Nazi Slogans: Has Berlin’s Gentrification Feud Gone too Far?

From Der Spiegel.

It may have begun as a joke, but with the adoption of slogans used by the Nazis, an ongoing feud pitting long-time Berliners against newer residents from southern Germany may have crossed a line.

In the past months, the so-called “Swabian hate” became increasingly aggressive. In early May, “Don’t buy from the Swabians” was spray-painted on the side of a Prenzlauer Berg building, an incitement to boycott that directly mirrors the slogan affixed to Jewish businesses in 1933 after Hitler came to power.

On Monday morning, residents of Berlin’s central Mitte district awoke to find a memorial bearing a bust of the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Hegel smeared with ketchup and currywurst, a local fast-food specialty, under a banner reading “Expatriate Swabians.” This probably didn’t come as a big surprise, however, given that in the past year, graffitied messages like “Shoot Swabians” and “Swabians Out” have become commonplace in the city — particularly in the former working-class neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg in what was once East Berlin.

Germans from the southwestern region of Swabia — with their hefty savings accounts and distinct accents — have become the unfortunate poster children for the city’s rapid gentrification. Proudly rough-around-the-edges Berliners like to complain that the well-heeled arrivals from the south are bourgeois and pedantic types who are not only causing rents to spike, but molding the German capital in their own provincial image.

An anonymous group claimed responsibility online for defacing the bust of Hegel, who hailed from Stuttgart, Swabia’s largest city. “The Swabians have until December 31, 2013 to leave the transitional quarter. They will be expatriated from Berlin and sent to the south,” reads their website.

Though most of the intimations of the “Expatriate Swabians” group and those like it are probably meant to be tongue-in-cheek, many feel the mock-nativism is in poor taste — especially in Berlin, where mass pogroms were carried out by the Nazis only a few generations ago. Berlin’s interior minister, Frank Henkel, called the most recent incident “tasteless” and “unspeakable.” On Tuesday, he told the mass-circulation daily Bild: “If anybody doesn’t fit into Berlin, then it is not the Swabians, but these intolerant factions.”

It Began as a Joke

The act is the latest in a series of incidents — often referred to as the “Spätzle Wars” in the local press — that at first seemed like harmless pranks. In January, a group known by the name of “Free Swabylon” splattered spätzle — a traditional Swabian egg noodle dish — on a statue of the artist Käthe Kollwitz and called for an autonomous Swabian district in Berlin.

A few days earlier, Wolfgang Thierse, a long-time Prenzlauer Berg resident as well as the vice president of Germany’s federal parliament, the Bundestag, had commented to a local newspaper that he felt he’d become an “endangered species” in his neighborhood and complained that many local bakeries now use the Swabian terms for various pastries, instead of the Berlin ones.

“I hope the Swabians realize they are now in Berlin, and not in their little towns with their spring cleaning,” he told the Berliner Morgenpost. “They come here because it’s all so colorful and adventurous and lively, but after a while, they want to make it like it is back home. You can’t have both.”

But in recent months, the so-called “Swabian hate” has grown increasingly aggressive, as graffiti has adopted the tone — and, in some cases, the exact wording — that was used by the Nazis in their persecution of the Jews and other targeted groups in the run-up to the Holocaust. One recent piece of graffiti reads, “Swabians, piss off,” with the double “S” resembling the Nazi’s SS insignia. In early May, “Don’t buy from the Swabians” (“Kauf nicht bei Schwaben”) was spray-painted on the side of a Prenzlauer Berg building, an incitement to boycott that directly mirrors the slogan affixed to Jewish businesses in 1933 after Hitler came to power. Both phrases were followed with “TSH,” supposedly an acronym for “Total Swabian Hate.”

‘No Justification’

Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, told the daily Berliner Zeitung earlier this month that the graffiti was an “unthinkable action” for which there was “no justification.” And Interior Minister Henkel pointed out that the act is especially insensitive because there is a synagogue on the same street. “Graffiti of this kind is no trivial offense,” he said. “The police will do everything they can to find the person responsible.”

“Its never good to trivialize the Shoah and the Third Reich by using the words and phrases related to that time,” says Ralf Melzer, an expert on right-wing extremism at Berlin’s Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. “But especially here in Berlin, where the Final Solution was planned and organized. It harms and insults the relatives of the victims.” Serious or not, he adds, this kind of glib referencing is normally frowned upon, if not unprecedented, in Berlin.

“From time to time, you hear politicians use wording similar to the Nazis in other contexts or apply the word ‘Holocaust’ inappropriately, and so forth,” says Melzer. But he can’t think of another instance in which the language of the Third Reich was thrown around in such a cavalier fashion, he adds.

As early as the 1970s, Berliners have had a habit of mocking newcomers from southern parts of Germany — especially Swabians, who were easily identifiable by their accent and idiosyncratic dialect. In the 1990s, after the fall of the Wall, derision grew as the younger generation flocked to the city from other parts of the country to take part in the wild parties and experimental arts scenes for which Berlin had become known.

In the past decade, as Berlin’s international profile has continuously grown, resentment against the influx of new residents has intensified, with locals complaining that the city is being overly gentrified, sanitized and sapped of its character. An extreme case is Prenzlauer Berg, which transformed in less than two decades from communist workers’ district to ragged bohemian playground to posh family enclave, complete with yoga studios, preschools and organic cafes. For all the claims that Swabian hate is just a bit of good-natured taunting, the sentiment is grounded in the real anger of long-time residents being priced out of their homes.

