Awesome Time

I was at one of my girlfriend Meghann’s friend’s apartments during a visit to Hagerstown recently when another friend of hers, a resident of Baltimore, denounced the arrival of Starbucks in her neighborhood as gentrification.

Disclaimer: I am not a topical person. I buy the newspaper to do the crossword and read selective sports articles, and I read the opinion section of the Sunday paper. As a rule I generally avoid meaningful reading due to my short attention span. That being said…

“Gentrification” is kind of an ugly word to be attached to chain stores we all know and love, given racial and class implications. I tried to discuss it with Meghann on the ride home from Hagerstown a couple of days ago, but she (understandably) leapt to her friend’s defense, and the result was more of a yelling match than a give and take sort of debate, as most arguments are.

I studied economics in college, and I probably got much less out of it than I should have. I took a bunch of macroeconomics classes, including several on economic development, but I’ll be the first to confess that I know next to nothing about it in the academic sense. However, it does seem to me that what Meghann’s friend affectionately referred to as gentrification is what many of the people who are making decisions see as development.

For example: We live on the border of East Liberty, a neighborhood in Pittsburgh’s East End. In the last five years, a number of chain stores (Borders, Whole Foods, and Starbucks, to name a few) have come into the area as a result of “urban renewal” projects. I’ve heard the area referred to as “up and coming.” It was a big market district back in the day, but in the 60’s and 70’s it kind of went to shit with the coinciding erection of low-income high rises and the failed Penn Circle and Motor Square Gardens experiments (see the Wikipedia entry for more details).

Are the arrivals of Whole Foods, Borders, and the like a good thing? Do they represent development? They certainly make the area more attractive to middle class white people, who have taken the area by storm. Money is coming into the area that wasn’t coming in before, along with jobs. This is arguably development, since the aggregate income of the area has increased. But isn’t there a problem if the process forces out the same poor black folk that ended up in the high rises 30 years ago when they were displaced by the erection of the Civic (now Mellon) Arena in the Hill District two miles down Centre Avenue? It is worth noting that part of the “urban renewal” projects is the demolition of that low income housing.

I’m certainly not saying anything new here. MacKenzie Carpenter wrote a pretty good article about the issue in the PG a couple of weeks ago. Some local black community groups are understandably unimpressed with the development, noting that there is little in the development geared to the African-American consumer.

Personally, I like the area. I feel like we live close to everything we need, which is nice. However, I’m pretty sure that an eventual result of the whole urban renewal process will be displacement (given rising housing costs and the destruction of existing low income housing), so I remain skeptical, and I understand where Meghann’s friend was coming from when she commented on the arrival of Starbucks.

Ladies and gentlemen, the site is up.  We are now officially on Awesome Time.