Is Gentrification a Problem in St. Louis?

The word “gentrification” is often used as a negative term against many developments in St. Louis, but is the use valid?  The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines gentrification as:

“the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle-class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces poorer residents”

To me a key part of the definition is “often displaces poorer residents.”  The dictionary says the first use of the word was in 1964, a very different time than 2011.

Here is the opening to the Wikipedia entry:

Gentrification and urban gentrification are terms referring to the socio-cultural displacement that results when wealthier people acquire property in low income and working class communities. Consequent to gentrification, the average income increases and average family size decreases in the community, which sometimes results in the eviction of lower-income residents because of increased rents, house prices, and property taxes. This type of population change reduces industrial land use when it is redeveloped for commerce and housing. In addition, new businesses, catering to a more affluent base of consumers, tend to move into formerly blighted areas, further increasing the appeal to more affluent migrants and decreasing the accessibility to less wealthy natives.

Urban gentrification occasionally changes the culturally heterogeneous character of a community to a more economically homogeneous community that some describe as having a suburban character. This process is sometimes made feasible by government-sponsored private real estate investment repairing the local infrastructure, via deferred taxes, mortgages for poor and for first-time house buyers, and financial incentives for the owners of decayed rental housing. Once in place, these economic development actions tend to reduce local property crime, increase property values and prices and increase tax revenues.

Political action, to either promote or oppose the gentrification, is often the community’s response against unintended economic eviction caused by rising rents that make continued residence in their dwellings unfeasible. The rise in property values causes property taxes based on property values to increase; resident owners unable to pay the taxes are forced to sell their dwellings and move to a cheaper community.

Gay men have often been accused of gentrification because we’ve seen the potential of many rundown areas, back to the same Wikipedia entry:

Manuel Castells‘s seminal work about gay men as “gentrifiers” in San Francisco, California, shows that “many gays were single men, did not have to raise a family, were young, and connected to a relatively prosperous service economy” is a pattern replicated in other North American cities.

The documentary Flag Wars (2003), directed by Linda Goode Bryant, shows the social, class, and gender tensions in the Silk Stocking neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, between an urban African-American community and the mostly white gays and lesbians moving in to the neighborhood, whom the original residents accused of gentrification and racism. In turn, the new residents accused the community of homophobia.  In 2006, in Washington, D.C., a religious congregation in the black Shaw neighborhood opposed the granting of a liquor license to a gay bar that was to open across the street from the church.  The bar was successfully opened and has since been replaced by another gay bar at the same location.

Gay people are not always the gentrifiers: real estate valuation trends can push out poor gay people, as in the Polk District in San Francisco: radical gay activists saw the value of a poor neighborhood as refuge for the economically and socially marginal.

Gentrification is the topic of the poll  this week (upper right).

– Steve Patterson