‘A Real Social Dimension’

“Maybe the intention is to make a joke, but I’m not so sure,” says Melzer. “I think this is actual resentment against a group. It’s a very diffuse kind of feeling, but there is a real social dimension in that housing prices are getting higher, the neighborhood is changing, it’s getting more chic. But you have to see that this is quite a normal phenomenon. Neighborhoods change. This has to be handled in another way — not by stigmatizing a whole group, be it the Danish or the Swabians. It’s a pity that things like this happen, and it’s not good for the atmosphere in the city.”

The focus on Swabians, in particular, has hit a nerve because it taps into deeper cultural and geographical animosities rooting back to reunification, when a bankrupt Berlin turned to the wealthier German federal states for support.

Today, the city-state of Berlin is more than €60 billion ($80 billion) in debt and receives around €3 billion a year in cross subsidies from the richer German states, such as Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, the two states straddled by Swabia. Some see the anti-Swabian acrimony as particularly hard to swallow, given the fact that Berlin owes much of its current incarnation as a dynamic creative capital to the fact that its southern neighbors foot the bill.

And for that matter, as Melzer points out, you could just as easily blame new residents from Bavaria, Brandenburg or Italy.

“I would say that to some extent, it’s an artificial conflict,” he says. “There’s a real basis, but you can’t blame individuals. And bringing this into context with the Holocaust and the Nazi era is not only completely inappropriate — but also counterproductive for people who want to keep prices low in their neighborhoods.”

Anarchists claim responsibility for torching East Vancouver duplex

From the Vancounver Sun.

Anarchists claim responsibility for torching East Vancouver duplex

Vancouver police are investigating whether an early morning arson fire at an East Vancouver duplex that was under construction is linked to a series of protests by individuals claiming to be members of an anti-gentrification group.

A group, calling themselves the Anti-Gentrification Front, claimed responsibility for burning down the building at Victoria and E. 1st early Wednesday morning and posted the claim on an anarchist online message board where other claims have also been made about attacks on banks and restaurants.

The incident comes in the wake of increased anti-gentrification activities, including vandalism, thefts and ongoing protests outside the new Pidgin restaurant in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Const. Brian Montague, a police spokesman, said investigators have not been able to verify the latest claim and are also looking at other possibilities, including disgruntled employees and unhappy squatters. But he said the seriousness of the fire, which nearly spread to an adjacent home, has raised the police department’s level of concern.

“Obviously this is a priority. Any time we get a serious incident like this we treat it as a priority when a group sees the need to rely on violence or arson to possibly make a point,” he said.

The fire in the partly built duplex in the 1900-block of E. 1st Ave. was discovered by police around 1:30 a.m. and residents on either side were quickly evacuated. Vancouver firefighters got the fire quickly under control, but adjacent houses suffered minor damage.

Someone claiming to be from the Anti-Gentrification Front posted the claim anonymously on the anarchist message board anarchistnews.org, saying they had set fire to the building because they were “tired of seeing our lives and memories being torn down one development at a time.

“We wish and will create fear for developers in East Vancouver. The class war is heating up. We have no intention on stopping. If we, if you, allow this (to) continue you will be pushed out of East Vancouver due to rising rent and gentrification. If you are the cause of gentrification you should never feel safe.”

A portable toilet on the construction site was spray-painted with an anarchist symbol and the warning: “We’ll be back.”

Neighbours say the old house once had two apartments but the building had been abandoned for years.

Montague said police take the threats seriously.

“There’s someone who is claiming responsibility and we will be investigating whether those claims are true or not. But it is too early to tell right now if there is any validity to that right now,” he said. “We will see if there is a link but there is nothing that we can say that links them right now.”

Mayor Gregor Robertson issued a statement saying he was deeply concerned about the arson.

“The alleged arson of a house under construction is of significant concern to me, especially in light of extremist claims made online,” he said.

“Innocent lives could have been lost. I would like to thank our first responders for their immediate action to evacuate the neighbouring homes. Violence of any kind will not be tolerated in the City of Vancouver, and any criminal acts will be investigated and responded to with every resource at our disposal.”

For several years, predating the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, anti-poverty activists and so-called “Black Block” groups have waged a small and so far ineffective war of vandalism on banks and other groups they see as capitalist symbols.

The Royal Bank, CIBC, HSBC and others have had windows smashed, and in several cases Molotov Cocktails — gasoline-filled bottles — have been thrown.

Heckling demonstrators have held ongoing protests outside Pidgin restaurant to draw attention to gentrification of the area. One woman was recently arrested and charged with a violent protest outside the restaurant after she tried to lock employees inside.

Individuals claiming to be part of an anti-gentrification movement also claimed responsibility for smashing the windows of a Commercial Drive pizzeria at least three times and stealing the sign from in front of Save On Meats on Hastings Street. Anti-poverty activists in the Downtown Eastside have repeatedly distanced themselves from the Anti-Gentrification Front.

This latest online claim has drawn comments from people — including some who call themselves anarchists — who said the arson fire wasn’t an anarchist action, especially considering it put people in neighbouring homes at risk.

At the height of the blaze, firefighters went door to door urging nearby residents to evacuate. Leslie MacDonald, who lives four doors away, had to flee with her cat and three dogs.

She “and the rest of the neighbourhood” waited on the corner for an hour until they were told it was safe to return home.

Despite the scare, MacDonald said she has “mixed feelings” about the stunt. “This is not the way to approach societal problems. It’s disturbing to think of that level of destruction, and the houses right next door with families and kids sleeping in them.”

Still, she “understands the frustration with how expensive it is to live in Vancouver … when there’s a divide like that there’s the potential for more action.”

According to property records, the site had the same owner from 1996 to 2012, when it was sold for $671,000 to two property development companies.

Gentrification of Berlin stirs protests with neo-Nazi tinge

From the Vancouver Sun.

