Do Not Go Gentry Into That Good Night (Part I)

Most American cities have neighborhoods whose vintage, architectural interest, and quaintness make them attractive to middle-class people who are less than excited by suburban tract homes and mini-McMansions. These neighborhoods also have the advantage of being close to commercial and shopping areas, and close to the "bright lights", i.e. the entertainment and cultural and nightlife districts of the city. What they also have, more often than not, is a history of neglect and so-called "blight", whereby areas that were upper middle class or upper class at the time of their construction (typically pre-World War I) went gradually downhill for various socioeconomic reasons, until such time as they were dealt a death blow by "urban renewal" programs and became part of the vast no-man's-land that is so familiar in our urban areas. But socioeconomic factors can give as well as take away. Many of these neighborhoods are getting a second look, and many of them are subject to "urban homesteading" -- a sort of upbeat term that really means, "trying to re-establish civilization in the midst of the wilderness". Some cities are offering considerable incentives to people who are willing to act as "pioneers" -- e.g. you can get a house for _free_ if you promise to make it livable -- which can be quite a challenge given that, at the time you got it, it was the occasional habitation of crackheads and junkies, and the permanent habitation of cockroaches the size of rats and rats the size of beavers.

But here's where the trouble starts. It's not enough to buy a house, or have it handed to you, and then proceed to move in and perform major surgery in order to restore it to some semblance of what it was like back in 1880. You're still in "that" neighborhood, and the people who "rule" that neighborhood are, by definition, the ones who aren't afraid to be outside on the street or in the alleyways at all hours of the night -- and that ain't you, bubby. You're going to be sitting inside those triple-bolted doors and barred windows, with elaborate alarm systems activated and emergency lines all ready to fire up in case of an emergency. You're going to hear -- over the sound of NPR -- the sirens, the hollering of drunks and street loonies, the domestic altercations from across the alley, and -- with any luck -- the occasional sound of small-arms fire. And yeah, you're a pioneer, all right -- just like the ones who had the rifle hanging over the door and had to watch out for Indians every time they went out to tend the pumpkin crop. And it's a bit ironic that in a country where the "frontier" closed over 100 years ago, we have a new frontier in our inner cities, fraught with all the same perils and then some. And for the few urban pioneers who knew what to expect, this is the sort of thing that can be taken in stride, up to a point. But for the ones for whom the city represented a newly-rediscovered utopia, it can be very upsetting, and that brings us to the present example -- one of many.

There is an area of Pittsburgh on the North Side known as the Mexican War Streets. It is, of course, a "historic district" and the center of various preservation campaigns. If you want to talk "retro" and "quaint", the place is hard to match. The streets are narrow, as are the houses (being, by and large, of the "townhouse" type, but of very early vintage). There are intriguing little alleyways, walkways, courtyards, rooftops -- all the things that draw people back to the city from the sterile suburban moonscapes. In some cities, these diminutive homes would easily run up to $1 million each -- say, in Manhattan, Washington, DC, San Francisco, or parts of Boston. But in Pittsburgh they are a bargain -- so far, at least. One reason -- other than the simple economics of supply and demand -- is that, despite the gentrification movement that has made this neighborhood one of the most frequently-cited in the area as an example of urban homesteading, the process hasn't moved quite quickly enough or with sufficient force to -- how do I put this delicately? -- "encourage" the former residents to seek lodgings elsewhere. In other words, a lot of people in the MWS area just haven't quite "caught on" to the fact that this area is now slated for gentrification, and upgrading, and settlement by middle-class people who are, by and large -- I don't know how else to say this -- white. So what happens is this. You have a patchwork of settlement -- again, a familiar transitional situation in many urban neighborhoods -- where a fixed-up house is cheek to jowl with a run-down poverty home, which is next to a crack house, which is next to a vacant lot littered with all manner of urban offal, which is, in turn, next to another fixed-up house owned by a couple of "DINKs" (Double Income No Kids) -- or maybe by a gay couple -- or a couple of "DIOKs" (Double Income One Kid, and not planning to have any more). And this unnatural and awkward juxtaposition, and daily rubbing of elbows, doesn't do a thing for the morale of either group, no matter how widely advertised the "diversity" of the neighborhood is. (I have discovered that when an area is described as "diverse" it usually means that one group hasn't yet figured out that it's supposed to leave.) So anyway, what we get is the usual round of muggings, shootings, vandalism, arson, drunkenness, drug dealing, and so forth, all boiling up around the ears of the new arrivals, i.e. the folks who thought that urban life was going to resemble those winsome little line drawings one finds as column-fillers in The New Yorker. So they get upset, and of course when white middle-class people get upset, they don't resort to the direct action of their duskier-hued neighbors and start throwing things through windows -- they call the mayor's office and "demand that something be done" -- and that "something" is invariably a meeting, or series of meetings, which are typically attended _only_ by whites, in a neighborhood that is still overwhelmingly black. And it is in these meetings that the truth finally dawns on all concerned, as to what can be done -- precisely nothing. And the reason it's "nothing" is that these people, like it or not, are outnumbered, outvoted, out-pressured, and "out-cultured", i.e. it is _they_ who are the "strangers in a stange land" -- everyone else is perfectly at home and uninterested in making any changes, thank you very much.

