Angelo Arcila mazo Professor Cacoilo
Women andMedia May, 05, 2010
Gentrification and Women in the U.S
Within the past fifty years in the United States, women have increased their social clout. Women’s Movements throughout the 1960’s and 70’s helped to change the perception of what a typical family embodied and also provided opportunities for women to join the workforce. Instead of being bound to the role of home-maker, millions of women became more independent and started to connect through consciousness raising groups as well as various movements. Around this same period in the late 1970’s, when vast networks of women activist were organizing around social and gender equality, the social fabric of many cities were also changing. After the movements of the prior two decades, the 1980’s marked the beginning of the process of gentrification across much of the country. Gentrification is the process by which poor and working-class neighborhoods in the inner city are refurbished by an influx of private capital and middle-class homebuyers and renters. Large urban areas, containing largely minority groups of similar racial origins and that were considered blemishes on the image of the cities they were located in, underwent drastic transformations.
While usually seen as a genderless issue that puts a strain on all groups involved, there is no increasing research that talks about the difficulties women directly experience as a result of gentrification. Liz Bondi, a former lecturer of geography at the University of Edinburgh, wrote about the ineffectiveness of scholars and academics to study the effects increased rights along with gentrification has had on women. “Moreover, little attempt has been made to locate the role of women in gentrification within broader discussions of gender relations, although it is clearly assumed that changes in the position of women, both in the family and in paid labour force, have been influential,” says Bondi (p190). Many women with secure wages in gentrified areas were able to adapt to the economic burdens, but those who were not financially well-off or already in poverty began to suffer tremendously.
Likely the first essential resource lost as a result of the massive relocation of families, were the connections made through direct action groups in the Women’s and Feminist Movements. While not all forms of communication were severed as a result of geographic relocation, there was a divergence in feminist thought and discipline that gentrification brought about. As a result of this departure from a coherent interconnected structure a one more widely dispersed one, the Feminist and Women Movements of the sixties and seventies struggled to remain in tact. What emerged were diffuse and diverse, but sometimes conflicting, feminist identity in women who were becoming indifferent from one another and much of society. As an article about the decline of the women’s movement, by instructor at the University of California-Santa Cruz Barbara Epstein points out, “During the eighties and nineties a feminist perspective, or identity, spread widely and a diffuse feminist consciousness is now found nearly everywhere. But feminism has simultaneously become institutionalized and marginalized. It has been rhetorically accepted, but the wind has gone out of its sails. The organizations and academic networks that shape public perceptions of feminism, have become distant from the constituencies that once invigorated them, and have lost focus and dynamism” (p378). Whether or not the process of gentrification has had such a drastic effect on the strength of Women’s Movements is unknown, however. This is because the study of gentrification as a discipline of study does not have extensive gender specific data, to show how women in particular have been impacted by the constant changes in relation to place and status. Not to mention the other life altering transformations that women were faced with as a result of changing social roles and cites. It is hard to determine how much effect gentrification may have caused rifts in these movements. But as a 2006 urban studies article by Kathe Newman and Elvin Wyly states, as a result of displacement, “Residents may be displaced as a result of housing demolition, ownership conversion of rental units, increased housing costs (rent, taxes), landlord harassment, and evictions. Those who avoid these direct displacement pressures may benefit from neighborhood improvements, but may suffer as critical community networks and culture are dismantled.” For many women who constantly are moving their families place to place, as is a classic narrative for many women characters in Hollywood films, is impossible, many times leaves them vulnerable and lacking vital resources.
A recent University of Oregon journal article talked about how Feminist geography literature (of the late nineteen eighties and nineties) helped to make some breakthroughs in studying the inequalities of the past that continue to plague millions of women. “An important task for feminist geographers has been to make women visible, by developing geography of women,” begins the article. “Two points have been made: women’s experiences and perceptions often differ from those of men; and women have restricted access to a range of opportunities, from paid employment to services. This is largely an empirical tradition, loosely influenced by liberal feminism and welfare geography. It has tended to focus on individuals, documenting how women’s roles as caregivers and housewives, in conjunction with the existing spatial patterns of accessibility to transport and other services such as childcare, conspire to constrain women’s access to paid employment and other resources” (p1). While the article goes on to point out the decreased emphasis placed on gender relations in subsequent studies towards the end of the century, it would be inaccurate to do so when gender inequalities cited in the article, persist across large urban areas do this day. Although the number of stay at home moms has sharply been on the decline, a December 2006 Census Press Release shows that, out of 82.5 million estimated mothers, there were 5.6 stay at home moms nationwide that year. The statistics also showed that a women age 15 and older, who works full-time, year-round, earns 77cents for every 1dollar her male counterpart earns. In an ideal world there would be no need to account for gender relations, but in actual reality there is a strong need to include them.
A similar Census track indicated that there were 7.9 million families in poverty, and that African American households possessed the lowest median income of any group. While a politically contentious a couple decades ago, the issue poverty in America has re-emerged with the onset of recent economic woes. In a 1987 entry for The Milbank Quarterly Leona Bachrach talks about the prior notions related to women and homelessness. “Few professional contributions even acknowledge gender differences in the homeless population, and fewer still focus on homeless women’s special circumstances,” says Bachrach. “Those writings that do exist are remarkably consistent in their reiteration of several basic themes: that women are being evicted and displaced in increasing numbers all over the United States; that their meager personal resources are inadequate to sustain them; that their homelessness is somehow more “invisible” than that of men; and that many of them suffer untold emotional deprivations in addition to their homelessness. (p342). In gentrification there are constant inconsistencies with the entire process of social reconfiguration. While many say the benefits of gentrification, nowadays, outweigh the detriments, large segments of any gentrified community are fully excluded from the new housing market prices. In Harlem for example, gentrification has been occurring for nearly three decades, with a recent upsurge in the percentage of Caucasians settling in the once predominantly area. These changes have resulted in difficulties for hundreds of African American and minority residents seeking affordable housing in Harlem. An NYU journalism piece recently chronicled this housing dilemma. “A lot of people are looking for a place to live here, but rent is skyrocketing and affordable housing is harder to come by everyday,” said Lester LaBoy, 51, an Art for Change employee since 2001 and lifetime resident of East Harlem. “These landlords, now all they do is put in sheet-rock and a wood floor, call it ‘renovated,’ and charge $875 for a tiny studio” (p2). Thus not only does this have an adverse effect of the social composition of neighborhoods but, various vital social networks and nodes that once existed in the neighborhood are strong-armed out of the community and forever lost.
