Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to The KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand.
I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: gentrification.
Duncan Crary (as interviewer): Well, Jim, I’ve got a good topic for us today.
James Howard Kunstler: Oh, boy.
Duncan Crary: We have a listener comment, a listener email from Kara in Washington. It’s about gentrification, so may I?
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah.
Duncan Crary (reading listener mail): Hi, Duncan and Jim.
James Howard Kunstler: Can you take an aristocratic tone with that, though?
Duncan Crary: I can’t even do it in a female voice.
James Howard Kunstler: Can you say something like, (with aristocratic voice) My good sir, we have a question here, my good man. Please answer this, if you would be so kind?
Duncan Crary: OK. My good sir… I’m sorry. I’m a total failure at that. You’re the one who went to school for theater, not me. But, here’s the question:
Duncan Crary (reading listener mail):
I listened to the latest podcast and I liked what you had to say about walkable cities. I just moved to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC and I love being able to walk to work, to the grocery store, and down town. My neighborhood has wonderful sidewalks and fully grown trees to shade us from that brutal DC July sun.
My question is about something that has been on a lot of our minds here in our nation’s capitol: gentrification. As middle-class people like me move into neighborhoods like Capitol Hill - that are wonderful in part because they were overlooked by developers - what happens to the poor people that are being pushed out? If they move out to the suburbs, where it’s become cheaper to live, they have the extra burden of needing a car because there is no mass transit out there.
Thanks for a great show! I’ve really been enjoying it!
— Kara, in Washington
Duncan Crary: OK, so Jim, what’s the deal with gentrification?
James Howard Kunstler: It’s a very complicated issue. I think we could start by making the point, maybe, that it was never the norm in city life for cities to be inhabited mostly by poor people.
That’s a distortion and a perversity that has only occurred because of what we did in America, because all of the people who were doing well had the option of living in a cartoon version of the country, which is what suburbia was. The cities were left by default to everybody else which were the people who weren’t doing well in one way or another.
So, we have to begin by observing that it’s an abnormality in the first place that our cities are inhabited by so many poor people at the center. If you go to other cities in other lands, what you discover is for the most part the cities at their centers are inhabited by the people who are doing OK and the poorer people live in the periphery.
Duncan Crary: Like in Paris, right?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, like in Paris. That’s been the norm. Now, it’s unfortunate that we have large populations that are poor and not doing well and seem to be stuck where they are. Those are social issues and social questions that may not be able to be addressed sheerly by physical form. Physical form can only do so much.
But, there are things you can do. One thing is that as neighborhoods are getting better in the cities you can typologically make provision for people of different income levels to inhabit the same blocks or the same neighborhoods. You can do that by activating the dwellings in the alleyways and allowing them in the first place, you know, allowing accessory apartments.
One of the problems we run into is that in many, many neighborhoods in America they have outlawed accessory apartments, meaning that families living in very large houses cannot assign part of the house to being the rental for someone who’s not in the market for a single family home or a single person or an older person. That’s the norm in other cities so we don’t do that. We kind of zone people out by — typologically.
But there is another kind of moral dimension to the gentrification issue that has a lot of people very worried and concerned. The problem is if you start creating rules and regulations against improving neighborhoods and against well-off people inhabiting the cities then you have to ask yourself: OK, then by default where do they go? And the answer is: They go to the suburbs; if it’s morally not cool for them to fix up the neighborhoods in the center of the city then they either have to go to the edge of the city or outside the city. It leaves us back in that predicament again.
The cities are not just for poor people, and the cities have to be the responsibility of people of all classes but particularly the well-off because if rich people can’t take care of their towns, who can? We really find ourselves in a bind, where to get back to the original form of an urban habitat — which is allowing people of all incomes to live in proximity to one another — we have to make it OK for them to do it.
Now, cities have gone through a lot of different transitions. Probably the most traumatic one was the one that let industry into the city when we entered the Industrial Age. That created a lot of difficulty that hadn’t been present before. Of course, there had been other problems before, like poor plumbing and poor sanitation and irregular delivery of decent water and stuff like that.
And you get into the Industrial Age and you start to get decent water and decent electricity, but then you also get the overwhelming scale of the industrial town and the noise and the obnoxious behavior of the factories and stuff that people want to get away from. By the early 20th Century, people were getting away from that in the United States when they could.
I guess the question really is: what are the scale and quality and shape and character of our cities going to be like from here on? And I would maintain that we have really gotten past the age of the industrial city as we knew it.
That is a story that is now coming to an end. I think the cities are going to be smaller, that they are going to contract, they are going to densify at their centers. That the people who are doing OK, if there are any in our society, will come to inhabit a lot of those places.
I don’t know where the poor people are going to go. I don’t know what the poor people are going to do. Right now, the poor people are not doing things that are necessarily that productive for themselves. That is a whole other social issue that is maybe beyond the cant of what you and I are talking about.
