For a long time I felt like New York was the place I was destined to be. Through a combination of music and popular culture I’ve had an image of what New York was like for many years, despite not visiting the city until I was 19. When I arrived in the summer of 2016, I quickly realized the city I had imagined was rapidly changing. The iconic culture of the city I had always dreamed about was being washed out, and the gentrification that I was a part of it was driving this phenomenon.
In order to understand my experiences in New York, I have to first describe where I’m from. I spent my childhood on the Westside of Detroit. The late ’90s and early 2000s were a pretty rough time for my city. People continued to leave in masses, as a city of once over 2 million was less than 800K by the time I got to high school. Large parts of downtown Detroit were completely abandoned. There were no major retailers in the city. In fact, by the time I got to high school there weren’t even major grocery stores in the city.
Around 2009, downtown Detroit fundamentally changed when Quicken Loans moved their headquarters from the suburbs to the city. At the time, most major companies wouldn’t have been caught dead in Detroit, because wealthy white people deemed the city unsafe and undesirable. Dan Gilbert and Quicken Loans quickly changed the perception of Detroit. I left for college in the fall of 2012. When I returned in May of 2016, I did not recognize large parts of the city I had lived in for my entire life. Neighborhood were given new names to remove the stigmas associated with them. White people had a noticeable presence in places that were historically exclusive to Blacks. The cost of living in certain areas increased overnight. Because what I’ve witness in Detroit, I can quickly recognize when gentrification is at work.
In June of 2016 I finally moved to the city I had been dreaming about my entire life. I settled in Harlem, moving into a neighborhood that I had never visited and moving into an apartment I had only seen in pictures. Though miles from home, there were many things that made me feel comfortable. The large amount of Black people, the sounds of people playing music on the stoop, the countless barbershops, beauty supply stores and bodegas that had exactly what I needed at any hour of the day all helped me find solace in a new place.
Despite these feelings of familiarity, I was often reminded I was out of place. My “accent,” style of dress, level of education and income were all in contrast to many of the people around me. As I spoke to people from the block, and reflected on my experiences I had this sinking feeling that gentrification was at work again. It’s something I struggled to come to terms with, in part because I always had a picture of what gentrification looked like when I was in Detroit. Hipster white people with ironic tattoos who drank green tea, ate avocado toast, and shopped at Whole Foods. While not a New Yorker, I was still a Black man from a Black city. I asked myself, can I really gentrify the block?
Gentrification is both an economic issue, and a racial issue. The two elements are irrevocably linked, but their impacts manifest themselves in different ways. I am acutely aware of the economic privilege I have in Harlem. When the subway fair rose last summer, I barely blinked; When my rent went up, I took a few mimosas out of the budget and kept it moving. A few extra dollars could mean little for me, but for many these relatively small changes impact their ability to keep food on the table. In that regard, I understand how Black people can be a part of gentrification. However, this completely ignores the complexity of race, the need for Black communal space, and how “Black gentrifiers” often navigate their new communities in different ways.
I never saw white people in my neighborhood in Detroit. In the summer, I was accustomed to hearing loud explosions at night and wondering if they were gunshots or fireworks. I’m unbothered by people smoking outside, or playing loud music because I’m usually on the same type of time. For some, the sights and sounds of summer in Harlem cause fear and apprehension, but to me it made it feel more like home. For people like myself who relocated to New York, moving to Black neighborhoods was about making an unfamiliar place more navigable. People of color are drawn to each other. When you walk into a large lecture hall at a predominantly white institution and count the people of color, you are doing so because you believe they will innately connect with you. This same logic is part of what drives Black transplants to the neighborhoods they settle in.
It’s also important to consider the way “Black gentrifiers” navigate their communities differently than their white counterparts. Income does not change the type of negative interactions I have had with police. It also does not change how uncomfortable some people feel with my presence walking around a night, even in a “progressive” city like New York. While I cannot relate to certain elements of the Black, native New York experience, I can still speak to the Black experience in America. Detroit and New York are very different cities, but the problems Black people have historically faced in them are one and the same. Income equality, access to healthy food, educational inequality, violence and drugs are issues that my neighborhood in Detroit, and my neighborhood in Harlem historically dealt with/still are dealing with. Because of this, despite growing up elsewhere, I feel in tune to Harlem and hope to be a part of empowering long time residents in the ways that I can.
Gentrification is a complicated issue. I won’t pretend I have the answers for many the ways it impacts people of color color. I can only commit to being mindful of the space I take up, the privilege I possess, and the way I engage with those around me. I commit to challenging others to reflect on how they navigate their neighborhoods, and refuse to give people a pass to be ignorant or insensitive simply because they are Black. Like the G.O.A.T. Jay-Z once said “I call a spade, a spade, it just is what is it”.