Campaign against wealthy Swabians buying in blue-collar neighbourhood uses Nazi imagery

The gentrification of rundown city neighbourhoods is a matter of anxiety and outrage worldwide just as in Vancouver. But in Berlin what started as a joke has developed into a bitter campaign with neo-Nazi overtones.

In the German capital’s working-class Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood, an influx of affluent Swabians from the country’s south scooping up relatively cheap housing in what was once one of the grimmer areas of grim East Berlin has sparked fierce resistance.

The district’s residents, proud of their blue-collar heritage in the old communist East Germany, have taken to hard-edged mocking of the southerners from Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg states for their distinct dialect, frugal habits and bourgeois ways.

Swabians have long been the target of jokes in Germany because of their accents and reputation for humourlessness.

Berliners, however, have in recent years had to face the inconvenient truth that it was the parsimonious Swabian states that played a major role in financing the revival of Berlin after reunification in 1989.

But in Germany, and especially in Berlin where the Nazis in the 1930s set in motion their schemes for the genocide of Jews, homosexuals, Roma and other distinct groups, the singling out of any culture for attack rings alarm bells.

The campaign against the Swabians started in January and at first it seemed to be more of a joke than anything.

A group using the name “Free Swabylon” called for an autonomous Swabian district in Berlin and backed up its demand by decorating a statue of early 20th century artist Kathe Kollwitz, known for her sympathetic depictions of the poor and downtrodden, with those well-known Swabian traditional egg noodles, spaetzle.

However, what local newspapers quickly dubbed “the spaetzle wars” swiftly took on a sharper tone.

What has startled Berlin’s municipal councillors and federal politicians is that the graffiti being spray-painted on the district’s walls with ever-increasing regularity draws on instantly recognizable Nazi imagery for its attacks on the Swabians.

Some of the messages use the exact phrases the Nazis’ used in their propaganda against the Jews and other targeted groups.

“Graffiti of this kind is no trivial offence,” Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, told the newspaper Berliner Zeitung. Police will do all they can to track down those responsible, he said.

Sensitivities are heightened because in Munich, the Nazis’ base before gaining national power, there is a high-profile trial of a group of neo-Nazis.

The five people are accused of murdering, over seven years, eight men from among Germany’s community of three million immigrant Turks, a Greek man and a German policewoman.

Those warning bells about reviving group hatred clang even louder when mainstream politicians appear to jump on the bandwagon of social rifts.

Earlier this year Wolfgang Thierse, who as well as being a longtime resident of Prenzlauer Berg is vice-president of Germany’s federal parliament, the Bundestag, told a local newspaper, the Berliner Morgenpost, that he felt like an endangered species in his own neighbourhood.

His complaint was that the Swabian new arrivals had begun to change the culture of the district to reflect the customs of their home states.

“I hope the Swabians realize they are now in Berlin and not in their little towns with their spring cleaning,” Thierse told the newspaper.

“They come here because it is so colourful and adventurous and lively,” he continued. “But after a while, they want to make it like it is back home. You can’t have both.”

The influx of people into Berlin, especially Swabians, began soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. That immigration from Swabia has intensified in the past decade and the magazine Der Spiegel says Prenzlauer Berg in particular has been transformed “from communist workers’ district to posh family enclave, complete with yoga studios, preschools and organic cafes.”

At first after the fall of the wall, Berlin became a magnet for artists of all stripes eager to take part in the joyous project of creating a new entity out of the city’s previously divided parts.

Indeed, one of the great symbols of the creative zeal of the rejoining, the so-called “East Side Gallery” where artists painted on the longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall, is also a subject of anti-gentrification outrage.

A controversial investor plans a luxury apartment complex where part of the 1.3-kilometre-long “East Side Gallery” runs along what was known as the “death strip” between East and West Berlin.

Dismantling the wall had to be halted early in March after several angry protests by demonstrators wanting the wall saved and the development killed.

But then, late in the month and early one morning work, crews protected by about 250 policemen took down the sections of the wall impeding the development.

Protesters Smash Google Shuttle Bus Piñata in Fight Against Rent Increases

Google Bus Pinata

Sick of high-paid tech employees driving up rent prices, protestors in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood held a “Anti-Gentrification Block Party” and beat on a Google bus piñata before cops broke up the crowd.  The area has long been home to artists and Mexican-American families, but they’re being forced out as techies move in, their employers set up shuttle stops, and housing prices skyrocket.

Mission district blog Uptown Almanac’s Kevin Montgomery was on the scene. He describes 30 to 40 people assembled at the neighborhood’s 16th street Bay Area Rapid Transit station. The spot is one of the dirtiest in the city — in stark contrast to fancy Valencia street just one block over where software engineers frequent posh restaurants and pricey bike shops.

anti-gentry-block-party

Google, Apple, and Facebook all have shuttle bus stops in the neighborhood making it easy for their employees to live in the hip district while commuting south to Silicon Valley in style. The buses have become a symbol of gentrification. Dozens of police officers surrounded the rally, fearing it might devolve into violence. Last May a riot broke out in neighborhood with many businesses vandalized with “Yuppies Out” graffiti.

Montgomery says that around 2:30pm yesterday “the [protestors] did string up the piñata to a makeshift fishing pole and beat it mercilessly” as seen in the video below from YouTube user Krionni. Soon after, the police swarmed in and dispersed the group.

As a three-year resident of the Mission, I’ve seen the influx of money from the rise of Apple and Google’s stock plus the Facebook IPO change its character. When the San Francisco Giants won the World Series, local techies came out to spectate and record the chaos with their iPads. Cheap grocery stores and eateries have been going out of business, while trendy bars and cafes move in. Rent increased 29% from 2011 to 2012 alone.

