Thursday, February 22, 2007
Revitalization (a.k.a. Gentrification)
Cherry Hill....This community of 7,500 stands at a crossroads of those two economic processes, by being part of a trend known as "gentrification," a movement which unmasks the barbarity of the New Economy, and the need to overcome the small thinking of the population...The story starts to unravel at an evening meeting at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Community Center. Present are various elected officials, a city planner (who is drawing up the plans for the new Cherry Hill), and many residents. A police officer puts forward the city's proposal for dealing with drugs and crime, the first local problem on the agenda: Continue with daily arrests, but move to evict the dealers and anyone close to them (friends, girlfriends, etc.) so they can be a problem for another jurisdiction. And thus, the audience accepts a policy that does nothing to solve the drug problem and creates a pretext for wholesale eviction of the poorest neighborhoods. The announcement of a forum to discuss the new shopping center covers the economics portion of the meeting. Community leaders brought attention to health care and other issues, emphasizing the need for volunteering and self-help.
This kind of local control process is the bedrock of a much larger change, never mentioned directly that night: the gentrification of blighted city neighborhoods, supported by many of the notables at that meeting. Its supporters usually call it "revitalization," and it has a kind of mystical appeal to community leaders and many residents who are being told it will bring money into the community. And so, the executive director of Cherry Hill 2000, a community group that interfaces between businesses/developers and residents, can say to the newspapers that the plan is supported 100% by the people there.
Now, let's step out of the microscopic geometry of this localized thinking to see whats really happening. - Former Industrial Powerhouse -
Cherry Hill is a waterfront area on the southside of Baltimore City. The community developed in the 1940s as an offshoot of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal reforms and the war drive, which made Baltimore as a whole one of the biggest manufacturing centers in the country. The city was home to a proud, well-paid industrial workforce, and the waterfront bustled with three ship-building plants, numerous steel mills (including Bethlehem Steel, which employed 30,000 workers), and various other factories and machine shops. As the FDR New Deal policies were reversed, so was the progress of the city. By the 1970s, city politicians like then-Mayor (and current Maryland State Comptroller) William Donald Schaefer were singing the tune of adjusting to "inevitable" changes in the economy. Baltimore's manufacturing base evaporated, and in its place came a flood of narcotics: By some estimates, more than 10% of city residents are drug addicts. Baltimore has become a poster child for the post-industrial society; it has seen a net decline in population of almost 30% since the 1970s, and a large number of the current residents live in dangerous, drug-infested housing projects, with almost no opportunities for productive, well-paid employment.
And then came "revitalization" (a.k.a. gentrification). Real estate developers and politicians promise the population an economic recovery if they will support (or at least tolerate) these development schemes. One of the fist was the Inner Harbor project in the '70s, which converted much of Baltimore's waterfront area into a playground for tourists and college students to blow disposable income at trendy restaurants and shops. Other projects kept coming, with an emphasis on higher-priced housing, shopping centers, and office space for post-industrial Information Age jobs. As land area is converted from post-industrial wreckage into high-priced real estate, the developers and the investors behind them make a killing.
Cherry Hill provides a good example of how this process works. It's still a close-knit community, and hasn't deteriorated as much as many other Baltimore areas, but the post-industrial shift has been increasingly leaving its mark. For a long time, it had the highest concentration of public housing in the city; hundreds of these units have been levelled in recent years and hundreds more boarded up. Drug trafficking has become a major source of employment for the young, and signs of it are everywhere. Among the lots for sale are a power plant, a concrete-mix plant, and the Carr-Lowrey glass works—all closed down.
But the real-estate developers have plans. Condominium apartments starting at $200,000, and townhomes at $450,000, will be built. Yes, the mortgage bubble is coming to town. And how many current residents will be priced out of the area as real estate prices rise? Where will they go? The developers claim there is another side of the story: city residents who are first-time home owners in Cherry Hill and other areas because of these revitalization drives. And it's true: Some of the middle- and working-class community residents get a home (and a piece of the doomed mortgage bubble), and since these people are more active in the community, they spread the word or organize support for the endeavor, in most cases without understanding this process. It's the same localized outlook that would lead one to fight drugs with evictions; to compensate for diminishing government services with volunteering; or to solve unemployment with low-wage service jobs at a shopping center. The poorest and most marginalized are sacrificed; and, as the overall economic collapse continues, unaffected by the magical incantation of "revitalization," how many of the survivors-of-the-moment will join them?
As for the investors behind this drive, tunnel vision is hardly the problem with their outlook. A look at one of the developers active in Cherry Hill will suffice. The Enterprise Foundation was started in the early 1980s by real estate mega-mogul James Rouse, who has been heavily involved in the post-industrial transformation of Baltimore all along, with help from mostly Democratic Party politicians. Enterprise, which is active throughout the country, bills itself as a force for home-ownership and economic well-being for the poor and working class.
