of Chicago. It was deemed an “up and coming” neighborhood a decade ago by urbanites who enjoyed the occasional long walk on 18th street and the scattered DIY gallery spaces they would come across. It was a lively and culturally rich community that appealed to those on the hunt for a new neighborhood. Since then, condos, cafes, and home goods shops have joined the community, catering mainly to the new demographic of migrants, and transforming what was a vibrant Hispanic community into a veritable mish-mosh of cultures, priorities, and wealth.
This socio-economic and racial diversity are by no means unhealthy. Cities, after all, are havens for heterogeneity — different kinds of people, different lifestyles, different backgrounds; these elements are what distinguish cities from their less colorful suburban counterparts. However, diversity does not necessarily indicate integration.
In fact, most instances of gentrification result in several groups of people living among one another, coexisting, cohabiting, but not mixing.
It’s true that gentrification, or otherwise, the gradual influx of middle-class individuals, is routinely seen as an opportunity for integration — an attempt to subvert systemic segregation. However, as Daniel Hertz writes anyone who perceives gentrification’s potential in integrating neighborhoods “needs to make sure that’s actually what’s happening.”
A neighborhood in transition requires delicate handling, and this necessitates a mindful approach when deciding to open a coffee shop in an area that perhaps has never commercially prioritized coffee, or moving into a new construction condo building that sits adjacent to a series of older multi-family homes. This is not to say that a local business or a personal decision to move for cheaper rent is immoral; rather, it simply indicates the pertinence of understanding oneself in the context of the majority population whose neighborhood you are invariably changing.
Bowtruss, a Chicago-grown artisanal coffee shop, is an example of a business that makes no effort to contextualize itself. While the ideal business structure should seamlessly blend into the community — offering relevant services and at least moderately supported products — Bowtruss stands out from its neighboring shops on 18th street. Existing on the far end of the stretch, blocks away from its fellow upscale storefronts on the East end of the district, Bowtruss has chosen the space between a physical therapy physician’s office and a small Mexican restaurant as its South-side headquarters. The coffee shop has grown rapidly since its inception in 2012, now boasting ten locations in the Chicago region with plans to open thirteen more in the coming years. Despite its claim to make good coffee accessible, it has enacted little effort to introduce it to the Hispanic population, refusing both to lower its prices, as well as to sell other coffee and food products that might have greater cultural and financial appeal. The response of Pilsen locals has been reactionary, as one winter night, Bowtruss’s facade was graffitied, “Go home gentrifiers,” written in stark white cursive across the glass.
There is a way for businesses like Bowtruss to adjust their practices to support a more inclusive model without sacrificing their ideology of well-crafted and unique products. Pledging allegiance to the simple avoidance of alienating any group of people is key, be it through a general kindness fostered within and among the business’s social stratosphere, the kinds of products sold in the context of the community at large, the re-funneling of profit back into the community, or ideally, all three.
In short, if a business is not owned by a born and bred local, either it or the individual supported by it must resonate with the community in some way. This means that although those young entrepreneurs who moved in down the street are taking over storefronts and creating maker spaces and craft shops, they are likely habitual diners, shoppers, and contributors to the neighborhood. This stands in opposition to a business owner who, if not the CEO of a large corporation living in an entirely different city, lives on the opposite side of town, drives to work, and abstains from frequenting neighboring businesses even if just to grab a sandwich at the deli next door.
Alternatively, if the owners of a gentrifying business do not have a hand in personally giving back, their business in some way or another should, either through products, community involvement, various discount systems, or hiring strategies. Vons, a supermarket chain in California, began modifying its products in the early ‘90s to accommodate its new sect of patrons, and even studied the cultures of those products in order to most authentically emulate the original market. According to a New York Times article written around this time, “firms are adapting their marketing strategies, from establishing retail outlets for a specific population to developing new advertising and even products to appeal to the tastes and unique characteristics of these markets.” Even Whole Foods is beginning to acknowledge the importance of neighborhood and demographic awareness; just this week, Englewood, a mostly African-American community on Chicago’s South-side received its first Whole Foods, the upscale market claiming to have modified its pricing specifically for this community.
Bowtruss, however, is not the only coffee option in Pilsen. The Jumping Bean, only two blocks away, carries specialty coffee drinks of a similar caliber for way less, and also boasts incomparably inexpensive lunch options. It additionally supports local artists by devoting several walls to their work, and has a diverse clientele.
