Daveed Diggs Wants to Talk About Gentrifiers

Lived in Berkeley 3 decades. Now live in Oakland since 2009. The condo unit is 900 ft.². On the edge of downtown. Nine years ago these units were selling for $150,000. They now sell for $525,000. Up till two months ago, there was a homeless village of over 100 tents under a freeway overpass 2 1/2 blocks away. There are often people sleeping in doorways, even in the entrance to our building! We like Oakland because of the diversity. Schools have to deal with the fact that there are kids speaking over 20 different languages in the school system. A little over 30 years ago, we took in a 14-year-old Black kid from the streets of East Oakland. He not only finished high school, but graduated college as well! We learned as much from him as he did from us.

Gentrifiers/real Estate developers in Harlem constantly using city agencies to push homeowners out. Been in my Harlem home for over 40 years and never had firefighters visit my home and threaten to call the cops on my family if I didn’t let them in. Mind you my home is up to code. However their goal is to hit me with violations and make my life miserable. Don’t believe this is a real threat and these visits are for safety reasons. Well can’t be for my safety when realtors follow up the next day knocking on my door asking me to sell. These people are pure evil!

From the minute we walked out of Africa, the human race has been migrating. People move. Places change. Neighborhoods. Countries. Continents. Trying to stop it is like trying to stop the tides from claiming the homes along the shoreline. You can do it for a little while. Then, nature just wins.

When we moved into our neighborhood a few years ago we found most people very friendly. Instead of thinking we were gentrfiers the neighbors were worrying about us being "white trash", a term I hate. I thought to myself "really, do you know how much the house cost?" Then I found out they thought we were renters. The guy who sold us a new microwave asked what street I was on and was visibly horrified when we told him. Sometimes I think that gentrication is about finding a really good neighborhood that has a bad reputation and moving there.

I'm a woman living in Brooklyn in her early 30s who is firmly middle class. I live within my means and I move to neighborhoods I can afford, and right now that means living a 50 minute subway ride away in deep Brooklyn. This isn't a ME problem. This is a salary problem, this is a real estate problem, this is a "banks are the only storefronts that can survive in this city" problem. I'm sick of Gentrification being shifted toward the low- to middle-income people who move to the only neighborhoods they can afford.

This q & a, and its companion piece, “Oakland in Their Bones,” compelled me to listen once again to a 1955 live recording of the late, great jazz pianist, Sonny Clark, performing in the Mocambo Club, which was located on Franklin Street, near what is now Uptown, Oakland. It’s no longer there. Of course, for better or worse, wasn’t it Gertrude Stein, who said about Oakland, “There is no there, there.”?

I'm guessing this guy is probably a cool smart nice guy so I don't meant throw shade but his, "I'm a gentrifier, but I'm not BBQ Becky, and that is what matters" is so telling. Gentrification is a process that has little to do with BBQ Becky, regardless of the racist context, and consequences, of her call. Gentrification is about capitalism and real estate. A guy with cultural capital and an ivy league degree moving into Washington Heights is the very essence of gentrification. But this article was useful for understanding the real role of the BBQ Beckys of the world: to make "woke" and more hand-writing gentrifiers feel not just okay about their decisions but even righteous about them. They move into the neighborhood. They do what they want to get theirs, and they have some demon to point to, and deplore, in order to make themselves feel better.

I think that gentrification is only the superficial problem, and that gentrifiers are only maximizing their own prospects, but they are not evil incarnate. The underlying problems have taken decades to develop. Redlining, urban mismanagement, distain for the poor, middle-class flight from old neighborhoods when there was still cheap land to which to move, and abandoning the responsibility of development in favor of the “free market” are historic stepping stones to the gentrification predicament in which we find ourselves now. Even when I was in school (which was decades ago) we were taught that American cities were like a photographic negative of European cities, where the concentration of money and power lay in the city center and the suburbs were the left to the less well to do. The European model created benefits for cities: better mass transportation, less urban rot, more stability and less displacement, better infrastructure, more aesthetically pleasing cities, more breathing room and living room for the poor, better distribution of services. Cities have a lot of problems more important that gentrification. Overcrowding (and overpopulation in general,) the reluctance of city governments to think, to plan and to spend for the future, and our lust for and deification of the Almighty Dollar. Penny pinching in the present exacerbates the problems of the future, but if there is no short-term profit to be made, who cares?

I eagerly await the day when Pebble Beach, Ca is required to provide Section 8 housing! In the meantime, I won’t be holding my breath in anticipation.

