I grew up in Washington Heights, a Dominican, mostly low-income neighborhood that is becoming increasingly gentrified. My parents moved to the neighborhood as low-income recent college graduates in the 1980s. Over the course of the last three decades, they (and many of their neighbors) have successfully landed high-paying jobs, attracting high-end restaurants and businesses that the original residents of the neighborhood largely cannot afford. Real estate agencies have renamed the section of the neighborhood now occupied by upper-middle class residents like my family “Hudson Heights,” outlining an area mostly located west of Fort Washington Avenue along the river.

 

 

Like other examples we discussed in class, this name-change distinguishes the gentrified area of Washington Heights from the rest of the neighborhood, encouraging the sale of more property to middle-class families and up-scale businesses, leading to further gentrification. This has transformed the feel of the neighborhood: while the park across the street from me used to be filled with Dominican teenagers playing music on their boomboxes and Dominican men playing dominoes, now the park has been renovated and is mostly populated by white toddlers and their Dominican nannies. The effects of gentrification are most visible in so-called Hudson Heights, where I live, but they are not limited to this area. Even in the most eastern part of Washington Heights, the presence of the private Yeshiva University is slowly but consistently applying real-estate pressure toward middle-class redevelopment. Just this summer, an expensive-looking, glass-plated residential building, dwarfing the worn-out low-income apartment buildings surrounding it, popped up on 181^st street and Audubon, directly across from the Goodwill.

As described by Desiree Fields and Sabina Uffer in their 2014 article, “The Financialization of Rental Housing,”¹ investment and financialization (specifically, transforming expected future earnings into concrete currency, making possible mortgages or deficit spending) have led to heightened inequality throughout New York City. They argue that previously low-class neighborhoods can be transformed by investment and financialization only at the expense of the original residents. This argument aligns with that of Neil Smith in his article “Class Struggle on Avenue B”²: namely, that the gentrification of neighborhoods such as Washington Heights can be described as a sort of frontier struggle, where more powerful sectors of society are called upon to “tame” the overly romanticized low-class neighborhoods. Smith points out that gentrification leads to an increase in official crime rates, police racism and assaults on the “natives,” or the people who were there first. Washington Heights is a prime example; throughout my life, these consequences have been evident. In high school, if my male black or Latino friends were visiting my apartment, dressed in baggy jeans and fitteds, they were questioned about their motives by police guards on my block, while my white male friends wearing skinny jeans and button downs were never stopped. Fort Tryon Park, just north of me, was never heavily regulated while I was growing up; now it is crawling with cop cars ready to hand out court summons to anyone in the park after 1am, echoing the harsh voice of Mayor Dinkins in 1991: “The park is a park. It is not a place to live.”²

It frustrates me that the nature of gentrification is so segregationist. Not only do the gentrifiers express, often subconsciously, intense racist fear towards original residents, but original residents often understandably intensely resent the gentrifiers. I have felt embarrassed to tell my neighborhood friends exactly which building I live in because, in their eyes, it would jeopardize my ability to say that I am “really” from Washington Heights, or worse, that I am “really” Latina. More interaction between newcomers and original residents is critical to bridging this divide. I believe that every new residential building in Washington Heights should include an equal number of units designed for tenants of low- and middle-income economic brackets. I would recommend similar regulation for Portland. Allowing for the displacement of low-class and immigrant communities due to gentrification is unacceptable. The most beautiful aspect of urban areas is the intense confluence of diverse cultures and varied heritages; only through strict housing regulation that prevents the displacement of low-income communities can we support such a confluence and nurture the growth of a vibrant and welcoming city.

Work Cited

¹ Fields, Desiree, and Sabina Uffer. 2014. “The Financialisation of Rental Housing: A Comparative Analysis of New York City and Berlin.” Urban Studies, July.

² Smith, Neil. 2014 [1996]. “‘Class Struggle on Avenue B’: The Lower East Side as the Wild Wild West.” In The People, Place and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, et al, 314-319. New York: Routledge, 2014.