Unfortunately, I’ve haven’t seen the tech giants who’ve colonized the neighborhood do much to give back. Funding some local education or beautification initiatives could go a long way to reducing the gentrification backlash.

more needs to be said on yarn-bombing, apparently

From there’s our catastrophe.

winged:

just because people don’t like a form of art you perceive as worthy doesn’t mean that you should degrade another form of art. That doesn’t make other people see the value in traditional tagging/graffiti, it doesn’t draw attention to art as a creative force, all it does is handwave people’s efforts.

Graffiti is art. Mural painting is art. So is yarnbombing, seedbombing, etc. It’s something that draws attention to the landscape and the ability of beauty to exist anywhere; sometimes it’s a statement about nature’s existence in urban spaces, or political situations, gentrification or development, and sometimes it’s just an expression of self – let’s not pretend every tagger or yarnbomber is doing anything more than ekeing out a spot for themselves. Who are you to quantify what art is based on the income level of who creates it? Moreover, who are you to DECIDE who creates it?

Yarn is not the sole domain of twee white kids. ANYONE CAN KNIT. Anyone can grab a ball of pretty cheap yarn from Walmart. …Does it make ANYONE feel better for you to say yarnbombing is worthless because white kids do it? Does it make anyone respect graffiti the way it should be respected? Because I don’t think it does. Art is art, and we should appreciate ALL of it, even if lawmakers don’t.

ohwhatatragiccost:

I have such a super major problem with this. Because, I fully agree, there’s a HUGE and EXTREMELY PROBLEMATIC difference between how things like graffiti are treated by lawmakers and police and how yarn graffiti and seed bombing are. But I think being like, “Oh, white hipster middle class people blah blah blah,” misses the point entirely and means you don’t have enough familiarity with the subject to actually be ranting about it.

First, knit graffiti, pasting, and seed bombing are meant to make public art and reclamation of space CHEAPER and MORE ACCESSIBLE for anyone. It may or may not have been embraced by POC and their communities, but it was never INTENDED to be exclusionary.

….Seed bombing, especially, is not gentrification. A person, any person, seeing an unused and empty space and trying to beautify it and bring nature back into the neighborhood, is not racially or financially motivated. I could see the argument w/ knit graffiti, possibly, because who has the time for huge ass projects like that if they’re working to make ends meet. But throwing packed seeds and soil into an abandoned lot isn’t gentrification. It isn’t making it easier for rich white kids to move it. It’s just trying to make the space nicer for the residents, end of story.

okay, I’ve addressed this before in more conciliatory terms, but it appears I’m gonna have to say it again because a whole string of you are making various defensive YES THANK YOU responses to these two posts (which I’ve edited for space).  this will probably be the last thing I have to say on the topic.  please read my earlier response before you respond to this.

1.   it is flat-out untrue that everyone is at equal risk of arrest and incarceration for doing illegal things, and if you think it’s even relevant to bring up that white middle-class-and-up people are theoretically subject to the same laws as everyone else you are so far out of touch that I don’t know what to say.

2. if you think that “there is no formal barrier to PoC and working-class people picking up yarn” means that there is no association of a particular aesthetic with particular groups of people then again, I don’t even know what to say to you.  This is not about the theoretical individual identities of street artists, who are in any case usually anonymous or pseudonymous.   this thing of “yeah street graf is black but the kind of graf I like is not racially categorisable” is super disingenuous.

3.  my main point: NONE OF YOU have addressed the issue of the potential negative effect this kind of public art has on the communities it is found in.  It is aggressively gentrifying.  that’s why I hate it, not because I think it’s dorky or because white and/or middle-class people do it.  and yeah, “just making the neighbourhood nicer for the residents” can be/precipitate gentrification — who decides what “nicer” is?  who controls the project that’s making things “nicer”?  it’s actually not much good making the neighbourhood “nicer” if it’s the kind of “nicer” that’s so appealing to a higher-income group that they move in and push all the original residents out.  there are other factors at play here, of course, but this is totally a thing.  wholesome-sounding shit like community gardens and local craft markets has historically been a factor in gentrification.  if this sounds defeatist and circular, well, it kind of is, because gentrification is hard to fight.  but I think the main point we can take from it is that if you want to make a neighbourhood better, you need to figure out what the most marginalised original residents want, not impose your own aesthetic and agenda.

3.  I fucking love art.  I also hate art but you know, I believe in its power to affect the world around it.    Especially public art, because that is what it is for, more directly than perhaps any other form of art.  If I didn’t think that then sure, I’d roll my eyes and think “that looks dorky” and try to keep to it to myself and get on with my life.  But as it is, I take art seriously, including its potential negative effects.  That’s what respect for art looks like when you are a grown-up.

Gentrified Sheung Wan

From My Little Record – Countdown Sheng Wan.

leaving sheung wan very soon. the only reason is my landload want to sell the flat. how common for hong kong people living here and there. the only push factor is land price. my story is just typical. sheung wan have been gentrificed speedy with the extention lines of MTR and promoting creative industries by government . gallaries, art space, servies apartments, decent and western restrauants  are getting more and more since 2008. the original community is going to disappear soon. my humble wish is to frozen my feelings, memories and moments in the rest of my days in sheung wan which i have been living for 4 years. today is 12 feb 2010.

快要離開上環。沒有特別的原因，跟其他沒樓沒錢的港人一樣，隨地價的急升，租客只能離開，東飄西盪。我從住了五年的中不環搬過來，經過了差不到四 年，很快又要搬走，都是典型的香港故事。上環士紳化的過程，愈來愈明顯，藝術空間、藝廊、服務式住宅及西式餐館愈來愈多。這除了多謝港鐡上環支線正式動工 外，也因為所謂創意產業、文化旅遊、文化導賞的興起。我無力抵抗經濟的力量，只希望用自己的方法，留下對上環的主觀感覺、生活味道。很個人，也很社會的。

Gentrification and its Discontents: Notes from New Orleans

From New Geography.