What people don’t understand or never share or talk about that I have seen is the neighborhood in decline. There always seems to be a bias against people who move into a rough neighborhood and then are blamed because oh my gosh they made it better or a more desirable place to live. If you ever lived in a neighborhood that was getting worse, like I did, you would have welcomed anyone who would make the neighborhood better, whether you call them a hipster or gentrification pioneer or whatever.

Whites don't call the police on Blacks who are engaged in ordinary activities (bbqing, sitting by the pool etc) because they're not thinking, or because they're ignorant of the consequences. They make those calls precisely because they're thinking ahead and are well aware of the potential outcomes. Humiliation, assault, incarceration, death.

What a pleasant, little read! Victoria’s spouse

I'm a middle-aged white woman (albeit a 'youthful' one ;-), and I guess I could be considered a gentrifier insofar as... I have a certain level of education/income, and I've tended to move to various NYC neighborhoods before they were popular, and then... boom! I always like to say that I'm different from 'those other people' who move into previously undesirable neighborhoods, the reason being that... many times these people come from one already-hip neighborhood to one that is just starting to become 'cool'. These people (typically white) also seem to wait until there are 'enough people like themselves' in the other neighborhood, before they consider it 'safe enough' for them to live there. This is, even though many of these neighborhoods already had low crime rates, but relatively few white faces living there. Your typical gentrifier also wants to perfectly replicate the 'curated' hipster neighborhood from whence they came, and make their new neighborhood a generic, bland clone. They have zero interest in getting to know or interact with the old-timers from the nabe. Zero interest in patronizing the old-school establishments. They also have this air of 'oh, aren't I so cool to have discovered this 'edgy' but great neighborhood in which to live?' When in fact, the neighborhood had been quite long before these newbies came along. Red Rooster in Harlem is a popular place for these gentrifiers (and now, tourists) to have their hollow 'kumbaya' moments with black folk.

The fact of the interactions in the first instance show it's all, and always, about race. Also, you missed the part where he talked about knowing/learning he would be policed differently. In any case, you knew all that already. But the push to pretend racism doesn't exist will continue. The explicitly race based slave system (245 years of it), the 100 years of de jure and de facto race based Jim Crow which excluded Blacks (regardless of "class") from voting, working, living where the wishes, marrying who they loved etc., and all of the terror and exclusion that followed, based on race told you that. In fact, racial exclusion is written into our founding document. Ignorance is not bliss. It's just ignorance. Even if it's willful.

Mr Diggs was fantastic in "Hamilton." He captured the essence of old TJ perfectly in a loud purple velvet suit and a pimp walk. Bravo!

While demonizing bbq Becky seems to be fashionable this week, it is important to note that Lake Merritt is the oldest bird sanctuary in the nation. We haul between 1,000 and 6,000 pounds of trash out of the lake each and every MONTH! Oakland collectively dumps around 300,000 pounds of trash into the bay each year. These staggering figures are worth considering before hauling lawn furniture and bbq pits to a bird sanctuary for an afternoon by the lake.

In the class not race claim, "class” doesn’t actually mean “class” in the commonly understood sense. Racist don’t mean social position, socio-economic status or your achieved position in free, democratic and meritocratic society. If that was the intended meaning of class, that would be almost as damning of America as race. Enslaving, terrorizing, abusing, excluding and hyper incarcerating people of a lower class isn’t good either. But here, class means individual or group actions and inactions. Blacks are treated badly because of what they do/don’t do, not because of who they are. That absolves whites of all responsibility. If those people acted differently we wouldn’t do what we do to them. There lies the slight of hand in the “class not race” comment.

[[If there is loud noise or loud music keeping me awake after a reasonable hour I will call the police. If any individual or group wants to avoid interactions with police the solution is simple; respect the law and respect your neighbors.]] I had a neighbor who was wildly inconsiderate. Knocking on his door and asking for quiet got me nowhere, so I began calling the cops. Interestingly, one of the first times I did the cop said "Call every time. Don't hesitate. People like that don't respond to politeness. We'll write tickets on him for disturbing the peace." Eventually, the guy moved.

"Gentrification" is another word for change. If you're lucky it becomes "history" in someone's mind. At best it leaves "monuments" like the Last Chance Saloon, or the Reuben sandwich on the menu at the Merritt Diner. I have fond memories of the bread at the Black Muslim Bakery. But it may not be remembered.