The frustrating fact regarding the Jumping Bean is that it is owned by a local Hispanic family, as is another cafe a few blocks away that similarly strives for inclusivity. We are seeing this bright as day: the contrast between local businesses and their gentrifying counterparts. A gentrifying business seems to disregard its social environs, while already established families and business owners happily adapt their markets to conform to shifting demands among their neighbors.
What makes gentrifying businesses think they are exempt from having to coalesce with the existing social and cultural state of a place? They identify a small yet growing type of appetite, and proceed to exclusively cater to that sophisticated palette.
But why? “We just opened a coffee shop — there was no master plan,” says a cafe owner in the controversial California neighborhood of Highland Park, quoted in “The Gentrification Machine,” an article featured on the website of Marketplace’s York and Fig, a podcast all about gentrification. Of course there was no master plan. “It would be improbable for [this couple] to have single-handedly constructed a master plan, while simultaneously starting a small business in a recession and nearly losing their home to foreclosure in the process.” But this inability to recognize the small hand their business has in shifting the commercial district and therefore, the overall cultural makeup of the neighborhood is exactly what makes gentrifiers appear ignorant. Sure, you didn’t mean to gentrify — but does the type of clientele your business attracts not clue you into the fact that you and your storefront may, in fact, be facilitating change?
A desire to open a business, and to base its genre on what might earn the largest dollars is not dishonorable — but a flagrant disregard for the character and nature of the existing community in all of its ethnic variations on BOTH personal and professional investment fronts does indicate either an oblivion born from social entitlement, or simply an indifference and insensitivity to people of disparate backgrounds.
This plea for a growing conscientiousness among gentrifiers does not only apply to business owners, but also to individuals who move to an area for its less expensive living options or its cultural diversity, naively becoming small currents in the much larger tidal wave that eventually disturbs the local water.
Jane Jacobs writes in her game-changing 1961 “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” that “the sum of casual public contact at a local level is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.” In summary, neighborhoods tend to be closer knit, and therefore, safer and more dynamic if there is a devoted and invested street culture and by extension, a caring and concerned community. As contemporary city dwellers, anonymity tends to be second nature to many of us, so we don’t necessarily think twice about ignoring those we pass on the street. However, these precise kinds of interactions that we’ve grown so accustomed to ignoring are characteristic of minority neighborhoods and ethnic pockets, which are incidentally, the neighborhoods most often in transition.
Several Pilsen residents were interviewed for a WBEZ feature on gentrification, and practically all of them claimed to have no fundamental opposition to their new neighbors. Janessa, a long-time Pilsen resident and Hispanic woman comments on her new upstairs neighbors, three college students who replaced the recently priced-out family with whom she had been friends for years. “It’s really different with them up there. We don’t talk to them. They just do their thing — go to school, come back, go to school, come back. In the building we try to make a cook out, invite everybody from there — everybody else comes but them.” The boy upstairs responds to this, and claims it is difficult to join a community that is already so established. But if people are going to reap the benefits of living in such an area, does it not make sense to at least try to connect? Especially if an invitation has already been extended, and the effort would be minimal, tantamount to stepping out onto your back porch and contributing some potato chips.
Many gentrifiers, however, believe that no such effort is necessary. After all, this is America, a country that should be integrated and inclusive. “We’re supposed to be united, it’s not supposed to be separated,” a white college student says as she and her friends shop on 19th street, also interviewed for WBEZ’s feature. But the reality is that we can’t choose to be an integrative society whenever it’s convenient for us. One cannot move into a neighborhood where 80% of the residents are racially or socio-economically divergent and expect a seamless transition, just because America “in theory” is all about integration, when in reality, it has historically nurtured the very structure that leaves most immigrants and minority populations no choice but to create their own ethnic enclaves.
Gentrifiers instead must be gracious and friendly, willing to step out of their comfort zones and observe the local culture of their new neighborhood. They must say hello to their neighbors, and not be taken aback or offended if their greetings are not immediately met with congeniality. All people have every right to be in any place — that is the America of today. However, that was not the America of yesterday, and it remains a responsibility of those who are attempting to deconstruct what has already been built to do so with that very thought in mind. Gentrification is only natural, but who mandated cultural resentment or social isolation as automatic byproducts? Gentrification will of course, always create a certain amount of dissonance. But with a conscientious mind, and a willingness to modify blind habit and routine, changing communities will have a better chance of evolving into a place that works for everyone.