Readers of this forum have probably heard rumors of gentrification in post-Katrina New Orleans. Residential shifts playing out in the Crescent City share many commonalities with those elsewhere, but also bear some distinctions and paradoxes. I offer these observations from the so-called Williamsburg of the South, a neighborhood called Bywater.

Gentrification arrived rather early to New Orleans, a generation before the term was coined. Writers and artists settled in the French Quarter in the 1920s and 1930s, drawn by the appeal of its expatriated Mediterranean atmosphere, not to mention its cheap rent, good food, and abundant alcohol despite Prohibition. Initial restorations of historic structures ensued, although it was not until after World War II that wealthier, educated newcomers began steadily supplanting working-class Sicilian and black Creole natives.

By the 1970s, the French Quarter was largely gentrified, and the process continued downriver into the adjacent Faubourg Marigny (a historical moniker revived by Francophile preservationists and savvy real estate agents) and upriver into the Lower Garden District (also a new toponym: gentrification has a vocabulary as well as a geography). It progressed through the 1980s-2000s but only modestly, slowed by the city’s abundant social problems and limited economic opportunity. New Orleans in this era ranked as the Sun Belt’s premier shrinking city, losing 170,000 residents between 1960 and 2005. The relatively few newcomers tended to be gentrifiers, and gentrifiers today are overwhelmingly transplants. I, for example, am both, and I use the terms interchangeably in this piece.

One Storm, Two Waves

Everything changed after August-September 2005, when the Hurricane Katrina deluge, amid all the tragedy, unexpectedly positioned New Orleans as a cause célèbre for a generation of idealistic millennials. A few thousand urbanists, environmentalists, and social workers—we called them “the brain gain;” they called themselves YURPS, or Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals—took leave from their graduate studies and nascent careers and headed South to be a part of something important.

Many landed positions in planning and recovery efforts, or in an alphabet soup of new nonprofits; some parlayed their experiences into Ph.D. dissertations, many of which are coming out now in book form. This cohort, which I estimate in the low- to mid-four digits, largely moved on around 2008-2009, as recovery moneys petered out. Then a second wave began arriving, enticed by the relatively robust regional economy compared to the rest of the nation. These newcomers were greater in number (I estimate 15,000-20,000 and continuing), more specially skilled, and serious about planting domestic and economic roots here. Some today are new-media entrepreneurs; others work with Teach for America or within the highly charter-ized public school system (infused recently with a billion federal dollars), or in the booming tax-incentivized Louisiana film industry and other cultural-economy niches.

Brushing shoulders with them are a fair number of newly arrived artists, musicians, and creative types who turned their backs on the Great Recession woes and resettled in what they perceived to be an undiscovered bohemia in the lower faubourgs of New Orleans—just as their predecessors did in the French Quarter 80 years prior. It is primarily these second-wave transplants who have accelerated gentrification patterns.

Spatial and Social Structure of New Orleans Gentrification

Gentrification in New Orleans is spatially regularized and predictable. Two underlying geographies must be in place before better-educated, more-moneyed transplants start to move into neighborhoods of working-class natives. First, the area must be historic. Most people who opt to move to New Orleans envision living in Creole quaintness or Classical splendor amidst nineteen-century cityscapes; they are not seeking mundane ranch houses or split-levels in subdivisions. That distinctive housing stock exists only in about half of New Orleans proper and one-quarter of the conurbation, mostly upon the higher terrain closer to the Mississippi River. The second factor is physical proximity to a neighborhood that has already gentrified, or that never economically declined in the first place, like the Garden District.

Gentrification hot-spots today may be found along the fringes of what I have (somewhat jokingly) dubbed the “white teapot,” a relatively wealthy and well-educated majority-white area shaped like a kettle (see Figure 1) in uptown New Orleans, around Audubon Park and Tulane and Loyola universities, with a curving spout along the St. Charles Avenue/Magazine Street corridor through the French Quarter and into the Faubourg Marigny and Bywater. Comparing 2000 to 2010 census data, the teapot has broadened and internally whitened, and the changes mostly involve gentrification. The process has also progressed into the Faubourg Tremé (not coincidentally the subject of the HBO drama Tremé) and up Esplanade Avenue into Mid-City, which ranks just behind Bywater as a favored spot for post-Katrina transplants. All these areas were originally urbanized on higher terrain before 1900, all have historic housing stock, and all are coterminous to some degree.


Figure 1. Hot spots (marked with red stars) of post-Katrina gentrification in New Orleans, shown with circa-2000 demographic data and a delineation of the “white teapot.” Bywater appears at right. Map and analysis by Richard Campanella.

The frontiers of gentrification are “pioneered” by certain social cohorts who settle sequentially, usually over a period of five to twenty years. The four-phase cycle often begins with—forgive my tongue-in-cheek use of vernacular stereotypes: (1) “gutter punks” (their term), young transients with troubled backgrounds who bitterly reject societal norms and settle, squatter-like, in the roughest neighborhoods bordering bohemian or tourist districts, where they busk or beg in tattered attire.

On their unshod heels come (2) hipsters, who, also fixated upon dissing the mainstream but better educated and obsessively self-aware, see these punk-infused neighborhoods as bastions of coolness.

Their presence generates a certain funky vibe that appeals to the third phase of the gentrification sequence: (3) “bourgeois bohemians,” to use David Brooks’ term. Free-spirited but well-educated and willing to strike a bargain with middle-class normalcy, this group is skillfully employed, buys old houses and lovingly restores them, engages tirelessly in civic affairs, and can reliably be found at the Saturday morning farmers’ market. Usually childless, they often convert doubles to singles, which removes rentable housing stock from the neighborhood even as property values rise and lower-class renters find themselves priced out their own neighborhoods. (Gentrification in New Orleans tends to be more house-based than in northeastern cities, where renovated industrial or commercial buildings dominate the transformation).

