Film recommendations 

Book recommendations

"Like tooth decay, it's a slow process, but in time, when all the original teeth have been left to rot and pulled out, brand-new gold crowns can be put in their place. You keep burning a neighborhood down, you keep cutting services. With all the unhappines, crime will rise. Now you can blame the people who live there for the decay of the neighborhood. The landlords will sit on the burned buildings, vacant lots, waiting it out, because sooner or later the government will have to declare it an empowered zone and throw money their way."

                   - from Chango's Fire by Ernesto Quiñonez

"Once again I think about how, when I was a kid, fires were so common. A way of life even. Sometimes the date of when the landlord would set his building on fire did leak. The date of the fire had been thoughtfully sent around, so people could escape... Kids would come up to the teacher and say, 'I can't be here for the test on Tuesday because that's when the fire is.' And the teacher was as lost as Oscar Lewis. But us kids knew that kid would not be back to the same school. I lost so many friends from relocation. Until it was my turn. Until me and my family were burned out."

                   - on Spanish Harlem, from Chango's Fire by Ernesto Quiñonez

"When West Town - a neighborhood dormant for years, torn and frayed, run into the ground - was reanimated in the public eye, its landscape of neglected real estate turned volatile. The space of buildings, houses and taverns and commercial boxes and two-flats, mutated into a liquid, as flexible as capital itself."

                   - from "Zoned Bohemian" by Mike Newirth in Skot's zine: A Gentrification Reader

Click here to listen to an episode of This American Life about "The Plan" for gentrification in Washington D.C. You'll need to fast-forward the audio stream to 32:30 to get to the part about gentrification.

Click here to listen to an episode of This American Life about small towns: "Stories of small town life: the claustrophia and freedom people feel in small towns, the yearning people feel in small towns. And ... three teenagers in one of the harshest urban environments explain how the public housing projects are like a small town."

"The area is considered 'racially mixed' or 'integrated' and is one of the most diverse communities in the city. But the Village promises to become increasingly homogenous, in social class, if not in race. The remnants of the Quakers, the counterculture, the middle-class blacks, the yuppies, and the students all become frustrated by crime, which lowers their tolerance for those who are less fortunate. Many people long for a crime-free and harmonious public environment. Unsafe streets give the well-off residents a common problem to solve, helping them coalesce into a group of haves who are increasingly wary of the have-nots."

                   - from Streetwise: Race Class, and Change in an Urban Community by Elijah Anderson (about Philadelphia)

From a Transom interview with Studs Terkel, 6/20/01:

Sydney Lewis

You don't hear Michael Moore on public radio. He's got Radio Network. They could be broadcasting that. And even more alternative points of view.

Studs Terkel

Yeah, of course. Michael Moore is now celebrated to some extent in certain circles. But there are others. Community people, what's happening in the community? What are the developers doing? A real study of gentrification, of what it is. What about people who are forced out? Where do they go? The whole phenomenon.

You're well aware of this. The restaurant that you worked at - we know the area was a working class area, and then bit by bit it became artsy craftsy. And this restaurant opened in the early days. Now the guy has to leave because his rent is so high.

I met this woman they called an over-aged hippie. This was when the word hippie was just beginning to be used, before Abbie Hoffman. And she was thirty-nine, forty. And she was saying, "I raise the rents, you know. People like me, we have a studio, and then another studio, and then hey, that's a party. Next thing you know, this yuppie couple moves in and they rehab things, and the next thing you know the rents go high, so now they're kicking me out." So her story would be interesting, that phenomenon. Where do these people go?

So this developer - by the way, he was a well-known patron of the arts in Chicago, oh yeah, very well-known, a collector of art, and philanthropic in several respects - I said to him, "Where do these people go when you build these new homes?"

And he indicated, he pointed casually west. "Out there."

Out there. Get them out of the way. Maybe that's it: a program called "Out There".