Can We Please Come Up With A Better Way to Talk About Gentrification?
I am so exhausted with the discourse about GENTRIFICATION, particularly its confused, anachronistic, often self-serving concept of who’s US and who’s THEM, who’s the outsider (looking in) and who’s the insider, who’s deserving of sympathy or scorn. I just returned from my annual summer vacation in Cape Cod, so I was naturally drawn to the Boston Globe piece (below) about the so-called “Nantucket-ization” of Provincetown. For those of you unfamiliar, Provincetown, or “P-Town”, is an wonderfully atmospheric 19th-century whaling port and fishing village on the tip of the Cape that became an artists colony in the early 1900’s, then a gay mecca in the 1970’s and today, also, a tourist destination. In deep-blue Massachusetts, its foot traffic regularly features unexpected juxtapositions of flamboyant drag queens and visiting “heteronormative” families — often in the same selfie. It is tiny, with just 3,400 year-round residents, but swells to some 60,000 in the peak summer months. The Globe article – in case you hit the paywall – talks ominously of an “ongoing condo conversion trend” and a “surge in wealth” that is supposedly undermining the “social identity of the place” as an “inclusive magnet for free-spirited and creatives.” Yet the author barely stops to consider whether the free-spirited and creatives are actually the same people who have given rise to this surge in wealth. After all, while there’s still no shortage of starving artists today, free-spiritedness and creativity can also be incredibly lucrative in modern consumer culture, as David Brooks so brilliantly captured in his “Bobos in Paradise” — and as places like P-Town have not hesitated to leverage for their economic benefit. Some 60 years after the the term was first coined, it is high time that we develop a more up-to-date, nuanced and useful way of talking about gentrification.