After the area attains full-blown “revived” status, the final cohort arrives: (4) bona fide gentry, including lawyers, doctors, moneyed retirees, and alpha-professionals from places like Manhattan or San Francisco. Real estate agents and developers are involved at every phase transition, sometimes leading, sometimes following, always profiting.

Native tenants fare the worst in the process, often finding themselves unable to afford the rising rent and facing eviction. Those who own, however, might experience a windfall, their abodes now worth ten to fifty times more than their grandparents paid. Of the four-phase process, a neighborhood like St. Roch is currently between phases 1 and 2; the Irish Channel is 3-to-4 in the blocks closer to Magazine and 2-to-3 closer to Tchoupitoulas; Bywater is swiftly moving from 2 to 3 to 4; Marigny is nearing 4; and the French Quarter is post-4.

Locavores in a Kiddie Wilderness

Tensions abound among the four cohorts. The phase-1 and -2 folks openly regret their role in paving the way for phases 3 and 4, and see themselves as sharing the victimhood of their mostly black working-class renter neighbors. Skeptical of proposed amenities such as riverfront parks or the removal of an elevated expressway, they fear such “improvements” may foretell further rent hikes and threaten their claim to edgy urban authenticity. They decry phase-3 and -4 folks through “Die Yuppie Scum” graffiti, or via pasted denunciations of Pres Kabacoff (see Figure 2), a local developer specializing in historic restoration and mixed-income public housing.

Phase-3 and -4 folks, meanwhile, look askance at the hipsters and the gutter punks, but otherwise wax ambivalent about gentrification and its effect on deep-rooted mostly African-American natives. They lament their role in ousting the very vessels of localism they came to savor, but also take pride in their spirited civic engagement and rescue of architectural treasures.

Gentrifiers seem to stew in irreconcilable philosophical disequilibrium. Fortunately, they’ve created plenty of nice spaces to stew in. Bywater in the past few years has seen the opening of nearly ten retro-chic foodie/locavore-type restaurants, two new art-loft colonies, guerrilla galleries and performance spaces on grungy St. Claude Avenue, a “healing center” affiliated with Kabacoff and his Maine-born voodoo-priestess partner, yoga studios, a vinyl records store, and a smattering of coffee shops where one can overhear conversations about bioswales, tactical urbanism, the klezmer music scene, and every conceivable permutation of “sustainability” and “resilience.”

It’s increasingly like living in a city of graduate students. Nothing wrong with that—except, what happens when they, well, graduate? Will a subsequent wave take their place? Or will the neighborhood be too pricey by then?

Bywater’s elders, families, and inter-generational households, meanwhile, have gone from the norm to the exception. Racially, the black population, which tended to be highly family-based, declined by 64 percent between 2000 and 2010, while the white population increased by 22 percent, regaining the majority status it had prior to the white flight of the 1960s-1970s. It was the Katrina disruption and the accompanying closure of schools that initially drove out the mostly black households with children, more so than gentrification per se.1  Bywater ever since has become a kiddie wilderness; the 968 youngsters who lived here in 2000 numbered only 285 in 2010. When our son was born in 2012, he was the very first post-Katrina birth on our street, the sole child on a block that had eleven when we first arrived (as category-3 types, I suppose, sans the “bohemian”) from Mississippi in 2000.2

Impact on New Orleans Culture

Many predicted that the 2005 deluge would wash away New Orleans’ sui generis character. Paradoxically, post-Katrina gentrifiers are simultaneously distinguishing and homogenizing local culture vis-à-vis American norms, depending on how one defines culture. By the humanist’s notion, the newcomers are actually breathing new life into local customs and traditions. Transplants arrive endeavoring to be a part of the epic adventure of living here; thus, through the process of self-selection, they tend to be Orleaneophilic “super-natives.” They embrace Mardi Gras enthusiastically, going so far as to form their own krewes and walking clubs (though always with irony, winking in gentle mockery at old-line uptown krewes). They celebrate the city’s culinary legacy, though their tastes generally run away from fried okra and toward “house-made beet ravioli w/ goat cheese ricotta mint stuffing” (I’m citing a chalkboard menu at a new Bywater restaurant, revealingly named Suis Generis, “Fine Dining for the People;” see Figure 2). And they are universally enamored with local music and public festivity, to the point of enrolling in second-line dancing classes and taking it upon themselves to organize jazz funerals whenever a local icon dies.

By the anthropologist’s notion, however, transplants are definitely changing New Orleans culture. They are much more secular, less fertile, more liberal, and less parochial than native-born New Orleanians. They see local conservatism as a problem calling for enlightenment rather than an opinion to be respected, and view the importation of national and global values as imperative to a sustainable and equitable recovery. Indeed, the entire scene in the new Bywater eateries—from the artisanal food on the menus to the statement art on the walls to the progressive worldview of the patrons—can be picked up and dropped seamlessly into Austin, Burlington, Portland, or Brooklyn.


Figure 2. “Fine Dining for the People:” streetscapes of gentrification in Bywater. Montage by Richard Campanella.

A Precedent and a Hobgoblin

How will this all play out? History offers a precedent. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, better-educated English-speaking Anglos moved in large numbers into the parochial, mostly Catholic and Francophone Creole society of New Orleans. “The Americans [are] swarming in from the northern states,” lamented one departing French official, “invading Louisiana as the holy tribes invaded the land of Canaan, [each turning] over in his mind a little plan of speculation”—sentiments that might echo those of displaced natives today.3 What resulted from the Creole/Anglo intermingling was not gentrification—the two groups lived separately—but rather a complex, gradual cultural hybridization. Native Creoles and Anglo transplants intermarried, blended their legal systems, their architectural tastes and surveying methods, their civic traditions and foodways, and to some degree their languages. What resulted was the fascinating mélange that is modern-day Louisiana.

