"At Risk"? the Fed Up Honeys Re-Present the Gentrification of the Lower East Side

Abstract

I was standing behind, I was walking down Columbia or something, and there were these three white frat boys in front of me and they were like (she imitates their voices) Look at these people they totally don't understand like value of space around them. Like they got a lot of real estate value here. They don't know what they got. And I'm like yeah we do. We just value it differently-it's a different kind of value. You see dollar bills when you see that building. I see that that's my grandmother's house, you know. That's like, this is my history! This is my place! You know, and you just want to step in because you think I'm stupid because I'm living in projectsRiverfront property! You know, prime real -Fed Up Honey While gentrification is often represented within framework of real estate capital as evidence of urban progress, this emphasis loses sight of not only its role in processes of community transformation, but also how it is experienced within a broader context of disenfranchisement by working-class communities. In this essay I consider experience of urban economic restructuring from inside perspective of young working-class women of color who have grown up in neighborhood of East Side in New York City in 1990s, a time of intensive gentrification, witnessing their neighborhood change while still living in it. In a participatory action research project titled Makes Me Mad: Stereotypes of Young Urban Womyn of Color (2005; see http://www.fed-up-honeys.org), six young women researchers (the Fed Up Honeys) investigated relationship between disinvestment and gentrification of their community, public representations, and their self-understanding. Questioning valuation of economic over personal, of dollar bills over her connections to place, of profit-making over communitarian ideals, one young woman researcher conveys a sense of moral outrage that her history, her grandmother's house, is now considered prime real estate. Why do rights of property ownership trump her rights to stay in neighborhood (Mitchell 2003; Harvey 2003)? Challenging commonplace perception of gentrification as an inevitable or natural process, this young woman foregrounds contested status of her neighborhood. Just like signs neighborhood activists carried proclaiming, Lower East Side-not for sale. This land is ours! as they marched on city hall more than twenty years ago to protest city's auctioning off properties to private interests (AbuLughod 1994), she expresses ownership-This is my place!-of community where she has lived her whole life. After weathering years of disinvestment, now her family is threatened with social and spatial exclusion as East Side is gentrified. If gentrification is the new urban form of globalization (Smith 2002), then its analysis is vital to our understanding of how neoliberalism reconfigures urban scale and processes of exclusion. Critical is role of representations that legitimate contradictions of new urban geography of inequality (Wilson and Grammenos 2005). My research focuses upon what Robin Kelley identifies as the culture wars in urban America, the ongoing battle over representations... and significance of cultural terrain as a site of struggle(Kelley 1997, 8). This is not just a matter of theoretical interest, Kelley argues, as culture wars continue to rage each day in streets of urban America (8). For young women living on East Side with whom I did research, issue of public representations was of utmost concern. If stereotypes of underclass and risk travel widely, distributed and produced at national and even global scales, they are also experienced as viscerally local and intensely personal. The representation of risk cuts both ways, justifying both disinvestment and reinvestment of East Side, and are experienced by young women as both a social betrayal and a public assault on their subjectivities. …

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