As someone who will more than likely be accused of gentrification as it becomes obvious that this is now finally happening here ... I moved into a neighborhood rife with poverty and crime, being broken into while working from home at an advanced age and scared to death; and all the door-to-door scams any "neighbor" could attempt. The only reason I moved here was that THIS was all I could afford to avoid paying an arm and a leg each month to landlords while maintaining a commutable distance for my caretaker son. This was just over 6 years ago. My son has been pulled over over a dozen times at the entrance to our neighborhood. They thought he was looking to buy drugs or hookers. Granted, there were a few other poor white families already here ... almost all left over from before the last downturn of the economy when the neighborhood was experiencing better days. Originally from NYC, I'm accustomed to racial diversity. I take pleasure in working with ALL my neighbors to make this a better place ... including both young and elderly white, hispanic and black neighbors. We get together for barbeques and parties. We share our laments about the inadequate policing in our area. I've found that neighborhoods rise in fortune and fall, just like most people. I'm hoping against hope that this particular area isn't marked for true "gentrification," but I am already seeing the signs ... my mortgage went up over $150 since my home's last valuation. I was able to fight it ... for now.

"When I moved to New York, I moved to Washington Heights, because it’s where I could afford." Really, that's it? There are SO many more affordable areas. You moved there because you had the money and thought it was a nice/cool/interesting/convenient/safe and getting safer neighborhood. This is so disingenuous and a rallying cry for ambivalent/"woke" gentrifiers. If I've heard it from well-educated, well-employed people once, I've heard it a million times. "We moved here because we can't afford not to fuel gentrification and to displace poor people". No. It is not complicated and you haven't shed light on any complexity. We all know the BBQ Becky's don't have to be new to town. They've been calling the cops and creating nuisances/policing/holding court right where they're from. Policing has been going on- it's not new. You think POC have been flying under the police radar in Oakland prior to gentrifiers? What is new is what you are fueling- fancy people moving to gentrification ground zero and thereby supercharging rent increases/evictions etc.

Hadn't heard of him before (not fortunate enough to land Hamilton tix!) but based upon this interview, I'm going to see his movie, because I want to hear more of what he has to say! Very insightful and interesting comments on tough topics.

I was speaking to an older black man recently and the conversation wandered to police stopping young black men. This upset him, and I empathized. Not ten minutes later he excitedly told me about the "windfall" he received by buying an expensive rifle at a suspiciously low price from a young man in the neighborhood. I was floored, and more than a little angry. When people talk about certain groups (like young black men) being "policed differently", is it really enough to just complain about it? Or can we discuss why it happens?

Proud to call Oakland my hometown. Daveed Diggs is right about all this. I have lived here 41 years and I am white (my children were raised here and they love Oakland for this rich mix of cultures) but I note that many of those who are now moving into town are unfamiliar with the mixture of races in Oakland across the socioeconomic spectrum. Their unfamiliarity with it as a daily experience results in fear of the other. Perhaps that fear is part of the polarization we now see across the country. Saddens me deeply.

For an abbreviated interview, David Diggs comes off as a very thoughtful man, as well as talented. And a calm self assured one: I think I'd be more riled up about the 36 police stops for DWB.

The term "gentrification" applies to areas occupied by poor whites (non-minorities) as well as poor minorities. What all groups being displaced or impacted by gentrification tend to have in common is not race or ethnicity, but lower income level (or lower socio-economic status). Looked at broadly, the issues here are about class (socio-economic status) more than race.

Local laws are generally enacted to preserve quality of life and can reasonably limit activities that adversely affect neighbors rights to enjoy the peace and quiet of their homes. It should not matter whether you are a newcomer or long term resident or whether you are a member of the dominant culture or not--the laws and the protections that derive from them apply to everyone. So, if there is loud noise or loud music keeping me awake after a reasonable hour I will call the police. If any individual or group wants to avoid interactions with police the solution is simple; respect the law and respect your neighbors. And please don't tell me to move to the suburbs or another neighborhood. I have the right to live wherever I want and the right to expect that my neighbors will observe the law.

Interesting things pop out if you look at the evils of 'gentrification' with actual empirical data. From the Economist Magazine last month: 1. Poor residents in a gentrifying area are LESS likely to move. 2. Gentrification boosts racial and economic integration for everyone In summary - from the Economist: "Gentrification steers cash into deprived neighbourhoods and brings people into depopulated areas through market forces, all without the necessity of governmental intervention." Or I guess we could ignore the evidence ala Ta-Nehisi Coates: "Gentrification’ is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy"

Smart guy, esp. the paragraph about policing. Wish he could be President....