16 replies on “Hari Kondabolu on Gentrification in Seattle”

  3. That Starbucks in the CD was put there by a black man, you know. I understand the frustration, but neighborhoods change. And a great deal of his gripe is nothing more than nostalgia for poverty.

  5. Ah, “nostalgia for poverty” – you’ve put your finger on it for me, Fnarf. Ever since I got more or less rich I’ve been romanticizing my own Carnation-powdered-milk youth down on 23rd. But it’s absurd – families strained and broken, having to buy things in poor taste – poverty sucks.

  6. @5, my mother, who passed away six years ago, and who made a small fortune during the peak of her lifetime, and who as a girl knew everything one needed to know about poverty, could never say this enough to me and others close to her: Those who say money does not buy happiness are lying.

  7. “Hey dentist, why don’t you gentrify my mouth!” Gentrify my mouth!

    Whoo! Dang. That’s comedy. Am I right? Am I right? Ladies, you know what I’m talking about. Am I right?

  8. Nostalgia for poverty helps sell records. Where would country music be without it?

    The thing that bugs me about the gentrification-of-the-CD argument is how simple-minded it is: For every “displaced” family, there is a family that profited handsomely from the years they spent paying their mortgage on a house in in a neighborhood that the city seemed to forget. For all the talk of property values and high taxes, there seem to be plenty of long term black families left there. Sure, some people were forced out – just as I was forced out of the “traditional” gay neighborhood when I could no longer afford it – but that is just part of the story of what happened to the CD.

    As for the cultural history of the neighborhood, it only became majority black in the late 1960’s, and only stayed that way until the early ’80’s – and only because of white flight and unscrupulous real estate agents, with a healthy dose of absentee landlord-ism thrown in for good measure. Prior to that time, it was a mix of everyone who wasn’t allowed to live anywhere else (i.e. Jews, Blacks, Asians), plus the descendants some of the original white settlers. By all accounts, it was a solid lower-to-middle-class part of town that was stable and fairly peaceful.

    The story of black folks in the Central District is a chapter of a much larger story that continues to be told. Reducing it to the level of “Good Times” is both inaccurate and insulting to everyone involved.

  10. You can’t be a politically correct hipster douche and funny at the same time.

    Nor can post-modern overly academic writers tell whats funny.

  11. I’ve lived in the CD since 1998. I don’t know about gentrification, but it would be nice to have a couple more restaurants. A book store. A movie theater. A non-Starbucks coffee place.

  12. This American Life did a good story on this a while back:

    American cities have gone through a massive wave of gentrification in the last few decades. To some people, it’s not a natural ebb and flow of the real estate market, but a plot, by rich, mainly white people, to take over the neighborhoods of poor, mainly black people.

    It’s about 30 minutes in, called “The Plan”.

    http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episod…

  13. “get rid of the brown teeth, and leave all the shiny white teeth”.

    Aren’t those teeth rotting and destroying everything around them? Pull ’em out I say.

    “A non-Starbucks coffee place.”

    Yes, you need some stuff white people like.

  14. white folks are more respectful when they move to (or visit) predominantly black neighborhoods than when it is the other way around. I don’t see white folks making racial slurs or threatening black folks for some perceived slight. I see it the other way quite often

  15. There’s a reason it took so long for the CD to become majority-African-American: there weren’t enough black people in Seattle to make a majority anywhere. Seattle’s black migration came much later than in most big northern cities, mostly well after WWII. Here are some figures:

    1940: 3,789
    1950: 15,666
    1960: 26,901
    1970: 37,868
    1980: 46,565
    1990: 51,948
    2000: 55,611 (including mixed race; may not be comparable; black-only is 47,541).

    Seattle is becoming significantly less black.

    What’s most startling to realize is that the when the biggest black population arrived, they were forced by into virtually the same housing stock that had previously held a tenth as many people, which led to overcrowding in poor areas, a decline in the quality of those houses, and a fair amount of tension between the dicty long-term resident blacks (clustered around 24th and Madison in the old Charles Grose estate) and the raw “sharecropper” blacks from the south clustered around 12th and Jackson. Eventually the two neighborhoods more or less merged in the middle.

  16. 6/Charles: my mother, who passed away six years ago, and who made a small fortune during the peak of her lifetime, and who as a girl knew everything one needed to know about poverty, could never say this enough to me and others close to her: Those who say money does not buy happiness are lying.

    Well, it is true that people with money aren’t necessarily happy. But if you’re going to be unhappy, it’s far better to have money because at least then you don’t have to worry about meeting basic needs, like poor people do.

    I loved Hari’s “gentrify my mouth” line but would’ve found it funnier had he not gone on to explain it.

    Gentrification has happened all over Seattle. People with money have bid up home prices in all neighborhoods making houses in the city unaffordable to the less-wealthy. Things may have changed somewhat the past couple years but I remember a few years ago the only neighborhood in Seattle where median wage earners could afford to buy a house was the Georgetown/Delridge area.

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