Duncan Crary: Well, Jim, it just doesn’t make sense to not have affordable housing within a city — even though that term is unnatural, and you’ve explained how ridiculous it is that we need to create this artificial commodity called “affordable housing”. But I remember as a reporter in Saratoga Springs, which is a very popular up and coming city, and a tourist destination in the summer time—
I remember reporting on the service industry, which is sort of the fuel of the Saratoga economy. And the people who are waiters and waitresses and other service industry professionals can’t even afford to live in Saratoga anymore. It’s really hard for them to find—
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, it’s gotten increasingly difficult, and you know it’s very much the same in other parts of the country, although I do think that that was another abnormality, another distortion that’s going to come to an end. We go through a lot of phases.
Right now, oddly enough, in Saratoga Springs, there’s a glut of apartments for rent, and the prices have been coming down, because the college built a new dorm apartment complex as they called it, because it really isn’t an ensemble. But one of the things that it did was it took away all of the college students out of the town, in one fell swoop, who were renting apartments.
And it left a lot of properties un-rented that are hard to rent because they had these three-bedroom and four-bedroom apartments that were pretty crummy, all divided up so that they could cram four students in there and collect $2,500 rent, which is a lot for an apartment.
But the students would pay it because they were only paying $500 or $700 a piece. And when the students left, these were apartments that nobody wanted to be in, because they were so crummy, even though they had a lot of space.
Duncan Crary: Jim, our letter writer is from Washington D.C., which has a substantial black population. Another city that we hear a lot of fear of gentrification is New Orleans, which is also a very black city. What are the underlying moral racial issues; do you feel that there are any going on with this fear of gentrification?
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, well, yes. A lot of it has to do with the failure of the social justice movement in the late 20th Century, and our embarrassment over the fact that we still have these large populations of one racial group that seem to be chronically unsuccessful and can’t change their circumstances and get out of this predicament.
And it’s very hard to account for, and it embarrasses us and makes us tremendously uncomfortable. So we can’t talk about it in those terms. And when you really get down to it, people are people. And it’s a question of what are you, Mr. Individual Person, going to do to take care of your life?
If you find — if you’re poor, if your family’s poor, even if your family’s been poor for three generations, are you going to make a decision to maybe try to do everything possible to not be poor? Or are you just going to submit to where you are because somebody has convinced you that structural racism will prevent you from ever succeeding?
I’m not really sure where structural racism, so-called, leaves off and personal behavior issues begin. And I think it’s very important for us to have that discussion. I think it’s very reassuring that, Barack Obama, running for president is beginning to touch on the edges of that discussion. And I think his contribution to that could be very important.
So that we are once again thinking about ourselves as people and individuals and not as stereotypes. And the question will become: what will we do? What will, as individuals, what choices will we make? And are we just going to allow ourselves to be scripted by cultural scripts and cultural scripts for behavior that condemn us to repeating old stories?
Duncan Crary: So let me ask you this Jim, should we be concerned about gentrification, and why should we be concerned about it? Should we make it a moral issue about racial relations? Or should we strictly think on economic terms? It’s not good for a mono-class society.
James Howard Kunstler: Well the implication of your question, and I would certainly say that we have to think about it in all of its dimensions… But we particularly have to think about the importance of making it OK for people who are doing well in society to live in the city.
And we can’t just take the position philosophically that it’s not OK for people who are doing OK to live in the city. Because that, by default, leaves them only the suburbs or the countryside to live in.
Duncan Crary: Because there is this unhealthy evolution of language in our culture, where “urban” is like code-speak for black.
James Howard Kunstler: Absolutely, and it’s peculiar, you know? It’s bizarre.
Duncan Crary: Well it’s offensive to black people. It’s also offensive to everyone else.
James Howard Kunstler: Well it should be. But I think it’s become the acceptable euphemism for now. And at some point it won’t be, because it suggests that the center of the city is the only place that’s suitable for black people, and black people should be urban.
The whole thing is really crazy, especially when you consider the fact that many of the black people who ended up in the cities were former sharecroppers, basically country people who moved to these cities to get jobs in the 1950’s and 60’s.
The mechanical cotton picker was invented, I think, in something like 1948, and that really put a whole class of southern rural people out of business. And they had to go somewhere and do something else.
And a lot of them went to Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, and New York City, and Philadelphia for industrial jobs, etcetera.
Duncan Crary: Well Jim, I know we just danced very lightly upon a very controversial topic. But I think it’s important to have the conversation. We’ll probably be criticized in some ways for how we handled this.
But I think we’ve opened up a dialogue, and if our listeners want to contribute to this, correct us… I for one was saying “black” and not African American. But I would like to point out that not all black people in America are African Americans.
James Howard Kunstler: Well it’s true, and I think that you deserve a lot of credit for even raising this difficult subject which most white people in America are just too uncomfortable to talk about. Somehow we do have to talk about these things. And the best thing we can do is just try to remember to be kind to each other as much as possible.
Duncan Crary: Well thanks a lot Jim.
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I’m your host, Duncan Crary, thanks for listening.
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