Almost every top foundation and business of the financier oligarchy that dismantled the New Deal and brought us this economic collapse is represented on the board of trustees and financial backers of this organism: J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Fannie Mae—the list could go on for pages. Two names on the Board of Trustees immediately jump out: Hollywood actor Ed Norton, who is especially proud of the green/solar-power initiatives that the Enterprise Foundation housing projects have worked out with British Petroleum; and former Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara, who ushered in an era of genocidal looting of the Third World as World Bank president starting in 1970. ¶ 6:23 PM
Cherry Hill....This community of 7,500 stands at a crossroads of those two economic processes, by being part of a trend known as "gentrification," a movement which unmasks the barbarity of the New Economy, and the need to overcome the small thinking of the population...The story starts to unravel at an evening meeting at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Community Center. Present are various elected officials, a city planner (who is drawing up the plans for the new Cherry Hill), and many residents. A police officer puts forward the city's proposal for dealing with drugs and crime, the first local problem on the agenda: Continue with daily arrests, but move to evict the dealers and anyone close to them (friends, girlfriends, etc.) so they can be a problem for another jurisdiction. And thus, the audience accepts a policy that does nothing to solve the drug problem and creates a pretext for wholesale eviction of the poorest neighborhoods. The announcement of a forum to discuss the new shopping center covers the economics portion of the meeting. Community leaders brought attention to health care and other issues, emphasizing the need for volunteering and self-help.
This kind of local control process is the bedrock of a much larger change, never mentioned directly that night: the gentrification of blighted city neighborhoods, supported by many of the notables at that meeting. Its supporters usually call it "revitalization," and it has a kind of mystical appeal to community leaders and many residents who are being told it will bring money into the community. And so, the executive director of Cherry Hill 2000, a community group that interfaces between businesses/developers and residents, can say to the newspapers that the plan is supported 100% by the people there.
Now, let's step out of the microscopic geometry of this localized thinking to see whats really happening. - Former Industrial Powerhouse -
Cherry Hill is a waterfront area on the southside of Baltimore City. The community developed in the 1940s as an offshoot of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal reforms and the war drive, which made Baltimore as a whole one of the biggest manufacturing centers in the country. The city was home to a proud, well-paid industrial workforce, and the waterfront bustled with three ship-building plants, numerous steel mills (including Bethlehem Steel, which employed 30,000 workers), and various other factories and machine shops. As the FDR New Deal policies were reversed, so was the progress of the city. By the 1970s, city politicians like then-Mayor (and current Maryland State Comptroller) William Donald Schaefer were singing the tune of adjusting to "inevitable" changes in the economy. Baltimore's manufacturing base evaporated, and in its place came a flood of narcotics: By some estimates, more than 10% of city residents are drug addicts. Baltimore has become a poster child for the post-industrial society; it has seen a net decline in population of almost 30% since the 1970s, and a large number of the current residents live in dangerous, drug-infested housing projects, with almost no opportunities for productive, well-paid employment.
And then came "revitalization" (a.k.a. gentrification). Real estate developers and politicians promise the population an economic recovery if they will support (or at least tolerate) these development schemes. One of the fist was the Inner Harbor project in the '70s, which converted much of Baltimore's waterfront area into a playground for tourists and college students to blow disposable income at trendy restaurants and shops. Other projects kept coming, with an emphasis on higher-priced housing, shopping centers, and office space for post-industrial Information Age jobs. As land area is converted from post-industrial wreckage into high-priced real estate, the developers and the investors behind them make a killing.
Cherry Hill provides a good example of how this process works. It's still a close-knit community, and hasn't deteriorated as much as many other Baltimore areas, but the post-industrial shift has been increasingly leaving its mark. For a long time, it had the highest concentration of public housing in the city; hundreds of these units have been levelled in recent years and hundreds more boarded up. Drug trafficking has become a major source of employment for the young, and signs of it are everywhere. Among the lots for sale are a power plant, a concrete-mix plant, and the Carr-Lowrey glass works—all closed down.
But the real-estate developers have plans. Condominium apartments starting at $200,000, and townhomes at $450,000, will be built. Yes, the mortgage bubble is coming to town. And how many current residents will be priced out of the area as real estate prices rise? Where will they go? The developers claim there is another side of the story: city residents who are first-time home owners in Cherry Hill and other areas because of these revitalization drives. And it's true: Some of the middle- and working-class community residents get a home (and a piece of the doomed mortgage bubble), and since these people are more active in the community, they spread the word or organize support for the endeavor, in most cases without understanding this process. It's the same localized outlook that would lead one to fight drugs with evictions; to compensate for diminishing government services with volunteering; or to solve unemployment with low-wage service jobs at a shopping center. The poorest and most marginalized are sacrificed; and, as the overall economic collapse continues, unaffected by the magical incantation of "revitalization," how many of the survivors-of-the-moment will join them?
As for the investors behind this drive, tunnel vision is hardly the problem with their outlook. A look at one of the developers active in Cherry Hill will suffice. The Enterprise Foundation was started in the early 1980s by real estate mega-mogul James Rouse, who has been heavily involved in the post-industrial transformation of Baltimore all along, with help from mostly Democratic Party politicians. Enterprise, which is active throughout the country, bills itself as a force for home-ownership and economic well-being for the poor and working class.
Almost every top foundation and business of the financier oligarchy that dismantled the New Deal and brought us this economic collapse is represented on the board of trustees and financial backers of this organism: J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Fannie Mae—the list could go on for pages. Two names on the Board of Trustees immediately jump out: Hollywood actor Ed Norton, who is especially proud of the green/solar-power initiatives that the Enterprise Foundation housing projects have worked out with British Petroleum; and former Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara, who ushered in an era of genocidal looting of the Third World as World Bank president starting in 1970. ¶ 6:23 PM