So is this the end of it? Experiment a failure, game over? Not necessarily. There are two main types of force that can be applied to a situation like this -- that originating with the government, and that originating with private enterprise. Government intervention is an ambivalent affair at best, since it was often the actions of the government that created the situation in the first place -- first and foremost being, as I have mentioned, the use of "urban renewal" programs as a club with which to evict the white working class and middle class from the city, and replace it with a warehoused non-working or barely-working lower class. As to why this was ever considered a good idea, I can only refer the reader to the definitive work on the subject, namely E. Michael Jones' "The Slaughter of Cities". Suffice it to say, it happened, to some extent, in virtually every city in America, some to a more severe degree than others, but every city shows its scars. But now, a couple of generations later, the cities (more precisely, their governments) are turning around and saying, "Come back!" Now at the risk of sounding cynical, I could speculate that the primary motive for this is the need to bolster the tax base. How one maintains a viable economy on the basis of small downtown commercial areas and vast "net tax-receiving" areas, and not much else, is beyond me. But it's also possible that -- perhaps by way of travels in other countries, or reading books on history -- a few city officials here and there have had the scales fall from their eyes, and have realized what a grotesque and twisted mockery of urban life most of our cities represent. So they decide to "do something", that that something is to -- by some means or other -- lure the middle class back into Gotham's bosom. The preferred way of accomplishing this at present is to either build new middle-class housing -- typically in concert with commercial and cultural development -- or to appeal in a more focused way to the adventuresome -- the "yuppies" -- the "bourgeois bohemians" -- by promoting the restoration of older, more aesthetically appealing areas. Now, the "new middle-class housing" option is not bad, but it seems, at times, to be no more than a process of moving high-density developments from the suburbs into the city. And it does create an island of security, no doubt -- but only an island and no more. The "restoration" option, on the other hand, retains the uniquely urban character of the area in question, but introduces other discontents as discussed above. In the meantime, the "second wave" of urban renewal is proceeding apace, and this frequently involves demolishing the very high-rises and "garden apartments" that were built to house the participants in the first wave. Where they are supposed to go from here is anybody's guess -- the answer seems to vary from one city to the next. Sometimes it's to other parts of the city, i.e. the ones not slated for upgrading. Sometimes it's to suburban developments which quickly acquire all of same unfortunate qualities as their predecessors. So one might say that the aggregate common good has not been noticeably enhanced. But, by gosh, the city looks better at least. It looks better in Chamber of Commerce brochures, and Better Business Bureau spreads, and in National Geographic. And mainly, the tax base starts to turn around.