Gentrifier culture is already hybridizing with native ways; post-Katrina transplants are opening restaurants, writing books, starting businesses and hiring natives, organizing festivals, and even running for public office, all the while introducing external ideas into local canon. What differs in the analogy is the fact that the nineteenth-century newcomers planted familial roots here and spawned multiple subsequent generations, each bringing new vitality to the city. Gentrifiers, on the other hand, usually have very low birth rates, and those few that do become parents oftentimes find themselves reluctantly departing the very inner-city neighborhoods they helped revive, for want of playmates and decent schools. By that time, exorbitant real estate precludes the next wave of dynamic twenty-somethings from moving in, and the same neighborhood that once flourished gradually grows gray, empty, and frozen in historically renovated time. Unless gentrified neighborhoods make themselves into affordable and agreeable places to raise and educate the next generation, they will morph into dour historical theme parks with price tags only aging one-percenters can afford.

Lack of age diversity and a paucity of “kiddie capital”—good local schools, playmates next door, child-friendly services—are the hobgoblins of gentrification in a historically familial city like New Orleans. Yet their impacts seem to be lost on many gentrifiers. Some earthy contingents even expresses mock disgust at the sight of baby carriages—the height of uncool—not realizing that the infant inside might represent the neighborhood’s best hope of remaining down-to-earth.

Need evidence of those impacts? Take a walk on a sunny Saturday through the lower French Quarter, the residential section of New Orleans’ original gentrified neighborhood. You will see spectacular architecture, dazzling cast-iron filigree, flowering gardens—and hardly a resident in sight, much less the next generation playing in the streets. Many of the antebellum townhouses have been subdivided into pied-à-terre condominiums vacant most of the year; others are home to peripatetic professionals or aging couples living in guarded privacy behind bolted-shut French doors. The historic streetscapes bear a museum-like stillness that would be eerie if they weren’t so beautiful.

So Hipsters Aren’t the Economic Boon Some Urbanists Thought They’d Be

From Jezebel.

originalRemember how the creative class of writers, artists, urban cheesemongers, professional tricyclists, novelty button manufacturers, food truckers, and artisan mustache-growers was supposed to supplant crumbling blue collar industries in economically stagnant cities? Remember? Well, according to Richard Florida, the editor-at-large for The Atlantic Cities, the creative class was totally going to work all those miracles, propping up cities like Detroit and Cleveland with pale, keyboard-cramped hands. It’s just that, um, well, that’s not at all what has happened.

Joel Kotkin, one of Florida’s sternest critics, sounded off (a little too gleefully) on the creative class’s many economic failures today in the Daily Beast. It’s been a trendy line of thinking over the last couple of years among urbanists, journalists, and academics, explains Kotkin, that an influx of “hip” young residents into urban areas would benefit those areas. The new arrivals would help build wonderful little independent bookstores, coffee shops, and tapas restaurants. Everyone would prosper as a result of such glittering monuments to urban hipsterdom — property values would go up, downtrodden blue collar workers would be enlightened, and there would be locally sourced produce for everyone.

The only hitch in all this optimism, as Kotkin notes here and others like Tulane sociologist Richard Campanella have have noted elsewhere, is that all these wonderful new creative class businesses benefit only one group of people: members of the creative class. In his thesis about the rise of urban creatives, Florida pointed to cities like San Francisco and Seattle as bastions of highly-educated, creative residents. With just a few more bike lanes and liberal arts majors, El Paso, for instance, could become a bustling hub of creative activity and not merely a glorified urban hipster playground.

So much faith was placed in the hands of the creative class that the Florida’s Creative Class Group cultivated a client list of cities ready and willing to spend the money necessary to make themselves over in the image of cities like Portland and Austin. Here’s what happened with that:

Alec MacGillis, writing at The American Prospect in 2009, noted that after collecting large fees from down-at-the-heels burgs like Cleveland, Toledo, Hartford, Rochester, and Elmira, New York over the years, Florida himself asserted that we can’t “stop the decline of some places” and urged the country to focus instead on his high-ranked “creative” enclaves. “So, got that, Rust Belt denizens?” MacGillis noted wryly in a follow-up story last year at the New Republic. Pack your bags for Boulder and Raleigh-Durham and Fairfax County. Oh, and thanks again for the check.”

And what does a newly hipsterfied city end up looking like? Well…

For Rust Belt cities, notes Cleveland’s Richey Piiparinen, following the “creative class” meme has not only meant wasted money, but wasted effort and misdirection. Burning money trying to become “cooler” ends up looking something like the metropolitan equivalent to a midlife crisis.

At times Kotkin can be pretty dismissive of the sort of generically and passively progressive creatures that comprise the creative class — young, usually single, and hungering for a cool district to settle down while they work through the 20-something angst. Their service-based hipster enclaves underperform economically, and have little, says urban thinker Aaron Renn, “in the way of coattails.” In other words, the creative class produces so little, that no crumbs fall from their table — there’s barely enough for them. Moreover, though such creatives certainly espouse diversity and political correctness, they also, as Campanella noted in his excellent demographic study of New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood, function as the first wave of gentrification. Campanella describes a four-phase process of gentrification, beginning with a pioneering group of (in New Olreans) so-called “gutter-punks” and continuing all the way to the arrival of high-income professionals:

The frontiers of gentrification are “pioneered” by certain social cohorts who settle sequentially, usually over a period of five to twenty years. The four-phase cycle often begins with-forgive my tongue-in-cheek use of vernacular stereotypes: (1) “gutter punks” (their term), young transients with troubled backgrounds who bitterly reject societal norms and settle, squatter-like, in the roughest neighborhoods bordering bohemian or tourist districts, where they busk or beg in tattered attire.

