There goes the neighborhood
Here's a thought-provoking piece by Jim Schutze in the Dallas Observer, writing about how his funky Old East Dallas neighborhood is going to hell because of all the improvements that are breaking out all around him. Schutze's neighborhood is also my neighborhood, but you don't have to know a thing about Dallas to relate to this story. I suspect this kind of dynamic is taking place all over the US. Here's the lede, which gives you an idea of Schutze's sensibility:
I'm afraid I've got little patience for this sort of thing. Schutzism was alive and well in New York City in the Giuliani years. It came from the sort of liberals who loathed Giuliani for cleaning up the porn theaters and making Manhattan a place you might actually want to live. There is a certain kind of Romantic who finds decay and disintegration somehow more ... authentic, and in any case preferable to regeneration. What's interesting about Schutze's piece is that he went to talk to his longtime neighbors, and found that they don't really share his silly idealism.
Take, for example, Lorlee Bartos, a sometimes-correspondent of mine who writes to bash me for this or that conservative thing I've said. She's a longtime Dallas liberal activist and Democratic consultant. Schutze went to her looking for back-up:
"Better than a whorehouse or a drughouse." The house I live in was something of a drug house not too many years ago. The neighbors across the street -- one a librarian, one an accountant -- talk about how before the guy we bought the house from moved in and fixed it up, it was a tumbledown renthouse whose resident was a junkie. Literally! He'd sleep on the porch, and they'd find his needles in the yard. Our neighbors next door talk about how the drug gangs controlled this neighborhood in the 1970s, when they moved in. "It was so bad the police were scared to come down here, and they told us not to risk sitting on our front porch at night," said H.
That's all gone now. You can still hear gunshots at night in the distance, but the streets of our neighborhood are pretty safe now. You're starting to see more people with strollers on the streets. You can sneer at them -- at us -- as yuppie gentrifiers, and I guess we are, but was it better when these beautiful old Craftsman houses were falling down, and anybody who could afford to leave was getting out for the suburbs because of the crime?
Lorlee makes a point that we all have to come to terms with: you can't have absolute stability. If you're not getting better, you're probably decaying. You can do things to control the rate of change and the direction of the change -- that's what our neighborhood achieving Historic District status recently was about -- but change is coming one way or another. If things keep going this way for Old East Dallas, I can foresee a time when Julie and I will have to sell our house because we can't afford the property taxes, in which case the neighborhood would likely have changed so much that we might not feel comfortable living there anyway. That might be a sad day for us -- or maybe by then we will be ready to move, I dunno. But as a general matter, I find it impossible to think it's a bad thing for the city of Dallas to have neighborhoods that had been abandoned to crime, decay and despair coming back to life, even if the Wrong Sort of Person (from a Schutzian point of view) is moving in.
I'm glad Schutze wrote the column, because even though I disagree with him, he's touching on some pretty significant core issues at the heart of what it means to live in a community. Still, it's interesting to think that if Schutze, who is white, had written a column talking about how the blacks or the Mexicans were moving in and messing up the character of his neighborhood with their tastes, he'd be an absolute pariah. But because the offenders are pretty much white people who don't share his aesthetic sensibilities, he feels free to rip them. Don't get me wrong -- I think he should be free to write about them (well, us) like this, and I say that as the sort of per son Jim Schutze is probably sad has moved into the neighborhood. I only say that to draw attention to how the absence of race as a factor makes it possible for us to talk about in public the kinds of culture-clash issues that everybody who lives in a transitional neighborhood talks about privately, all the time. It's also the case, I think, that the fact that Schutze's targets are upwardly mobile instead of downwardly mobile makes it easier to take shots at the gentrifiers. Then again, I bet when the Schutze family first moved into its house, there were people in that neighborhood who thought of them as interlopers. These wouldn't be people who had a newspaper column, though.
I am concerned for my people. Last summer a neighbor spoke to me on my lawn in Old East Dallas—an artist, one of the original urban pioneers, a person who has lived an entire life of collapsing rooflines and spotty plumbing on our street midway between White Rock Lake and downtown. I wanted to believe she was looking over her shoulder while she spoke because she was ashamed. But she was not ashamed.
"I went inside one of those McMansions on the other side of La Vista," she whispered. "It was a real estate open house. And you know what, Jim? It was really nice!"
I said, "No, Valerie, stop. Please don't say these things."
"Everything worked. Even the windows! Everything. I bet they never have to call Roto-Rooter. And the kitchen! The kitchen!"
"You've got to get a grip on yourself. I'll tell Jordan on you if you don't."
"The kitchen was my dream kitchen!"
I am frightened. East Dallas, once a funky, diverse refugee camp for people on the lam from the real Dallas and maybe real life, is now well on its way to becoming the one thing none of us ever wanted. A nice neighborhood.
The nail in the coffin for me was the announcement in early January by Whole Foods Market Inc. that they will close their old store on Lower Greenville Avenue by the end of this year and open a gigantic new 50,000-square-foot foodie cathedral less than a mile away at Abrams Road and Skillman Street. When I went to neighbors hoping for commiseration, they stared at me instead with those unblinking, watery eyes the people had in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers after they'd been eaten by the space pods, and they said, "Oh, but Jim, the new Whole Foods will be so much nicer."