One neighborhood in Brooklyn, Clinton Hill, has shown how the process of gentrification does not always immediately provide an increase in quality of life for residents. The 2006 Lance Freeman book, entitled “There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up,” talks about the long and drawn out processes of gentrification in Clinton Hill and other areas in NYC. “The gentrification of Clinton Hill, did not occur in a continuous and steady fashion” says Freeman. “The same article that described Clinton Hill as a revival neighborhood also pointed out there were no especially good streets, rather the Brownstoners were scattered throughout the neighborhood in Clinton Hill. Long-term residents, whose narratives form the basis of this book, also paint a picture of Clinton Hill in the 1970’s and 1980’s that despite the incipient gentrification still had the hallmarks of inner-city decline” (p41). Only recently has this decade has the Clinton Hill area in Brooklyn begun to emerge as a successful case study for gentrification. While the crack epidemic in the nation during this era was one of the factors that caused this long period of lag, there was also a period of economic depression described by Freeman as being one of the major culprits in the lack of progress and opportunity. In recent years, the global recession has again resulted in the rollback of gentrification in many neighborhoods across the country.
As more and more people continue to be displaced and suffer financially, there is a need to not forget just how much women are still suffering in such areas where gentrification is occurring or has become stagnant. Places designated for gentrification, such as the area of Atlantic and Pacific Avenue in Brooklyn, where residents have been told for a handful of years that developer Bruce Ratner would revitalize the area by building a multi-billion dollar sports arena along with “affordable housing” for residents, continue to wait for whatever benefits of the process. While the community vehemently opposed the project, the city, developers, and state claimed eminent domain in order to go about clearing the real estate for ground to be broken.
Hundreds in the community have had their small businesses shut down and their livelihoods taken away from them. All this occurred during the start of 2004 more or less, and more than five years after plans to break ground, the old businesses remain vacant, the promises made by the gentrifying forces remain unfulfilled, and no progress has been made as a result of the lingering recession. As Keith Halfacree points out in his book, Migration and Gender in the Developed World, “While gentrification is by definition a class process, in that it changes the class composition of the neighborhoods affected, several commentators have argued that the position of women in the family and in the labor market have been integral to what Demaris Rose describes as the “production of gentrifiers”. Statistical evidence indicates that inner urban areas in general contain more women than men, many living in poor and disadvantaged households, including lone elderly women and lone mothers with children. However there is also some evidence to suggest that women are disproportionately represented amongst gentrifiers, in at least some localities”(p170). Through the past decades there has been somewhat of an improvement in the overall standard of living for women, although the overall living standard has been slipping. Many studies have tried to reflect these advantages experienced by women as a result of gentrification in urban areas of the metropolis. But besides the comfortable, middle class, white women, who were and continue to be targets of gentrification or who thrived in their new neighborhood, these places remain exclusive for millions of minority women while it also up-rooted millions from these areas.
Instead of focusing on the argument between the pros and cons, there should be a re-focusing on the way particular groups in society are affected. By doing so we can begin to see how women of all sorts experience complications due to gentrification, and what these conflicts mainly are. Unfortunately many women minority groups have remained, as Leona Bachrach put it, invisible in these new beautified settings. This remains so despite the fact that women are now officially, and have been for several years, the majority of the American population in terms of male or female. Although a large amount of women are now running their own businesses in America, gentrification is an issue that continues to change women’s perception of time, space, and self. All which are products of the process of gentrification itself, a discipline within urban sociology that needs to be approached not just as another term, but as a long, seemingly never-ending process that affects women is disproportionate ways.
1) Bondi, Liz. Gender Divisions and Gentrification: A Critique. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1991 New Series, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1991), pp. 190-198.
2) Goodwin, Jeff and Jasper James. “The Social Movements Reader”, The Decline of the Women’s Movement. Blackwell Publishing, Massachusetts, 2009.
3) University of Oregon. “Feminist Geographies”, Department of Geography: 2002. 10 May 2010
4) Newman, Kathe and Wyly Elvin. Gentrification and Displacement Revisited: A fresh look at the New York City experience, University of Toronto Urban Studies, vol. 43, issue 1, January 2006
5) United States. Department of Commerce Census Bureau. Press Release, February 2006.
6) Bachrach, Leona. “Homeless Women: A Context for Health Planning”,The Milbank Quarterly, Blackwell Publishing, Vol. 65, No. 3:1987, pp. 371(72)-396.
7) Winters, Rachel. Art for Change in El Barrio, NYU Journalism online: 4 August 2007, New York, 9 May 2010. <http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/pavement/in/east-harlem/art-for-change-el-barrio/>
8) Freeman, Lance. There goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification From the ground up. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006
9) Halfacree, Keith and Boyle Paul. “Migration and Gender in the Developed World”, New York: Routledge Publishing, 1999.
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