On their unshod heels come (2) hipsters, who, also fixated upon dissing the mainstream but better educated and obsessively self-aware, see these punk-infused neighborhoods as bastions of coolness.

Their presence generates a certain funky vibe that appeals to the third phase of the gentrification sequence: (3) “bourgeois bohemians,” to use David Brooks’ term. Free-spirited but well-educated and willing to strike a bargain with middle-class normalcy, this group is skillfully employed, buys old houses and lovingly restores them, engages tirelessly in civic affairs, and can reliably be found at the Saturday morning farmers’ market. Usually childless, they often convert doubles to singles, which removes rentable housing stock from the neighborhood even as property values rise and lower-class renters find themselves priced out their own neighborhoods. (Gentrification in New Orleans tends to be more house-based than in northeastern cities, where renovated industrial or commercial buildings dominate the transformation).

After the area attains full-blown “revived” status, the final cohort arrives: (4) bona fide gentry, including lawyers, doctors, moneyed retirees, and alpha-professionals from places like Manhattan or San Francisco. Real estate agents and developers are involved at every phase transition, sometimes leading, sometimes following, always profiting.

This is the reality of the what a rise in a creative class does to a city, a reality that proves inconvenient for many hipsters and millennials whose value system is at odds with the idea of gentrification and, what incensed New Orleans writer Jules Bentley, criticizing the city’s burgeoning food truck culture, described earlier this month in terms of hipster colonization. His rant is worth reading in its entirety even if you don’t know much about current New Orleans demographics because of little gems like these:

Blitzkrieg cultural imperialism allows previously under-Instagrammed areas of our city to fulfill their potential as playgrounds for the rich without the headaches of investment or community engagement. Never mind having a Starbucks on every corner-when your favorite high-concept boutique eateries can chase you around on wheels, you can go absolutely anywhere and still get the same $12 bacon and wheatgrass smoothie.

There’s a lot of anger in that paragraph, but there’s also strong ray of righteous truth — the privileged 20-somethings of this country are imposing an ironic brand of cultural homogeneity on the “authentic” urban neighborhoods they flock to.

Masked mob marks Mayday outside fancy restaurant in Vancouver – with lit torches

The title is my own. Look at the original article on CBC and watch the video cause I can’t figure out how to embed.

Vancouver police had to ramp up their presence on the Downtown Eastside this week, amid ongoing anti-gentrification protests and an anti-capitalist May Day march.

A strongly-worded editorial on a local blog called The Gastown Gazette detailed the May 1 event and warned the public that soon “there will be blood” in the neighbourhood.

The editorial showed photos of a masked mob carrying lit gas torches outside the Pidgin restaurant, on the boundary between Gastown and the Downtown Eastside.

The high-end restaurant has been a target of anti-gentrification protesters since it opened opposite notorious drug-dealing hotspot Pigeon Park.

Const. Brian Montague said the May Day incident was part of an International Workers’ Day protest.

“There was a group within the march and the protest that wore masks and covered their faces and carried torches,” said. Montague.

“We did have to increase some of police presence there as we were concerned that things may escalate. We didn’t have to do anything. The march eventually moved on and then up into Thornton Park.”

Protester facing mischief charge

Police are also asking for the public’s assistance in locating a Vancouver woman wanted for an alleged incident related to the ongoing anti-gentrification protests at Pidgin restaurant.

Robyn Claire Pickell, 25, is wanted for mischief after police saw a woman trying to chain and lock the restaurant’s front doors while staff worked inside during the early morning of March 15.

The editorial in the Gastown Gazette urged Vancouver’s mayor to take action to quell the anti-gentrification protests, which have been condemning high-end local restaurants as contributing to the gentrification of the local area.

Protesters say the restaurants are too expensive for residents of the low-income neighbourhood to enjoy. Many would prefer to see the location used for housing.

Mayor condemns ‘counterproductive’ demonstration

On Friday, Mayor Gregor Robertson released a statement, saying violent demonstrations were counterproductive.

“Aggressively targeting a restaurant is unacceptable, and a significant distraction from urgent issues such as homelessness, affordable housing and chronic poverty receiving full attention in the ongoing provincial election campaign,” Robertson said.

“I also hope that input on these issues will continue to be directed through the Downtown Eastside Local Area Planning Process, which the community pushed hard for and is actively engaged in.”

Robertson also said he was pleased the Crown had approved charges against Pickell, the protestor who is alleged to have tried to chain and lock Pidgin’s front doors.

HOME campaign comes to Prahran

From the Socialist Party’s Hands Off Melbourne’s Estates (HOME) campaign news:

Prahran Estate

After beating back the governments plans to build private apartments on our open space at Fitzroy and Richmond the campaign has now turned its attention to Prahran where the government has said that that are still going ahead. HOME activists have done some street stalls in Prahran and put up some posters around the estate in the past couple of weeks. So far we have made a few contacts with residents there but we need to get in touch with more. We want to call a meeting in Prahran but we need help with jobs like letterboxing the towers. If you or someone you know lives on the estate, and can help please, let us know or come to our meeting this week.

Committee meeting this Thursday

We will be discussing how to further our work at Prahran as well as elsewhere at the HOME campaign committee meeting this Thursday May 2 at 6pm in the community rooms under 140 Brunswick St in Fitzroy. Anyone who wants to help with our work is invited to attend. If you have any queries feel to email back here or call 96399111.