Nicer? Nicer? Like that's a good thing? In the old days we took pride in how crappy our part of town was. It took guts to live here. But that's all gone now.
I'm afraid I've got little patience for this sort of thing. Schutzism was alive and well in New York City in the Giuliani years. It came from the sort of liberals who loathed Giuliani for cleaning up the porn theaters and making Manhattan a place you might actually want to live. There is a certain kind of Romantic who finds decay and disintegration somehow more ... authentic, and in any case preferable to regeneration. What's interesting about Schutze's piece is that he went to talk to his longtime neighbors, and found that they don't really share his silly idealism.
Take, for example, Lorlee Bartos, a sometimes-correspondent of mine who writes to bash me for this or that conservative thing I've said. She's a longtime Dallas liberal activist and Democratic consultant. Schutze went to her looking for back-up:
She lives just south of East Dallas on the other side of Interstate 30 in a neighborhood that has come a long way under her tutelage but is still, shall we say, significantly challenged. Her neighborhood is where we were when I moved in.
But every time I tried to tell her how sad I was about Whole Foods leaving Lower Greenville, she told me stories about her side of the freeway.
"It got so bad this summer one time, there's a house between the whorehouse and the drughouse, and the daughter showed up with a 3-year-old. She was bringing him in to use the bathroom, and she threw her car keys down on the seat. Then the minute she was in the house the skank w ho was watching from the whorehouse stole her car."
I didn't call to talk about ugly things like that. I called to talk about the whole ethos of the Lower Greenville Avenue Whole Foods, how it was a tie to a kinder, gentler time. But she wouldn't listen.
"This young couple," Lorlee said, "I think they're from Balch Springs, they put up three Confederate flags, two on the outside and one in the window. And then they stole my neighbor's pregnant pit bull. Then they put some sort of chicken wire on the outside of the house around the windows with wood around it for trim, and somebody said that's because they've got a python in the house. And they've got a 3-year-old and a baby."
Her point, I gather, is that absolute stability is not an option. You can have change for the better or change for the worse. Pick your poison.
"I have some concern about McMansions," she said, "just from the size and in terms of destroying the character of a neighborhood, but a new house is nice. It's better than a whorehouse or a drughouse, and you can quote me on that.
"It's sort of exciting to drive through East Dallas to see new stuff pop up here and there. I'm not opposed to new houses."
"Better than a whorehouse or a drughouse." The house I live in was something of a drug house not too many years ago. The neighbors across the street -- one a librarian, one an accountant -- talk about how before the guy we bought the house from moved in and fixed it up, it was a tumbledown renthouse whose resident was a junkie. Literally! He'd sleep on the porch, and they'd find his needles in the yard. Our neighbors next door talk about how the drug gangs controlled this neighborhood in the 1970s, when they moved in. "It was so bad the police were scared to come down here, and they told us not to risk sitting on our front porch at night," said H.
That's all gone now. You can still hear gunshots at night in the distance, but the streets of our neighborhood are pretty safe now. You're starting to see more people with strollers on the streets. You can sneer at them -- at us -- as yuppie gentrifiers, and I guess we are, but was it better when these beautiful old Craftsman houses were falling down, and anybody who could afford to leave was getting out for the suburbs because of the crime?
Lorlee makes a point that we all have to come to terms with: you can't have absolute stability. If you're not getting better, you're probably decaying. You can do things to control the rate of change and the direction of the change -- that's what our neighborhood achieving Historic District status recently was about -- but change is coming one way or another. If things keep going this way for Old East Dallas, I can foresee a time when Julie and I will have to sell our house because we can't afford the property taxes, in which case the neighborhood would likely have changed so much that we might not feel comfortable living there anyway. That might be a sad day for us -- or maybe by then we will be ready to move, I dunno. But as a general matter, I find it impossible to think it's a bad thing for the city of Dallas to have neighborhoods that had been abandoned to crime, decay and despair coming back to life, even if the Wrong Sort of Person (from a Schutzian point of view) is moving in.
I'm glad Schutze wrote the column, because even though I disagree with him, he's touching on some pretty significant core issues at the heart of what it means to live in a community. Still, it's interesting to think that if Schutze, who is white, had written a column talking about how the blacks or the Mexicans were moving in and messing up the character of his neighborhood with their tastes, he'd be an absolute pariah. But because the offenders are pretty much white people who don't share his aesthetic sensibilities, he feels free to rip them. Don't get me wrong -- I think he should be free to write about them (well, us) like this, and I say that as the sort of per son Jim Schutze is probably sad has moved into the neighborhood. I only say that to draw attention to how the absence of race as a factor makes it possible for us to talk about in public the kinds of culture-clash issues that everybody who lives in a transitional neighborhood talks about privately, all the time. It's also the case, I think, that the fact that Schutze's targets are upwardly mobile instead of downwardly mobile makes it easier to take shots at the gentrifiers. Then again, I bet when the Schutze family first moved into its house, there were people in that neighborhood who thought of them as interlopers. These wouldn't be people who had a newspaper column, though.
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