Gentrification and the Increasing Significance of Racial Transition in New York City 1970–2010

Gentrification is characterized as a spatial manifestation of economic inequality. An unsettled debate about gentrification is the extent to which it is also marked by distinct changes in neighborhood racial composition over time. This study uses a balanced panel of census data and retail data for New York City between 1970 and 2010 to extend prior research on the trajectory of gentrification and racial transition. This analysis finds an inverse relationship between Black and Latino residents and the pace of gentrification that increases over time. Consistent with theories of gentrification, it consistently trends with increasing household income. When income growth is disaggregated by race, Blacks and Latinos either have no effect or dampen the pace of gentrification by 2010. These findings support popular claims that even middle-class Blacks and Latinos are increasingly unable to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods as processes of change extend across the city.

Epilogue

By the mid-1970s, upwardly mobile middle-class African Americans were increasingly departing neighbourhoods like Glenville, Mount Pleasant, and Lee-Harvard for a number of nearby bona fide suburbs. As a result, such former “surrogate suburbs” began to lose their lustre, although a core (generally elderly), home-owning black middle class still remains in these outlying city neighbourhoods to this day. Starting in the 1990s, Cleveland experienced a wave of predatory lending that culminated in the 2008 foreclosure crisis. Although middle class blacks in Cleveland as elsewhere have been disproportionately impacted by this trend, they have continued their historic strategy of outward geographic mobility in search of acceptable living conditions, even to the farthest metropolitan limits.

Urban Change and Reform Agendas in Cleveland’s Black Middle-Class Neighborhoods, 1950–1980

This chapter looks at the ambitious reform agenda that black middle-class activist residents went on to mount in these outlying city neighbourhoods, encompassing housing upkeep, business revitalization, traffic safety, trash removal, and efforts to reduce liquor availability, juvenile delinquency, vice, and crime – all in an attempt to maintain what they considered an acceptable quality of life. Perhaps the most ambitious effort along these lines was a venture in which a group of African American investors purchased and renovated the Lee-Harvard Shopping Center, making it during its existence from 1972-1978 the “largest black-owned commercial complex in the nation.” Sometimes these reform efforts involved moralizing or exhibited an explicit class bias; upwardly mobile middle-class blacks did not always recognize that less well-off newcomers were motivated by similar concerns with liveability. In the end, however, their various attempts to take charge of their lives and communities contributed to the long-term vitality of these neighbourhoods and the city as a whole.

Black Women, Romance and the Indiewood Rom Coms of Sanaa Hamri

This chapter explores Sanaa Hamri's innovations on the mainstream genre of the postfeminist romantic comedy in her Indiewood productions Something New (2006) and Just Wright (2010). Compatible with a trend for ‘feel-good’ films about middle-class blacks, Hamri’s films are neither formally innovative nor politically progressive and therefore ignored in studies of contemporary black film and women’s cinema alike. Yet simply in existing, as films about black women made by black female filmmakers who are thereby made visible, Hamri’s films intervene in a pervasively white postfeminist media culture. They also transfigure the black romantic comedy by challenging the dominant stereotype of the middle-class black woman’s negotiation of love and career in which she must give up one to have the other.

All’s Fair? The Foreclosure Crisis and Middle-Class Black (In)Stability

Is the protracted foreclosure crisis eroding the Black middle class? Foreclosure rates in the United States have reached an all-time high. Blacks have been hit especially hard by this crisis. I focus here on intraclass distinctions within the Black middle class precisely because scholars and journalists so often fail to distinguish between the experiences of the Black lower middle class and those of middle and upper-class Blacks, leaving the unintended impression that middle-class Blacks all have the same odds of losing their home. I argue that conventional explanations of the foreclosure crisis as a racialized event should be amended to account for the differential impact of the crisis on three distinct groups of middle-class Blacks: the lower middle class, the core middle class, and the upper or elite middle class.

My Story

Jeannette Brown’s career has included accomplishments in industry, academia, and publishing. Her claim to fame is working in two different pharmaceutical firms, where she was able to contribute her skill to the research teams who produced several marketable drugs. She was also able to mentor minorities to encourage them to enter the field of chemistry, both as part of a corporate effort and as a volunteer. Jeannette Brown was born May 13, 1934, in Fordham Hospital in the Bronx, New York. She was the only child of Ada May Fox and Freddie Brown. She was born in the middle of the Depression, and times were tough. Her father worked a number of jobs in order to feed his family, including shining shoes on the street. Finally, when Jeannette was five, her father got a job as a superintendent in a building in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. This section of Manhattan was just becoming a home for middle-class blacks moving up from Harlem. Since her father was a super, he had a basement apartment in the building. One of the tenants in the house was Dr. Arthur Logan, who became Jeannette’s doctor when she became very ill. Jeannette was in and out of the hospital many times, and she remembers asking Dr. Logan how she could become a doctor. He told her that she would have to study science. Jeannette was only five or six at the time, but that conversation impressed her and she immediately decided to become a scientist. When Jeannette started school at the age of six, she went to the neighborhood public school, which all children did at the time. The children in the school were mostly black, and some of them taunted her because she was interested in being a good student. Her father decided that the only way that she was going to get a good education was for him to try to get a job as a superintendent in a white neighborhood so that Jeannette could go to the mostly white schools.

The Public Identities of the Black Middle Classes: Managing Race in Public Spaces

Drawing on data from a two-year ESRC-funded project into The Educational Strategies of the Black Middle Classes, 1 this article examines how middle class blacks negotiate survival in a society marked by race and class discrimination. It considers respondents’ school experiences, marked as they are by incidents of Othering and racism and explores both the processes by which they came to an awareness of their status as racially minoritized and how they made sense of and managed such incidents. The majority of our respondents have made the transition from working class to middle class during their lifetimes. It is argued that these early formative experiences of racism and this class transition have facilitated the development of a complex set of capitals upon which middle class blacks are able to draw in order to signal their class identity to white others therefore minimizing the probability of racial discrimination.